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felassan · 3 years

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Zero To Play podcast episode: John Epler, Narrative Director at BioWare

In the most recent episode of Zero To Play podcast the guest was John Epler, Narrative Director on DA4. He talked about narrative games, how they fit inside an industry leaning towards games as a service, his experience being at BioWare for almost 14 years, and advice that he has for aspiring devs who want to create memorable, impactful and transformative moments in games.

The episode summary read as follows:

In this episode John brings his 13+ year experience being at BioWare and working on titles like Mass Effect & Dragon Age: Inquisition to explain how he believes storytelling will evolve and develop through the medium of games.

He shares some of his favorite moments and why he thinks games are the most powerful and interesting medium to be exploring in this generation.

It’s a good and interesting interview, so worth checking out if you can! You can listen to it here or on Spotify.

This post contains some notes on what was talked about in the episode, in case a text format is better for anyone (for example folks that can’t listen to it due to accessibility reasons). It’s under a cut due to length.

A bit of paraphrasing.

The average dev stays with a game company/studio for about 5 years. John joined BioWare right after the EA acquisition happened.

[on going into Trespasser] “Myself and the Lead Writer Patrick Weekes both knew that we needed to wrap up at least this part of the Inquisitor’s story, and set up where we want to go next with the franchise, with the IP. We learned a lot of lessons from DAI itself. DAI was a game with a lot of exploration and open-world content, and while we stand by that (I still think it was the right call for the game), one of the pieces of feedback we got from the fans was that they really wanted some more directed storytelling. Jaws of Hakkon was more of a continuation of open-world, more free-from exploration and free-form design. Trespasser was our opportunity to tell a story in a much more linear and focused way. [this way of telling stories] really does help to be able to create that sense of pacing and emotional escalation. It’s a lot harder to do that when you’re mixing up storybeats with big, wide open-worlds. Trespasser was a project where everyone was kind of in sync, we were all building [towards] the same thing.”

“There were [story]beats [in Trespasser] that I don't think we would have been able to get away with in basegame DAI, one of those being the - quite frankly - incredibly lengthy conversation you have with Solas at the end. Because by this point we knew that if someone is playing this DLC then they are in it - they’ve been in it for the last two DLCs, they’ve played through the entire game, they want something incredibly story-focused. And we were able to really dive deep into that, some of the deep lore, some of the narrative. This was one of the only conversations that I’d worked on which, due to limitations of the engine, we actually had to break into two different conversation styles because it was so massive. We also got opportunities to do some fun callbacks. One of my favorite ones was one Patrick suggested which was, ‘What if I [didn’t like Solas much and] spent the entire basegame telling Solas I didn't want to hear anything he had to say?’ So we had the option that if you never chose ‘Investigate’ or a dialogue option that implied that you wanted to hear him blather on, there was one dialogue option that you could pick which was basically ‘Solas, when have I ever wanted to hear any of the shit you have to say?’ And it just kind of wrapped up the conversation super quickly, and Solas looked exasperated. It was fun because it’s not the kind of thing you can necessarily do in the main game, but in a DLC which is entirely for those core fans, you have a lot more options as to what you can do.”

John has an understanding of games as an interactive medium.

“Choice of combat, choice of mechanics, all of that does have an impact on the storytelling and on the narrative that you’re trying to put through. A lot of storytelling in games is trying to make sure that the - there’s a phrase, ludonarrative dissonance - [for example, say] I’m making a game where I’m trying to make the player feel powerful. How do you [do that?] [...] In games, this is kind of the challenge. Interactivity is so key to it. [...] It’s a lot harder [compared to characters in film] to put the player in a situation that they are going to lose, because as soon as you take away that autonomy, you’re taking away some of that interactivity. [...] If as a player I'm making you feel strong and powerful, and then I pull you into a cutscene and suddenly you’re losing the fight, you’re losing what’s going. That is a much different sensation, that is something movies can get away with that games can’t.”

“What are [players/our audience] actually meaning when they say that they ‘want choice’? I think that in a lot of cases we conflate that with ‘Oh, they want to make a big decision that changes the world’. But in a lot of cases what players want is the game to react to what they’re doing and the choices that they’re making in a way that feels organic and natural. I think this is something CD Projekt Red and the Telltale games did really well - of making it clear when the game is actually going to pay attention to what you said or did, so that when you see it later you’re like ‘Oh right yeah, I made that choice, the game said it was going to remember it, and it remembered, this is cool’.

And it doesn't always mean completely changing the course of events. The Telltale writers, as they got on through the games, they realized that the better way to address choice - and something we’ve done too - is, if we make the game have three endings, four or five - like DAO had an absolute massive amount of ways that it could turn out. How do you pay that off if you want to do a sequel? There's basically two choices. One is that you make an incredibly short game because you have to account for these very different branches, OR you collapse them and say ‘Sorry, this is what we’re going with’. And I don't think either of those are necessarily satisfying. For me it’s about making the players feel like their time and the choices they made have been respected. More than anything else that's the key, it comes down to understanding your fanbase, what it is they’re looking for, what it is they’re asking for, because there is that desire for choice, reactivity, consequences. And it’s something that BioWare, that we’re especially sensitive to because it’s always been a big pillar of the games we make. It’s just about understanding what this actually means from a practical standpoint and how you execute on that in a way that makes your fans feel satisfied, while still not writing yourself an impossible check to cash, because, you know, you can react to anything, but if you have a game that ends in three separate ways, you have to go with one of those two options and neither of them is going to be intensely satisfying to the player.”

“A phrase I’ve been using is, what I'm describing as - the half life of quantum. ‘Quantum’ is what we say when it could be like, one of six different things. The half life of this is how long before you actually resolve that down to a single point. Like, provide the player with that reactivity, but collapse those into a way that you can proceed forward. This is 100% a lesson learned from Dragon Age, for all the games. ‘Ok, what do we do with this? Holy shit, that is huge, how are we actually going to pay that off?’ Reactivity, but without putting yourself in an impossible-to-win situation [from a story/writing standpoint].”

“More than anything else, the advice I would give [to aspiring devs] is, come up with some fundamental pillars of your story and of your design. There's a misunderstanding that we plan out the exact story for years in advance. We know what we want to get to, we kinda know how we’re going to get there, and a lot of it is just making sure that you have those pillars and those razors. So as you go through development and find, ‘Oh this piece is not working, this piece is clunking’, you’ll always have principles that you can go back to. What is important about this story? Does the piece that isn't working satisfy any of those things? If no, then we have to change it or get rid of it.”

[more advice] “Don’t be afraid to fail (I say fail here as a good thing). Don't be afraid to put something out there and have it absolutely torn to shreds. Feedback is your best friend, having people that you trust to provide that feedback. If I were building a big epic narrative, a big epic franchise, [I’d advise that you] start with your principles and the core of what you want to do, and then just start putting out ideas. ‘Here’s my idea for this story’. It’s easier for me, I'm inheriting a lot of work that's already been done, a lot of ground that's already laid - I have a Lead Writer that has been doing this longer than I have, PW is fantastic. But for myself, it’s just been a lot of like, okay, taking this stuff that's already been built, and making sure that I know what we want to do with whatever the next project is. It sounds overly reductive and overly simplistic, but it really is about just having a really strong sense of what is important to your franchise, what’s important to your brand. If you’re coming up with a new IP, it’s a little trickier. You need to spend some time thinking: what’s the tone, what’s the setting, what kind of story do we want to tell.”

[more advice] Don’t be afraid to heavily reference existing media [as actual razors, internally]. But that's not something you ever want to have go out to the public, because people go like ‘Oh, you’re just being derivative’. It’s like no, we’re just leaning on cultural touchstones that people know, so that when you’re communicating with people outside your discipline, or with people above you like executives, they can at least get a sense like, ‘Oh I kinda get what you’re doing, okay that makes sense’, versus ‘Let me first of all explain the entire history of the world’. My experience with executives is that they don't have time for that and justifiably so. But if I tell them we’re doing X but with Y and Z it’s like, ‘Ok cool, we get that’. [...] It’s a tiered approach. You have levels of detail that you provide to different people based on what they need to know. You yourself may need to know the history of these characters and how they relate to each other and the thousands of years of history for that, but the person building combat probably doesn't need all that detail and just needs to know ‘What am I working with, how do these characters fight.”

“A razor is a statement that you use to slice away what doesn't fit. The narrative razor for Trespasser was, I can’t remember exactly, we were basically trying to go for the Avengers meets Indiana Jones, Winter Soldier. Avengers meets Winter Soldier. [a razor is] a statement that you take all the content [by], ‘Okay, does this actually fit this statement? No? Okay, get rid of it’. It’s about focusing your game. Cutting away the ideas that don't really fit is how you avoid scope-loading and people crunching, and how you keep your project focused.

Trespasser was an intensely-focused DLC, in that it focused on basically two main core things, Solas and the fate of the Inquisition. Everything kind of wrapped into those two razors. As we were going through content, we had stuff like - I said this at a GDC presentation in 2016 - the Qunari are farming lyrium to make Qunari templars. And then we looked at it like, how does that apply to either razor? It doesn't, it doesn't fit either one of them. So we simplified it to, ‘Okay, what actually makes this work in the context of what we’re building?’. [a razor is] a statement that you use to slice off what doesn't fit into the game that you’re building. It can be painful, but having strong razors means that it never comes across as a personal thing.”

Narrative does not mean story.

Two of his least favorite mechanics in games [not including Stalker and DayZ] are weight limits and weapon degradation.

On games as a service:

Interviewer/host: “Talking about games as a service, it’s definitely something that is talked about a lot in gaming in terms of the most successful games. With Dragon Age, putting DLCs out is kind of maybe that same influence, but games that are launched and then iterated on and updated and pushed with content every month, like Fortnite, Riot Games, League of Legends, Valorant etc, that's kind of I feel where the trend of games are trying to go and make the most of those interactions between other people, to make replayability possible and easier. How do you see narrative, do you see it being forgotten with this increase of games as a service? [...] Do you see that as a positive part of narrative in games or do you think there’s still work to be done in that space?”

John: “[...] The place we start to see some confusion, a lot of people think it’s one or the other, but to me, it’s another way, another option for telling stories that by their nature have to be different. I think that's where you need to be, again, very cognizant of what you’re building and of the genre you’re working in, because a story that works for a more traditional box product is not necessarily the kind of story that would work for a games as a service product. [...] Games as a service, understanding what the cadence is that you’re planning to deliver to and what kinds of stories best fit that cadence - some games are better at it than others.

One game that did a pretty decent job of it is Destiny 2, through patches. Final Fantasy 14 is another example, they do a lot of their storytelling between the big expansion releases as part of their free patches. They always know that they have - I think, five big patches? - between each expansion, and they’ve structured their stories to fit into that very specific five-act structure. If they tried to do it weekly or bi-weekly it would be a very different experience. I think there’s always room for narrative. It’s about knowing that there are different lessons to learn and not being afraid to learn those lessons, as opposed to trying to fit the traditional box product square-peg narrative into a live service round hole. And that’s why you need to have a strong vision and why you need to have somebody at the Director level who understands and plays the kinds of games that you’re building, so they kind of understand what works and what doesn't - ‘This type of story worked really well for this game, and I'm not saying you should copy it, but you should at least be willing to learn those lessons and not reinvent the wheel every time.’

We’ve been making games for a long time now, there’s lots of lessons to learn, we should be trying to learn from them and not trying to like, change everything every single time.”

[on length of narrative] “In a lot of cases you know how long your game should be and the hardest part is sticking to that. [...] There is always a worry that fans are going to see a number and be like ‘That’s not big enough or that’s not long enough.’ I do think that there is sometimes a lack of confidence in what you're building, and a desire to make it shorter or longer, but I think at the core, the people building [a] game know how long it’s going to take to tell this story that they want to tell. I say this specifically for narrative, but even stuff like progression, you know how long you want it to take. For myself, I will always take a short but well-executed game over a long game that feels that it has a lot of [useless/boring] padding. It’s about identifying the kind of game you’re building. Open-world games are always going to be bigger and longer than more linear games. Being confident in that number and recognizing when you’re adding time and space for no other purpose than just to make that number on the back of the box longer [is important]. Fans don’t love that, they can see right through that.”

“It was nice to see the amount of hard work that went into DAI rewarded by the press [with the Game of the Year award]. There are definitely parts of it that didn't land that we wish we could have done differently, but it was a project that felt like we were all pulling in the same direction and when we started getting that positive feedback, it was definitely a sense of relief. Especially because a lot of us had been on DA2, and while we were proud of that project, it obviously didn't get the reception that we wanted at that time.

[when they were watching DAI’s release and tracking its reception] We’re keeping a running tally, like ‘Okay, this is really looking like we did something special here’. I’m proud of every project that I’ve worked on but DAI is definitely one that I’m especially proud of.”

“Part of the advantage to being at a company for as long as I have, I've worked with a lot of the other people [responsible for things in other departments like art, writing, audio etc], so while there is that anxiety like ‘I reeeally hope that this works out’, I know it’s going to, because I know that everyone who is doing these roles, like our Animation Director, our Audio Director, Levels, all those other people on the project know what they’re doing and they know their shit better than I could ever hope to. So I’m just kind of standing here like ‘Hey y’all this is what we need’, and it’s coming in. And when it does come in, when you see the pieces together - I think for myself, on DAI, the moment that I first finally started feeling like it was really all coming together was, one of our music designers, going into one of the moments at the end of Redcliffe, doing the music/audio pass, and me finally seeing this scene that I’d been staring at and banging my head against for months - turn into something that actually conveyed emotion, that actually was something that I was excited for our fans to get to see and get to experience. That’s always a special feeling.”

