well. there's a lot going on. I'm extremely tired n I'm about ready to just lie facedown on the floor and not move until life forces me to. so. I'm gonna design some ports

I said ages ago that my next step for atdao would be Making Ports Weirder so I've gotta do some idea generation and experimenting and practice

n some better Port Worldbuilding

like I've covered what the function of ports is and what big scale effect they have on the universe and what their role is in the worldbuilding and the story but

I've not gone real specific with them in terms of individual ports and what specific different kinds of malfunctions in reality they can cause

like. I do with a few?

but I can do better and I deserve to do better considering the potential there is for all sorts of avenues of weirdness

I gotta make the most of that premise, I gotta Vibe

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 3

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 and Part 2. 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 and 2. 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 4, Part 5, Part 6)

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

The Battle of Ostagar cutscene is one of the first big cutscenes that got made during production. When it was shown to the team for the first time, it was one of those moments where DG felt like “Awesome, this is a game!” Context: During the development of a game it feels more like doing a series of disconnected tasks and assets rather than working on a game, so seeing stuff come together at times like this is rad. The first time it was shown, it had temporary placeholder voiceacting.

Pathfinding is always a nightmare to do, especially in games which involve a party of NPCs. As soon as other characters are involved alongside the PC, it’s exponentially more difficult and takes up a lot more resources. The PC is the most complex thing going on visually on-screen, with so many moving pieces, and in party-based games you have four [etc] of them. So, some critique that’s made of the DA games in regards to this subject which compares it to games like The Witcher doesn’t really make sense, as The Witcher has a solo PC.

‘Weird mage hats’ didn’t really become a trademark ‘DA thing’ akin to their place of random pieces of cheese around the world until later games. For DAO, someone probably asked the artists to create “mage helmets”. Mage hats actually looked better in the concept art than they did in-game. What happened was that they were already modelled and then they didn’t have time to re-do them.

DAO was made for PC first. The plan from the get-go though was that it would be an all-platform release (PC/360/PS3). Games like these are always made for the “lowest common denominator” from among the various platforms that they’re being planned to release for. Games have to be made for the most stringent/basic of the platforms because this makes for less conversion rate. At the time of DAO’s development, the PS3 was getting weak graphically and getting old, and this was quite a limitation: “Why do we have to limit [crowds?] because of this one platform?” “Well, we just gotta”. The original models were a bit too detailed. Later on, the artists started making models that had lower polycounts that they could put in a bit more of. DA was never really focused on making environments realistic in an ambient manner (making environments less “gamey” and more lived in, like having crowded places). They could have put more emphasis there but this would have led to a resources issue. Ambience basically wasn’t a high priority. As a writer DG isn’t keen on this decision and naturally he wanted the world to look more realistic, but he noted that it’s easy for him to say this when this would be work that he didn’t have to do personally.

During DAO development, they might have just had a dev sphere originally that was called “tech design”. DG thinks this was later broken up into systems design, combat design and maybe level design. Level designers are the people that are the implementers of the plot. Narrative design is a branch of the level design spoke. System designers respond to requests from lead designers. Narrative designers and writers don’t interact with system designers much unless they have to. As an example of interaction here, system designers might come to writers and say, “Alright, so we’re doing combat, what are the sorts of things a mage can do in this world?” The writers would be like “Ok, these are the sorts of spells we imagined.” The system designers might then come back with “Ok, that fulfills 2 of the 10 things we need mages to be able to do in combat. Is it possible that mages could do [this]?” Sometimes it is, and other times it would be like “No, that’s really outside of the lore”. Still, sometimes said original-lore-breaking things would be added to the game a week later due to necessity and DG would be like “Oh ok”. This kind of stuff is an insight into how some aspects of the lore came to be or changed over time during development.

The system designers on DAO got a better idea of what could be done and what could not be done according to the lore as things went on. At first, DG had to keep telling them things like “It’s not that big a deal, but in the lore mages can’t teleport. Instant teleportation isn’t possible in the world”. The system designers needed a spell where someone could get from spot A to spot B really fast on the battlefield. DG said that that’s fine in itself, “have them turn into a cloud of bees or have a light that moves between the two places. We can use magic as a transition or as a speed thing, but what is against the lore is instant teleportation, to traverse distance like that”. At first the system designers weren’t on board with it, but they got on board with it later. 

This sort of thing doesn’t just depend on the system designers. It also depends on what the tech artists are willing to do. Sometimes a certain request made of them was too hard and they said they weren’t able to do it. Other times it was a matter of DG not communicating the request properly, or the tech artists had already done the work and so throwing out all their work to re-do it just because he didn’t communicate clearly wouldn’t have been cool. So sometimes the originally planned lore got contravened, and sometimes things other parts of the team implemented in the game became the new lore.

LE made an insightful observation at this point: You can’t think of game development as a cohesive series of decisions that everyone on the team is involved in. This simple isn’t how it works at all, especially on large complex projects. There are processes at some studios for decision-making, but most of the time, a bunch of decisions get made by system designers. Others get made by level designers, still others by narrative designers. Situations then arise where someone notices a certain decision and that that decision and another one contradict each other. This is where conflict arises and a solution has to be negotiated. This is why often in games we get elements in the end product that are dissonant, because it was discovered too late or by the time it was realized, it was too difficult to change. It’s actually a miracle that on a game of DAO’s depth and scope that all these things largely hold together. [My note: With this insight and the context below on documentation, it makes sense how BW sometimes appear to ‘forget aspects of their own lore’ or end up contradicting parts of the lore in different parts of the franchise]

Sometimes such things would be noticed in time and DG would go and say, “Can we not do that or do something else instead?” and the relevant parties would be totally accommodating and do it (depending on how much time they had or how much time it would take to remedy). Sometimes this worked out and sometimes it didn’t. For the most part, everyone wants to work together. DG couldn’t be involved in every aspect of systems design “like some kind of All-Watchful eye of lore”, so he had to rely on the people who were there knowing enough from the documentation. Not everybody reads every document however. There was so much documentation even back during DAO. DG can only imagine the sheer amount of world/lore documentation that now exists now in the run-up to DA4; he said he thinks that nobody at this point on the current team has read it all, as editor/lore-wrangler Ben Gelinas isn’t with BW anymore. Lots of legacy documentation accumulated very quickly. Sometimes, the old document would still be there. Over time it became harder for people to discern which was the most recent version of a particular document. Sometimes people didn’t update the relevant documentation after changing things. Lore documentation was particularly bad for this issue. BG wrangled all the documentation and created an internal reference wiki (essentially acting as a lorekeeper). He was constantly coming in and picking DG’s brain to clarify conflicting aspects or obtain the correct, in-date information etc (“Good on him”).

DAO was the first time DG was involved in voice-recording. Prior to that he was only on the receiving end, in that the recordings would come in and he’d review them as they did so. DAO is when BW set up their own VO department and where Caroline Livingstone came on. CL wanted DG and Mike Laidlaw to be more involved in the casting process. As a result, the writers then were to write casting scripts: like, ‘For Morrigan, can you write a 1 page script that goes through 3 big emotions? [like regular talking for a bit, then here’s a bit of heightened emotion such as anger, then here’s a part where they’re being funny if they were a comedic character] These scripts had to be kept short so that the recording that was made from it wouldn’t be more than 30-40 seconds in length.

For the initial VA sessions, DG and CL flew down to Technicolor studioin LA and they had all the major castmembers there (later on, recording sessions were done a lot more remotely; this became easier as BW’s setup got more sophisticated). The idea was that they would both be present live in-person for the first 2 or 3 sessions to help each VA find their ‘voice’, and for DG at the first session to sit down with each VA and walk them through who their character was, what DA was about, and help them figure out how their character should talk. Claudia Black was the first of these sessions and he was “a wreck” going into that one. It got easier after that however. CL gave directions into the soundproof booth and DG was present to give notes on things like pronunciation or the intentions behind some lines. He says he learned everything he now knows about VO direction from CL. The things and tricks CL can do to get a performance out of an actor are amazing. Sometimes an actor would get a bit fixated or stuck on a particular way of delivering a line. CL had atrick to help them past this; “I want you to clear your mind, and I want you to give me a version of this line that’s more yellow”. The idea is that they just had to break out of where they had been stuck in that mindset, and the thing was that it doesn’t matter what “yellow” meant, but what was important was what “yellow” meant to the actor. They could then take that new varied delivery and progress from there.

Alistair’s dialogue when the PC talks to Flemeth outside her hut was the first complex conversation DG wrote for DAO. It was the first one that had a lot of branching and fiddling to it. The hardest conversations to write are the ones with a lot of exposition, and when they do have exposition still making this interesting and natural. At this point in the game, the player has no agency, just reactivity. The devs talked a lot about this subject when they wrote the origin stories. Some of the stories allow the player to initially say no and refuse to join the Wardens, but you always end up being railroaded (the devs here ended up doing a form of the trope ‘But Thou Must!’). Do you give the player the option to say no? Is it important to allow them that option? At some point, writers have to accept that the player has some level of buy-in and is game to play. They discussed a lot where they sat on this and what is agency. “Maybe don’t worry about offering the player every possible choice, but about having reactivity.”

Loghain wasn’t okay with letting Cailan die. He didn’t sit and angst about it openly where the player could see, and once the decision had been made, it being Loghain, it was Made and Had To Be Done (he felt that it was something that had to happen). But he didn’t kill the son of the woman he’d once loved dearly as a random off-handed thing.

The Solas twist was planned from the beginning, from the DAO dev days. Such big things/broad strokes have stayed the same. However, some of the details have changed or been added along the way. They didn’t know for instance that Solas was going to be a companion; that was something they came up with when they were planning DAI. Flemeth’s true identity has never changed.

Zevran says Rinna was an elf, but WoT says she was a bastard child of a noble in line for the Antivan throne (the Antivan royal family being human). When asked if this was an oversight, DG said yes she was a bastard, but she may have been really far down the line of succession, i.e. technically in line, but would probably never have been allowed to take the throne in practise had that scenario ever actually arisen.

DA was maybe inspired a bit/some by ASOIAF. This was way before it was on TV of course. DG at the time had read the first book or so. He liked the fact that it was a fantasy setting but low-magic, and was about the people in the world and their politics rather than magic, prophecy and other high fantasy stuff.

It was only by DAI that the system designers decided that it was okay to think of banter as an “activity that players engaged in”. In previous games, the devs had inadvertently managed to ‘train’ players to immediately stop when companion banter fires so that they could hear it all (because if you do something else, it gets cut off). When the level designers put together the spaces, they accounted for what players would be doing i.e. how much time between combat. They didn’t however account for like “You’re travelling down this hall and there’s a banter for half of that space. This is an activity, so it’s okay not to put anything in there”. This is how the inadvertent training happened, when originally banters were supposed to be a thing that ran as you move around the world (as opposed to stopping and standing still). 

When asked if the Blight resulted from the creation of the Veil or pre-dates it: “I think you’ll probably have to wait on the game[s] for that answer, if it ever explains it”. He was also asked whether Arlathan is the Golden City. He won’t answer such questions naturally because they are “DeepLooooooore™~~ ♫”.

DG isn’t sure that he will play DA4 when it comes out. It’s not that PW and the team won’t do a good job, they will, it’s just that when DG plays RPGs he has an analytical mindset going on and finds it difficult to slip into the game and just enjoy. For DA4, as he was previously so involved in DA, there’ll naturally probably be an extra level of that with feeling like “What would I have done [for particular parts of the game’s design]?”. Alternatively he might instead feel like “Wow, this is awesome, here’s a game I would have made but didn’t have to do any work on!” DG stressed that it’s important to him to be fair about the work of his former colleagues - he wouldn’t want to come out and be like “I wouldn’t have made [this or that] choice”. He also noted that just because something might be a call he personally wouldn’t have implemented in the game, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad call. There are people out there where if DG intimated at all that there was an aspect of DA4 that he wasn’t keen on, he’s worried that they would pounce on it and use it as ammunition against the current team (who are his friends that he really cares about and wants to do well). He walked away from DA voluntarily and is happy his game will continue on. PW popped by in chat at this point and agreed that it’s definitely hard to play something that you used to work on.

Other assorted tidbits:

DG really opposed the part at the Battle of Ostagar where mabari are set to charge the darkspawn horde - “That’s not how you would use dogs [in war]”

There was supposed to be a cutscene where Flemeth rescues the HoF and Alistair from the top of the Tower of Ishal in her dragon-form. This was cut. DG remembered being angry about this like “nobody is gonna buy that you fall unconscious and then wake up in the hut totally rescued. [...] I guess I’m not always right”

When DG went to Beamdog there was a period where they thought about making a Baldur’s Gate 3. They put together a pitch and had a long series of discussions contemplating things like “What do we need from BG3? What do we expect it to have in order to have the BG name? What is needed and not needed to connect to from the previous games?”

DG isn’t sure who designed the DAO inventory system

PW in chat recalled a game writer from another company who was really ragging on DAI on the Christmas Day after release

Narrative designer and system designer are very different positions/roles with very different responsibilities

Simon Templeton as Loghain did all his voicework stuff in one take, which was very impressive

It would have been the marketing department that chose 30 Seconds To Mars for music. DA was really good at choosing up-and-coming acts for this that weren’t huge when they used their songs, but became huge afterwards

During work on Baldur’s Gate 2 was the most DG has ever crunched. He slept in the office a few times

“As soon as you get both Alistair and Morrigan in the party, that’s when it’s like ahh yes, this is a BioWare game”

Were Flemeth and Morrigan’s interactions with each other and the PC when Morrigan is being told to leave the Wilds and go with the Hero an act, considering that Morrigan did know about the OGB plan? No. That was The Plan, but said plan wasn’t like “Ok, she’s going to leave Right Now”

The elves and the inversion of the traditional elven trope are DG’s favorite part of the world/world-building

One of the original intentions for DAO was to make it so that the player wouldn’t need a healer in the party, or that there would be different kinds of healing, or that healing itself wouldn’t be a thing, but this just didn’t work out

The Imperial Highway used to be a really important part of the lore but it kind of got forgotten a bit

It’s kinda funny that after release some players expressed that Corinne Kempa’s accent as Leliana was “sooo fake”. It’s not fake, she’s actually a Brit that moved to France when she was young, so she has the exact type of accent that Leliana would have (Leliana was born in Orlais and is culturally Orlesian, but her mother was Fereldan and she considers herself as such)

They talked some about the need for documentation and how doing this can feel beurocratic and uncreative and how like you’re not working on a game or writing. PW in chat expressed that there was a year where they spent a lot of it working in PowerPoint and Excel, “so I feel this”

When they switched art directors to Matt Goldman, his first big complaint was about all the brown. He came to DG like “Is there a lore reason for or are you particularly in favor of the brown for story reasons?” DG was like “Uhh no” and Matt was then like “Ok good”

Console codes/commands aren’t usually stripped out of a game before release, they are usually still in the built, just disabled. The system itself is not removed but how to access said system is

BW doesn’t crunch as bad as we hear some companies do, and kind of prided itself on “not being terrible at crunch”. But BW’s “not terrible at crunch” is still crunch. We obviously don’t commend abusive family members for only abusing people on certain days of the week or whatever

Kate Mulgrew is American but she at times did the same thing a lot of the British VAs did, which was that the devs had a lot of struggle with getting them to say “darkspawn” correctly, with the emphasis in the right places. They’d say “dark SPAWN” as if it was two words with an adjective, and the stress put in the wrong place

Lack of children in DAI was a resources thing. They only had time to make a certain number of models. There was a series of meetings where they had to decide what things to cut. In the last meeting it was like ‘Here’s a bunch of things you don’t want to cut, we need to cut 4 of them’

They decided to put horned qunari back in DA2 because then they had the resources to do so. They then ended up having to explain why there were hornless qunari at the same time, and make this an in-world explanation as opposed to just ‘We didn’t have the resources, that was totally intentional’

Lots of players missed out on recruiting Leliana and/or Sten on their first playthrough and didn’t even know they existed/could be recruited. “Apparently we weren’t that great at pointing players in the right direction”

Tevinter is inspired by the Byzantine Empire (which wasn’t called that at the time incidentally, this is a name given by historians after the fact), what used to be the Roman Empire after the western part fell. This is the era Tevinter today is meant to encapsulate: decadent but clearly in decline, far away from the heyday and the heights of the former empire [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

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

HOW TO DO A REVIEW IN ENGLISH

Let's start with an example of how a review should NOT be in English (a criticism) ... One night many years ago, when leaving a small independent cinema, my partner took the sheet with the reviews of the films and began to read aloud the short “review” of the one we had just seen. To our amazement, the text said absolutely nothing about what type of film it was, or the actors' interpretation, but rather limited itself to almost scene by scene telling the entire argument, until the last minutes, in which the actor died protagonist. It was a great relief for us not to have read those lines before entering the room. Of course, whoever wrote them had not understood that the most important rule in a criticism of a literary or cinematographic work is not to spoil it, that is ... not to gut it!