Cinematics is one of the last things to come in, which means that audio is always waiting for them to come in: “They always did an amazing job with very little time, I will never not praise our audio and music designers.”

“Patrick Weekes is the Lead Writer, which means ultimately PW is responsible for the writing side of the game. As Narrative Director, I’m there to offer, to basically take the vision of the project and interpret the part that focuses on narrative and then provide that to my team - because I work with writing, cinematics, level designers and everyone - I’m there to be like ‘Hey this is the narrative we want to achieve’, which sometimes involves getting involved in the story side of things. But a lot of that is PW’s job as Lead Writer, they’ve been doing it for a long time, they’ve been in the industry longer than I have. It’s a really good working relationship. We worked together when I was in cinematics and they were in writing, we worked together on the Iron Bull, then we were both leads on Trespasser, so we have a trust.

I think what’s been really helpful is that they know that if I tell them something’s not working, it’s not coming from ‘I wanna do it my way, you better just do it my way because I’m the boss’, it’s coming from ‘This is something I think we need to do for the project’. And vice versa, if they push back on me about something, I know it’s not coming from ‘Screw you I'm the Lead Writer, I make the decisions’, they’re saying it because this is an actual concern. I do writing, I’m a writer on the project too but I will fully admit PW is a way better writer than I am, so I'm comfortable leaning on them for that stuff, and then I’m the person who can provide that ‘Okay, we know that gameplay is providing this, we know levels is providing this, let’s shift the priorities'.

It’s also about knowing, being able to take that back from any one discipline and say ‘Okay, what is the right decision for the project as a whole’, and sometimes that means telling PW something that they may not think is their favorite thing to do, but they will listen because they trust me and I trust them. I don't know how it works at other studios, there are places where Narrative Director is also the Lead Writer, or where there is Narrative Director and Lead Writer is the highest authority on narrative that exists, but it’s worked for us again because we have that lengthy experience. It would be interesting to see how it would work if we didn’t know each other for a while before this. It’s largely a relationship of trusting each other to know our areas of expertise and also just understanding what’s important to the narrative vision of the project.”

When they did Tevinter Nights it was ‘extracurricular’ work: “It was fun, I got to do some writing, I got published, which was really fun”.

[source]

[☕ found this post or blog interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #solas #long post #longpost

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olivemeister · 3 years

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya��s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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having-a-hyperfixate · 3 years

Text

Secret Reports

Gonna just edit this thing and put line breaks as I get more of them.

I’m also working on the rest of the completion, and will probably wander off in the middle of this to do Another Day, which will probably have its own post. I fully expect that to be sheer madness.

#1 So is it just me or is Mr H writing these reports to channel how extremely stressed he is. Cuz like. Mood. *gestures vaguely at blog* *gestures at this post specifically*

I. Hold up. Skeezy McFuckwad and Joshua did what resulting in which now. Excuse me. EXPLAIN!??! Joshua had a sneaky Game running with Skeezy that directly lead to Hazuki ordering Skeezy to destroy Shinjuku??? Is that what I am reading. Or possibly the order was already in the works, and then there was the Game, which ultimately just pushed that forward?? You can’t just say shit like that and not give details ffffffff.

#2 Mr H having about as much contempt for Shinjuku rules as I do I feel seen haha. Bogus indeed. I can’t remember if I said it in one of my other posts, of if it was in a group chat, but I made a comment somewhere how this ruleset doesn’t seem to work with the stated purpose of the whole Reaper’s Game system. Sweet validation.

#3 Not much to say except that if I had read this entire report when I actually got it, I would have been much more alarmed by all of the Replays Rindo has to do after that. I got it partway through week 3 but decided not to read it until I beat the game and then BAM it has this lovely tidbit about potentially being able to destroy the UG and RG.

#4 So, the business that the fandom refers to as the Long Game is known in universe by the higher-ups and Shibuya’s impurification, because it didn’t get ‘purified’ like Shinjuku (I object to that term but ok).

“The hierarchical freeze presumably stems from opposition to the impurification”

Skeezy wasn’t reprimanded when he arrived in Shibuya “possibly because most Higher Plane denizens still oppose Shibuya’s impurification”

ExcUSE ME. I. WHAT. In one of the secret reports for the first game, Mr H says something about the way things turned out be an ‘ideal parallel world’ according to the Angels. I guess he only meant the ones who didn’t want the city destroyed holy shit. That most of them didn’t want Joshua to change his mind and STILL DON’T is so massively fucked up I can’t. Dear Higher Plane, what the actual, ever loving fuck.

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#5 One hundred and four Games under Shiba. That’s… so. many. teams. Holy shit. And the teams we knew had seen at LEAST 30 teams go. And the three teams we saw weren’t small. So many people…

Also, “Minamimoto seems to be plotting something” is the funnies thing I’ve read in ages OF COURSE HE IS that’s what he DOES. XD That was some mood whiplash.

#6 I was so hung up on the lack of entry fee for so long you don’t even know. Like. Those were so important in the first one it was baffling to me that Shinjuku rules didn’t have anything similar. And then eventually I just decided that the whole Game wasn’t being run correctly and Shiba was clearly after something other than driving the improvement that’s supposed to be the point.

I would like more explanation on this ‘Rindo’s stagnation makes him perfect for time travel thing’. I kind of understand how his reactions being consistent would be helpful in being able to control where the timeline goes (also I just realized this further confirms that Angels remember the other timelines glad I wasn’t imagining that the Prime days are a blur), but what does he mean about being able to maintain abnormally high levels of imagination? (It might tell me later so don’t say anything lol)

“I can only hope I’m not overthinking things.” Oh, you aren’t. If I’m understanding everything correctly, Skeezy actually had two proxies. And poor Rindo managed to end up being proxy for both sides at the same time which is. A mess.

#7 Well, finally we know how Coco managed to get her hands on a taboo sigil. Plagiarism. Lmao. That at least makes sense and I can worry less about her being Something Else. I would like a word with whoever didn’t clean that up from Udagawa long enough for her to copy it though. That’s hilarious. Interesting that Mr H thinks it wasn’t a perfect recreation though, that something in him got changed. Once again, please elaborate. Please. *headdesk* What prompted Coco to just. Copy a taboo sigil though. Cuz that seems. Unusual.

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#8 Ok there’s a lot to unpack in this one. Namely, more Shinjuku rules. I would love to know if these are long standing rules or relatively recent. Cuz like. Did Shinjuku’s Game ever run in a way that would drive the kind of improvement that’s supposed to be the overall goal? Or has it always, or at least for a while now, been basically a meat grinder? The players that don’t clear that minimum bar probably just get erased outright, I would think. Actually, I’m confused. If normally, one team would get to leave and one team would be erased, wouldn’t that normally keep the average pretty level, so the Game would basically go on forever? Otherwise what do you do with all the other teams that are between first and last? I’m confused. It can’t be normal for teams to keep asking for more rounds. And what if the winning team says ‘everyone gets to go home’?

“The Conductor has yet to contact the Composer” and “it is possible he is unaware of the Higher Plane’s purification protocol.” I don’t know why, but I get the feeling these are important.

#9 These secret reports are really driving at the whole ‘Rindo just goes with it’ thing, aren’t they. Like, that was his thing, right? He has trouble making definitive decisions? So his arc culminates in that moment in Udagawa where he tells Hazuki that he’s going to take the risk and go back one more time, where he’s making that decision purely for his own sake. And here Mr H seems to be saying that prodding Rindo down the road to character growth is going to be a lot harder than it was with Neku back in the day. Which makes sense, I think. Confronting someone with the concept that other people have value is a lot less complicated than trying to get them to not only make a firm decision, but to choose something that is purely because it’s what they want and need, not because someone else thinks they should.

It’s a little alarming that this report implies that if the pin wasn’t absorbing the Dissonance caused by the Replays, the UG and RG would already be having a bad time. Yikes. This is the report for day 2 of the second week. We haven’t even gotten into the crazy time travel yet.

Aaaaand #10 is for completing the social network, so I have to actually go do Another Day. I want to read these in order; it is much less confusing that way.

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#10 I really shouldn’t read these late at night with a possible migraine coming on, they’re already confusing enough. The bits that made sense: Uzuki was acting Conductor damn girl. (Did she have to deal with Joshua and was he in Dignified Mode or Being a Shit Mode because that’s possibly an oof.) I had assumed Shiba was Shinjuku’s Conductor and then just kinda took over after they moved in but apparently not? And RIP the actual Conductor, apparently. Weird that so many Reapers made it but the Conductor, who by all rights should have, didn’t.

I am slightly concerned by the fact that there’s standard procedure for obliterating a district. That’s. Alarming.

I don’t think page 4 is continuing the thought on page 3. Fucking. Stop that. Don’t just say a thing and then start talking about something else I would like EXPLANATIONS. UGH. “Almost” he says. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that almost is a big deal, so why don’t you tell me about it.

Four cases where a district got into trouble before a final decision on whether to reset or not was made. And one was the last game. I wonder if that means whatever was wrong that made Joshua want to destroy it, or if the ‘imbalance’ was all the madness that happened after he agreed to one final Game with Kitaniji and the left the UG. Cuz in one of the first set of secret reports, it says that with the Composer absent, the UG is starting to fall apart as the rules are no longer valid, or something like that. I would definitely call that an imbalance.

#11 All I care about in this report is that Mr H wants to have a digital art bonding party with Kaie and that is so random why are you writing this down you absolute goober. The first page of this report is like ‘everyone is getting depressed’ and then just a wild left turn into dork-town. Lmao what.

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#12 I don’t think Mr H knows at this point (you get this report for W2D5’s Boss Noise) that the Ruinbringers are all Reapers. He’s gonna be mad. He does know what Shoka is up to though. He’s worried. Aw.

#13 It didn’t occur to me until this report hit me in the face with it, but they’ve set up a fantastic contrast between the two people Rindo knows from online. One is. not great, let’s say, because I did not take the reveal of Motoi’s true self well. The other is Shoka, and she’s a real friend. I now see what you did there. One relationship that’s a farce and one that really, really isn’t.

#14 Me, out loud, at 1:30 in the damn a.m.: WAIT. HOLD THE FUCK UP.

If getting Tsugumi out of Mr Mew required an Angel, how in the hell did Shiki manage to…? What. I’m very confused.

Also damn, saving Tsugumi was so important that Shinjuku’s Conductor died for it. Did he know what she could do, the whole visions thing? Or maybe that something was wrong with Shiba and it would take someone like her to potentially stop him in the future?

I still would like to now how the hell Tsugumi got her hands on Mr Mew. Especially since its apparently the ORIGINAL Mr Mew and she seems to have had him during the inversion? What.

#15 So… Inversions don’t always happen when a region is purified. I’m trying to wrap my brain around what a ‘complete loss of character’ in and area that’s had an Inversion could mean. Like… I think I get it, but my brain won’t make words, let alone sentences. Like when you go into a hotel room, and it doesn’t feel like a home, as opposed to when you go to a friend or family’s house, and it does? Kinda like that but it’s the whole district that’s just… blank? That’s kinda creepy.

If there are so many who think a ‘regular purification’ isn’t enough, the a) what does that even look like, b) is that what Joshua was going to do to Shibuya and c) is there an intermediate step between ‘normal’ and Inversion? I have been staring at this report for literally 15 minutes now.

#16 “I wonder how [Shiba] will feel about all this after he is allowed to return to his former self.” Yuuuuuup. I still Do Not Like him, but dude was borderline mind controlled so like. Yeah. And I did get to kill him once, so. As long as he minds his business and isn’t a total dick from here on, whatever. It all just sucks.

*facepalm* Well at least we got to being suspicious of Replay eventually. Why did it take you this long Mr H. Though I do wonder what Rindo would have been able to do without the interference. He had to have some kind of latent skill for the pin to react to him, right? I’m now going in circles mentally trying to puzzle out if Replay is like, a leveled up version of whatever Rindo would have naturally had, and regardless, where exactly it came from. Because the only time I can think of when anyone had a chance to mess with the pin was when he didn’t catch it in the prologue. And I’m pretty sure it was Joshua who picked it up. Aaagh I’m giving myself a headache.

I find it hard to believe skeezy would just yeet a random time travel pin out into the world. That seems both dumb as fuck and inefficient.

#17 “Some of them who know what I am occasionally try to contact me.” Lol so Kariya DOES know who Mr H is, I take it. Alright.

I’m having some kind of emotion that Wildkat still exists in a way for the Reapers, and that some of them still go there.

I just imagined Uzuki texting him like ‘plz make the Composer fucking do something kthx’ and I’ve got the giggles now oh dear

#18 HA! I was right! Minamimoto WASN’T in control when he attacked us! ‘Distortions within himself’ though, that’s concerning. Does that have to do with how he’s come back from the dead twice now? And how Coco’s copy of the sigil was apparently imperfect?

#19 I was about to say ‘who would target him for his abilities?’ and then my brain turned back on because duh. Shiba and them were looking hard for Neku, to the point that they flooded the RG with Player Pins in the hopes that he would pick one up and get sucked into the Game. A thing that occurred to me last night at 3:30 in the morning because I am a disaster: Mr H says that Minamimoto ‘seems different’. Neku says much the same thing after he comes back. So… Neku’s ability to Scan all the way down to someone’s Soul is potentially close to as sensitive as Mr H’s long distance ability. Which is a little insane. On top of the fact that he can use basically every psych imaginable no problem, survived a pact with a Composer for a full week, while said Composer was using crazy light beams which probably should have melted Neku from the feedback, and then almost singlehandedly defeated the Conductor while somehow inventing four-way fusion attacks. Kid is mad powerful. And he’s just a human. Like, the OG secret reports say that people always become dramatically stronger when they become Reapers. Reaper!Neku would be unstoppable.