So what makes a good review? What should it include? If you are interested, keep reading.

What is a criticism?

Today you can find reviews of almost everything, from restaurants to video games, but in any of them the purpose is the same: to help the reader decide whether or not to go to that restaurant, play that video game, etc.

A review might be funny (as you can see from the ones Dorothy Parker wrote throughout her life), but that's optional. Maybe you need to write a review ('write a review') likepart of an english exam As the First or the Advanced, or perhaps at some point, using this language, you want to record on a website a good or bad experience you have had; In any case, the objective is to make your opinion known so that whoever reads it can make an informed decision with confidence.

What should a review include?

Whatever your review is about, readers will want to know:

Category

Author or responsible

Point

Positive and negative aspects

Your recommendations

Category

In the case of a story, such as a movie or a book, you will have to specify within which genre it can be framed, such as romantic comedy, horror, musical, etc. Make sure you know how each one is said in English; Here are some of the most important film

Currently there are many works that are not limited exclusively to one genre, so we can say that a film is, for example: 

 A romantic comedy with elements of action .

 Maybe your criticism does not have as its object a story, and then the category on which also must report, is something like "travel website" ( 'website Travel'), "multi-player driving game" ( 'video game driving multiplayer ') or ' weather app ' (' weather app '). In the event that you need to write such a review for an exam, make sure you know enough technical vocabulary before choosing the topic!

If instead your review is about a hotel or a restaurant, tell the reader the type of food ( traditional, local, Thai [traditional, local, Thai ...]) or accommodation (luxury, basic, family-friendly [luxury, basic, familiar]) that it offers.

Author or responsible

People who read your review will almost certainly have their own opinion about certain writers, film directors or video game developers, so you should include this information in it (along with the names of the main cast in the case of a film review) .  

To talk about a restaurant or a hotel, another relevant piece of information, if any, is the chain to which it belongs or the name of the chef in charge of the kitchen.

Point

The starting point of a story (in English, 'the premise' ) is the situation that starts it . It is not about narrating the entire plot (remember, nothing about revealing the ending!); For example, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would look something like this:

Harry, a young orphan adopted by his aunt and uncle, is very unhappy at home until one day, on his eleventh birthday, a mysterious stranger visits. The stranger tells Harry that he is really a wizard, and takes him off to a new life at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. 

( Harry , a young orphan taken in by his uncles, is very unhappy until one day, when he turns eleven years old, a mysterious stranger arrives. The stranger reveals to Harry that he is actually a wizard, and leads him to live a new life in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry). 

 As you can see, all the action and dramatic twists that take place at Hogwarts (most of the book) are not included here. The starting point tells us that there will be action and adventure and a better life for Harry : if the reader is curious to know how, they will intuit that he will probably like the book; otherwise, you will feel like you can do without it.

Similarly, a review of a video game should tell the reader what the game is about , not detail what happens in each level.

 In other types of reviews, this starting point is the raison d'être of the product: a hotel for families who want to do outdoor activities, a restaurant where you can grill what you are going to eat, or a platform that puts contact professionals, to name a few possibilities.  

Positive and negative aspects

Try to find something positive and something negative to say, in order to show greater fairness.

Maybe you have nothing negative or nothing positive to include in your review. Nothing happens, as long as you back up your opinions with evidence and avoid extreme claims.

One last tip

In this post we have offered you in general the conventions that you must follow to write a review. If this is part of a test, read the statement carefully and respond accordingly . Certainly, you will have to apply the guidelines that we have just seen, but beware: if in the exercise they ask you to deal with something specific, such as “say what you learned from the book / film” (“say what you have learned from the book / movie ”), be sure to include that point!

Day 16: Preoccupied by the same things as trolls

https://homestuck.com/story/2792

Not actually a whole lot of substance for all this dialogue, but we’ve got a few things.

I forgot how hostile Kanaya became toward Vriska, and it sounds to some extent like that’s how it is toward Tavros too? Girl really knows how to hold a grudge - Kanaya is a generally sweet girl, but she’s got a pretty uncontrollable temper when it comes to matters of the heart.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/2805

Rose is not a Prince, and if the inversion theory is true, she wouldn’t invert into one either, but the parallel between them here is about as clear as it can get. By Trolling Rose, Eridan makes it irritatingly obvious to Rose just how dangerous and uncooperative she’s becoming in her pursuit of knowledge and power by drawing these comparisons between the two of them. Ridiculous as they are, Eridan is right - Rose is becoming something of a villain, or at least a dangerously unstable anti-hero.

Rose, unlike most of the main characters who might be called antagonists, does not actually do anything especially heinous. She doesn’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it like Vriska does.

But she’s definitely turning into an antagonistic force nonetheless, and one whose actions will ultimately lead to the creation of the Green Sun - something which has to happen, but which nevertheless makes her Scratch’s dupe just like Vriska.

https://homestuck.com/story/2809

If Rose is a parallel to Vriska, and Aradia is a parallel to Vriska, perhaps there are some parallels between Aradia and Vriska. Not the least of which is being severely pessimistic young ladies who engage in reckless, self-destructive behavior to cope with their feelings of helplessness.

https://homestuck.com/story/2818

Gamzee is the reverse of Dave here, in a way.

Gamzee and Dave have both been under the influence of Lord English, more or less directly, their entire lives, and in time, Gamzee inherits Lil Cal. Gamzee’s crisis of faith turns him into a villain, and he exits the story as a character, becoming more or less a plot element.

Dave will also get to enjoy his crisis of faith before long when Bro dies, and separated from him, he’ll have the opposite experience - becoming a far happier and more chill person, but pretty irrelevant to the plot.

https://homestuck.com/story/2825

Dave gets trolled by Trolls along the same basic lines Rose does. Equius’ preoccupation with Hierarchy may not seem like it reflects on Dave, but Dave is clearly unsettled by his relationship with John as second banana in terms of power - there’s no way he can catch up. Dave is not the hero, in spite of all the symbols associated with him that should make him the hero. He’s the sidekick.

https://homestuck.com/story/2836

Here’s a fresh take. Dave’s Broken Symbol, and his Broken Sword, are both emblematic of the fact that he “flunked” Bro’s training. Dave is not the strongest. He is not the most badass. He is not even all that cool.

But what Dave is is genuinely creative. He’s a cunning lateral thinker. Practical, to the point, reliable. Dave isn’t the aloof guy who always wins that Bro tried to turn him into, and having his sword broken and his disc scratched are both symbols of that failure - but they are also symbols of transformation, and of coming into one’s own strengths after becoming disillusioned with a false sense of pride.

Dave might not be able to pull the sword out of the stone - he’s not the destined King. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

https://homestuck.com/story/2848

Let’s do some more theme association.

If the Squiddles are the Dark Gods, and Squiddles are also symbols of intimacy, maybe there’s some degree to which the impulses stoked by the Dark Gods are unifying impulses - the desire to become tangle buddies with your pals are at basic odds with the fact that you are a separate individual with your own body and your own will. The union of the real, one, unique self, Skaia, with the realm of all unrealized possibility, the Furthest Ring, is what the Dark Gods are after, but that union would be destructive to Skaia - perfect unity with the Horrorterrors would have it cease to be Skaia at all.

https://homestuck.com/story/2850

Following the same pattern to analyze this set of troll-human relationships.

I wonder if Jade comes across as cloying and condescending as Feferi does to her friends? Is she afraid that she does?

https://homestuck.com/story/2853

If we’re paying attention to these particular conversations because of the Trolls’ preoccupations with the same things that the characters are anxious and preoccupied about is any indication, Jade’s psyche is in way worse condition than just about anybody’s right now.

What I’m saying here is that the Trolls almost certainly contact the kids and have far more conversations in general than we get to see - Act 5 has already started to play around with skipping conversations and interactions that aren’t mission critical, and only paying attention to the ones that are relevant to the overall character arcs.

Karkat contacts Jade and airs the grievances that she’s currently feeling internally - Karkat all but literally is Jade’s monster headache. The two of them are frustrated over their sleeping situation and have had the exact same response to encountering the Dark Gods.

Jade is, in pretty short order, going to have to confront the same self-loathing and anger issues that Karkat has too, and this conversation serves as an immediate prelude to that.

And while it’s a pretty short line, Karkat is right - Jade suddenly understands Jack Shit.

Prospit’s destruction has completely shattered her expectations.

https://homestuck.com/story/2868

Wow! And just like that, those anger issues come right to the surface. Jade is noticeably nastier to John than she’s ever been to just about anybody but Karkat in this conversation!

https://homestuck.com/story/2880

Jade and John are task-focused, and don’t really talk much with each other about what’s going on inside of their heads - they talk about the events that are happening to them, and what they’re doing.

Which is to say that of the pair Problems and Feelings, Prospit Dreamers are more about Problems, and Derse Dreamers are probably more about feelings.

https://homestuck.com/story/2887

Now that we’re getting a chance to know the real Jade, one of the character traits I’m immediately finding she shares in common with Feferi is their sort of motherly disapproval of their friends’ choices - one of the conversations I’ve had recently with some friends about this (including @bladekindeyewear) has pegged one of Jade’s flaws as being “smothering” and it comes out in the way that she dunks on John’s preferences.

I’m going to show my ass here a little by making this reference, but it reminds me of Rarity from Friendship is Magic just a tiny bit. Maybe Rarity is a Witch too, although of what Aspect, I wouldn’t be able to tell you right now.

https://homestuck.com/story/2922

It’s extremely easy to forget that Rose pretty much unilaterally decided on the behalf of the rest of the team, more or less without consulting them, to sabotage their game of Sburb, and while it was always destined to fail, the fact that Rose chooses to destroy the game instead of playing the game is suggestive of the fact that she bears some level of accountability for the misfortunes throughout.

I’m not trying to play the blame game so much as I am trying to draw connections to help explain why I see Rose and Vriska as being fairly alike, and not just by merit of being Light Players, but also in terms of the role that they play in Act 5 - they are both manipulating and organizing timeline events in order to get the other players to do things that are contrary to their seeming interests, neither of them listens to the pleas of the people who love them to stop, and their actions ultimately lead to (at least temporary) catastrophe.

Rose is dangerous to herself and her team, and she doesn’t much care.

Or she at least tries hard not to feel too bad about it while having serious and obvious misgivings about her own actions. Knowing that there is a problem and ignoring it anyone is like looking at your face in the mirror and immediately turning away and forgetting what your face looks like.

https://homestuck.com/story/2927

And with that, we’ll pause for the evening. Not as many pages as usual, but a hell of a lot of text.

Cam signing off, Alive and not Alone.

“The poison apple created by the beautiful queen…It has an effect which would awaken someone from eternal sleep through true love’s kiss. …Romantic? I don’t know.”

the presence of “the strongest poison” is inevitable over the course of the pomefiore chapter, if only by the mention that the current dorm leader must be able to create this deadliest one and we all know which one it is....and why kalim and jamil will precisely be here to unveil it, but a cure will have to be present too and the sleeping death’s cure did fascinate the evil queen

originally, snow white was not saved by a kiss but barely by choking the apple piece stuck in her throat and waking up.. that kiss is indeed a specific to the movie and it being mentionned means that, a kiss or something similar will have to be performed?

"Admiring the apple as if she'd like to eat it herself - "Pink as a maiden's blush." ( Richard Creedon, story conference in 1936)  

love played a huge role in the queen’s life, her beauty was for the sake of love toward herself and others (her father rejecting her for sharing the beauty of her deceased mother as per serena valentino’s disney book though unsure if it’s relevant or not but vil being rejected in his hometown does ring a bell)

(and the subsequent mad descent) her not having hated snow white and truly loved the king was testimony to it, she also was fully conscious that the spell would be broken but was hoping for a quick burial by the dwarves to prevent this kiss from being performed, the queen admiring the apple also implies that she did consider who would kiss her to break the spell 

so who would realistically perform a true love’s kiss without bias and MC involvement?

-> so far in each chapter the “hero” protagonist of each stories the villains came from has made minimal impact themselves, except maybe scarabia for obvious reasons and kalim holding no malice and not being twisted from a villain as well as fareena, here the only twisted non-villain is none other than rook who also shares many troubling snow white elements (gestures, animals, beauty in all things, SW was originally blonde meanwhile the huntsman had black hair... strange reversal)

-> the apple is only a VECTOR of the sleeping death, you could say the vector of the queen’s wrath as well, just like how epel would be the vector of it as well, whether epel is truly another aspect of the queen as the witch and two parts of the same whole

now for who could, 

kalim and jamil already stayed at each other’s bedside in the past from poisonings and coma...it would be especially sorrowful to have them re-enact it especially given how they are now in the process of mending, extremely tragic as it is but could possibly happen as a platonic kiss

mc would never be kissed or kiss anyone for obvious player reasons

epel, claims to dislike romantic things and it is truly the case but he only ever dislikes over the top idealized romance (rook’s), he still believes in his grandparents love and that a prince should come on a white horse, he dislikes ideas of love lacking sincerity and true love’s kiss appears as one to him

now for the contradictions, vil and rook, not only embodying the evil queen and her most faithful huntsman willing to almost do the undoable for her, rook’s vision is deeply idealized but he does value sincerity the highest, most people and especially ace in ghost marriage were unwilling to trust his words as they are, the only person who DOES trust those words over anyone else’s however...is none other than vil himself, as vil’s broken mirror or as vil’s failure of a huntsman, trust issues between the two will surely be a plot point and what act of “true love” whether platonic or romantic could be a sincere proof...?

Combating Writing Paralysis with Successive Drafts

Hey all!  It’s been a long time since I’ve written about writing, but a switch flipped in my brain while I was drafting this morning.  Suddenly, I had to share my thoughts on utilizing successive drafts to split the copious concepts writers juggle into manageable loads.  

This is a long, but practical post.  I hope you’ll read on below the cut!

It’s common for writers to feel overwhelmed, and no wonder.  There are so many narrative elements to consider, and there’s usually far more content to write before you have a complete work of fiction.

My advice is to never attempt to nail every aspect of your story in the first draft.  Instead, try approaching each draft with specific goals, lightening your expectations and mental load for each iteration.  The idea is to make writing less intimidating, and to polish every element by giving each one individual attention.

I’m not a professional writer, so I can only tell you how I approach the drafting process.  I encourage you to experiment with these ideas and find what works best for you; there’s no need to limit yourself to my template.

Annnnd here we go!

Draft 1:  Plot and Movement

The purpose of my first draft is to simply move the characters through the plot points/action of the chapter or scene.  

I’m not suggesting that you exclude dialogue and characterization, or that you write a plot outline.  Simply write a rough draft in its entirety, but don’t worry about the quality.  Your goal here is to iron out what happens.

Draft 2:  Herding the Plot Bunnies, Staging

In this draft, I focus on:

-Refining the plot:  At this stage, I consider concerns such as: do the plot points obey the work’s internal logic?  How does this scene contribute to the overall plot?  How does it lead to the next scene?  Am I properly setting up/providing info for future scenes?  

-Tracking plot details:  If timeline/dates/the current time are important to your story, double check them.  Make sure no important objects materialized from the ether.  Confirm that no plot points were dropped or forgotten; if a character lost her shoe last scene, then it should still be gone.

-Scene staging:  Did a character appear in the scene without explanation (ie, where did he come from)?  Where is everyone standing?  Where are any important objects?  If there’s an animal in the scene, where is it (it’s so easy to forget to mention a pet, who should be included in scenes set in the character’s living area)?  Are there important environmental features?

Draft 3:  Setting/Description, Characterization, and Pacing

Now that the basic details are handled, it’s time to dig deeper!  In this iteration, I focus on:

-Adding information about the setting.  In the previous drafts, you established where the characters are (for example, at a library).  Now, you can focus on the details and engage the senses.  What does the library look like?  Are patrons being quiet, or is someone obnoxiously talking?  Does it smell like old books?  Is the protagonist handling a mass produced book with thin pages that stain fingers with printing ink, or a hefty tome meant to last for generations?

-Enhancing dialogue and characterization and marrying them to the plot.  For example, in the library, perhaps the most bookish or research-oriented character should lead the scene.  Alternatively, maybe a less scholastic character is out of their element, and needs help or feels uncomfortable.  Choose the character best suited to move the plot along and generate the mood you desire.  

Ideally, you want the characters to lead the plot (ie, have agency), instead of the plot seizing the characters (ie, the characters have no choice but to flounder along with what is happening).  Plot-driven stories are absolutely a thing, so if that’s what you’re writing, then go for it.  Generally, though, audiences respond best to characters making their own decisions.

This is the perfect time to examine your previous drafts and play around with the characters, shuffling them among scenes or reassigning lines of dialogue as needed.  Which character has the skills or personality to handle this challenge?  Which character needs to be here to learn a pivotal piece of information, or to witness the scene and be changed by it?

-After you address the above points, take time to consider the chapter’s pacing.  Does anything feel bogged down and repetitive?  Rushed or unclear?

Draft 4:  Character Growth, Theme and Mood

Ah, now we’re getting to the juicy bits!  

You might have noticed that these drafts focus on increasingly difficult concepts.  Now, we’re striking at the heart of narratives: what the story aims to say, and how it aims to make readers feel.

Here’s what I consider at this stage:

-Character growth.  What did Character learn from this?  What new idea is churning in her head?  What pressures are building that might explode later?  How did I show Character displaying her growth or regression?

-How did I reinforce the thematic goals I have for this scene, and for the entire piece?  

It’s pivotal to identify your themes before you begin work on a story.  At this stage, I briefly identify how the chapter or scene supports the work’s themes.

Everyone has specific themes that matter to them.  I tend to write about: dealing with trauma, surviving and healing from abuse, the importance of seeking and giving support, found families, self-actualization, setting up and balancing your life according to your specific needs, feminist issues, establishing boundaries, acceptance, and independence vs dependence.  Even my works with lots of shenanigans and comedy, like Four Years, circle around these ideas.

I also “level” my themes in this draft.  I want to avoid being too heavy-handed or too oblique.  People tend to go too hard, rather than too soft, so I usually dial back.  You want to guide your reader to your point, not write it on your knuckles and deck them. 

-How does this scene make me feel?  

Influencing the emotions of your readers is... possibly a writer’s loftiest goal?  If readers experience an emotion as a result of your writing, then they’re invested, they’re absorbing it.  And, to some degree, they’re resonating with your words and message- and with you.

Consider what mood best suits your intentions, and play close attention to your execution.

Editing and Proofreading

I edit and proofread during every draft stage, except for draft 1 (here’s a resource on the difference between the two, if you’re interested).  

Stephen King’s On Writing is a must for folks who want to learn more about editing.  I’ve read many writing books, but his taught me to edit with a single sample, so it’s the one I recommend.  Basically, you must learn to excise words that aren’t adding anything (adverbs are frequent offenders), replace words with more direct/relevant/evocative ones, and replace hefty phrases with shorter ones.  Here’s a sample of that last concept from my Seeking Resonance draft:

“Koushiro moved out of the doorway” became “Koushiro moved aside.”  In the prose, I already established that Koushiro was in the doorway.  There was no need to specify where he was both coming and going, so I was able to express the idea with three words instead of six and avoid repeating the word “doorway/door.”

Once you see this logic in action, everything will click.  Give On Writing a read!  I guarantee that your library has copies, probably physical and digital.

Whew, I am out of steam, so I’ll wrap this up!  Remember, trying to hold the many aspects of narratives in your hands and carry them simultaneously is an enormous mental load.  It’s so much to carry that you might walk away instead of writing.  I hope this encourages you to pick up a few pieces at a time, in whatever order and combination makes sense to you.  

Additional Writing Posts

-Dishing with an artist

-Tips for Fanfic Authors

-More Tips for Fanfic Authors

-Tips for Winning Nanowrimo

-Resources/Advice for Digimon Adventure Fanfic Writers

Da 5 Bloods (2020) Review

WAKANDA FOREVER!!!!!!!

Plot: From Academy Award® Winner Spike Lee comes a new joint: the story of four African American Vets - Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) - who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul's concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature - while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.

Talk about coincidental relevancy! The Black Lives Matter movement is in full swing currently (following the death of George Floyd), and non-other than Spike Lee releases a Netflix film about Vietnamese veterans, emphasising that it wasn’t only the whites who fought and died for their country during the war. On a serious note, racism was always an issue in the US, so movies like this should always be welcomed, with or without the movement. Director Spike Lee recently addressed the fact of his new film’s release timing accidentally coinciding with what is happening on the news recently in an interview with Variety, where he said the following: “I cannot take any credit for this. The film was shot when it was shot; it was ready to come out when it was ready to come out. And then the world changed for everybody. When something is repeated all the time it becomes a cliché … but that doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. And the truth I’m talking about is timing is everything. This film’s coming out at the right time for the world we live in.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, Mr Lee! This reiterates how severe racism is engraved in America’s DNA, especially that we keep coming back to this issue over and over again. You’d think that by now people would have learnt from their mistakes and would have become better. But as I said, it’s in the DNA of the US, and there is only so much that that can be changed unfortunately. History has taught us a lot, and sadly history tends to repeat itself. But let’s not talk about negatives. In this pandemic filled world where new films are such a rarity due to cinema closures, we actually have a decent film to talk about! So let’s talk about it! 

In a nutshell, this is a quest film! Find a fallen comrade and do some good ol’ gold digging whilst they’re at it! As expected with these treasure escapades, things get out of hand. Straight off the bat, our four leads meet up at the beginning of the movie, and right away you sense the camaraderie between these guys. Through the solid writing and great acting, you truly get the feel that these are true friends who have been through a lot together, like, say, a war! You get to observe their friendship and their love for one another, and though each of them have their own ideologies and beliefs, they work naturally well together, and at the end of the day that is what friendship is. A group of different people who share something in common. That is a theme I’m sure everyone can relate to. That is unless you don’t have any friends, in which case I am very sorry to hear that. Wish I could help. Not even much for advice on that one. Maybe get out more? Honestly, I’m no counsellor, so not the best point of conversation on this topic. I can provide you with a pat on the shoulder and a “there there” if necessary, but that’s about it... Anyhow, friendship!! There’s a lot of it in this movie! That’s just one of the many profound themes applicable to humanity that are present amongst the scenes that play out before our eyes. Even with the Vietnam war aspect, from the trailer I thought this was going to be a war movie, but it actually isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the war element is certainly present in flashback form, but otherwise it is a modern day set tale. So the war is done, but that is the thing, for these guys, this war never ended. They still suffer from PTSD, getting nightmares and constantly being haunted by past demons, and thus the horrors of war are constantly surrounding them. Again, a very timely theme that can resonate with a few, even as loosely as the idea of being tormented by the past. This makes the movie work really well. It feels real, as it is dealing with a lot of true to life human emotions. 

I need to also mention the technical side, as the way this movie is filmed....it feels like a filmmaker who knows his chops! For example, the way aspect ratio is used in this movie to emphasise the time and place in certain scenes really helps in separating the different story elements and tones. The modern day plot-line is presented in normal scope 23.5 aspect ratio as well as 1.78, then the flashbacks that show the Bloods fighting in the jungles of Vietnam during the war are shown in 4:3 (basically a slightly widened square shaped, very old-school) ratio with a more grainy palette, that very much adds to the feel of the past. Heck, for many audiences this might not be a big deal, but I appreciated this cinema trickery. 

As a whole this movie is a solid watch (and surprisingly intense with quite a few shoot-outs), and, like The Irishman last year, perfect for a streaming service like Netflix, as it’s a pretty long movie, reaching over 2 and a half hours, so it’s very comforting to split your viewing into two or three sittings. In terms of negatives, there aren’t many. As I said, it is a bit long, and 20 minutes could have been chirped off, and also at times the movie does come off a bit preachy and on-the-nose with some of its ideas, which seems to be a bit of a Spike Lee shtick, as I had the same little complaint with his previous directorial outing BlacKkKlansman (though, again, that was a very good movie too!), but never so much that it was beating you over the head with its messages. Though as previously stated, a lot of the themes and ideas are timely messages and thus I cannot really fault them. Also a shout-out to the entire cast, everyone is on their top game, and as I haven’t seen many of these actors before, I will definitely make sure to keep an eye out for them from now on, as these fellas have talent! Special applause goes to Delroy Lindo, who gives such a raw, emotion-filled, vulnerable performance, that I really hope The Academy consider him for an Oscar nomination at the ceremony next year. The film as a whole to be honest definitely oozes with awards potential. We’ll just have to see if these nominations truly come to fruition. Also those looking forward to seeing Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman, in this movie, just want to warn you, he isn’t in the film much. That being said, his role is very important and has a great impact on it’s characters. So don’t worry, you will still get your chances to scream “Wakanda Forever!” at the top of your lungs, you Marvel sycophants! 

Overall score: 8/10

Worldbuilding Tutorial #11: Outlining History

Intro I received a request (a long time ago, by this point) to write about how to go about constructing a world’s history. The request is as follows:

Can you write more about how to develop a history for your cultures? And how much is adequate for a good story/campaign? You mentioned time altering things in the last one, and changing empires and migrations can create reasons for the spread of peoples, religions, cultural elements, and political forms. Great series!

Thus, without further ado: history!** **Disclaimer: This is one I might have otherwise waited longer to do, because it can be a bit fiddly compared to a lot of other aspects of world building. If you’re following these tutorials while building your world, you may want to wait on this one ‘til later!

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There are a few ways you can approach writing your world’s history. Which one you pick depends mostly on how much you have written about other parts of your world so far. If you have a lot decided-upon already, you may want to start by working backwards; if you’re still in the process of deciding what you want your world to look like, you may want to work sequentially instead. There are other ways as well, depending on what role history is going to play in your world - I’ll outline them each below.

Working Backwards In most cases, you’ve probably already got a fair amount about your world decided, whether it feels like it or not. Maybe you’ve already got a larger map with the major cities and borders marked out, or you have a sense of the cultural time and place you want parts of your world grounded in (example: the classic Tolkein-esque fantasy setting being medieval western Europe); either way, you’ve got a clear image of what your world looks like and the standards of everyday living. What you want to do is start from there and, well, work backwards to write your history.

The first question when looking backwards is, of course, what do you already know? Look back through your notes. What’s your cosmology - how did the world and its people come into being? Did they come to be slowly over time, evolving from prior species and working through their stone age (or equivalent) and onwards - or were they manifested as they are now, with or without cultural and technological assistance from another source? Consider how long it’s been since your world was populated, where they started from, and where they have ended up. That will give you some sense of the distance that you’re looking to fill.

If you have places that you’ve already established - particularly cities - take a look at those as well. Which one is the oldest? Which one is the newest? What order were they built in, and by who? Are they still controlled by the same cultures that founded them? If not, when did they change hands - and how? This can go for other locations, too: dungeons, the local dragon lair, a major spaceport, a pirate hideout, you name it. You can go through the same process with other things too: a major trading company, a secret order, a ruling bloodline or house, an ancient and powerful being, you name it. Figure out what order everything that exists now came in, and write those out in an outline to get a sense of which things started to come into being during the same time period. Are there any patterns? Jot those down.

The other thing to consider is the question of prerequisite. What needs to have happened in order for things to be the way they are now? If your world has a ruler or government, that had to be founded at some point. If your world is spacefaring, they must have acquired or developed the technology for that at some point. If two countries or cultural groups are enemies, something must have happened to spark that enmity. Consider what the basic prerequisites for your world in the current day are, decide how long ago they happened, and note that down with your locations. As a rule of thumb, for determining age: dynamics that are more settled have been ongoing for longer; and dynamics that are still shifting or subject to change are more recent. This isn’t always the case, but it’s a good “when in doubt”.

Once you have major places and events sorted in order relative to one another, look for clusters - groups of events that all seem like they happened in the same time period. Do they share a history? Did the same thing instigate multiple events? Did one of these events lead directly to one of the others? Trust your gut - if it says yes, then yes; if it says no, leave it be for now. Look also for any big gaps - if there are long periods of time between clusters of events, why? Either decide why nothing of importance happened during that time, or fill them in with the little steps that bridge the point between the older event and the newer one. Continue to fill in the gaps until you’ve got something that looks roughly like you want it to for your world.

Sequential Development If you’re working through a process of building your world from the ground up - perhaps literally - you may want to develop your history sequentially instead. That is to say, starting at the beginning and building out from there, and following that development wherever it leads. This one tends to work less well if you’ve already got a clear idea of what your world looks like right now, although it can still be done even so.

As always, the first question to consider is what you already know. The species and rough cultures you’re working with can be a good place to start, since that influences all that follows. Based on those factors, you’ll want to start with determining early population centers - I’ll write on that more extensively in another tutorial, because that’s a doozy - and working a bit with the development of early civilizations. How fast do they develop? Do any of them get wiped out, through war or disease or natural disaster? Where do the survivors of these fallen civilizations go, and what impact do they have on wherever they end up? Consider all the empty spaces on your map - who’s going to start to reach out to those first? Are the settlers deliberate expansion attempts from a civilization - or dissidents from it? What is their reason for moving into these places? Play with the dynamics of early civilization and see what survives. 

Survival is not the only factor to consider: for those civilizations that hang on for long enough, change is a factor as well. Cultures don’t simply stay the way they are for hundreds of years; they change, in a myriad of ways. As they expand, for example, they may need to adopt new ruling structures that suit a larger domain. Or as they develop new technologies or discover new resources, a culture will adapt to and incorporate (or vehemently reject!) those discoveries. As other cultural groups move through the area - the remnants of fallen friends, or invasion from enemy forces - a culture will pick up pieces from other cultures, particularly those most relevant to the point of contact. Is the primary contact between two cultures trade? Then expect that influence to come in the form of aesthetics, transportation, and status. Is the primary contact more like an incorporated population of refugees? Then the influence may come in the form of family structure, religion, or holidays. Consider how that change may ripple out to the larger culture - will it be celebrated? Suspect? Spurned? By whom, and why? What follows, and what changes?

Sequential history development is really a matter of following these questions through to their natural conclusions. Moving from early civilizations into middling ones, there are other factors to consider. What cultural origins are no longer relevant? A culture may have had its origins in herding, but if herding is no longer necessary (or possible), what will creep in to fill its absence?  What changes are necessary to accommodate an increase in population, or physical territory, or changes in the landscape and climate itself? There is also the matter of the influence of prior history itself - for example, we would never have had the Italian Renaissance without the efforts of Arabic scholars translating old Ancient Greek works; and Rome always aspired to be Greece, even if its vision of Greece was deeply distorted by its own cultural lenses. What do the people now think of the people who were? What do they even know about them? Do they look down on them, do they idolize them, are they merely confused by them? These questions change culture too.