“This would be much simpler if I could sit down and talk with him.” Okay, I laughed out loud. Like, loudly.

So… Shinjuku’s Composer… basically had his Conductor assassinated by skeezy. And because skeezy was messing with Shiba’s head, he could prompt Shiba to take the Reapers to Shibuya afterwards, to start doing it there too? Hazuki ordered Shinjuku’s purification so… Oh dear. I might have a few bones to pick with him.

OH NO. OOOOOH. OH NOOOO. SHINJUKU’S CONDUCTOR. HE WAS TSUGUMI’S BROTHER OH MY GOD. That is fucking tragic what the fuck. What the FUCK. Okay several things make sense now but OH MY GOD FUCKING HELL I WAS NOT READY FOR THAT. Shiki fixing Mr Mew allowed Tsugumi to free herself because her brother had already done part of the work, I take it? Along with us getting the Noise out of there? No wonder the Conductor stayed, he had to go get his sister… Shit, man.

…… Did Coco steal Mr Mew and take him to Shinjuku?????

----------------------------

#21 isn’t very interesting, just a rehash of stuff we already knew.

#22 Okay Haz IS Shinjuku’s Composer. What. Why? I’m. So confused. Why would he intercede on our behalf, and why NOW? He was happy to throw his own city away, but stepped in to stop skeezy in Shibuya? And then tried to put it back together, and when Rindo was miserable he came to try to understand why. And then cajoled Rindo into having a breakthrough in his Character Development to boot.

Mr H says he has an idea why Haz did all this. And then doesn’t fucking say it because OF COURSE. *headdesk* That gets really old really fast, game.

I’m now running through The Last Day’’ to get the final two reports and this entire section with Haz is somehow even more confusing with context. God damn it Nomura.

#23 Even after he said we were on our on this time, he forced the Soul Pulvis to reform as Pheonix Cantus to make it easier for us to fight? Bro. What. Are all Composers just… walking contradictions? Aiya.

Shoutout to emotional support Joshua at the end there lol. I remember half-hysterically thinking ‘what are you just here for moral support?’ but ok. And I mean, it did work, Neku did manage to do the thing, so. *sigh* Speaking of, it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that Neku manage to sync with the entire city without his brain melting. Remember at the beginning of the first game when he scans for the first time and has a massive sensory overload? Look at my boy, all grown up.

#24 Holy shit world building on how exactly people come back to life without everyone freaking out. I never thought I would see the day.

I still have so many questions but that was always going to be the case. The first game had so many things it left open as well. Agh. Time to start wearing new holes in my brain overthinking things.

#let's liveblog: neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #secret reports

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comradekatara · 5 years

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let’s talk about ty lee

there’s this one, very overlooked line from “the beach” that I just find fascinating. ty lee is trying to pacify zuko, at which he yells

to which ty lee sighs and responds quietly, wistfully

the reading of this line betrays a sadness on ty lee’s part that brings out an otherwise unforeseen maturity.

anyone paying enough attention can tell that ty lee is smarter than she lets on. she and mai are both protecting themselves against azula’s manipulation in different ways. it’s a two-sided dance: azula brazenly manipulating mai and ty lee, and mai and ty lee subtly manipulating azula. azula knows that they fear her and are only there by coercion, and she openly uses this to her advantage. but she does not anticipate either of their betrayals, and this speaks volumes to how ty lee wears a mask of naiveté that [almost] never cracks.

make it impossible for her to disagree with you by complimenting her.

mention auras whenever you want the conversation to change tracks.

feign innocence.

make her jealous by flirting with boys. (that one’s just for fun.)

this whole scene, and every scene, she is looking for levity wherever she may find it. she is the peacekeeper; she knows how fragile their group is, all the underlying tensions bubbling beneath, constantly on the verge of overflowing. she’ll make vapid remarks whenever she feels like anyone is about to lose control of their emotions and say too much and/or hurt someone.

but here, ty lee’s tone does a 180. she lets her perky cheerleader persona fall, because she’s overwhelmed with sympathy for zuko. frankly, if she had slapped zuko across the face this episode, i would not have complained, because zuko in this episode is peak Little Bitch. but his insufferableness in this episode only further speaks to ty lee’s sadness at seeing him in this state.

ty lee did not know him during his banishment. she saw him as a child, and she saw him after ba sing se fell, where he was basically just introduced as the latest player in azula’s posse. azula used the same coercion tactics on him to make sure he never strayed too far, and it’s clear to anyone (because zuko is...not subtle) that he is unhappy here, with them. she never saw zuko in his Ponytail Phase. she never saw him yell “I DON’T NEED ANY CALMING TEA” and stomp around burning things.

so when she sees him again, to us as the audience, he’s actually calmed down quite a bit. but to ty lee, the change is drastic. for one thing, half his face has been burned off since she last saw him. again, to us, this is how he is introduced, and it just feels like a natural part of his face. but to anyone who only knew him before the age of 13, they’d be quite horrified to encounter his scar. it is not clear whether she knows the specifics of his banishment, or what exactly happened. well, that is, before zuko yells at her, “my father decided to teach me a permanent lesson on my face!” which... yeah, elucidates the situation pretty nicely.

but even more so than the scar is his seeming personality transplant. before his banishment, zuko was terrible at performing the way azula is. some of that is simply the fact that azula is also far better at lying to herself, and convincing herself that ozai’s feelings are her own. zuko is painfully transparent. especially in contrast to someone like ty lee, he wears his heart on his sleeve (and you can bet daws peck at it). ty lee knows zuko as he was before he was warped by that severe trauma, so she knows him as he truly is. whenever i watch this episode, i can only scream “this zuko is not my boy!!!!” and i’m willing to bet ty lee feels the same. instead of being earnest, idealistic, kindhearted, and sensitive, zuko is just yelling all over the place and treating her best friend like shit. it’s horrible to watch.

and yet, ty lee can’t find it in herself to be frustrated by his behavior, only saddened. so when he yells “you don’t know me,” what he’s saying is “you don’t know what i’ve been through,” and while that may be true, ty lee did see his life before that. his childhood paints a relative picture of what his life would have been like in a vacuum. sure, he’s still suffering under ozai’s abuse, his mother’s disappearance, lu ten’s death and iroh’s consequent grief, but before the agni kai, he’s still an idealist who cares about people and isn’t afraid to speak his mind in favor of what he believes is right.

zuko was routinely punished for showing kindness, because kindness = weakness, but even though he was punished for it, he still trusted his instincts and remained kind. that is, until he got banished for “speaking out of turn.” how could he have been in the right in that situation when clearly his father who loves him would never have done such a thing unless he had committed an egregious crime? so he tries to behave the way he thinks ozai would want him to behave, and bases his decisions off of what he thinks his father wants, convincing himself that these must be the right decisions, and that his instincts are wrong. thus, he feels tremendous guilt when doing the right thing, and he feels tremendous guilt when doing the wrong thing––and it is only once he confronts his father, and acknowledges that ozai had been the one in the wrong the whole time, does he learn to trust his instincts again.

it’s obviously a tragic situation, and therefore ty lee’s cognitive dissonance between this zuko and the one she knew is enough to break her facade, for even a moment. she wants to reach out to him, she wants to help him, but with azula there, she knows she cannot.

look at how this shot in “the boiling rock (part 2)” is positioned. azula is in the background, with ty lee in the foreground. here she is realizing that azula would just let them all die, let her brother die, without a care. but we know that ty lee does care. ty lee’s fighting style is specifically one of fully incapacitating people without truly hurting them. and even when they took ba sing se, azula made sure not to kill anyone. but now, here she is, not only letting strangers die, but letting zuko die.

ty lee is not faced with the decision between saving zuko and betraying azula (and it seems like she cares more about not incurring azula’s wrath than she is about finding a way to help them) because mai makes that decision for her, and ty lee only acts when it’s clear azula is about to strike mai. if mai “loves zuko more than [she] fears [azula],” then ty lee loves mai more than she fears azula. this is significant, because up until this point, we––as well as azula––are pretty much convinced that ty lee worships her. and say, for argument’s sake, that she does. then we can look to this moment on the gondola as a turning point. ty lee realizing that azula would not hesitate to kill zuko would cause ty lee to want to turn against her, and azula forces her hand when it looks like she is about to kill mai.

but i don’t even think it’s as simple as that. because ty lee’s not dumb. she knows what azula is capable of. this is why she behaves just so sycophantically towards her. azula trusts mai because she deems her too apathetic to act on a moral code, and would instead act only in her own self-interest, and in a sense, she’s right. but mai won’t let zuko die, which azula did not anticipate because she assumed that because she was the one who engineered their relationship, that meant that their relationship would work on her terms. she thought the same of mai and ty lee, that because they were only friends through her, they would choose her over each other. but obviously, they wouldn’t.

meanwhile, ty lee knows that azula likes her not just as an asset, but as a person. and she knows that the more she flatters azula’s ego, and the more she pledges her loyalty, the more azula will like her. azula clearly cares about mai and ty lee. their betrayal hurts her on a personal level that she isn’t willing to admit, but incites a breakdown nonetheless. you can see that even in the beginning of “the southern raiders,” azula is starting to come loose at the seams. and by the time that ozai demonstrates to her that he does not truly love her, all the bonds in her life have been broken. she falls apart because to her, she has just been handed empirical proof that she is incapable of being loved. and so she loses it completely.

ty lee let azula feel loved, even if said love was only expressed in dramatic compliments, the illusion of obsequiousness, and paper-thin loyalty. this scene, at the beach, shows us ty lee’s internality in a way we very rarely see throughout the show.

it’s clear that she cares. to be able to manipulate people as well as ty lee manipulates azula, one must be able to read people incredibly well. it’s obvious that ty lee possesses uniquely adept social skills, and it’s obvious that zuko, well.........does not. ty lee is an incredibly quick-thinking performer. very rarely does she not know how to talk her way out of a situation. we only see two instances wherein she does not:

when she is confronted by multiple boys at once asking her to pick one, (sidenote: dykon???????????) and when she must save mai.

even though it’s clear that she easily could, punching her way out of a situation is ty lee’s last resort. though azula’s priorities lie elsewhere in assessing ty lee’s usefulness, it is evident that personally, ty lee values her people skills over her fighting skills.

she wants to resolve this conflict not through violence, but through communication. zuko is making it particularly difficult because he keeps lashing out, but she can tell exactly what he is thinking and feeling because his behavior is so readily apparent. when the audience is introduced to zuko, we are led to assume that he is an inherently angry person. and yes, even as a child, he has always had a bit of a temper. but zuko behaves particularly egregiously in this episode, and ty lee is acutely aware that this is not his neutral state. this behavior is a response to an inner turmoil that becomes painfully obvious when he burns a portrait of his family.

ty lee confronts him about it and he says, “whatever. i don’t care,” to which ty lee sadly responds, “i think you do care.” thus the exchange that leads to ty lee’s most revealing moment. the line, the wistfulness behind its delivery, lets us infer so much about ty lee. she is more perceptive than she lets on, and more caring, too. if azula had only been paying attention, she would have known that her betrayal hadn’t come out of nowhere, not remotely. but to paraphrase mai, azula doesn’t know people as well as she thinks she does. because ty lee played her like a fiddle.

#ty lee #analysis #zuko #azula #mai #azulaxtylee #maixtylee #tylee&zuko #this analysis is kind of all over the place but you guuuuyyyyssssssssss #i love ty lee #sidenote #mai and ty lee are .....what the kids call........an otp????????#ok im done now

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mybg3notebook · 3 years

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Gale: Hypothesis and Analogies – Part 2

Here, I will compile several hypotheses that are pretty common to find around and I will express my opinion on them showing what EA has given us so far to justify them or not.

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in June 2021.

Disclaimer about interpretations of Real Life concepts: I’m not a fan of bringing real life issues into plain analogies/allegories in a game which intention in doing so was not made explicit, but the fandom seems to like this aspect and therefore I would like to share those opinions here as well since some seems reasonable despite not being of my taste. This topic may be sensitive for some people. Be aware of it.

Hypothesis: Gale is a gaslighter

Concept

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgement. It may evoke changes in them such as cognitive dissonance or low self-esteem, rendering the victim additionally dependent on the gaslighter for emotional support and validation. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction,and disinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilise the victim and delegitimise the victim's beliefs.

A gasligther's ultimate goal is to make their victim second-guess their choices and to question their sanity, making them more dependent on the abuser. Fandom does an incredible misuse of this word (and similar ones), that over-magnifies situations which don't have those dimensions. For example, it’s pretty common to read in this fandom that Wyll “gaslights” Tav when he denies that his eye is a sending stone. Gaslighting and lying are not synonymous at all.

Then, what's the difference? A person usually lies by either withholding or concealing information, or falsifying information and presenting it as true.

Gaslighting is similar to lying, but a gaslighter will also be attempting to confuse the other person by flipping a situation and putting the blame onto them, making them doubt their perception of events and second guess themselves. Typically the gaslighter is either trying to avoid taking responsibility for something and they want someone else to take responsibility, or they are trying to gain control over someone because they have an agenda.

So basically, gaslighting is about flipping, attacking, confusing and blaming, gaining power over another, and trying to get someone else to take responsibility for their bad behaviour. But lying doesn’t involve flipping, attacking or blaming and the liar isn’t trying to get someone else to take responsibility for their behaviour, they are merely hiding information for personal reasons.

Inside the context of BG3

Honestly, nothing of this is happening with Gale, not even with Wyll and his denial about the sending stone. Gale and Wyll are hiding personal information, but without any interest to control Tav. In fact, the one holding power is Tav: the leader of the group that no companion questions. It's clear for any player that Tav has so much power over the group that they can kill any of the companions without consequences.

Unlike an average gaslighter, Gale is well aware that his dire situation is the product of his own mistakes; the folly of his young self who believed that Mystra's love would last forever. We also learnt in the Loss scene that he deeply regrets this situation and during the Revelation scene he makes it clear over and over again that the only one to blame is “the silly wizard who did not accept a no from a goddess”, while being quite oblivious of the power imbalance his young self was in (here is where the grooming interpretation comes. Read Part 1 for details). Gale never disrespected Tav's opinions, confusing them or dismissing them. Gale can agree or disagree with Tav, and be very clear about it, but like an expected scholar, his disagreements are done with sensible touch and respecting Tav's individuality. In the only moment where Gale is aggressive due to dissidence is during the conversation after the goblin party or in his final scene before leaving the party when he is very low approval. But it's more than understandable since Tav forced him to be part of evil acts he did not want to participate in (after all, he is a good-aligned character, as Sven said it in PAX).

Even Wyll, lying straight to Tav's face about his stone eye, is not even gaslighting. Gaslighting is about power, control, and submission of the other. I would really like the fandom to learn the context of the words they use.

Hypothesis: Gale is a narcissist

Concept

Another word that fandom can't grasp and misuses so lightly. The difference between a narcissist and a cocky person or a high self-esteem person is big.

A narcissist is not just someone who loves themselves in excess and has a big ego. A narcissist is a person that has very specific character traits, the three main are: having a sense of entitlement, being exploitative, and being empathy impaired, or having a complete lack of empathy for others.

Sense of entitlement: A narcissist views themselves as superior and special and better than everyone else, so they think they should be treated that way. They have delusions of grandeur and a sense of omnipotence and grandiosity that makes them feel entitled to have whatever they want.

They see their needs and desires as a priority and more important than anyone else’s; they are ruthless in getting them fulfilled. They crave admiration and adoration and will demand attention, but they will not give anything in return. They’ll punish others if they don’t get what they want. They don’t care about the consequences because they don’t believe consequences apply to them, since they think they are above reproach.

Being exploitative: Because of their sense of entitlement, the narcissist needs to exploit and use others to get what they want. Exploitative behaviour includes: intimidation, manipulation, control, plotting, conspiring, strategising, teasing, bullying, threats, being aggressive and passive-aggressive. They take advantage and treat people unfairly . They do only what is best for themselves in order to achieve their own goals. Due to their lack of conscience they will not feel any remorse or concern for the person they use and exploit. Instead they will just feel excitement and pleasure at having gained what they believe is rightfully theirs.

Lack of empathy: Empathy is the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, and imagine what they are feeling, understanding those feelings. Narcissists lack this ability, so they do not concern themselves with other people's feelings, showing little compassion for others. This lack of empathy means they have no problem taking advantage of people or hurting them when they exploit or degrade them for their own means, and they have no conscience or awareness about the pain they cause in others. This is the reason why they can't offer comfort or reassurance. Another big sign that someone might be a narcissist is if they have trouble being told ‘No’. Narcissists lack boundaries and they don’t care about other people’s boundaries, so trying to set a boundary simply by saying no to them, may provoke a very strong reaction in them.

So, the difference between a narcissist and a cocky or high self-esteem person are clear:

A person with high self-esteem greatly respects themselves. Self-esteem is confidence in one’s ability to think, make choices, and act on those choices, as well as feeling deserving of happiness and benefiting from one’s hard work and accomplishments. Above all, it means valuing the facts of reality and reason to guide one’s life. A lapse in knowledge or a mistake won't threaten their self-esteem. In fact, they embrace facts, whether those facts come from themselves or someone else, because they know that knowledge will help them in their life.

People with high-self esteem rarely (if ever) evade facts or rational advice because they know reality is their survival tool and means of achieving and maintaining happiness. They may be cocky at times, but they have tact and empathy to understand their own mistakes and the effect that they may cause on others, accepting the blame.

Narcissism is the opposite of self-esteem. Narcissists act as if they know everything, and anything that contradicts what they believe is either evaded or rejected out of hand. They’re not interested in facts that contradict what they feel or want to be true. They feel they must be right all the time. Their charm and show-off is usually aimed to belittle people. They always want to remain blameless.

Inside the context of BG3

Gale is certainly confident in his knowledge and he is proud of what he does; he spent many years learning under many tutors; his skills are a product of hard effort and a privileged education (wizard education).

Gale: I'm a wizard of considerable acclaim, and scholar of exceptional accomplishment.

Lae'zel: You strike me as cleverer than most istiki, Gale. Multiple tutors I should guess. Gale: Many a wise man and woman, indeed. Waterdeep is the home of myriads of scholars.

Gale: Benefits of a wizard's education, you see. Of course my considerable talent didn't hurt either. Well... That depends on who you ask, I suppose. I may have summoned things rather more exotic than a winged cat.

This is not mere fake, because the scene of Ceremorphosis shows that Gale has a deep understanding of the process, compared to the knowledge that any githyanki has (Lae'zel or githyanki Tav). What Gale continues stating are facts:

Tav: And what makes you the expert? Gale: Study.

He is far from being the typical obnoxious scholar who enjoys making people feel small and inferior. Unlike the archetype, Gale doesn't enjoy mocking Tav's ignorance, on the contrary, the excess of explanation can be seen as a typical vice of a teacher (which is confirmed after the Weave: Gale has been a teacher for some students even though his patience was thin). But in the same way Gale states the fact that he knows a lot, he is also well aware of his limitations, and he doesn't hide that fact: during the scene of ceremorphosis, he acknowledges that his “knowledge fails him” when he tries to understand the anomalies they are experiencing.

During the Weave scene, he acknowledges the obvious:

Tav: You’re a good teacher. Gale: I Know.

Annoying? yes, but true. After all, the game allowed a non-wizard Tav to channel the Weave, a unique experience for non-magical users. They are casting the Weave for the first time thanks to Gale's good instructions (and some luck with the dice).

Another situation can be seen during the scene of the consumption of the artefacts.

Tav: Thanks don't get me that artefact back Gale: I myself am a much more powerful artefact in your arsenal. Rest assured of that.

His comment may be cocky, but it once more displays a fact: a functional wizard (with many spell slots) is more valuable than the power that those artefacts give to Tav (usually one spell alone). It’s also worth noting that none of his show-off comments tries to dismiss or belittle Tav.

Because of his habit of over-explaining, Gale tends to be considered a mansplainer. I would see it that way if his excessive explanations would only happen with female Tavs. But the truth is that he is explaining too much to anyone, even to fellow wizards that may know all that stuff already. After all, it makes sense: he has the [sage] tag; he read all his life, he knows a big amount of things, and he was a teacher: a terrible combination that justifies a character with a tendency to over-explaining.

But Gale is not even that cocky, in my opinion. Many of his scenes have a level of teasing that implies more a hidden joke than high self-esteem. This is a pattern that can be seen in several opportunities: Gale uses this fake cockiness to put some levity in the moment, showing his joking intentions by context or explicitly with words:

The scene of Ceremorphosis starts with him observing his own reflection. When Tav asks him what he is doing, Gale answers: “Indulging in a spot of vanity. Handsome devil, aren't I?”. He deflected the raw context of the answer with teasing. He was not indulging into vanity, what he was truly doing was to observe any change in his physiognomy, and he attempted to levity by teasing. This is explicit later, when the topic of the conversation focuses on the changes that ceremorphosis causes. Even the handsome devil comment has teasing implications: according to some idiom dictionaries, the expression handsome devil “it's usually used playfully or flirtatiously”. Again, a teasing.

During the Stew scene, Gale puts some levity before introducing the dramatic conversation about the artefacts he needs:

Gale: Curious time to be dieting. Especially with a chef like myself around.

When meeting the Myconid, Gale will talk with fascination about the ability of this species to raise the dead through spores.

Tav: Sorry, but I don't share your fascination for fungi. Gale: Nobody's perfect.

Tav can be a bit dismissive with his response, to which Gale will reply with one of his typical teasing/jokes, implying the ridiculous idea that a perfect person should always be interested in fungi. It’s a joke.

Another attempt to levity despite fearing to turn into mind flayers that night:

Gale: More blood. That's a pretty sight. Give it to me straight, how do I look? Tav: Like your handsome self, Gale. Gale: Thanks, that's what I thought.

During the Loss scene, in the romantic path of “more than friends”, we have this silly, teasing/cockiness which lacks belittling intentions. He is just playful. That can be seen because he doesn't let the situation last more than a moment, immediately calling himself “insufferable”. A narcissist, under no circumstance, would call himself as such.

Tav: When I said we could be more than friends, you answered “perhaps”. What does that really mean? Gale: If I recall correctly, the Waterdhavian Dictionary of the Common Tongue of Faerûn defines it as an adverb that conveys the meaning of “It may be that”, or “possibly”. Sorry, sometimes I just can't help being quite insufferable. In seriousness, I'm glad you asked that question. [...]

When the joke/teasing finishes, his words change immediately returning to the “serious” note of the conversation, doing it explicitly: “In seriousness”. Meaning he was joking a moment ago. He is painfully explicit.

The same exact teasing/joke happens during the scene of the consumption of artefacts:

Tav: Let's hope this was the last artefact I had to part with. Gale: Come, come, these are mere fabled objects of great to enormous value. My continued presence though – quite priceless! On a more serious note, I do not wish to give you false hope. We're only treating the symptoms, not the cause. [...]

After the teasing, Gale explicitly says “talking on a more serious note”, meaning, the previous moment was a joke. Again.

Another example of teasing/cocky joke:

Wyll: Between the orb and the bug you've got more than your fair share of unwelcome passengers. Gale: What can I say. Mother always taught me to be a gracious host.

Gale claims to be a gracious host, but the context surrounding this... just makes it into a joke. This is why I insist so much in the Context.

This happens during the “Revelation” scene too, when it's Tav who attempts to use this teasing to relax the tense situation with a joke:

Tav: When you put it like that – no one can say no to me. Gale: After all, even I am only human. (Gale Approves)

It's painfully obvious they tease one another. After all the conversation of Mystra and the orb, some Tavs may want to opt for this option to answer Gale, and he even would approve this attempt of levity, because it's the same exact, silly thing he does as a pattern. He also approves it because he likes confidence. Again, I will repeat myself, but it's clear that Gale is char with high self-esteem, and likes people with that same trait. We know this because during the party when Tav accepts his out-of-nowhere “thank you”. Gale immediately says: “There's that confidence I like”.

During the scene after the party, we have some extra silly, cocky moments that could be the result of wine in Gale's system, or the messiness of the scene itself, since it’s so unpolished:

Tav: I think that sounds delightful Gale: That's because I'm full of delights

Tav: You’re a good kisser. Gale: I’m of the opinion one should try to excel at everything.

Tav: Thank you for a wonderful night. Gale: Like I said; I try to excel at everything.

I would like to highlight this line because the way it's said shows a level of confidence that is not related to an excess of ego, but to a high self-esteem behaviour: he says “try”. Meaning, he knows he may fail. His past is proof that he can try to excel at things that he would never be able to manage, and unlike a narcissist, he acknowledges his limitations once more.

Another interesting exchange is after that night:

Gale: A night to remember. It was wonderful, wasn't it? Tav: Oh, I've had better. Gale: I had a goddess, but you don't hear me complaining. [After apology] Tav: We should do it again sometime. Gale: We absolutely should, after all I need to undone the misconception that you had better.

Tav can question Gale's performance, and after repaying that rudeness with his comment on the Goddess, (again, Gale is a character that will pay you with the same coin [18]) he accepts the criticism and promises—with a teasing—to do it better. Again, an impossible gesture in a narcissist.

But not only in these teasing/joking situations we see his high self-esteem: in bitter or aggressive reactions, we see he uses it to enrage his rude/violent interlocutor:

During the Weave scene:

Gale: What did I think about seeing my head on a spike? That I still looked as handsome as ever, that's what.

Gale is hurt of being depicted beheaded (we know he fears death, the scene with Nettie shows it). His answer is, of course, rude after such a gore image projected in his mind. But instead of resorting to plain aggression, he pretends that it did not have the effect that Tav wanted to cause. To do so, he shows off.

The scene of Mirkon displays both styles of teasing: Gale started using his teasing/cocky attitude with a clear intention of sharing something personal with Tav, who has just done an action that it's important for Gale (saving children/youngsters of their own mistakes [5, 12b], a concept that echoes in Gale's background).

Gale: Benefits of a wizard's education, you see. Of course my considerable talent didn't hurt either. Well... That depends on who you ask, I suppose.

Tav can ignore this silly cockiness and engage in what Gale wants to share, leaving the moment at that. But if Tav opts for a rude comment, Gale will answer with a degree of rudeness too, using a condescending tone (but it’s very light if we compare it with the level of aggressive condescending he displays with an evil Tav). We need to remember that Gale is a char who follows the philosophy of giving people their own medicine [18]. That's what he does:

Tav: Considerable talent. Are you always this full of yourself? Gale: Only when the occasion suits. That's mostly a synonym for 'yes', by the by. Anyway--

Gale is a very confident character, but his high self-esteem is not that broad. It is limited to his knowledge and appearance, but never to relationships. Exactly it's there where he becomes less confident and when his emotions and abandonment issues conflict with his good sense.