If you ever find yourself in a place of not being sure where things go next - if there’s not a clear sequence, or your world has become too stable - introduce something radically different. Natural disasters in their many forms are always good candidates; so are plots and conspiracies, sudden deaths of important figures, first contact with a perviously-unknown Other - you get the idea. Something to shake things up a bit, and something that there isn’t an immediate or obvious solution to. History is, ah, exciting (or rather, chaotic), despite historians’ best efforts to paint it in as dull a manner as possible - and full of crazy things and crazy coincides on even the most sane of days. 

The last thing to consider as you develop is to think beyond merely events. People are an easy example - who drives these changes? Who will become the important, storied figures of history whose tales and influence survive long past their deaths? Locations, too - what new locations will arise, out of discovery or opportunity or necessity or tragedy? Artifacts is another; what are the important artifacts that come out of this history, and what happens to them? Who owns them, and what do they gain from it? Stories is another good one, especially as civilizations move into ideology as a primary motivator - what stories from their past are these civilizations striving to live up to - or avoid at all costs? 

Keep going until you reach the point in your history that you’re ready to settle at, whether for your own story or game or interest; then flesh it out in more detail. And, of course, you can always go back later to fill in more things as necessary.

Spiderwebbing This is a method you may want to use if you already have a few key historical moments in mind - the fall of an empire, the assassination of a political leader, the arrival of a prophet, the theft of some holy jewels, you name it. Spiderwebbing is similar to working backwards, but involves “spidering out” from several key points rather than from simply the current state of your world. With spiderwebbing, you look at each event and then spin your history a little forwards and a little backwards - what had to happen in order for this event to come to pass? What are the consequences from this event, both immediate and long-term? You can then draw the before and after out a little longer and a little longer until you connect the major events of your world into a chain of its history. Once you’ve got the chain, you can build off details as needed to support the chain and fill in the gaps. How did these events impact or affect those who weren’t directly involved? What was going on elsewhere in the world? 

Final Considerations If all else fails, consider the factors that motivate changes in history. Need is a big one; people will go to great and even desperate lengths to obtain the things that they need. Want is another big one; people are also willing to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain things that they want, and the more resources they have to do it with, the greater those lengths can be. These things don’t only have to be resources; they can be power, agency, and knowledge can all be needs and wants too. Values is another big one - how do you ensure that you continue to pursue the values of your culture? Do you try to spread your values to others - and if so, how? What do you do if your neighbors practice values directly counter to your own? What if it’s your own people who reject these values? Mystery is another one, particularly if your species is like humans - what is left to be discovered? What remains unknown? What happens if we try x, y, z?

How Much History Do You Need, Anyway? This one harkens back to the fundamentals of world building - which is to say, consider what purpose you’re building your world for. If the story that you’re telling is ultimately one that has little to do with history, there’s no need to go all-out; what you want to develop may resemble a list of historical fun facts more than it does an actual outline, and that’s okay. On the other end of it, if the history of your world is absolutely integral to the story you’re telling now, you’re going to want to go deep. If your world is static - that is to say, not being influenced by anyone besides you - then you can afford to develop a little less now and add more later as you need; but if your world is dynamic - that’s to say, there are others who will influence it as well - you’ll need to make sure you put in just a little more work up-front than you think you’ll actually need. Lastly, of course, there’s the matter of fun; if you’re having fun with it, there’s no reason to stop before you’re tired of it. 

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Next tutorial could go in a couple directions. Either it’ll pick up where the last tutorial left off and go into day-to-day aspects of culture, or it will deviate back into the fundamentals of civilization (as per the note towards the beginning of the Sequential Development section up there). Or, as always, if someone has a specific topic request, I’ll happily answer that instead.

First impression of Frozen 2

I have been a fan of the franchise since it came out. And I mean hardcore fan. I was deep into the fandom for a long time, and even though I stopped being involved I haven’t stopped loving Frozen. These characters are very important to me, so before watching Frozen 2 I had a lot of feelings and expectations. Naturally, I have much to say about the movie and I’d love to discuss it with other fans. So, here are my (extense) thoughts on the plot, characters, technicalities and other things! (I might change my mind on some things after watching it again and listening to the soundtrack properly, these are my right-out-the-movie-theater thoughts) Note: I haven’t used tumblr in so long! I barely know how to use this app so sorry if my formatting is weird.

Plot. I loved the incorporation of the elements of magic and the origins. I also loved the lesson of there being wrongdoings in the past and one must make them right even if it might affect us. And the message of people in the present benefiting from harm done to another group in the past without being aware of it. For people in colonized countries or marginalized groups, it is a familiar story. I’m quite surprised they addressed this topic which was last touched (yes, touched, not addressed) in Pocahontas if I’m not mistaken. Certainly, it’s a strong message that deserves an analysis of it’s own. The fact that it is about the origin of Elsa’s power wasn’t unexpected, but that didn’t make it uninteresting. However, I did feel like they kept adding too many punchlines which made them seem weak somehow. For example, when they reveal Iduna was Northuldran it didn’t feel shocking. It wasn’t that relevant to the plot, that is to say, it wasn’t delivered in a way that felt like it mattered. It was only later on when Anna says that she was a gift to her mother for saving the prince, but is that even true or was she just comforting Elsa? Why would the forest thank her for it anyway? I think it wasn’t delivered correctly. Additionally, I do feel that superficially the plot is little similar to the original one but looking at the details it a different kind of journey.

Storytelling. The directors really ventured out and got experimental with the story telling this time. Those black background scenes are very unlike disney, and the way they explained the elements is also rare in 3d animation. That being said I’m glad they got brave and used it because it really makes you understand how (Elsa’s) inner conflict and memories also serve as settings in this movie. It helps connect with Elsa on a deeper level, in contrast to the first one where we get to know Elsa mainly through Anna’s memories.

The lighting. The lighting is by far, the boldest I’ve seen in mainstream 3d animation. The lighting alone sets the mood of each scene and delivers it’s own message. It’s an extremely old art technique to give texture and personality to a scene/painting through lights and shadows, but they took it to a new level (as far as Disney Animation goes). They chose to play with the light artistically, without it feeling unnatural which isn’t so easy. Anna’s scenes in the cave? It feels like the light contrast is an additional character. I think the light was the most breathtaking visual in the film! Of course the choice of colors is also beautiful, but honestly you can’t go wrong with a classic seasonal palette so it’s not groundbreaking or original. Moreover, it was specifically brave for a Disney film to use such strong shadows on their protagonists. It’s not unheard of, we’ve seen this in Brave but it is not easy to incorporate it without losing the overall taste that Frozen has (I do not need to explain why the mood of Brave and Frozen is completely different). I personally think this use of dramatic yet poetic lighting is was truly makes you realize you aren’t watching the same movie.

The songs. Now this a personal preference, but I do love how most of the musical numbers were ballads. However, there wasn’t anything new in terms of story telling through musical numbers. In truth, I found Frozen did it better because it had more songs that actually moved the story along. In Frozen 2 we don’t really find musical numbers that explain the past, current situation or develop the plot (as is the case for DYWBASM, First Time in Forever, Love is an Open Door, etc.). However, we do find more songs that develop or showcase a character’s inner conflict: Into the Unknown, Lost in The Woods (kinda), Show Yourself and The Next Right Thing (in Frozen we only have Let it Go). I can only assume it’s because, as I said, the film focuses on inner thoughts way more than the first film so it is a reasonable choice.

Animation. Going back to technical aspects, there has been so much improvement in the past 6 years! I was particularly impressed by the improvement in expressions and small movements. Perhaps watching so many animation films in these years, gradually improving, it hadn’t been shocking. But looking at how the same characters are moving way more naturally now really made me realize how much progress Disney has made (I say Disney, because in the past I had felt Dreamworks was ahead of them in terms of making movements seem human). Just by using more exaggerated and dynamic expressions I felt like I got to know the characters’ personalities more, even if, script wise, I didn’t. It is such an intrinsic part of filmmaking that Disney has been slowly incorporating into their 3d animation and finally we get to see it in it’s full glory. What is more interesting, is that they had to expand characters’ (previously limited) body language in a way that was in accordance with the first film and the character’s personality. It was quite obvious how they recreated Elsa’s mannerisms (ie. Hugging herself when pushing Anna away) but I was impressed how they added to Anna’s personality through her very strong facial expressions (her sobs, her anger). Not to mention, I think I actually like Kristoff way more now because I understood his character in a way I hadn’t had a chance to before.

New characters. I can’t say I wasn’t hoping to see more of Honeymaren, she seemed like an interesting character. I guess the choice was between her and Ryder and they went for the latter. They had a lot on their plate already as they were including the King and Queen, the Lieutenant, Bruni... plus the weight of the plot... So it’s fine I guess... I just wanted to get to know the tribe more. Naturally the audience will feel more intrigued about them than the soldiers, and we didn’t really learn anything about Iduna or Agnarr as people anyway. I would’ve preferred to focus on one or two new characters and get a clearer picture of them. Writers’ choices.

Character opinions

Elsa: First off, Elsa is a character that is very dear to me, so I am very biased on this. I was slightly disappointed when she froze. I admit it. I thought “Wait, this is it?”. I was simply so into this Elsa-focus and to suddenly be snapped out of it, it was a little discouraging. But I respect the director’s intentions, they were trying to say that it will never be only about Anna or only about Elsa. I respect that. Another thing is that I was looking forward to getting to know her personality more, something new but that really wasn’t the case. They chose to dig more into her identity, which, again, I understand. It is simply not what I was expecting. Realistically, I shouldn’t have expected for them to dive more into her personality without establishing her place in the world first. Oh and by the way, the could’ve not found a better place for Elsa. It was something that I would’ve never thought about but of course, that is where she should be and I’m happy about her joining the forest!

Anna: she really won me over in this film. I grew to love her way more than in the first film. Perhaps it’s because she obviously has matured or because I got to understand her more but she is truly a well constructed character now. She is now not only loveable but also badass. And no I don’t mean it because of the rock giant scene (she had endangered her life before) but because she literally thought her sister was DEAD and she got up and did something about it. This girl, who thought she has lost her last family member and a close friend (Olaf) still did was was needed to be done. Anna is so strong it’s unbelievable. And?! She became Queen!? Again, the writers are amazing! Of course, that’s the way it should be. Anna’s willpower, kindness and sense of justice would most certainly bring prosperity to Arendelle. I would’ve had my doubts about Frozen 1 Anna but Frozen 2 Anna can be trusted with anything.

Kristoff: I grew to like him as a character. I didn’t dislike him before, but I just wasn’t very drawn to him. This time I did see more into who he is, and many times I thought “Oh, that is so Kristoff”. In a way, it made me realize that I did know him more than i thought.

Final thoughts, I loved this movie. I was expecting a LOT and I got a lot. Maybe not what I thought but I gladly accept this path the writers took. And the visuals are just unbelievable. Beautiful. I personally think it has the most breathtaking scenery out of any Disney Animated movie.While it also deals with very serious emotions in a way that is more upfront and mature than previous Disney movies.

The Other Ships in My Fleet

So, I’ve already made a post talking about how I feel about certain ships in My Hero Academia, and another post about some of my other fandoms. Both posts got a lot of likes and reblogs, so I figured I’d talk about my ships from other fandoms. If this post also gets a lot of positive feedback, I’ll consider starting a second page to post my fan content for all of my fandoms, while still maintaining this one almost exclusively for My Hero Academia and Kiribaku specifically.

Klance (Keith x Lance) Voltron: Legendary Defender

I’m fully aware that this ship is probably not going to happen, but it’s really the only ship in the series that speaks to me. I will not lie, I am a big fan of dark and moody dating happy-go-lucky, and the rivals to friends to lovers element is just icing on the cake. It’s only further helped by Lance being Keith’s second-in-command. They help each other grow, and the trust that forms between them is cute and endearing. They also shared a major element to their characters. Both of them feel out of place, Keith because of his Galra heritage, and Lance because he doesn’t have a niche role.

Rabies/Rae x BB (Raven x Beast Boy) Teen Titans (2003)

While there wasn’t a lot of shipping fodder for these two in the 2003 iteration, the two are a canon couple in most versions of the teen titans, having been married in the comics (more than once, I think) so this is sort of a unique ship in that I ship it across every version of the two characters. Sporting a snarky moody goth and a lovable goofball, their dynamic was like that of an old married couple, or a moody teenager and her annoying little brother. Still, the two were good friends, and even though their personalities were polar opposites of each other, they had a lot of quiet, emotional moments together in the series. Whether you want to read them as friends or potential lovers, I think it’s hard to deny that there was a genuinely nice bond between the pair.

Garnet/Rupphire (Ruby x Sapphire) Steven Universe

As the show’s literal physical manifestation of love and a perfect relationship, it’s hard not to like the relationship between these two adorable lesbians. With the show sometimes being edited to remove the queer elements, it’s absolutely hysterical that they had the two get married in an episode very important to the plot, and put Ruby in the dress so that absolutely nobody could misinterpret her as a male. Editing it would only confuse viewers as to why everybody is in wedding attire, thus taking a very satisfying stance against censors and bigotry. Garnet also marks a first in children’s programming as the first same-sex wedding in a children’s animated show, at least as far as I’m aware.

Pearl x Mystery Girl Steven Unieverse

Although only featured in a single episode and having no dialogue, Mystery Girl (possibly named Sabina) is a very important element to Pearl’s character, being her first step toward moving on from Rose Quartz. There were fans that hoped that Mystery Girl would come back, but even if she doesn’t, she’s still important to Pearl’s character development.

Amedot (Amethyst x Peridot) Steven Universe

I know a lot of people prefer Lapidot, but frankly I find Lapis too selfish and cold-hearted to be ready for a relationship as she currently stands. I find Amethyst to be a better fit for Peridot, since they both share issues with their height. That, and the way the show frames them has romantic comedy tropes interwoven into their scenes. But even if they’re just friends, Amethyst’s approval means so much to Peridot.

Stevonnie (Steven Universe x Connie Maheswaren) Steven Universe

I’m not usually a fan of lead boy dates lead girl ships, as they tend to be very poorly done, and many feel forced, or are just boring and predictable. However, the bond between these two feels very genuine. They don’t feel like a lead boy and lead girl forced into a relationship at all. They come together very naturally, and the show takes its time to build their friendship up slowly. The show remembers that they’re kids first, friends second, jam buds third, and love interests last.

Tomstar (Tom Lucitor x Star Butterfly) Star Vs the Forces of Evil

Considering the show’s themes of monsters, racism, and not judging evil at face value, this ship serves as the most thematically poignant to the narrative that the show is setting up. It also makes Star a stronger parallel to her “evil” great great something grandmother, Eclipsa. Both are monster sympathizers with monster boyfriends. While the blood moon bonds complicate things, I see this ship as the most relevant to the themes and messages the show seems to want to send.

Tomco (Tom Lucitor x Marco Diaz) Star Vs the Forces of Evil

More of a joke/crack ship, I know it’s unlikely, but the entire episode of Friendenemies had romantic comedy written all over it. Between the literal in-universe break-up song to the show’s promotional art being inspired by dime store pulp romance novels fuel the fire that keeps this ship afloat.