Don't get me wrong, Gale's ego is there, I'm not denying it. But like everything in this fandom, some groups tend to over-magnify what the game gives in EA. Gale has a very well founded self-esteem in academic and researching fields: he has been a prodigy of the Weave from a young age (probably very close to a Weavemaster, skill referred in the novel Dead Masks), and a remarkable scholar with artistic attitudes in poetry. He worked hard for years to amass all that knowledge (he has a [sage] tag for a reason) and then he became, briefly, a Chosen one (not a small feat) which catapulted him to an status of archwizard. He could be so immensely obnoxious, aggressive, and dismissive as Fane is in DOS2. Still, Gale remains in a low level of a playful ego that only surfaces when the situation requires a teasing/levity or when it is a bitter tool against an aggressive and rude Tav. Considering him a narcissist is to over-magnify this trait out of the chart. He is a lore-content character; that character that in many rpg games will accompany us while explaining the context of the fantasy world we are playing in; therefore it is natural and obvious that he will over explain like no other companion so far.

Of course, all this is EA and may change by the time the game is released. But so far we should analyse what has been given to us.

I personally don't like this trait of his, but I think it's part of his many flaws. After all, he is the embodiment and the concept "humans are fallible", and he is very aware of that every time he speaks in seriousness.

Hypothesis: Gale is a manipulator

Concept

I suggest reading the post about "Context, persuasion, and manipulation" for the definition and understanding of the concept.

Inside the context of BG3

On this aspect, I won't repeat myself, and I will recommend to read the series of posts I've done about "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust" which explains in detail the Stew Scene, the Loss Scene, the Party Scene and extra scenes (death protocol and dreams). This series focuses exactly on the degree of truth and lies that Gale shares with different Tavs (depending on their choices). As a broad conclusion I can say that Gale is not a manipulator as a main trait in his personality, and may (or not) withhold information if romanced (depending on Tav’s choices).

He is not even a liar, since he has always made clear his boundaries and never denied to have secrets. Earning his trust to open up takes its time and good actions, and only in a romantic path there is a more messy approach: the scene pretends to create a “great betrayal”, when there is little since all the information concerning the “orb” has been given in broad strokes previously. The information that Gale has been withholding was personal and private but said in a bad timing making it of poor taste. The whole scene is very unpolished, not reacting to the amount of information that Tav can have from previous scenes. It presents two apparent conflicts:

The “orb”, which danger has been stated since the first moment we met Gale, and it was reinforced in most scenes; so there is not a great revelation in it by the end of EA.

The other conflict is apparently Gale's past lover: Mystra. Which can be surprising for a Tav, but not so much for a player who knows the lore background. In any case, the scene offers poor options to react to all this: or it ignores all the information that Tav can know by that time (information given by Gale himself), or gives over-reactive options, pretending that Mystra and the Orb are informations that never were informed in the game.

So far in EA we see that Gale could withhold personal information not because he wants to have power over Tav, but as a consequence of his visceral fear for a second abandonment. Gale suffers from abandonment issues that make him prone to making bad decisions when confronted with that situation.

As I said before, for a real and detailed analysis read the post "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust", which is summary of the posts

'Stew' Scene (extensive)

Loss Scene ( extensive )

Party Scene ( extensive )

Extra Scenes: death protocol and comments on dreams

Hypothesis: Gale makes you "cheat" your LI

I won't repeat myself so I recommend to read the post Gale proposes you to 'cheat' "

Hypothesis: Gale still loves Mystra

I recommend reading the post Does Gale love Mystra?.

Hypothesis: Gale has no Tadpole

I recommend to read the post of "The Tadpole"

---

Sources for both parts:

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( 5V)

Some concepts were summarised from: https://melcrowecounsellor.com www.d2l.org/child-grooming-signs-behavior-awareness/

This post was written in June 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

#bg3 meta #gale #gale of waterdeep #bg3 gale

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class1akids · 4 years

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Chapter 283 - Thoughts

This has been probably the most dissonant chapter in the arc for me so far.

It starts out great - seeing the Mansion side students stare in horror at the destruction wondering how the pros are doing. Cut to Hawks still alive and Tokoyami holding him, while Dark Shadow saves a bunch of medics and I’m almost crying how much this little goth bird-boy has grown.

and we get flashbacks to the efforts of the pros to save them (bless you, Majestic!!!!, we don’t know you, and it felt like there was something being built there, but even if you are dead, we will stan you forever).

Also, I can’t believe that poor Gang Orca was done so dirty. At least both Sero and Satou get a rare moment of saving their friends. Well done, boys.

Gah, I’m pretty worried about Fat Gum (and a little bit Amajiki)

Naturally, the students are questioning if everything they or the heroes have done was in vain. (ominous cut to Hawks, who of course, is one of the main contributors to this raid with all his spying, but also taking out of Twice (who would have made this instant game over).

But well - as messy as thing are now, it would have been still worse, had it been a complete surprise attack at Shigaraki’s full power with the organized regiments.

While the rest of the LoV seems pretty somber, Dabi seems to revel in the destruction the same way Shigaraki does, which makes me worried about the upcoming inevitable family reunion. It seems like not much Touya is left in him, if any at all. The harm goes way beyond bringing down the heroes.

But then as we cut back to the hospital battlefield, just to hammer home how hopeless everything is - with pretty much all the pros down for the count one way or another (I think both Endeavor and Ryukyu are knocked out from Deku’s smashes - maybe? It’s not too clear?) or was useless to start with like Manual and Rock Lock. The Nomus are still chewing on Burnin’s group (Native will be eaten before we’ll ever learn what his quirk is).

Endeavor is the only one who seems to have in any way reacted to Todoroki’s dramatic entrance from last chapter (which is kind of a bummer, it was a very decent entrance), but Shouto resolutely refuses to engage in any feelsy father-son stuff even at death’s door, as he literally just tells Endeavor to chill on his way towards Shigaraki (?) Endeavor looks pissed. Why? Who knows?

Let’s cut to Bakugou. Oh sorry, the Bakugou panels are completely incomprehensible too - it feels like they were pretty much phoned in, so that we get Bakugou swearing and not doing anything at all. Bakugou who has been a good team-player and a smart contributor, showing how much he changed and grown fixing his mistakes is rewarded by being literally get left in the dust by a deranged Deku who is behaving sort of like Bakugou was at their midterm exam - trying to win it all by himself. These images make me utterly uncomfortable, so I imagine Bakugou must feel a thousand times worse.

Deku is checking on Aizawa and gets his rage counter increases. He directly contradicts Rock Lock’s advice on account of it being a totally ridiculously stupid advice. Why is even Rock Lock there? He serves zero narrative purpose other than make Deku even more pissed. Raging, snotty Deku is a good look though. (the art is great, even if the writing is lacking)

OK, so Deku’s group is closest to Shigaraki, I think I see Shouto moving towards them. Bakugou is sitting on the ground further away? Everyone seems to be waiting for Shigaraki’s next move, except Shouto who is moving closer probably to attack again (isn’t he a long-range fighter?)

Luckily for everyone, Shigaraki’s half-baked state starts to catch up with him oh so conveniently finally, and he’s literally coming apart at the seams like a ragdoll. Uhm, ok? At least his confused face is kinda hilarious.

Deku, the smart cookie he is, notices this as one finger-breaking kid to another - it’s a possible opening for the heroes, even with Aizawa down for the count.

Shigaraki’s 75% cooked status is of course the result of everyone’s contributions - from Hawks and Tsukauchi getting the intel, to the hospital raid team, especially Mirko and Present Mic, to Endeavor who has been the main damage dealer, to Crust who kept Aizawa alive, who made it possible for the heroes to push Shigaraki towards his limit...

Yet, somehow this teamwork narrative gets lost in the final pages, as Deku emerges as the Savior Octopus floating in the sky, once again unlocking an ability when he most needs it and is sufficiently angry on account of MC power-up and really really badly wanting it.

Oh yeah, Gran Torino is not really dead, because he gets to float one last time (sorry, my dark black soul cannot appreciate this level of kitsch, especially because if the writing were consistent, blood would gush out of the wounds, and his guts would float poetically in the wind).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not salty because float activated (we knew it would) or that Deku uses it with BW to get everyone away (we knew he would), but the set-up just feels so dumb. It’s like Horikoshi was phoning it in with everyone else’s actions in his hurry to get to that panel, because he couldn’t wait to draw black whip.

Deku seems to completely disregard that there is a team around him - a team that got him this far and it makes me a very very sad bunny ahead of the two-week break.

This could be just another not-so-greatly executed misdirect and Deku will have to face some consequence for his recklessness or this could be the beginning of the end, when the wheels come off the narrative for good and we’ll learn that after all another Symbol is all the world needs and all the other heroes are completely useless and unnecessary and shouldn’t have done anything, just waited for their wonderful All Might 2.0 take care of it all with one hand, while holding up triumphantly all those other pathetic bastards with his broken other hand...

Yuck. I’m sorry but that just won’t work for me.

I hope Bakugou and Todoroki especially will be allowed to do something intelligent next chapter, because neither of them is the sitting-back type and Deku will somehow be forced to remember that he has allies who are not dangling little ornaments on his tentacles but capable heroes themselves.

BONUS:

For now, the only bright point I can see is that Horikoshi wanted Todoroki be here for the Float unlocking, which makes me think he’ll be brought in on the OFA-team. Though chances are, everyone will learn it.

#bnha manga spoilers #bnha 283 #class1a reads bnha

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notyourfathersdungeonmaster · 4 years

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How to Make Powerful NPCs Interesting Again

We all know the trope: the powerful wizard hires the party to go run some minor errand, which inevitably leads to them stumbling onto the World-Ending Plot, which they have to solve, alone, with only the occasional advice from their wizened mentor. It's a trope as old as time; even Hercules got occasional boons from godly beings to help him on his quests. It's a great narrative device, until some player stops and asks, "If this wizard is able to stop time with a snap of his fingers, why doesn't he just stride into the field and shove a ninth-level fireball into the Lich's cranial cavity?"

This simple bit of cognitive dissonance can really ruin the fun and undermine the urgency of an otherwise great adventure. If the party knows that the only reason they're on this quest is because Randalf the Off-White can't be bothered to deal with the horde of undead outside his tower, it can make them feel like chumps or patsies, and undermine any sense of gratitude that comes later during the campaign's denouement.

There's a few simple ways to fix this, though: tricks that can help you, the DM, keep your high level NPCs while also explaining why the great powers of the world are relying on this band of scrappy adventurers to solve all their problems. Below are just a few.

The Balance of Powers

This principle is a great one, but is often sadly overlooked in many campaigns. Simply put, in the above example, the wizard mentor doesn't get involved not because he can't, but because doing so would bring in a whole host of other powerful beings that would complicate the conflict. Perhaps there's a council of archmages who have all agreed, for the sake of maintaining the fabric of reality, that they should keep their Ninth-level spells in their pockets unless they all agree it's necessary. Perhaps the BBEG has a patron on the Council, and the mentor can't interfere on his own without dragging his evil opposite into the campaign. This can actually make for a great part of the climactic battle: the mentor decides he can't stay on the sidelines anymore, and joins the fray, participating in an epic wizard's duel.

This can also be used with deities bestowing boons on the party: they can act indirectly by helping the party, perhaps because one of their rival deities is already helping the BBEG. Thus, the conflict of the campaign turns into a proxy war for a larger divine conflict that can't be fought, because it would annihilate all of existence. If you do take this path, make sure your NPC stresses to the party how essential it is that they solve this issue, because if the major players themselves join the fight, no one will survive.

The Protector of Reality

Similar to the Balance of Powers, this rationale places the Epic NPC in a conflict from which they cannot afford to divert their attention or resources, even for a moment. Perhaps there is a constant threat of otherworldly incursion for which they need all (or almost all) of their capabilities; after all, you don't want to be caught with your pants down and your spell slots expended when Tiamat bursts through the material plane like an alien parasite from a man's stomach. Even the threat of such an apocalyptic event would mean that, like a missile in a silo, an epic level NPC would have to sit dormant, never expending his magical capabilities because he never knows when they may be required. This is actually a great archetype to use for the Wizard in the Tower trope; they may have built themselves a convenient magical retreat at great cost because they couldn't afford the spell slot to cast Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion everyday, not while that same spell slot may be needed to banish an archduke of the Nine Hells. So, they sit in the tower, separated from the affairs of the world by necessity - but, still caring about the world and wanting to make sure it's not a shit place to live, they can find and recruit adventurers to handle the more mundane threats that don't shake the foundations of the universe. This is also a great twist finale to use on the party: perhaps the Wizard in the Tower joins them in the final boss battle, expending all his magical power -- only for, at that moment, the threat he's been guarding against for centuries to finally arrive, and now it's up to the party to stand against them where he cannot.

The Otherworldly Being

This works especially well with warlock patrons, but it can work similarly well with questgivers and friendly NPCs that have an otherworldly or spiritual bent. The key idea is that the force recruiting, motivating, and rewarding the players is not located on the material plane itself and is therefore unable to act on it; they need to find a local agent to handle the problem. There is plenty of inspiration throughout myth and folklore; dream visitations, whether by angels, fiends, fey, or Lovecraftian horrors, are particularly common as an impetus to get an uncooperative character to fall into line. There are more tangible methods of communication as well; perhaps they are a being of immense power that is trapped in every mirror in the world and needs an agent to eventually get them free, or perhaps they can only manifest through signs and omens that require interpretation. If you want to pull from Greek mythology, there's also the possibility of a dedicated oracle who acts as the voice of the gods, but gives only vague, ominous prophecies that won't reveal their true weight until later. In all cases, a clear distinction is established between the power of the questgiver and the limitations of their abilities to influence the mortal realm, making the party the ones with agency in the situation.

The Hidden BBEG

You'll want to be careful how you use this one, because you only get one shot to pull it off with a given group, and once the players suspect something it is really, really hard to recover from it. The basic premise is that the powerful NPC who recruited them, who sent them off to fight against the Big Bad Evil Guy, was secretly a villain themselves, trying to bring down their rival or clear the way for their own scheme. Think of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, sending the Jedi across the galaxy to deal with the Sith and the CIS, only to betray them all. Unfortunately this has become a major trope, and given how paranoid players typically are, it's very hard to pull off. There's a couple of tricks to making it work, and some of them may seem counterintuitive.