Bumblebee/Bumbleby (Blake Belladonna x Yang Xiao Long) RWBY

Partners, teammates, and close friends, the ship really took off starting in season 2 during the episode “Burning the Candle”, as Blake spiraled into self-destructive habits due to obsessing over her problems. Nobody is able to get through to her until Yang comes in to talk to her. She doesn’t lecture her or beg her to stop. She instead forms a bridge of trust by first opening up about a similar situation she’s been in, and how she knows first hand that this sort of spiraling can only have negative impacts. They are shown to be parallels, as both girls are negatively effected by a loved one no longer in their life, and the trust issues that spring from that loved one’s actions. Yang was abandoned by her mother, a problem which she mentions Blake repeated. For Blake, it was the uncertainty of trusting someone’s character, and being afraid of someone slowly turning into someone else. She explicitly states in season 3 that her ex started off a nice guy, like Yang. The first time he hurt someone, there was a reason. There was always an excuse. Until eventually, she became the pardoner. The one excusing his actions. And, she expresses the fear that Yang could be following a similar path. Both girls have been hurt by someone in the past, and both girls are afraid of being hurt the same way again, and inadvertently hurt each other the same way as someone else has. It’s also known that RWBY characters tend to represent or be based on fairy tale characters. Yang is Goldilocks, and Blake is Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. However, based on the lyrics from Red Like Roses “Black the Beast descends from shadows, Yellow Beauty burns gold”, there seems to be an implication that Yang is the Beauty to Blake’s Beast. This is interestingly supported by Blake’s name. Blake is a Celtic name meaning both Black and White, and Belladonna literally means Beautiful Woman in Italian, but is also the name of a very poisonous plant often mistaken for the harmless blueberry. The duality of her name could be pointing to how she plays the dual role of both Beauty and Beast.

Seamonkeys (Sun Wukong x Neptune Vasilias) RWBY

A bit more of a crack ship, these two lovable idiots are far less likely to be canon, but since Sun is Yang’s main competition for Blake’s heart, I have no problem shipping him off elsewhere with his goofy best friend. Although they act more like usual best friends in the canon show, their relationship does have a much gayer tone in the less canon comedy show RWBY Chibi, where Neptune almost seems to act like a jealous clingy girlfriend a lot of the times. I doubt the ship would ever sail, but I mostly ship it because they’re cute together. Although, with season 6 just starting, I got the vibe that Sun was stepping aside to let Bumblebee sail uninhibited. Sun doesn’t really have a third popular ship, it’s just Black Sun and Seamonkeys, so this ship may be gaining validity in the future.

Gumlee (Marshall Lee x Prince Gumball) Adventure Time with Fiona and Cake

The male counterpart to Bubbline (Princess Bubblegum x Marceline), there’s no real difference between the two pairs other than their genders, and Gumball preferring baking while Bubblegum prefers science. Because they are effectively just gender-swapped clones of the canon ship, anything canonical between the girls is also technically canon with these two. It’s not that I don’t like Bubbline, but when given the choice between gay or lesbian versions of a couple, I’m going to be naturally inclined to lean toward the gay version.

Sasunaru/Narusasu (Sasuke Uchiha x Naruto Uzumaki) Naruto

Maybe there’s a cultural aspect I’m unaware of, but it’s a bit of a running gag in the Naruto fanbase at this point that Naruto is obsessed with Sasuke. So much so that he seems to care about him way beyond normal friendship. With how much these two obsess over one another, it’s no surprise why this became such a popular pairing. Their dynamic even dwarfed Hinata’s heartfelt confession of her love during the Pain Invasion Arc, because as soon as that ended, did Naruto go talk to Hinata? No, he immediately started thinking about Sasuke. Hinata definitely got the shaft in part II, which is a shame because I really loved her character.

Bob and Linda Belcher Bob’s Burgers

More of an honorable mention than a full on ship, I wanted to highlight them as one of adult animation’s only married couples that actually still like each other. In the wake of the popularity of the Simpsons, and the cementing of the genre with Family Guy, the stock dynamic of idiot husband and enraged but supportive wife became a recurring trope. Before long, every single animated sitcom-esque family fell into this very annoying cliche. So, finding a couple in adult animation that are not only married but still manage to show they love each other is amazing. Their marriage isn’t on the rocks, they find time to at least try and be romantic, and even when they have bets or are on opposing sides of something, the show never forgets that these two love each other at the end of the day.

Captain Swan (Killian “Hook” Jones x Emma Swan) Once Upon A Time

This relationship between Captain Hook and the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming might sound odd on paper, but this couple is by far one of the healthiest relationships in the series. Both Hook and Emma come from broken lives, and together build themselves up to something stronger. In a melodrama surrounding fairy tales, both characters are surprisingly grounded, realistic, and skeptical cynics, a very stark contrast from the usual wide-eyed lovey-dovey couples Disney is known for. Emma’s tendency to put up walls and Killian’s tendency to always put himself first are both slowly broken down over time as Killian tries to tear down Emma’s walls and get to know her while she works on building a foundation of trust between them. The pairing feels very organic, and they definitely feel like the most realistic couple in the series as they both take turns stumbling and working toward being good for each other.

Rumbelle (Rumplestiltskin x Belle) Once Upon A Time

In the early seasons, this couple was beautiful to watch. I truly loved their chemistry and dynamic, as both of them were given such strong characteristics without simplifying either of them. However, as the show went on, it started to lose that power. The couple started to feel toxic as Belle kept waiting for Rumple to change, and he kept on lying and lying. It even reached a stopping point. A perfect one. Rumple was redeemed. He was a good man again. He could be the man Belle deserved. But instead, he slipped right back into his old ways. It was then that I fell off the band wagon for this ship. I loved it once, until I got sick of watching him hurt her over and over.

Daenerys Targaryen x Khal Drogo Game of Thrones

Although together only for a short while, this power couple won audiences over very quickly, as Drogo’s gruff but passionate affection mixed with Danny’s growing confidence and rise to power made these two iconic.

Renly Baratheon x Ser Loras Tyrell Game of Thrones

Another short-lived relationship, the remarkable thing is that Renly was literally the only character vying for the throne with fully good intentions for the realm. He was concerned with the needs of the people, and was the only morally good candidate in the War of Five Kings. Sadly, the ydidn’t get much screen time, but they were still a strong couple.

Peraltiago (Jake Peralta x Amy Santiago) Brooklyn 99

A rare exception to the don’t force the leads to date rule, the show let them form a bond over time that went from a friendly childish rivalry to a friendly dating rivalry. While each character experiences change and growth, it is not at the expense of their personalities, and the progression feels like it was meant to happen.

August’s Featured Game: Shroom Soup

DEVELOPER(S): Shroomy ENGINE: RPGMaker 2000 GENRE: Adventure, RPG, Psychological Horror WARNINGS: listed here (may contain spoilers) SUMMARY: You play as Arnika, a gloomy teenage girl. Perpetually tired, you live off excessive sleep, lime juice, and instant soup. You look into the vortex forming in your cup of said soup, this time mushroom flavour. Next thing you know, you are in an entirely different world where everything, from buildings to people, is being devoured by fungi. It seems like you have no choice but to walk on... Your journey involves exploration, puzzle-solving and battles.

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Hello! I am Shroomy, and I still haven't figured out which one of my nicknames I should go by, but I use "uboaappears" for art and "toxic shroom swamp" for games. I have a bachelor's degree in biology since two weeks ago and like everything surreal, gory and gay. Nice to meet you. I have been in the community since about 2012, and that might be also when I first wanted to make a game - a Yume Nikki fangame, because YN brought me here. I messed around with the engine for a long time, and certain characters and ideas gradually mutated to whatever this is now.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Shroomy: It's about making a cup of instant soup and accidentally going on a very weird adventure. ...Okay, actually, it's a coming-of-age story with an emphasis on mental health, relationships, and toxic flesh-eating mushrooms. The idea came to me when I made myself an instant soup once. For some reason, I thought it would be cool if there was a portal into another world in the cup. That's how it started. (I was also into drawing mushrooms growing on people at the time, so that naturally made its way into my Awesome Game Idea.)

How long have you been working on your project? *Shroomy: ...A while. It's enough to say that I graduated from both high school and university with it. But to be honest, I didn't really do much with it until about two years ago. Right now I tend to think of the time before that as trial and error, playing around with ideas and learning to use the engine. I feel a little self-conscious about how long it took me to come up with a coherent story, but that might be a good thing. Since this is quite a personal game, it helped to grow as a person. I think it made for a more interesting and mature work than it would be otherwise.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Shroomy: I feel like I take little bits of inspirations from everything. But I'd say Yume Nikki and Re:Kinder were the biggest game influences. Maybe Hello Charlotte, too - the minimalistic world gave me some food for thought :> Design-wise, I think my current (character) style is a lovechild of Danganronpa, Killing Stalking and something else I am not sure about. Maybe just me.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Shroomy: I think the biggest challenges for me have always been centered around the lack of free time, the lack of energy or the lack of motivation. Some people manage to juggle life and gamedev, but I get exhausted really easily, so it's hard. This is an ongoing issue. I tend to try and free up a day just for relaxing and creative stuff. I've also started using the Forest app for focusing on things, and sometimes use it for gamedev as well. At the beginning I found it frustrating that my skills (in pixel art, for example) didn't match what I wanted to create. That one was improved by - you guessed it - making a lot of pixel art. Making and scrapping a bunch of tilesets for the game. It's as simple as practice and learning how to get the most out of your art program. (It also helps me to make a detailed sketch of a map before I start working, or at least brainstorm the main elements of it.) Another challenge was the incoherence of the story. Originally I wanted to make something really vague and open to interpretation, but... that actually didn't give me enough material to work with. In the end, I played around with the characters, tried to write them some backstories that no one was going to see, and somehow ended up with an actual plot..? Shocking, I know! And the final thing is putting gameplay into the game. To be honest, the puzzles in the demo were pretty random on my side, I just thought them up on the spot. In subsequent locations I tried to make them relevant to the game's themes and/or hint towards the story.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Shroomy: For one thing, the current project has a story and a plan, even if the story is presented in quite an obfuscated way. The original concept was not much more than an idea of a shroomy world. The characters also have a lot more depth and pain to them than they used to. The locations have changed a lot as well, to the point where most of the original ones don't exist anymore.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Shroomy: My team is mostly just me. At the beginning it was a young and naive me, and now we have a slightly older and better-at-art me. After I started my dev blog, I was contacted by Tommuel, who now helps me with sound design and music. And my old friend Robin has made a few NPC sprites for me, and might give a hand with more pixel art in the future. They're not really involved with other aspects of development, but I really appreciate their help anyway! I prefer to keep most of this game to myself - it feels too personal to share, plus I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Shroomy: I would say it's putting my work out there and sharing it with the world. I'm also really proud of how much I've grown as an artist and writer through developing this. I got attached to this story and this world, with all of its fun, weird and sad details. It's also been really fun, amazing even, to get to know other devs and make friends through being part of this interesting and creative community. I owe some wonderful friendships to it.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Shroomy: I definitely play other games for inspiration, it helps me a lot. Though I try not to make things "just like" other games, but make it a transformative learning experience instead.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Shroomy: I feel like I have been through stages. At first I was Arnika, then Lina, now I feel like I'm turning into Arthur. I guess I put my traits into all of them. (Does that mean that Bernard is the next stage? I'm /so/ ready to transcend humanity, finally learn how to do maths and become everyone's favourite character.)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Shroomy: I think the biggest mistake I made was jumping straight into making a game without thinking it through or considering the scope. In the end, the lack of planning set me back a lot. Admittedly, I was young and excitable, so I guess it was a learning experience? I didn't really know how to write stories or plan long-term projects, but over time, I somehow built up those skills. I think it's good to have a clear-ish idea of what you want to make before you start, and maybe start with something small. (So basically, do the opposite of what I did.)

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Shroomy: Aha. Actually, yes. I have accidentally started writing two sequels already. They will be small games focusing on other characters' perspectives (as opposed to Arnika). I'm not actually touching them yet though, only making some notes and writing scripts. Perhaps by the time the first game is released I'll have enough material to comfortably work on them.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Shroomy: Fan reaction, I think? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I'll just be enjoying the incredible dopamine rush after finally setting this child of mine free to explore the world and infect people's brains with all the shroomy memes it contains. (Also will probably get off the internet for about a week from the anxiety.) Then maybe being free to work on other things, indeed. And posting spoilery concept art >:D

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Shroomy: I am a little worried about the reception of the game's subject matter. If you looked at the list of warnings, you might have an idea what I mean. Sometimes it feels dangerous to explore certain themes in your stories, because people misinterpret depicting something bad as promoting it, for example. But that's why that list exists. I'm just going to let people know straight away that I explore dark themes in this project and I'm not going to hold back on how I do it. Creativity should flow freely, I think. (I am also a little worried about the ratio of my free time vs. gamedev time and /when/ I will finally be able to release it, but... Thankfully, I'm the one in charge of that.)

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Shroomy: Take some time to make a plan for your project, start small, fail faster, and aim for something finished before you aim for perfect. Make a system for organising your files. Back up often, and on a different drive/cloud than your game is on, preferably several. Most of all, make something you would love to play! And don't be too hard on yourself.

Question from last month's featured dev @blackcrystalsrpg: What are your game dev pet peeves?? *Shroomy: I dislike the fact that sometimes I want to have made a game more than I want to make a game, but to have made a game you need to go and make the game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But there's no escape from fate, so... go, go and make that game happen!

We mods would like to thank Shroomy for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Shroom Soup if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

The Myth and Meaning of MissingNo

A few notes about this essay: first, I have removed the period from the name “MissingNo.” for ease of transcription. I also refer to MissingNo’s sibling as Bar ‘M Bar or [][][][] ‘M [][][][] because its real name is irreproducible in Unicode:

Also, for the purposes of this essay it is helpful to think of Pokémon less as animals and more as a gamut of spectral entities: yokai, devas, fairies, sprites, genies, elemental intelligences, ghosts, servitors, unincorporated astral matter, etc. All those strange and elusive beings who populate world mythology and the collective imagination. In contrast to our world, however, people in Kanto are universally aware of these entities and their relation to ourselves. Much more can be said on this subject, but allow the basic premise to inform your reading when it feels appropriate. The subject before us is liminal by its nature.

Myths, Stories, and Suspicions

When we encounter a glitch in a game the temptation is to say that it broke our immersion. Maybe it’s because children are more easily entranced, but as a child my experience with MissingNo did not feel particularly incongruous with the narrative. The encounter, though strange, didn’t contradict the world of the game -- it expanded it in a psychedelic direction. When I met MissingNo, the battle played out more or less as normal. It was only the image of the creature, the arcane initiation, and the haunting after-effects that were atypical.

As soon as Pokémon Red & Blue came out, one fact of life became very clear: Kids love to spread tall tales about Pokémon. It was quite common to hear about Mew hiding under a truck or Togepi skulking around in the inaccessible wilderness behind Bill’s house. But the purported apparition of something called “MissingNo” or “Bar ‘M Bar” held an especially uncanny sway, because everyone believed it to be true. The basic story was that you talk to an old man, and then fly to an island where you meet bizarre and game-glitching Pokémon – but the many accounts which peppered the playground and Internet each held idiosyncratic details. Some said Mewtwo would turn up on the island, others said they found Pokémon native to the Safari Zone, or rogue trainers, or that you could multiply your items by 100. When I finally initiated what came to be known as the “Old Man Glitch”, I performed it in the prescribed manner:

Talk to the Old Man in the North of Viridian City. He will show you how to catch a Weedle.

As soon as the Old Man is finished, fly to Cinnabar Island.

On the island, walk over to the eastern edge and use Surf.

Surf the very edge of the water, moving up and down.

And sure enough, there appeared a fuzzy Tetris-looking rando named [][][][] ‘M [][][][]. Armed with a little background research, I succeeded in slaying this entity, and came away with 128 rare candies, a glitched out Hall of Fame record, and a whole lot of questions. The experience was so simple and tidy, and the performance of the glitch was just dreamlike enough that my young mind felt the thin silver light of meaning shining dimly from behind the supposedly arbitrary method of contact.

MissingNo and its glitch siblings became well known in the Pokémon community as reliable and functional game exploits, and stuck in the imagination for the peculiarity of their presentation. The programming quirks behind MissingNo’s operations are well understood, and the character has wormed its way into a sizable number of fan theories and creepypastas. Something about this strange little block of static resonates with players, and it seems to have surrounded itself with cryptic clues as to its true nature.

The Method of Contact

The first step to understanding a mysterious aberration in a game is to consider the events that lead up to it. What must the player do in order to find MissingNo? The trip begins by talking to an old man in Viridian City who shows the player how to catch Pokémon by snagging a wild Weedle in a brief scripted encounter. This is an interesting motif right off the bat, because we are meeting a teacher figure who shows us how to catch the worm. In dreams and in myth, the worm is often a symbolic representation of the Kundalini serpent, the principal driving force of life itself which coils at the base of the spine. The Old Man is found near the beginning of the game, and he will show you this tutorial as many times as you like. After all, he is teaching an essential lesson: catch the Pokémon around you to expand your team; or more abstractly: integrate the aspects of nature which complete you.

Viridian city itself is a special place, in that we begin and end our Pokémon journey there. It is the first town we come to after leaving home, and it is also host to the final gym and provides a road to the Pokémon League – the culmination of a trainer’s journey. The next step to MissingNo is to fly to volcanic Cinnabar Island, which is incidentally the last town a trainer discovers. So we have leapt from the site of our first lesson to the final city. Here on Cinnabar we walk straight east to the beach, and use surf to ride a Pokemon up and down the edge of the water. If we venture further out to sea, the ritual is forfeit and we must restart. So we glide up and down and up. Here along the crashing waves, apparitions greet us according to our name. The letters in the player’s name are the values that determine which Pokémon appear – and what form MissingNo takes. With this, contact is made. So let’s take a look at this setting. The island is a classic symbol of self-conception: a crystallization of identity emergent from the undifferentiated ocean. There happens to be a volcano on this island, which is also a timeless symbol: that of the eruption of unconscious content; hidden energy and power which has formerly lain dormant and unknown. We encounter MissingNo in a rather narrow area: a single column of tiles representing the edge of an island. We move up and down this coast attempting to trigger the event, swimming/surfing/pacing along the seashore. This is an incredibly profound detail, because the shore of the ocean signifies the mediation between the mundane terrestrial (the land) and the vast realm of the unconscious (the ocean).  The fact that it is the Eastern coast is a bonus, as that is the place where the sun rises in its most prolonged glow, and gives birth to the new day. The island itself is named Cinnabar, home to a research facility that serves a major role in the game’s plot. As we discover through research notes littered about, Cinnabar Mansion was the site of a series of experiments to re-create Mew, which is thought to be a primordial Pokémon. Famously, this resulted in the creation of Mewtwo, an anthropomorphic “clone” of Mew who lacks the originator’s genetic purity (Mewtwo cannot learn any TM, as Mew can), but appears to have gained a humanlike awareness, a trait lengthily elaborated in the first Pokémon movie. Mew as Prima Materia

So what does Mew symbolize? It is known to resemble an embryo, and believed to be the ancestor of all other Pokémon. It is a light pink, which is interesting given that the alchemical prima materia – the formless substance that composes the primeval material of the universe – is said to be dually white and red. In the original games it is only attainable through the metatextual experience of an IRL promotional event, and was allegedly inserted into the game secretly. Mew is clearly meant to be a transcendent being, notoriously elusive and often depicted in space.

Mew is the only pokemon that learns Transform, except of course for Ditto. This has spawned a highly popular fan theory that Dittos are failed clones of Mew. There are some supporting reasons for this idea: they share the same coloration (in both common and shiny iterations), the same weight, the same stats, and Ditto is present at locations relevant to Mew’s story (notably the Pokémon Mansion and the Cerulean Cave, where Mewtwo is found). Unlike Mew, which cannot breed in game, Ditto can successfully mate with any non-Legendary Pokémon. But Mew, critically, is a psychic type. Ditto is “normal.” It is as though the scientists succeeded in recreating the prima materia, but only in a purely physicalist sense. Ditto contains the genetic potential of all current life, but it does not generate new forms. It does not even learn new moves by itself, it must be taught. Science has apparently replicated the form and fertility of immemorial cosmic life, but not its potentiating vitality, its breath of life, its pneuma. I wonder where that pneuma went. Mewtwo, though not having begat novel lifeforms of its own, nevertheless expresses the pneuma in its thoughts and deeds. But maybe pneuma, as a formless concept, could only be expressed allegorically to the player as the enigmatic and varying being known as MissingNo. Revealingly, MissingNo is a Bird/Normal type Pokémon, birds being classical symbols of the spirit. Its cry upon encounter is the default “blank cry”: an unaffected cry of the male Nidoran (the only gendered Pokémon in the original release). But when MissingNo is viewed in the Pokédex, it makes the sound of a Rhydon, the first Pokémon ever designed; we could interpret this therefore as a reference to the voice of creative impulse. There is a caveat to discovering this: the player can only view the Pokedex entry if they have not seen a Cubone. This is another mythic peculiarity, as Cubone’s defining characteristic is its knowledge of loneliness, and its desire for reconciliation with its ancestors. If this sense of separation has never been known, only then can we “read” Missingno’s information, understand its primal utterance, and order it in our Pokédex-pantheon (as #000)

Curiously, Cubone is also host to a popular fan theory: that its missing mother is Kangaskhan. This is believed mainly because Cubone always pines for its perpetually absent mother, and Kangaskhans bear their young in their pouch, but the young are never seen independently. It is therefore supposed that when Kangaskhans die, their young don the skulls of their mothers and become Cubone. I have no strong opinion about this story, but MissingNo closes the circuit thematically. Just as MissingNo has ties to Cubone, its sibling Bar ‘M Bar mysteriously evolves into Kanghaskhan. Additionally, one of the appearances MissingNo can take is the “Ghost” sprite. In the main game, this sprite is only used for the ghost of Cubone’s mother in a unique encounter. Until a special item is used, this ghost isn’t affected by the player; with this guise MissingNo tells us it cannot be grasped.

4 Visions of MissingNo

In addition to the L-shaped white noise and the ghost, MissingNo can appear in two more ways. It can take the form of the fossils glimpsed in the Pewter Museum: a skeleton of Kabutops or a skeleton of Aerodactyl. These constellations of bones further suggest that MissingNo is an ancestral spirit. Kabutops is a water dwelling primordial life-form, whose development name meant “Atlantis,” and who symbolizes the origin of physical life from the first primal waters. Aerodactyl resembles a dragon or wyvern, an intermediary of heaven and earth. These two beasts, like the ghost, are no longer embodied. Though all 3 are potential symbols of the dead, they embody that sentiment differently. Kabutops comes from the water, Aerodactyl from the sky, and the ghost, as a veiled Marowak, would be terrestrial, but its image taken independently refers to the realm of the etheric.

To see these alternative forms, the player must have a certain letter in the 5th, 7th, or 9th slot of their character name: W for Kabutops, X for Aerodactyl, and Y for the ghost. The natural form of MissingNo gives us 4 forms, an apparently timeless property of visionary and mystic experience, from Ezekiel to mandala art and the platonic elements. In fact, there are over 150 such amplifications found in Carl Jung’s General Index, so it’s rather difficult to catch them all. Like many mythological quaternaries, 1 among the 4 is qualitatively exceptional. In this case, of course, that is the so-called “Normal” form, the fuzzy L-block which appears as a result of a much greater variety of player names. Though this natural form is less definite in criteria and appearance, it is actually more definite in its character. The other three forms take their base stats and moves from the last Pokémon in the party (a dittolike effect!); and their sprites, when viewed from the back, are taken from whichever Pokémon’s data was most recently accessed. So when these entities are in use by the player, they resemble something else entirely; they are phenomenologically reordered to resemble a known quantity. The natural form however, has a constant square-shaped sprite when viewed from the back. Though this form is exceptional among the 4, it is reductive to say that this is its “true” image: each of the 4 is a different capitulation of the same idea which itself is formless. Though there is one more peculiarity about the natural form! MissingNo. and Its Twin MissingNo’s natural form is identical with Bar ‘M Bar, as is its Pokédex number, leading many to believe that they were the same creature. However, there are many differences between them. Their height, weight, and stats are different, and they learn slightly different moves. Bar ‘M Bar does not cry like a male Nidoran, but instead sings a pitched-up version of the Zapdos call. This sound resembles birdsong with a background buzz indicating electricity. This pitch-shifted voice tells us that Bar M’ Bar resides even higher in the heavens than the sky-streaking legendary bird of thunder. Its “height” is also coincidentally tied in value with that of Rayquaza, a sacred serpent whose name means “firmament” and is the canonical lord of the skies. Another difference previously mentioned is Bar ‘M Bar’s unique ability to evolve into Kangaskhan. This happens at level 0, but if you glitch it to level 128, it can also evolve into Clefairy. Clefairy is a symbolically rich Pokémon as well; it was the main character of the original manga, and originally slated to be the main character of the anime. It is strongly indicated to be of extraterrestrial origin and is also plainly representative of the fairy kingdom, as indicated by its name and type. Additionally, it happens to be the Pokémon that Bill, a famous internet architect, accidentally transforms into as he is playing with time and space in order to construct a teleporter. We therefore can surmise that Clefairy relates to that which is alien: the alienation of the creature from the franchise, the alien origin of the species within the narrative, and the truly alien experience of inhabiting another body. This changing of bodies is perhaps what Bar ‘M Bar does when pushed past the realm of possibility, into level 128. There is of course a practical programming reason for the number 128, but it also happens to be double the number of possible codons in DNA. The “clef” in Clefairy means “musical key,” or in French simply “key.” Clefairy’s trademark move is metronome, which replicates most other Pokémon moves through the magic of synchronization. What would the world be like if this memetic sprite succeeded in its role as mascot of Pokémon? Would the world be all the more entranced?

When it comes to seeking an audience, Bar ‘M Bar is even wider in its accommodation than its sibling MissingNo. It can be encountered with any name at all – besides the preset options! Bar ‘M Bar’s own actual name, [][][][]M’[][][][] is certainly its most obvious difference. The bars on either side of the ‘M are determined by the actions of the player – Bulbapedia sums it up nicely:

It is most commonly known as 'M, since these are the only typographical characters in its name—its real name is impossible to produce with text, and some tiles in its name are not constant. It is also called 'M Block due to either the glitchy blocks next to its name or the Pokémon's boxy shape.

The first two tiles in [][][][] ‘M [][][][][]'s name depend on which sprite is occupying the spot where the player's Pokémon appears. In battle, the tiles on the left of its name will copy part of the sprite in the bottom-left corner of the screen (the player's Pokémon), while the block on the right will copy part of the sprite in the upper-right corner of the screen (the opponent's Pokémon). Out of battle, the blocks in its name will change depending on the player's location.

We know that MissingNo’s name is constant, and its form is undefined, a result of the player’s bestowed name. On the other hand, Bar ‘M Bar is a definite outcome for any bestowed name, but its own name is defined by the player! Yet it always retains the ‘M in the middle, which is tempting to interpret as the conjunction n’ (and). It looks as though Bar ‘M Bar’s name is something like “This n’ That.” And indeed, that’s what the sprites which comprise the bars draw from: the player’s Pokémon and the opponent’s Pokémon. The fact that these two glitchy blocks are separated by something close to “and” is a beautiful detail. It takes these two oppositional beings and phrases them both, but does so with the separation intact. If it lacked the ‘M between the two samples it would give a different impression. It is the difference between hendiadys (good and ready) and a modified adjective (well ready). It acknowledges that the two things are distinct and in concert, yet they are termed by Bar ‘M Bar in a single body. There is an endless mystery surrounding the mythological motif of 2-in-1, but it is often explored in alchemy and Jungian psychology through the image of the coniunctio, the holy marriage, the reconciliation of opposites.

Can we even say that Bar ‘M Bar is a single entity? It certainly has the strong dual aspect of its twin, MissingNo. Are these two glitch Pokémon the same or not? In the coding of the game, they are not. None of MissingNo’s forms share the constitution of Bar ‘M Bar. Yet they are defined in the Pokédex – the pantheon of the player’s understanding – in the same place, #000, and therein utter the same cry (Rhydon’s). They share an identical sprite and learn nearly identical moves. They cause the same glitch effects to occur in game. The strongest evidence for seeing them as representations of the same essence is in popular conception: Bar ‘M Bar is frequently referred to as MissingNo, and was the first of many other glitch Pokémon subsumed under the generic description of “MissingNo.” It is almost technical trivia to separate them. And most tellingly for the sake of this investigation, they complete each other’s symbolism. So, they are discrete entities AND they aren’t. The mystery of the coniunctio is thus further embodied in this dual being.   The Lingering Presence Now that we’ve outlined the taxonomy of MissingNo+, we can begin to look at the consequences. The two most well-known effects of meeting MissingNo are the Item Duplication Glitch and the Hall of Fame glitch. Item duplication occurs after any encounter with MissingNo or Bar ‘M Bar, regardless of whether the player has fled, caught the creature, or knocked it out. When examining the bag after the battle, the player will find that the 6th item in their inventory has been increased by 128 (although this does not occur if the value is already over 128). Given that a player can reorder their inventory at will, this was a famous exploit for getting hundreds of Rare Candies in order to quickly max out any Pokémon’s level, or generating 128 Master Balls ensuring the capture of any creature you meet from then on. Indeed, this is the most common reason for performing the old man glitch, and likely the critical factor in MissingNo’s renown. And what fuel for the legend: a bizarre seaside vision that grants a wish. Another popular exploit is duplicated fossils, normally given only once per game, so that you could resurrect 100 Kabuto, Omanyte, or Aerodactyl. But any item is fair game: you could effectively wish for infinite wealth, health, lives, moves, defense, speed, power, whatever. You hooked the magic fish, what you do with it is up to you.

The experience also corrupts your Hall of Fame data, replacing some of the images with blocks of static, and scrambling names and values of your champion Pokémon. This is a largely inconsequential effect, but it has symbolic weight. Each Pokémon that exists is a symbol of some kind, representing an attitude, or an attribute, and as you go along meeting them and incorporating them into yourself, they accumulate further personal meanings. So consciously or unconsciously, the Pokémon that accompany you to your final battle are in some sense a mirror of the player: they represent your priorities, values, and appreciations. These are the ones canonized by the game in the Hall of Fame. MissingNo then transforms this composite irreparably. This act can be seen a psychic realignment of the player-character.

Summary

Let’s imagine the story of meeting MissingNo as a fairly tale. The protagonist, Red, talks to an Old Man at the edge of town who shows him how to catch a worm. Next, Red flies through the skies to a volcanic island. There on the Eastern shore of the island, he swims the coast. Attracted by his name, some number of foreign beasts appear before him, culminating in the appearance of a totally unexpected entity which defies easy categorization (though there are partial physical descriptions in some versions of the story). He then defeats, captures, or flees from the apparition. Then looking in his bag, he finds some object or capacity of his has been magnified to a superhuman extent. Finally, we find that some of his major psychic precepts have been mysteriously and radically altered for evermore.

So what then what was the encounter? An alien? A deity or holy ghost? The pneuma which animates life? Is it an unconscious complex made manifest? A psychotic break? The disorienting eruption of the Real? Is it a highly coherent and synchronous glitch-experience, or a pareidoliac imprint in static? I don’t believe that any of these answers satisfy in themselves. Like the images of MissingNo, the interpretations are interdependent, forming points along the circumference of a subject whose middle cannot be approached by the intellect. What is easier to parse is the influence of MissingNo on the fanbase. MissingNo is so famous as a glitch that it has become the common shorthand for any glitch Pokémon throughout the series. MissingNo and Bar ‘M Bar have inspired not only countless tall tales, but tons of fiction, fanart, merch, and a featured article on Bulbapedia. Using our imagination, it is rather easy to place MissingNo into the narrative context of the game, conceptualizing it any of the above ways. As much as this being seems keen to disrupt our in-game immersion, it seems equally willing to stride across our imagination, as though it were walking a bridge leading into the world of Pokémon, or our own reality, or wherever its place of origin.

Unsinkable + 2, 6, 7, 10

Ooooh thank you!