Do not make the Hidden BBEG perfect or flawless. Establish a set of motives for their actions, ones that may seem prosaic but also have a selfish bent. The high priest wants to rid the land of the evil king who is oppressing the population, but who is also stifling the priest's ability to build his church. The noble ruler wants to defeat the opposing empire that threatens the peace and stability of his lands, but also is motivated by revenge for the war crimes committed in the past. Create a pretext that puts them on the same side as the party, but a subtext that leaves the party slightly uneasy. If the party is concerned about their ally having selfish motives, they'll be expecting selfishness, even recklessness, but not duplicity and betrayal.

Do not reveal the full capabilities of the Hidden BBEG. If anything, they should appear to be about mid-level; capable, but not able to handle world-shaking threats. Most often they are hiding their capabilities until some final piece is brought into their grasp. One excellent example would be Fraz-Urb'luu, one of the demon princes of the Abyss, who is obsessed with recovering his staff of power; as a Hidden BBEG, he might pose as a friend to the party, waiting until they recover all the pieces and bring them to him before he strikes, showing his true might. Another excellent example is the Heirophant from the classic geek movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.

Show genuine conflict in the Hidden BBEG. Let them display passion and inner conflict, moments where they are troubled by the methods the party uses and the methods they and their followers are forced to use. There's an old adage that every villain is the hero of their own story; if you can make that ring true for your Hidden BBEG, to make the party invested in not just their cause but in maintaining their moral character, then the betrayal will hurt even more.

The Common Crowd

This might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes the best Epic NPC isn't epic at all, but just a collection of ordinary folk. If your campaign originates in a specific village or town, especially one full of colorful, memorable NPCs with personal ties to the party, then the collective needs and will of that settlement can become a questgiver NPC in its own right. The town is suffering from an unnatural drought? Send the party to seek out aid or a magical cure. The town is displaced following an invasion? Keeping the town safe and finding them a new home becomes a priority. This can also become a source of individualized side quests for the PCs; they're likely to be far more concerned about seeking out the rare medicine required to save the orphan girl who the rogue took under wing than they are about exploring a random tomb for loot drops. Plus, if the PCs invest their time and effort into protecting the town, it can make for an amazing final battle when the townsfolk come to support the party in battle, armed with everything they can get their hands on, ready to die for their heroes (a.k.a. The 'Mass Effect' Effect).

I hope these provide some good inspiration for your campaign! Let me know if there's any tricks you've used on your campaigns that worked particularly well, or any that you think should be added.

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Jonathan Shaw 2020: Another Year of Pissed-off, Bone-tired but Resilient Music

I’ll forego the exercise of noting in any sort of detail what a shitty, shitty year 2020 was. Stipulate to the point.

But there has been some really terrific music, both new and old, to sustain us. Given the unrelenting tides of awfulness and misery, the music has been especially crucial, and I am even more grateful than usual that we have such brilliant, talented and courageous artists among us. They can channel our anger, respond to our sadness and create moments of transcendent joy — even in the teeth of all the feckless fascists, the capitalist criminals and an earth ball increasingly struggling for its breath.

I will take a moment to repeat my customary EOY-column disclaimers: This isn’t a “best-of” list, so much as an accounting of the records that refused to leave the rotation of sides that moved through my life in 2020. As ever, there were too many records to listen to, too many more that I had committed to reviewing, daunting stacks of songs that needed my attention. But the releases listed below kept turning up when I pressed play — and I kept turning them up, louder.

SUMAC’s May You Be Held and Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou’s May Our Chambers Be Full were the records that I played most often this year, even though they were released fairly late into 2020. Maybe there was something in the wishful invocations of the record’s titles that variously touched my moods. Through 2020, I did a lot of wishing for other and very different circumstances. So I list those two records first. The rest of the records appear in alphabetical order. I listened to all of them a lot.

SUMAC — May You Be Held (Thrill Jockey)

May You Be Held by SUMAC

A prayer. The record’s integration of improvisation and rigorously heavy song forms has an unusual power, both meditative and propulsive. The players are uncannily in tune with one another’s talents and vibes. They’re all talented musicians—don’t sleep on Brian Cook’s bass playing on this record. The band makes and stays in a tight pocket. You listen to their performances, and to this record from end to end, and you feel like you’ve come through something. Exhausted, thrilled and transformed.

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou — May Our Chambers Be Full (Sacred Bones)

May Our Chambers Be Full by Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou

A collaborative record that issues in gloriously intense and beautifully excoriating music. Rundle’s voice in full song with Bryan Funck’s is something to hear, and the players’ musical sensibilities prove complementary in any number of interesting, aesthetically effective ways. It’s been kind of fun watching the metal blogs and press attempt to label the music: “atmospheric sludge”? “Post sludge?” What’s next? Melo-sludge? In this case, the inevitable label-wrangling seems especially irrelevant. The songs and the sound demand your attention. They’re really good. The record never neglects the heaviness of life’s gloomy difficulties, but the songs still find ways to soar.

Decoherence — Unitary (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Unitarity by Decoherence

There were a number of really good black metal records released this year (see Botanist’s and Shaidar Logoth’s recent sides for some evidence of the music’s underappreciated diversity). Unitary is clearly a black metal record, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything else. It hisses, hums and crackles with industrial atmosphere, and sometimes there’s a lot of dissonance to listen through, in order to discover the band’s powerful gifts for riffs and propulsive rhythm. And while the tones and textures are transfixing, the songs are really strong as songs. Twisting, extruding, hammering: is this the black metal of physics?

Fuck the Facts — Pleine Noirceur (Noise Salvation)

Pleine Noirceur by Fuck The Facts

Okay, okay — so I’m cheating a bit. This record was released way late in 2020, so technically I have played some other records a bit more often. But this one is too good not to get a shout here. Fuck the Facts is classed as a grindcore band, and they can rage and sprint along with the best of them. But their music is a lot more than speed and fury. Melodic invention and emotional atmosphere are crucial components, maybe on this record especially. I’ve only played it about a hundred or so times so far. I’ll let you know.

Mamaleek — Come & See (The Flenser)

Come and See by Mamaleek

This record was released in late winter, but its fury and themes made it a strangely prescient soundtrack for the summer months of protest. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Many more whose names we don’t know. The grinding misery of life in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects provides the socio-cultural focus of Come & See, and the record’s righteous indignation is in tune with the sounds of voices raised, and cops buckling on riot gear. Mamaleek is frequently tagged as a black metal band, but their questing sensibility always exceeds the genre. There’s some noise rock, some punk and even some blues in the music’s volatile mix. It’s deeply angry.

Primitive Man — Immersion (Relapse Records)

Immersion by Primitive Man

Less massive and noisy than their previous LP Caustic (2017), Primitive Man’s Immersion is a focused gut punch—or more properly, a deliberate battery of them, delivered with the patience and precision of a trained fighter. Primitive Man’s sludgy doom (doomy sludge?) lends fresh credence to terms too often trotted out in writing about this sort of music: “crushing,” “punishing,” “pulverizing.” Applied to this record, those words regain their relevance. And Ethan McCarthy’s vocals may be the heaviest sound in contemporary metal. Yikes.

Raspberry Bulbs — Before the Age of Mirrors (Relapse Records)

Before The Age Of Mirrors by Raspberry Bulbs

The phrase “blackened punk” really bugs me: blackened as opposed to what? Taupe? Raspberry Bulbs give the phrase some meaningful bite with this terrific record—the latest in a string of them from the band, which started as a solo project for Marco del Rio. He may be more familiar to some Dusted readers as “He Who Crushes Teeth,” longtime member of Bone Awl. For Raspberry Bulbs, he moves to guitar, and slashes and tears at these songs, now with a consistent full band behind him. The songs have a punky tunefulness, even as they burn with black metal’s cold fire.

Special Interest — The Passion of (Thrilling Living)

The Passion Of by Special Interest

I got to this one way too late. Special Interest’s first record Spiraling (2018) seemed to me overly enamored of its own casual nihilism, and all the hype accompanying the release of The Passion of put me off. Then I listened to the record (always a productive practice for the music critic…). Holy shit, it’s good. There’s still a lot of creepy sexual violence and druggy dissipation. But the songs’ socio-economic critique is incisive and never preachy, and it contextualizes the rest of the grimness and gruesomeness with sharp and a coherent politics. An excellent punk record.

The Stooges — Live at Goose Lake, August 8th, 1970 (Third Man Records)

youtube

For listeners deeply engaged with the Stooges — a game-changing band and a total mess — it’s hard to overstate the importance of this record. It’s a recording of a Stooges live set that actually sounds great; and because the recording is so clear, you can hear Dave Alexander’s bass, a crucial piece of sonic evidence that counters the long-established story of the band’s set at Goose Lake and Alexander’s subsequent firing from the Stooges. History is revised, right there in your ears. Mostly, though, it’s a good live set by the band. Ron Asheton’s scorching guitar and, eventually, Steve Mackay’s sax stylings fire up the pyrotechnic intensity. Punk? Free jazz? Why choose?

Sun City Girls — Live at Sky Church, September 3, 2004 (2182 Recording Company)

youtube

The Girls were always way, way out ahead. Post-everything, pranksomely funny and deadly serious, their wit existed in tremulous balance with their inexhaustible curiosity about music’s arcane power and their equally inexhaustible rage. Their 2004 set at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival focused largely on the rage. 2182 Recording Company’s release includes a DVD of the performance, and it’s essential. The Bishop brothers and Charles Gaucher, Jr., fill the stage with politically charged images and props: a Saddam Hussein mask, a portrait of Osama Bin Laden, copies of Mein Kampf and Brother Number One. They pour and hurl various forms of invective on and at the festival audience, and the band plays with passionate ugliness, seizing the opportunity to draw connections between art, entertainment and ideology. A vital document of a uniquely American event.

Thanks for the tunes, y’all, and smell you later, 2020.

Jonathan Shaw

#dusted magazine #jonathan shaw #sumac #emma rundle #thou #decoherence #fuck the facts #mamaleek #primitive man #raspberry bulbs #special interest #the stooges #sun city girls #metal #punk #yearend 2020

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powerbottomblake · 5 years

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RWBY and Masculinity

I love RT’s, and specifically RWBY’s take on masculinity so much. The show subverts all expectations wrt their male characters and their development, which is why the male viewers experience major cognitive dissonance between what they expect and what story is actually being told (and then have the gall to call it bad writing). Under cut because this has gotten so long so fast.

The two main male characters - Sun and Jaune - are subvertions of genre/medium staples.

Jaune specifically hits all the beats of the typical male self-insert in a harem anime: he’s catapulted into a world he knows nothing of, instantly establishes 3 different dynamics with 3 different female characters/archetypes - Cheery, Ice Princess and Hot Tall and Earnest - one of whom he immediately sets his eyes on, he’s surrounded by women that are a whole lot more powerful than he is (and arguably THE most powerful one is instantly drawn to him), he’s essentially powerless and dealing with self-esteem issues and is nondescript enough to be a vehicle for any male viewer to project themselves onto. Which is why you have a good chunk of Jaune’s fandom from V1 being the embodiment of the Venn diagram intersection bewteen weebs and incels like That, and why there’s so much harem fanfic revolving around Jaune.

CRWBY have heavily drawn from anime when making rwby so I don’t think this was coincidental; they laid out the groundworks to subvert a specific trope. Male fans, however, bought into the facade and kept waiting for Jaune to essentially steal the spotlight, be the focal point of several love interests and get a power up that’ll let him be their own power fantasy to boot, but CRWBY took his character in the very opposite direction.

Jaune makes a lot of mistakes but what defines him is how earnestly he learns from them and redeems himself. He apologizes for lashing out at Pyrrha as a result of his own feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness when bullied by Cardin and then accepts her offer to teach him, sincerely taking instruction from her and then taking inspiration from her strength. Once he realizes his seduction skit with Weiss is not only ridiculous but wrong, he instantly changes his approach and prioritizes Weiss’s wants and needs over his, giving her space and knocking sense into Neptune so that Weiss can have her “ideal” date. Jaune doesn’t get embittered about being essentially rejected and most importantly he doesn’t let it affect his relationship with Weiss. Both of them become actual friends from that point on, and we get to see Jaune develop a certain measure of emotional intelligence starting that moment, which becomes part of his skillset and is shown to be part of what makes him a good leader. One of the best examples is how he and Ruby team up in V6E1 to get the hunter on the train to turn the turrets off. Jaune heals the hunter’s wounded arm and gently assuages his fear, in clear contrast with Qrow abrasively manhalding an injured and panicked man and expecting him to comply. The writing essentially puts down the show of arms and props up Ruby and Jaune’s approach; Jaune specifically is the example of masculine leadership the writing looks favorably on.

And that’s the kicker here: Jaune’s strength comes from his set of soft skills as opposed to traditionally portrayed masculine strength, which usually careens into toxic power fantasy land. His whole arc in V1-3 is about learning to shed any distorted notions of chivalry and strength and knowing that his end goal shouldn’t be to become a hero for the sake of it or to live up to societal expectations, but to do what he can and as good as he can for the sake of everyone. Jaune is a good strategist and he knows how to make the best out of everyone’s powers. He’s there to enhance how people use their semblances together. His big power-up, his semblance reveal is basically him getting confirmed for a cross between a cleric and a paladdin (DnD players amongst us please correct me if I’m wrong): he is the ultimate support, acting as a healer and an amplifier to everyone around him, and that’s why he’s a good leader. His power on his own loses its entire meaning: Jaune takes strength from the people he loves and endlessly, earnestly gives back to them, never once stealing the spotlight in combat because that’s not his role and that’s okay.