2. My favourite scene to write? 

Molly Brown was a joy to write for, and it gave me a fun opportunity to allow a distance between Nikola and Helen, where the stakes weren’t too high, and they couldn’t properly get into a row, so they’re just sniping (rather mildly) at one another, without real consequence. I also just frelling live for people observing them in action (99% of my non-pre-show fic ideas involve Will/Henry playing witness to an altercation/unintended confession between Tesla and Helen. I live for that kinda thing.)

The opening letter was super fun as well, it was the first thing I wrote and it was great to try and immerse myself in the language of Helen Magnus in that era (I love the idea of their writing back and forth, and that’s mostly inspired by reading the letter chapters in David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’ in which Frobisher’s letters to Sixsmith could easily be Nikola Tesla, had his passion lain in music rather than the sciences, but maybe that’s just me!)

6. Any cut scenes? I cut a flu storyline! When I first began thinking about writing this, I had intended for Helen to be quite ill shortly after her arrival (with Mr Tesla to care for her, of course. *sings* Because I’m a sucker for these things, and it would be cuuuute). However, at the time of writing that particular chapter, I myself was laid up in bed with the flu, and therefore did not particularly fancy sitting down and writing about it (when one is in the throes of the flu, one finds the notion far less romantic and compelling as a plot point). Instead, Helen is physically fighting fight, but alas harbours mental scars...

Any added in? Not yet... However, I did realise that this fic is entirely set within a hotel suite revolving around the lives of my babes, and while that isn’t an altogether unpleasant plot, it is lacking! To truly write a fic involving Helen Magnus, there has to be an Abnormal aspect, I think, not purely historical. Whether it involves her study of Abnormals, a stakeout to infiltrate an Abnormal smuggling ring, the hunt and capture of a deadly creature, and so on, I think there has to be an element of her work involved. Because who is Helen Magnus without her work at her core? It’s easy to give Tesla his, you just need to throw in some dialogue about his current projects (and more likely than not, unfortunately, his recent failures). He’s easy. I find Helen’s line of work harder to incorporate. However, last year, I did decide to add an element of this to the story, but that won’t come into play until the end (whenever the hell we reach it). There will be the vaguest of hints, but nothing too heavy until I’ve really sketched out this idea for myself. I will however, start to mention her work in about two chapters (?), I think. I’m finding it difficult to remember that this is an aspect of her that bears consideration, and it’s something that I’m trying very much to weave into all of my headcanons.

7. Oh my, Nikola is by far the greatest pleasure to write for. You can make him say the most outrageous things, write lines of catty comments, fill pages full of smirks and scowls, and THE DRAMA. Helen often gets my best lines, but only because I write something ridiculous for that damn vampire, and then think, “Christ, what would Helen say? Would she be flustered? Would she brush him off? Raise his hackles? Bait him? Tease him?” And once you decide what she’d do, his response is automatic. He’s easy, because he’s competitive and sauve, he has a bloody answer for everything. I love love love writing for him, he’s really someone who quickly becomes larger than life in a scene.

10. I don’t think there’s much to clear up about the title! I needed something that conveyed that this story was about the Titanic, I wanted something snappy, memorable and relevant. And “Unsinkable” was thrown around far too much prior to and in the aftermath of its demise. Of course, the fabulous Margaret Brown, a survivor of the Titanic, has been referred to as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”. I’m not very imaginative when it comes to titles I’m afraid (hence all my unnamed chapters, something I do intend to remedy at some point), give me snappy dialogue any day, just not a title!

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE GREAT ASK! I promise I’ll get back to working on chapter 11 this instant (currently weighing in at 1700 words, and plenty to go...)

Podcasts & Style/Substance

I must share to you readers that I am in the middle of a very much expected but somewhat rough decision at the moment. After about six or more years of having the same black Toshiba laptop that has stored information from middle school crossover fanfiction to job resumes to questionable png files, I’m afraid it has officially kicked the bucket or at least fallen into some kind of cybernetic limbo. 

After one faithful day when it gave itself one less kick to grant me the privilege of finishing Miss Koboyashi’s Dragon Maid and was forced onto an infinite black screen for all eternity, it dawned on me that my little pal that has been my partner in blogging for years just couldn’t pull through the strength anymore. 

It was an old, busted thing by now-touch pad now replaced by a wireless mouse, brown-gray dust permanently caked onto the screen and in between the keyboard from lord knows wear, a severe lag that regularly musters an effort to keep my video files and word documents secure as I mindlessly surf the internet, and a battery that kept my computer at a pathetic half way point that threatened to undo all of my current progress if a passing dog were to trip the wire at the slightest. 

Little Tobi (as I called them) was a good friend and I will dearly miss them and the disposable information I will lose from letting it rot in the bottom of my bed for now. I write this now from my mother’s laptop as I secretly plan out my next move. 

The likely preceding from here is that I have plans to buy a new laptop to continue my work, to which you are entirely right. I am already aware that the simple black Toshiba with its decent screen size and functional keyboard are all I need for a few extra years of blogging and book pitches, but it’s so…boring. 

Beyond my desktop customization, there’s not much to old Tobi that really sparked the imagination of what kind of person I am and what business I have with a laptop from the get-go. To any passerby I could easily be an accountant or an overworked college student grinding through an essay. 

It’s a bland but perfectly usable piece of machinery that has done me no wrong for years, and yet I find myself eager to pursue something different. Something more pink.

I am set for my next laptop to be a pink one and my itchy buying finger might just make that happen before the summer ends. And my strong, personal desire for every item within my reach to be pink-or something related to pink-tends to skew my idea about features and actual quality. 

My sights have been set on a smaller computer with less memory and detachable keyboard for about a week and I am so very close to just finalizing the deal without anyone else’s input because…it’s pink. And I like pink.

This got me thinking about how we as content creators and consumers tend to be divided over what we perceive as genuine quality in our media. Specifically targeting podcasts, I do believe the concept of style and substance is a very common recurrence we come across and I have mentioned it at least vaguely in most of my reviews and other articles. 

The term “style vs substance” tends to have a fairly flexible meaning behind it that can pertain to multiple aspects at once. This contrast can come to mind when dealing with everyday obstacles and personal preferences over pretty much anything, though let’s talk about how it pertains to audio fiction since I know that’s what you’re here for.

Substance has to mainly deal with the idea of something’s overall depth and purpose. Substance aims to tell you one thing or multiple things and provide it in such a way that the idea can’t be muddled or misinterpreted. Be it an Aesop or a specific type of theme or message, substance is meant to leave an impression in more of the practical variety.

Style is much different. Style can be easily defined as to how something is done or presented in a way that is distinctly unique. Style aims to be eye-catching, interesting, or to generally appeal to a certain type of aesthetic choice. It wants to look good or cool or scary or weird and will go by any stretch of the imagination to fulfill that.

A story that relies too heavily on substance will certainly have a focal point and a clear narrative that is easy to digest, but it will be at the risk of being unremarkable. It will not stick with a listener if an audio drama has a very clean cut story and characters that all fit predetermined roles but no real flair of individuality that makes its whole plot really ring any bells besides the ones set to a very specific tune. 

On the flip side of this coin, too much style can provide an entirely different dilemma. This creates the situation in a which a show is rich in pretty little details and nice music and the occasional wit, but it will ultimately be as compelling as a screensaver. These stories don’t exist in the realm of being genuinely deep or progressive but rather to just to give off a unique vibe, which can make it rather hollow in everything else. 

In my last article, I did go on about my irritation with podcasts that don’t cater to a story and care more about being quirky for quirky’s sake, namely about the over saturation of the “fake radio show” format that is hopefully being reworked by The Bridge as we speak, but that’s a topic I’ve ragged on enough one March ago.

And despite this, I am lucky enough to be invested in a type of medium that seems to have this style and substance balance pretty well figured out. 

Not everyone is a winner in this department, though I am confident in my belief that many podcast writers know that their vision is not complete without a purpose and that this purpose can stay relevant with just the right amount of tasteful flourish. 

As this is a fairly open-ended topic, there is more than one way to manage this balance. For example, I believe a show is capable of being more heavy on substance while still having a style because the aesthetic of choice was minimalist to begin with. Titles that comes to mind is The Bright Sessions, Wolf 359, and the newest show I’ve gotten around to simply titled OAKPODCAST. 

I won’t go into much detail about each one though all of them do cater more to providing substance over style in a way that works. They are known best for their character focus, engaging dialogue and some occasional thoughtful narration, and mostly realistic portrayal of its setting even though they will occasionally lean heavily on otherworldly elements to show the setting is not as normal as it appears. 

These shows are abundant in the substance category because its ideas are meant to be narrowed down to a few very specific idea pertaining to whatever arc or character they may focusing on. And yet they are still memorable because they exist in a world that is just different enough from our own that we’d like to learn more about it.

Shows that play more into style than substance can be equally engaging. Ones that come to mind are Hadron Gospel Hour and The Meat Blockade, two very different shows that are dedicated to strong stylistic choices that don’t interfere with its narrative. 

Be it Gospel Hour with its love for dimensional travel and ideas directly inspired from seventies and eighties pop culture or The Meat Blockade’s ideas drawn from the likes of Kafkaesque and surreal humor and just the right touch of Broadway, it’s clear where the focus is meant to be without it being a deal breaker on where the story lies in all this. Thus the strange decisions work as a service to the story rather than it being treated as a lesser priority. 

Going back to the Broadway thing, I wasn’t kidding. The Meat Blockade has an entire, roughly four minute segment in their fifth episode where a group of anthropomorphic frogs break out in a music number…and it works really well because it’s ultimately an exposition song that describes their current situation, the hidden lore about the setting, some hints of foreshadow, and nicely transitions into the next scene and leaves on a cliff hanger for episode six.

It’s such a strange choice editing and writing wise and I’m choosing to provide this as an example because it’s a damn excellent way to establish creativity and tasteful zaniness that still works to inform.

But it is also possible to have a fifty-fifty situation going on where the style and the substance coexist so well that one cannot exist without the other.

Our Fair City comes to mind where it’s richly described dystopian world and unique characters are used to explore more in-depth themes and still have one single tale to tell, or, multiple branching tales. 

The same can apply to Greater Boston with just a touch more realism thrown into the mix, creating a fairly stylish and satisfying audio drama about life in a fictionalized version of a real city.

The key here is that the world and its rules play a part in why the characters act the way they do which lets it be equal parts distinct and fulfilling as a story.

Without these aesthetic decisions in mind, some of these shows simply wouldn’t be what they are while the same can apply the substance latent shows who wouldn’t be the same without their choice of character interaction and treatment of specific themes. 

Some are far more likely to lean more towards one than the other but that’s because it’s not a necessity for The Bright Sessions to have a jazzy backtrack and it’s not expected for The Meat Blockade to have a long and detailed monologue about Berenger’s relationship with his girlfriend. 

But that’s the interesting thing about the style and substance equation-it can be switched around as many times as necessary to fit a story’s current narrative. Maybe one day we learn the tragic backstory of a single gag character, maybe one day there will be a stretch of retro-funk music played over a straight faced hero’s inner thoughts. 

It’s when these ideas are of service to the stakes and a characters’ all around presence that the script can be flipped and deliver a much needed change of tone that keeps the listener on their toes.

This won’t only be impressive on a sound design and editing standpoint, but also establish some diversity in the writing style to keep the story varied and interesting. 

Whatever the balance may be, it must be one that lets the story flourish in a way that feels authentic and natural. A concept is only as strong as the effort going into it. 

Don’t allow a story to be expressed in a distinct way then it won’t be remembered but let flair and pizzazz be too much of a focus and your final product will come off as meaningless fluff. 

Let your world building and natural need for sparkle be the thing that draws in the viewer rather than isolate them from the goings on of what is especially important. 

Don’t let characters fade into oblivion from a need to make a story easy to understand, let them be factors and active players, not mouthpieces and exposition machines. 

And if one certain element speaks to your project more than the other, that is entirely understandable. Certain plots are better seen through a substance perspective than a stylish one and some ideas are best seen with stylish decisions being a priority with substance being a smaller part of the equation.

I suppose you could say it’s less a case of style vs substance than it is style/substance or substance/style-it’s a balancing act that comes with compromise and patience rather, not just a case of right and wrong.

So thus my decision about what new laptop I should get to replace my old one is less a choice of a functional laptop or a pink laptop, but rather settling on a functional pink laptop.

New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/does-every-developer-need-to-use-rebase/

Does Every Developer Need to Use Rebase?

Written by Alexander Junger, Software Engineer Backend

As a developer nowadays, chances are that you grew up with Git. Sure, you might have had to use SVN at an internship at some point, but Git is generally what we learn and use these days. You might have found out that Git was created by Linus Torvalds for himself and his kernel developer friends. Maybe you tried a rebase once (by accident?), destroyed a few days worth of somebody else’s work, and now you’re feeling a bit gun-shy. You may very well decide that rebasing is not for you and Git is a glorified save button anyway.

Learn to walk before you run

To me, the most important aspect of proper version control is that it allows you to understand the history of the software you’re working on. Especially in legacy code bases I sometimes ask myself questions like “what were they thinking?”, “is that a bug, or was it once a feature?” Git can answer those questions. That is, if the code history has a linear plot, is structured into atomic commits that have descriptive messages and grouped in branches indicating the larger feature those changes were part of. Working with branches is a topic of its own, owing to many branching models and countless variations. The two essentials however are descriptive messages and atomic commits. That’s something everybody working with Git should be well- versed in.

The intro paragraph obviously uses exaggeration to make a point, but I do believe that many of us are missing out on the more advanced features of Git. Are they needed or can we cover our bases without them?

Descriptive commit messages in reality: “Fixes the stuff”…

Everybody has “been there, done that” – commiting just to get it committed, with the message being an afterthought at most. The established way to stay disciplined while working on unappealing tasks is to make it as easy for yourself as possible. Thus, align on a pattern for commit messages within your team and really stick to it with every single commit. In the backend system of Runtastic, we mostly use the imperative style as per Chris Beams.

What I like to do is add our Jira ticket numbers as a suffix, to add more context. Many Git interfaces automatically integrate your issue tracker when the ticket number is referenced in the message.

Tekin Süleyman makes a point in his talk “A branch in time” that your commits will probably be around for much longer than your company uses your current issue tracker. Thus, relying solely on details in a referenced JIRA or github issue is not a safe bet – it should be an addition to an already explanatory commit message.

Atomic commits in reality: The “Plutonium-commit”

It has a half-life of 2 weeks (indicating the time after which even the author no longer has a clear picture of what changed) and contains a new feature, two bug-fixes and, while we’re at it, the refactoring of an unrelated module. Also two major library updates. And, you guessed it, a new bug…

This is the exact opposite of an atomic commit and can be prevented to a certain extent by simply structuring your work. If you’re testing properly – yes, to me that means TDD – you already have a workflow that makes this very easy. Let’s have a look at how it works in practice: I mostly commit units. That means, if the unit passes its specification, I decide: do I need to specify it further (edge cases etc.)? If not, I commit it, if yes, I might still commit it and amend that commit later, or just continue working on that unit. Your mileage may vary, but this usually gives me commits with a granularity that fits just fine.

Through our Runtastic training program, I was able to attend the Craft Conference in Budapest this year (an amazing conference!). Tim Ottinger gave a nice talk titled “Test Driven: The Four Step Dance”, in which he argued that “Integrate” should be the fourth step after “Red-Green-Refactor”. What does that mean specifically? To him it means “making changes part of the code base,” as in committing, pushing, and having them run through CI.

More collaboration makes it harder to maintain a concise history

So you’ve figured out clean, atomic commits. But then your colleague requests some changes on the pull request. The usual choice is likely a new commit, everything looks good in the overall PR diff, but now we have two non-atomic commits:

In the long term, commit a7176f1 is probably not a relevant part of this software’s history that could cause confusion, or at least some wasted time. We should merge it with the first commit of the branch by performing an interactive rebase, applying the commit as a fixup to the first one. This means that it will be merged into its predecessor, forming a new commit that replaces both of them, while keeping the message of the predecessor (in this case 04b7fc5)

If you haven’t configured a default editor for rebasing, you have to prepend your choice in an environment variable. Like most other backend developers at Runtastic, I use vim for coding, so that’s what I also choose for any interactive rebase.