And as for Jaune’s romantic prospects, think Forever Fall established once and for all that Jaune’s already found the One and I don’t think we’ll see him get any other love interest, especially now that arkos parallels oz/salem and with how vehement CRWBY are about lancaster being platonic.

Now Sun. I want to tackle a specific expectation I’ve seen from male fans and that’s about him becoming more significant to the plot by coleading/leading the new White Fang movement...which would be hijacking Blake’s storyline. Blake is the one with drive and a cause, she was literally born inside the movement and has since seen it get derailed AND was the one to reclaim it from Adam and give it a new vision, as opposed to Sun who apparently wasn’t even aware of the systematic oppression Faunus had to deal with on a daily basis outside of Vacuo. So why is Sun, who has exactly 0 qualifications for this job and no interest in it, still expected to get it by a good chunk of his fans? Aside from the pervasive misogyny permeating fandom culture, there’s a specific trope media has served to us for decades now and that’s of a Semi-Competent Male Hero with his Hyper-Competent Female Side-kick (Vox published an article about it a few years ago and I really recommend checking it out), where a male character who’s semi good at best and not nearly as well-versed into whatever field he shares with his infinitely more competent female sidekick somehow walks in and saves the day and most of the time the female sidekick also, unsurprisingly doubles as a love interest. Time and again, male characters get rewarded for being half as good as their female counterpart at best AND they get the girl most often than not.

But Sun’s whole character is, again, the very opposite of this. Sun never outweighs Blake on her own narrative (as is literal common sense) and shouldn’t be expected to. Sun actually gets schooled into the Faunus cause by his more competent female counterpart, Blake acting as his mentor and introducing him to the fight and why it matters. Blake and Sun basically reenact the plotline of Journey to the West (Sun quite literally references it by calling it a “Journey to the East”) a story whose main character is the legendary monkey king Sun Wukong, who’s the mythical figure Sun’s based on. Sun’s arc about finally knowing the cause and fighting for the right reasons happens thanks to Blake’s guidance - which Sun earnestly complies with and never questions because he knows she’s the expert and he doesn’t usurp that spot from her - and never overshadows her own narrative. Quite the opposite, it builds up to her own arc as a future leading figure of the WF and face of the Faunus cause by having her politicize someone who has no real stakes in this fight even though they should have.

And then even his endeavor with Blake as a love interest falls through, with their relationship getting entirely recontextualized in V4-5 where their dynamic gets rebuilt as a friendship. Incidentally, that’s when it finally starts actually developing, instead of being stuck in the V1-3 limbo of mutual fleeting attraction where they’re constantly missing each other’s cues because they literally do not understand each other on a fundamental level. V4-5 is when Blake understands Sun isn’t what she needs in a romantic partner, but she does need him as a friend and ally. And Sun, whose premise falls in line with the Nice Guy trope, actually subverts it: he never makes Blake’s emotional journey about him, never expects anything in return and gracefully bows out of the narrative (for the time being) without ever pressuring Blake into acknowledging or returning his feelings. He doesn’t agonize over the initial attraction not going anywhere and doesn’t expect to be rewarded for being a decent person; again Blake’s feelings and well-being are his priority because that’s what good friends do. Their relationship developing into a steady friendship is never a point of conflict between them, and it’s actually lived as a positive event for both.

And then, to top it off, CRWBY parsed together every bit of toxic masculinity and wrapped it into a power fantasy package and named the end result Adam Taurus, who’s the absolute worst abusive piece of shit. Adam is every single thing bad about men as a power structure: abrasive, entitled, controlling, takes violence as an indication of power and doesn’t take kindly to his leadership/vision being questionned. It’s not really coincidental that he steals the power seat from a woman and acts like he deserves it in any way. But male fans were so starved for their power fantasy fix and traditionally masculine cool calm collected and complicated male character that they were ready to minimize/outright ignore the abuse he’s put Blake through and just how awful a human being he was just to be able to hard project onto him. And CRWBY’s answer to that is basically this:

TL;DR: RT says if your masculinity isn’t humble, nurturing, supportive, compassionate, selfless and earnest then we don’t want it.

#rwby #my posts #jaune arc #sun wukong #me holding myself at gunpoint: why can't you say what you want in 5 sentences or less #my meta #@ incels watching rwby you've been bamboozled

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aenigmaticdays · 4 years

Text

Non-linear Trajectories

A series of significant steps over the next few months since the Mandalorian and the baby became a clan of two post-Nevarro. There’s still a lot Din has yet to learn about the kid he’s taken under his wings, and even if it’s a wild-goose chase to reunite him with his kind, who says space-parenting is easy?

A/N: Inspired by…Yoda, of all creatures, who became a Jedi Master at a hundred years old, and continued that way till he was 900 ish.

If it stands to reason that its ageing must not quite be that linear, what fun then, to know we’re probably standing at a precipice when Dyn Jarren is about to get thrown into a dizzying time of fatherhood with a kid whose sudden growth spurt and accelerated rate of learning will probably happen…quite soon.

Apart from this, all we know of this species is that it’s supposed to remain an archetypal mystery on George Lucas’s orders, though The Mandalorian has pretty much opened this can of worms by introducing the baby on our small screens.

I’m taking liberties here. #Sorrynotsorry

Also on AO3.

9 years, 3 months ABY

What pitiful little Din Djarin knows of parenting is thrown further into dissonance when the ad’ika finally speaks.

“Tion'ad's ogir? See you, I can.”

The high-pitched warble is enough to galvanise Din out of the pilot’s chair to stumble in front of the child who is gnawing at the silver Mythosaur, its attention fully fixed on the inanimate object as though it hadn’t nearly floored him with its casually-spoken but cryptic words.

After all, he’s only a novice at figuring out the ad’ika’s garbled coos, squeaks and trills when the kid suddenly decides to speak.

His own voice, rough with sleep, comes out gravelly, low and bewildered as he’d ever heard. “What…what did you just say?”

The only response Din gets is the slight lift of its disproportionate lift of its green years, a slobbery grin and two raised green arms.

He slumps back into his seat with the kid on his lap, his mind racing. More importantly, the kid’s first word isn’t Buir to his shamefaced relief, because he wouldn’t know how he’d react otherwise.

3 months after leaving Nevarro, the decree that they are now a clan of two still simultaneously terrifies and elates him. But it’s a bond—whether he wants to admit or not—that had been forged long before he’d traded the kid for beskar and hadn’t needed the Armourer’s affirmation or the emblematised mudhorn now welded onto the beskar he wore to give it a name.

The fault solely lies on Dyn’s shoulders which become weightier by day.

Coming to terms with being something akin to the kid’s father requires more than an overhaul in the long-held mindset that he only worked alone and had only himself to look after. It is a change that he tries to welcome nonetheless, according to the creed all the Mandalorians live by—the kid that started out as an asset is now a foundling.

Gone are the days of taking coin in exchange for bounties—that course of destiny he’d irrevocably altered with the split-second decision to get the child back and out of the clutches of the Client.

Theirs is a strange relationship: he’d turned from reluctant captor to reluctant protector to somewhat reluctant dad to a foundling who in its own way takes care of him as much as he takes care of it. There hadn’t been anyone, not even his own adopted parents, nor his clanmates, who’d been as fully attuned to the sweep of his emotions and physical well-being as this child, and maybe it’s because of that sorcery-magic that the green creature wields at moments of its choosing.

The kid is an odd contradiction on its own: small and vulnerable, helpless…yet not, not with the immense sorcerer’s power that he wields at opportune moments when Dyn had thought all was lost.

This is something that he had yet to fully assimilate, despite the daily, round-the-clock reminders of the kid’s dependence on him.

Swivelling the chair around, he turns to regard the kid, who’s still happily playing with his pendant like he hadn’t just upended Din’s brooding. A quick mental calculation about the kid’s development leaves him overwhelmed.

The low-level of panic that accompanies the thought of taking responsibility for the ad’ika hasn’t fully ebbed since the day he’s single-handedly tanked his bounty-hunting career, but he’d be in denial to say he’s taking on this momentous task with the same gusto he’d used to take down bounties.

If the ad’ika is merely a gurgling, teething infant at fifty who has just learned to talk, what then, is its lifespan and what other powers will it develop in the years to come?

“Buir!”

It’s the second time that Din nearly falls out of his chair at that squeaky warble, accompanied by a toothy giggle.

The uncomfortable feeling in his gut grows, but it isn’t one he can put a name to.

oOo

9 years, 8 months ABY

The slight, sharp prod in his mind is the only thing that nudges him upwards towards the light at the end of the tunnel—so sharp that it momentarily erases the lingering, recurring nightmare of dirt roads falling to ruin or of the sudden darkness that envelops him as his parents shove him into a basement storage or of the amplified sounds of broken screams and the whine of Imp blasters.

Amid the chaos and the flames, the intrusive presence twists itself into the well-worn scene, a supporting player in a familiar cast that always ends with him staring into the wrong end of a blaster.

Except that this has the exceptional warmth of someone he recognises by instinct, a warmth that suddenly takes on a rapidly-swelling tinge of green, red and yellow colouring the edge of his consciousness upon which only blackness had once encroached.

Wake up, Buir! Buir! Protect you, I will!

This is must be a hallucination, Din thinks, because the pain that colours his side has just blurred his vision fuzzy and dimmed all else around him.

With eyes that have crusted over, he blinks with difficulty and sits up, the noise of the shootout still loud in his ears, except—

Clarity returns incrementally as time ticks by slowly, as though orchestrated by a three-clawed hand that is waving shrapnel through the air in a miniature tornado that has them sitting in its calm eye.

With a flick of the ad’ika’s little arm, the funnel-shaped shrapnel loses its form and falls into a heap by his feet before arrowing upwards in a spectacular rush of speed and descending impossibly fast onto—and into—their would-be captors.

Only when the last Imp falls does the kid slump in exhaustion but not collapse, its slight wheezes and heaves of breath the only sounds echoing through his earpiece. Still, it’s instinct that has Din catching the kid and clutching it tightly to his chest as the baby babbles a mix of mando’a and Basic distractedly and pushes itself into him, before imprinting its claws into the edge of his armour.

The fumble back to the Razor Crest is a slow one, with the kid snoozing in his carrier bag after Din’s repeated assurances that they’re both fine and that yes—they are well clear of enemies.

The doors shut with finality on this godforsaken planet and it’s not a moment too soon as more Imps suddenly enter the arena.

Din busies himself with the take-off protocols before allowing himself the luxury to think in the silence of the cabin once he makes the jump into hyperspace.

“Bad men, they are.”

The soft squawk and the lifted green ears challenge him to deny otherwise.

He’s used to the kid’s random bursts of sentences by now. The kid’s intent is always understandable, even if his syntax defies correction. But it isn’t a moral issue that Din’s going to engage in right now, especially not with a kid who’s just saved both their hides.

So he nods, swivels around and touches a green ear in a way he knows the baby likes.

“You did good, kid. That was a hellhole we just got out of. And thanks to you, no less.”

As though pacified by the Mandalorian’s words, the kid returns to gnawing at the Mythosaur pendant that hadn’t left its neck since Nevarro.

Verd ori'shya beskar'gam.

The words uttered by the Armourer long ago floods his memory banks—words bestowed with restrained approval when he’d once used his smarts to outwit his trainer-captors and not with his weapons in the Fighting Corps.

A warrior is more than his armour.

The kid had proven that in spades.

Whatever the ad’ika had done earlier, this is the clearest and most overt displays of power he’d seen it wield over space and matter. If whatever the kid has done thus far—from moving pieces of toys for its own amusement or turning the flametrooper’s fire back on him—had baffled him or given him pause, it’s today’s show of power that brought a fuller understanding of how the Mandalorians had found the Jetii a fearsome foe.

If the kid had once collapsed after the fight with the mudhorn and slept for days, the energy that it seems to has right now is a clear sign that it’s capable of much, much more than Din could ever have imagined. That it’s only coming into its own now given the exponential rate of its increasing powers is more than unsettling, making the search for its own kind suddenly made much more urgent.

He continues to marvel at the baby’s growth, if it’s still considered a baby at this point in time. He’s flying blind as always, more so with a species whose unknown past is still hidden within the confines of the kid’s mysterious memory banks.

But the kid had grown remarkably in the months he’d left Nevarro, astonishing Din with its mental dexterity and its ability to…do its thing when it wants to.

Din checks the navi comp, mentally cancelling out the planet they’d just taken off from.

One more down, too many more to go.

oOo

10 years, ABY

How the holovid had found its way into a flea market is beyond anyone’s comprehension, but he’d made his purchase on impulse after hurriedly gathering his rations for the next space run, eager to get back to the Razor Crest lest the ad’ika’s latest brand of mischief involving opening and slamming shut the Crest’s various doors damages something permanently and strands them in yet another godforsaken planet.

Labelled nothing more as a training vid for aspiring Force-users and shoved among renowned fake vids, it’s probably worth fewer credits than he’d paid for, but this is the only hot lead that Din had been tossed in a long, long time.

Only when the child’s tuckered out with a full belly does he play it.

The grainy footage, short as it is, is…mesmerising.

It’s merely a static-filled, shaky snippet of a jetii in training, her luminescent, long, blunt-edged sword moving with a hum to deflect blaster shots before they meet their mark, before cutting to a scene where she leaps across the forest floor and onto the branches of primeval trees, each one higher than the other.

But it’s the last scene that threatens the relative stability that both him and the ad’ika had found.