EDITOR=vim git rebase --interactive 04b7fc5^

The interactive window will display a list of commits to be rebased, allowing you to edit the action to use for each one. The default “pick,” which simply replays the commit on top of its (new) parent, can be replaced with actions including “drop”, “edit” or in this case “fixup”. Once we’re happy with the to-do list, a save and exit will start the rebasing process.

pick  04b7fc5 fixup   a7176f1 pick  2ba3b03

Neat, we just rewrote history to make our commits atomic!

In the example above, we use the parent of the first of our three commits. This means whatever we do in the rebase, those commits will remain ancestors of 7ddc117. In many cases however, you would run `git rebase -i master` or use any other branch reference. Given that your copy of the referenced branch is up to date, this moves the branching point from where it originally was (say, commit 7ddc117) to the tip of the target branch. The effect is that your branch is now “aware” of what happened in master in the meantime and contains those changes.

This is where TDD step 4, Integrate, comes into play again. I like to continuously integrate the changes of others into my own work, by applying my own branch onto the master or feature branch early and often. This increases collaboration and speed while preventing what I call “merges from the abyss”. These are branches that split off from their parent two months ago and you need to “load more” a couple times in your commit graph to finally reach the branching point. The problem with those: you have no idea, whether the author is aware of the changes that happened to the codebase since then.

By rebasing – integrating often, we make our commit history more linear and easier to grasp. The rebase puts our changes “ahead” of everything else on the parent branch and it’s completely our own responsibility. Thus, a reviewer can safely assume that we considered all those interim changes and that our own changes make sense in that up-to-date context.

But rewriting history is bad!

“Not so fast!”, you say. “Pushing a rewritten history requires force and it can cause mayhem!”

Most devs know this and many teams have the rule to never force push. The argument is that a cleaner history is not worth the risk of losing work by a happy little accident. So incorporating rebasing into your git workflow would require you to also incorporate force pushing. Sounds dangerous, doesn’t it?

The risk depends largely on the type of branch, I’d say. Rebasing a branch that multiple devs actively work on – which in itself is already questionable – certainly carries some element of risk that can only be somewhat controlled by close coordination. However, let’s say the example given above is about a branch owned and worked on by one person. If this developer changes the history on that one branch, no other developer is impacted, except when reviewing it.

So I think we shouldn’t be so rigid about force pushing and rather establish guidelines when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. Here are some best practices I found regarding rebasing and force pushing in the context of the code review process:

Before the Code Review

Sometimes it makes more sense to change the order of commits, or even move some parts of a commit’s diff to another commit. Rebasing is nothing more than sequentially going through the to-do list you modify in the interactive window. This means you can simply halt at one commit  via the “edit” command, reset it and then create two separate commits from the working changes – see the reference for details.

It can also make sense to do multiple runs. Consider the three commits pictured above. Let’s assume that there are some changes which should be part of C1 but, for whatever reason, were only committed with C3. We can use the splitting technique as described above, leaving us with a temporary commit (512ceb0) and a cleaned-up atomic Commit 3.

We run another interactive rebase, moving the temporary commit from line 3 to 2, and, once again, we mark that commit with fixup. We end up with three clean commits and our branch is now ready for review.

For me, rebasing a task branch is now the default before I open a pull request. When I think of an additional test case that’s missing for a class, it goes into the commit that added this class. I decide on a situation-by-situation basis whether I want to shift focus from writing code to rebasing. In that case, the additional test case would be amended to the original commit right away. More often though, I just create a fixup commit referencing the original commit (with `git commit –fixup <SHA>`) because it’s less of a distraction from coding. Just before opening the pull request, I run rebase with the autosquash flag to automatically squash test cases into the commits they belong to. No matter which way you choose, you will help your reviewers with more structured commits.

During Code Review

If you already opened a pull request and your code is being reviewed by others, avoid force pushing rebased commits! Imagine that the pull request suddenly shows a completely new diff, but no other commits were added. If your colleagues are thorough, they’d have to review your entire PR all over again. What this looks like depends slightly on the software you use to review, some are smarter than others in this regard.

  Some review systems don’t even require force pushing at all, even though the commits of a PR are completely malleable during review. They are only “baked into” the codebase on approval. One such system is Phabricator, which makes a great point explaining their review concept. At Runtastic, we use BitBucket. It works similarly to the GitHub workflow, which means that rebasing and force pushing during review doesn’t work really well. You can, however, commit the requested changes with a fixup commit. After a regular push, the reviewer will see the exact changes you made to the PR and the “history of the PR” is preserved.

Sidenote regarding code review that I find interesting: Linux kernel developers still use mailing lists for that – and Git actually has built-in tools to send diffs via email for exactly this purpose. Check the email section in the Git reference. Because of this review style, they actually rebase frequently in their review process. Whenever changes are requested, the patch author rebases the entire branch and sends out an email with the updated patch, until everybody agrees that it can be merged as is. This goes to show that every team needs to find the process that works best for their context.

After Code Review

Everybody approved your pull request and it’s ready to be merged. Now is the time to clean up those fixup commits. A final interactive rebase with the `–autosquash` flag tidies up those commits into a clean history. What I described above as “history of the PR” is now no longer necessary and all changes should be in atomic commits that build on each other. Small rebases on personal branches are usually nothing to worry about. Now, the first time rebasing a branch with thirty commits or so…that’s where you want to make sure you’ve had your cup(s) of coffee.

If you’re skeptical that this is going to go well, it can make sense to backup the branch before rebasing it:

$ my-feature-branch:~$ git checkout -b my-feature-branch_backup $ my-feature-branch_backup:~$ git checkout my-feature-branch $ my-feature-branch:~$ git rebase …

If in the middle of the rebase, you decide that you’re too far down the rabbit hole, abort the rebase with `git rebase –abort`. And should you go through with the rebase, only to discover that you overlooked something, leaving the whole branch in a broken state – time to use your backup:

$ my-feature-branch:~$ git checkout my-feature-branch_backup $ my-feature-branch_backup:~$ git branch -D my-feature-branch $ my-feature-branch_backup:~$ git checkout -b my-feature-branch $ my-feature-branch:~$ git checkout -D my-feature-branch_backup

This works because a branch is nothing more than a reference to a certain commit (just as HEAD), so the commits on your backup branch are not affected by the new commits you’re implicitly creating with the rebase.

A curious mindset is important

You will run into conflicts and it can initially be tempting to simply abort, thinking “I’ll clean up my branch the next time”. But of course conflicts don’t happen randomly, they are predictable and follow some common patterns based on how Git works and the rebase you’re doing.

Git also offers many additional commands that are helpful when things don’t go smoothly:

bisect: Allows you to find the commit that introduced a certain behavior (e.g. regression). Let’s say after rebasing, you notice that your test suite no longer passes – you must have accidentally broken something, perhaps while resolving a conflict. With bisect, the last known healthy and the first known broken commits can be flagged. Git will then traverse this commit range in a binary search pattern. For every commit it stops at, you check if it already contains the regression and flag it as good or bad. Once the offending commit is identified, it can be fixed with an edit rebase. (It goes without saying that fixing a bug this way should only be done if you notice right away and that code is not merged upstream yet!)

reflog: Allows you to see the history of a reference (such as a branch or HEAD). That might seem like inception-level stuff at first, but a reference changes over time and, of course, git keeps track of that. It’s not strictly necessary to use this command but it can come in handy.

stash: Perhaps the best known in this list, but I still want to mention it because of its versatility. Stash works like a stack for dirty working directories. The default “push” mode saves and then wipes it clean, while the “pop” mode recovers the last state you stored. This is especially helpful for in-between branch switching or during rebasing.

Don’t shy away from the Git reference. It often contains typical examples of how commands can be used. Keep a curious mindset about features that you don’t (and do!) use regularly, know that you can recover almost anything, practice, and you will soon start appreciating those more advanced features of Git.

Why bother?

We have seen a few ways every developer can get the most out of Git in day-to-day work. Now, integrating rebasing into a team’s workflow is definitely a hotly debated topic.

Is it for everybody? Probably not. I’ve shown some examples of completely different strategies and I think all of those have the potential to be the “best one,” providing they work for the people using them.

For me personally, combining the essentials – that is structuring and describing – with cautious rebasing of individual commits on non-collaborative branches already goes a long way. It will increase the quality of your code history, the way you structure your programming, all while keeping risks quite low. As I see it, this can be part of every developer’s reality.

It’s obviously an entirely different animal (in risk, needed concentration…) to move around large feature branches from here to there and I agree that such things should not be done carelessly.

Can it be justified? For sure.

Whatever you’re doing, just don’t degrade Git to a glorified save button.

***

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what are your thoughts/hopes/predictions for the next yugioh series based on what we know? I have a few but until we know who's directing it it's hard to know how it's going to turn out (btw, nice to have you back!)

I posted something relating to my predictions for Yusaku a few days ago. But I’ll write on my hopes/predictions for the series itself because I like taking shots into the abyss and seeing what, if anything, sticks. I also… need to take my mind off of Arc V for a minute…

So, my thoughts on it? I’m very interested to see what the VR system has in store. I’m currently imagining it as being sort of like season 1 action fields were, times a thousand. The setting of it will change depending on the duel, just like action fields—but it’ll also go a step further. I think everything—everything—will be highly interactive. It’ll be another world onto itself, perhaps even as expansive.

And I think that’s where the danger lies. Even if the VR world feels completely real and like it’s own separate universe, that doesn’t mean it stops being artificial. It sounds like it would be powered by some sort of super computer, and like any computer, it would be vulnerable to corruption (hacking, viruses, blue screen of death, ect).

Now, imagine our young Yusaku and his band of merry thugs getting stuck in a corrupted VR world. Honestly, if it is a computer, I can’t see the writers not doing something like this. Depending on how severe it is, it can either be some minor, two episode conflict, or the endgame duel. I believe the latter would be most likely if the VR world is revealed to have any sort of sentience.

Then there’s also how duelists can change their appearances in the VR world, which is probably going to be Yusaku’s biggest incentive to try dueling. There’s one post (I can’t find it now; if anyone wants to help out, let me know so I can link it?) theorizing that he’s going to keep his identity hidden for as long as possible, and that it’ll be a sort of superman-esque scenario—so he goes around dueling under his persona, perhaps even gains a sizable fan base, but no one knows that it’s actually him. This would be an interesting way to both explore Yusaku’s apparent shyness, his hidden depths (whatever that may entail), and to re-invent the hero theme GX had going on.

Now, getting back to the ‘real world’. Everything’s supposed to take place in a HS setting. The fact that Yusaku starts off as a non-duelist means that the system is likely going to be similar to the one in Arc V—that is, regular school in the morning and afternoon, and then a dueling cram school that Yusaku will eventually go to.

As I said in the above post, I’m hoping that it won’t be a boarding school, because that would be too reminiscent of GX for my taste. I want a dynamic setting. One of the biggest beefs I had with GX is that for the first two seasons, the setting was stale as hell (imo). The only way I could see a boarding school working is if it’s some sort of blend between GX and Arc V’s systems. So it can’t only be a duel school, and it’s dueling program has to be voluntary in order to conform to Yusaku’s lack of previous experience.

But no matter what type of HS he goes to, when it comes to his personal life I really do want his family to be involved. If there’s one element of Arc V that YGO6 recaptures, I want it to be the exploration of different family dynamics. I also hope that they amend where Arc V went wrong in this aspect. So, I don’t want him to have one particular parent that he worships right up until the end. I don’t want his parents to be separated by anything other than divorce or death (which would be great concepts to explore, if they’re taken seriously and not used for simple angst). I’m just not feeling a rehash of Yusho’s (and apparently, Kazuma’s) stories.

And then there are his potential friends. As I said in the post above, I don’t think he’ll start off with any. But he’s going to “meet a lot of new people through dueling”, which means that he’ll be gaining friends as the story goes on. We just don’t have any names or faces yet.

And I don’t care. A lack of information never stops me from at least expressing my hopes for what I’d like to see. But it does confine me to defining them via archetype. 

So based on other types of friends we’ve seen in the past spinoffs, we’ll probably get some combination of:

the rival

the ride-or-die

the foil (to Yusaku)

the rich kid

the lone girl (damn, it hurts to write that)

the angry/brash one

the thickheaded one

the morally questionable one 

the non-duelist

the upperclassman (the older friend)

the underclassman (the younger friend/the ‘child’)

Now, all that sounds rather boring and predictable–name any spinoff, and you can fit most of the protag’s friends into these categories. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these archetypes, because they’re all eventually filled with individual characters who fill their “roles” in unique ways. 

Still, as far as my hopes go, I’d want number 6 to shake them up more than the previous spinoffs did. How can that happen?

Make the rival a girl. Make the rival noticeably younger than Yusaku. The rival doesn’t have to have an overpowered deck—I think it would be interesting to have a rival who used, say, a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy, or who had a 0 ATK ace. The rival also doesn’t have to be jaded and bitter. They could be optimistic and peppy, but also highly competitive.

The ride-or-die doesn’t have to be stuck in second place behind our protag. Make the-ride-or-die one in the same with the rival, right from the start.

There isn’t much room to play with the foil; this one varies depending on who they’re playing opposite to. The one thing I can think of? Make the foil a girl. 

The rich kid could be a girl. Instead of having them be some pompous windbag, they can be spoiled sweet. They could be super generous—the product of a functioning, loving family. It would also be great if they don’t give a damn about rare cards—or if they do, they don’t bring up the subject in front of people who can’t afford them. 

It would so kick ass if the lone girl was also a formidable duelist. I want her to have agency, and to not be regulated to the sidelines (at any point in the story). It would be great, and so different from what we’ve always gotten, if all of her strategies are based on overpowering her opponents through brute strength alone. Let the girl’s monsters be fiends, or insects, or beasts. Give her a scary, 3000 ATK ace. And, if they want to go above and beyond and be truly radical (by YGO standards)? Make the lone girl a lone boy. Let every other one of Yusaku’s friends female. Lol that’ll never happen, but it’s nice to dream.

The angry one could be a girl. Instead of bombastic and egotistical, their anger could be rational, even righteous. Their anger doesn’t need to be explosive; it can smolder, quietly. I’d love to see a character so viciously unassuming that when their true nature comes through, it’s a shock to everyone (including the viewers!)

Let the thickheaded one be a girl (thus, destroying the concept that women are inherently more sensible—it puts undue burden on us). Instead of having them be book dumb and street smart, it would be interesting to see the inverse: book smart, but painfully naive, and still stubborn enough to believe that they’re always right. Or maybe their ‘stupidity’ could be a facade in order to lull people into a false sense of security. In that case, let them be a mix of archetype, and the next one.

The morally questionable one is also hard to play with, because by it’s very nature it defies boundaries. Again, the only one I can think of—make this friend archetype a girl. 

The non-duelist… well. All I can say is: for the love of god, don’t make this one a girl. Let them be a boy who cheers on everyone from the stands, including the female duelists. But all the same, let them also be plot relevant outside of their cheerleading role. 

Make the upperclassman a girl. Make senpai bumbling and unskilled.

Let the underclassman be a formidable duelist. Let them be jaded and cynical. Let Yusaku’s kohai also be his mentor in dueling. (And if that last one comes true? Say it with me: let his mentor be a girl).

More general hopes for his friends: more than one relevant girl (that should be obvious), queer friends, friends who all actively encourage Yusaku to come out of his shell but will rain sweet hell upon anyone who tries to mess with him. And if Yusaku ends up having any siblings, I want them to be plot revenant enough so that they’ll also be able to fit into one of these archetypes.

… damn, this is longer than I thought it’d be lol. What do you think is going to happen?