It’s one where the same jetii grimaces—and trembles—in concentration, the gleaming sword held straight in front of her glistening face as she strains forward but makes no progress, as though resisting an invisible mental and physical probe.

A voice from outside the three-dimensional vid commands. “Steady, you will hold. Feel it. Runs though all living beings, it does.”

The jetii breaks, stumbling backward onto the grass as her chest heaves with exhaustion.

Finally, Din puts a face to the squeaky, raspy voice. A green creature with large, pointed ears and wispy white hair ambles into the side of the holovid, wielding a similar-looking, glowing, green blade in its claws—

Forgotten, you have.

The Force is with you, always.

It’s not so much the green creature speaking as it’s a…a reverberating hum in his own head just as the holovid crumbles into thin air at that moment.

Beneath his helmet, Din is sweaty and light-headed, his mind drawing a blank.

The Force. The jetii.

A creed, possibly, or an order, not unlike the Mandalorian Resol’nare that they live by.

More specifically, the older, jetii version of the ad’ika who is presently rushing around the Crest, babbling in its own curious mix of mando’a and Basic and finding new places to start a game of hide and seek.

A teacher of sorts.

As far as he’s concerned, this could be confirmation of more of the ad’ika’s kind out there, and in this short snippet, he’d learned much more about the mysterious, Force-sensitive jetii than anyone had been able to tell him apart from the stories of the Great Purge and the fragmented tales of ancient Mandalore.

It isn’t without a twinge in his gut when he realises that the answer he’s looking could be closer than he thinks.

oOo

11 years, 2 weeks ABY

They are uncomfortably close to a Mid-Rim planetary system that Din would have preferred to forego when the Razor Crest starts to act up.

It leaves him no choice but to guide the Crest into the icy, buffeting winds on Iridonia, a planet he’d judged too inhospitable for him and the kid to stay on, both for its terrain and its native predatory creatures.

The ship turns belly up, then rights itself, free-wheeling as it breaks Iridonia’s atmosphere even with his hands firmly on the landing controls. Swaying in the planet’s gravity pull, it heads straight for a massive, molten lava field south of its equator—

He’s swept left and right, barely hearing the alarmed screeches of the kid as they are nearly tossed off their seats. It’s the tail end of his cloak that the kid falls onto with a displeased, pained squeal, but he doesn’t even have the time to look at it for any injuries as he scrambles to flip several switches with one hand as a last resort while scooping up the ad’ika with the other.

A low whine indicates that the emergency landing gear has kicked in, but a short explosion a few seconds after that and pitch-darkness in the cockpit says that even that’s out of commission.

This is it, Din thinks.

He’s flat out of tricks of his trade.

The last year of his life with a kid that he probably hadn’t done any justice by is going to be snuffed out in a hot, painful burn. Along with a vulnerable, tiny creature that he still knows so little of. The regret that floods him is immense, along with the desperate panic that he could have still saved the child if he’d only—

Two shaking, green hands stretch past his peripheral vision as the kid strains forward with half-closed eyes.

The Razor Crest shudders to a halt in mid-air as the steaming vapours of the lava field obscures its viewport, then glides serenely past the wind storm and into a stable air flow before hovering unsteadily and landing bumpily on a patch of green near a massive body of water.

Whatever the kid does with the Force these days (and it’s getting more and more impressive by the day), it still stuns him speechless. How it’d gotten to a point where it wields this power over space and matter so instinctively and easily is not something he understands and probably can’t ever.

When Din speaks, he’s breathless with awe. “Once again, you’ve saved us, ad’ika.”

The child sags and fidgets drowsily on his lap. “Sleep…buir.”

The kid’s worn himself out this time around and even Din can understand the sheer amount of strength it’d taken to push a ship out of its path and into another.

He sighs and glances down at the snoozing kid.

The repairs that await him are extensive.

There’re some he can do on his own, but others are beyond him. Din only hopes that there’s a port that will stay peaceful long enough for the Crest to get fixed before they’re on their way again.

Luck barely stays on his side when he stumbles across an isolated workshop near a village, though the hostile stares of the humanoids Zabraks keep his hand permanently stayed on his blaster and the other holding the kid’s carrier bag more tightly.

A tall, grizzled native waits for him at tent flap, her pale orange skin oddly glowing in the light pushing the facial tattoos and horns into sharp relief.

“I have seen your ship.”

Din acknowledges her greeting with a curt admission of his own. “We nearly crashed.”

She merely smiles and gestures him in. “I saw this months ago. Come, your ship will be repaired. For now, rest, Mandalorian.”

It’s only after he’s had a meal and taken care of the kid’s needs that the Zabrak tells him of a jungle-covered moon that orbits a red gas giant.

She leans forward, the intensity of her stare somehow penetrating the toughness of his visor. “You are both ready.”

oOo

11 years, 1 month ABY

An ancient structure comes into view when the stars of deep space disintegrate into thick clouds and rain relentlessly pattering the viewport.

Yavin-4 is a cleverly-concealed habitable planet that has been the heart of the Rebellion for a long time and simply being in New Republic territory when he’s merely operated in the Outer Rim is justified cause for nervousness.

He gingerly puts the Razor Crest down on the landing site next to an X-wing but makes no move to lower the ramp. Behind him, the child fusses and fidgets, squawking when it’s unhappy (which is practically most of the time) and barely using the words Din knows it can speak.

Calming the kid down these days is a monumental task.

The ad’ika seems to have regressed in the last two weeks alone ever since they’d left Iridonia, restlessly chirping and babbling gibberish as though it’s trying to erase all the progress it has made since Nevarro.

The kid’s also clinging more than usual to his armour, refusing to sleep on its makeshift cot and insisting on being near him as much as it can. Even now, it toddles towards him, arms outstretched and eyes wide.

Something stirs on this planet despite its surface stillness: a particular sort of energy that rumbles through the mossy ground and saturates the humid air, the sort that lifts the hair on the back of his neck.

If Din has a slight inkling of it, the kid mostly likely feels it everywhere.

He’s got a bad feeling about this—this is the journey that will change the holding pattern that he’d found himself in for the last year or so.

Whatever happens from here onwards hasn’t yet been written.

The finality of the Zabrak’s words is deeply imprinted on to his psyche; months and months of searching is suddenly culminating in something that Din has no words for.

Maybe both him and the kid are not ready for it.

He gently settles the kid in its carrier bag and hits the ramp’s controls. “Ready to go?”

The ad’ika frowns in defiance. “No!”

The kid’s separation anxiety is rearing its head even before anything happens and he commiserates. The bond between them is a life bond—sacred words have been spoken about this and if anything, it’s his fault for not reassuring the child of it ever since they’ve become a clan of two.

Din sighs in empathy. “Neither am I, kid. But it has to be done.”

It does.

There are so many missing pieces here that he needs the answers to and the cloaked spectre—the jetii that he now knows by the name of Luke Skywalker—who awaits him at the structure’s massive entrance might provide them all.

But…

Din weighs the words he’d heard so long ago in his head and tests them on his lips, the feel of them strange on his tongue.

“Whatever it is, the Force will be with you, ad’ika.”

The kid stills suddenly, its ears lifting as he turns to glance at the waiting jetii and then back at his buir.

He tries again, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “Aliit ori'shya tal'din. And I will be with you. Always.”

-Fin

oOo

Tion'ad's ogir – Who’s there? Buir – parent (either father or mother) Jetii – Jedi Verd ori'shya beskar'ga – A warrior is more than his armour Aliit ori'shya tal'din – Family is more than bloodline

#The Mandalorian #Star Wars #Din Djarin #Dyn Jarren #Fanfic #I caved and wrote one #Baby Yoda

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imaginaryelle · 5 years

Text

On Aziraphale and “I’m soft”

I was talking with @irisbleufic about differences between show! and book!Aziraphale, and especially about the line “I’m soft” in the show, because it really threw me for a loop, but the reblog chain contracted some incredibly odd formatting, so this is a hopefully more-comprehensible version:

@imaginaryelle: random but re: Aziraphale's show characterization vs book: I enjoy both, but they are so, so different in weird ways and when I rewatch the show I'm just left with dissonance & wondering WHY that change happened. The "I'm soft" line struck me the hardest, because I have literally never thought of Aziraphale as soft. Not emotionally. The closest to the book we got was maybe the french executioner? But then he just ignores the implication. The show version feels almost unfinished, as a character.

@irisbleufic: I mean, Aziraphale is physically soft, no question, but in any other sense? Whoa, nope. Not unless you count how soft he is for Crowley once he gets put through the wringer of a failed apocalypse and unlearns some of those rude, holier-than-thou tidbits he says to Crowley from time to time. I mean, he’s soft for Crowley before their ordeal, but the ordeal is what adjusts (and hopefully eradicates) his prejudice. I’ve always found the whole “I can’t expect you to know what love feels like” thing remarkably callous, and the fact that Crowley gets cut off before he can say what his perception of a great sense of love is like just…ugh, I’ve always loved that moment so, so much, because it’s quite a perfect encapsulation of this entire disconnect between book characterization / miniseries characterization that we’re talking about:

“Odd,” muttered the angel, “I keep getting these flashes of, of…” He raised his hands to his temples.“What? What?” said Crowley. Aziraphale stared at him.“Love,” he said. “Someone really loves this place.” “Pardon?” “There seems to be this great sense of love. I can’t put it any better than that. Especially not to you.” “Do you mean like—” Crowley began. There was a whirr, a scream, and a clunk. The car stopped. [Enter Anathema, etc.]

@imaginaryelle: Yes, yes, I love that moment too! Okay, it took a bit longer than I hoped but I finally got my thoughts in order on this, and it ended up way longer and more like an essay than I originally thought it would, but I really enjoyed playing with it so I hope you enjoy it too.

Yes, absolutely Aziraphale is physically soft. He’s even described exactly that way by Shadwell (“the soft one in the camelhair coat”), and it seems to be pretty clearly about his appearance and presentation. Shadwell thinks Aziraphale is gay, fastidious (tries not to touch anything in the WFA headquarters) and an easier mark than Crowley, though he still finds the idea of threatening him “terribly risky.” We also have Aziraphale’s plump hands in the gun conversation at Tadfield Manor and the Compline reference too. But those and the intelligent/English/gay footnote are actually the only description of him I can find in the text. The only reference to height is that snake!Crowley has to look up at him, but that doesn’t tell us much. Which was surprising to find, because I had thought there was a little more than that, but yes. Physically Aziraphale is soft and I love that about him.

On a non-physical level, yes, exactly, in the book Aziraphale is extremely callous. Quite often. It actually surprised me, going back through my notes, how rarely he’s portrayed as anything else, but I think it does overall build a picture of him that, to me, has always been pretty immovable. I’ve never really been able to set aside that Aziraphale is, as Crowley says, a bastard. And he’s fairly thoughtless about it a lot of the time. He’s offhandedly pretty harsh on Crowley on a number of occasions, most of which got really toned down in the show. There’s the conversation about love, yes, which got especially confused in the show (the presentation made it seem like Aziraphale was talking about the Manor rather than all of Tadfield and they didn’t follow up on it well, and then it’s further muddled by the stain-miracle interaction). I would love to read pretty much anything on the subject of what Crowley was going to say there and how things are different for demons, because mmmmm, world building, and of course I love Crowley too.

But back to Aziraphale: there’re other callous remarks to Crowley too. In their very first interaction we have this:

“Yes, but you’re a demon. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for you to do good,” said Aziraphale. “It’s down to your basic, you know, nature. Nothing personal, you understand.”

And then, when Crowley keeps on with his “but what is it about, really” line of conversation:

“Best not to speculate, really,” said Aziraphale. “You can’t second-guess ineffability, I always say. There’s Right, and there’s Wrong. If you do Wrong when you’re told to do Right, you deserve to be punished. Er.”

Like, here, let me just rub your face in the Fall for a second. You can’t help your basic nature but also you deserve punishment. Ouch. (And this is not in the show. In the show he references Crowley’s being a demon as related to “[making trouble] is what you do” and has what looks like a pretty disturbing experience watching his gift of kindness result in the immediate death of a lion by flaming sword.)

It’s implied book!Aziraphale is embarrassed about having said that, but he doesn’t actually change his tune. He brings up the “you’re a demon” thing twice more, both in situations where it’s clear he thinks he has the moral high ground, because of course he does, he’s an angel. (book!Aziraphale is less openly doubtful of Heaven’s rightness until closer to the end, I think.) In contrast, throughout the show it’s often Crowley who reminds Aziraphale that he’s a demon, and thus not nice, not forgivable and not to be thanked while Aziraphale maintains that Crowley is a good person. For another example, book!Aziraphale, in the wake of failing to find records of Adam at the manor, has zero reaction to Crowley’s fear, and Crowley is pretty obviously freaking out:

“What are we going to do now?”

“Try and get some sleep.”

“You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.”

“Evil in general, maybe. This specific part of it has got into the habit of getting its head down occasionally.” [Crowley] stared into the headlights. The time would come soon enough when sleep would be right out of the question. When those Below found out that he, personally, had lost the Antichrist, they’d probably dig out all those reports he’d done on the Spanish Inquisition and try them out on him, one at a time and then all together.

He rummaged in the glove compartment, fumbled a tape at random, and slotted it into the player. A little music would …

… Bee-elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me …

“For me,” murmured Crowley. His expression went blank for a moment. Then he gave a strangled scream and wrenched at the on-off knob.

“Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him,” said Aziraphale thoughtfully.

“What?” said Crowley, distractedly.

And shortly after this, of course, Aziraphale finds the Book and just leaves when Crowley’s trying to confirm they’re still on the same side. In the show, this interaction doesn’t even happen. Crowley’s annoyed that they can’t find anything, but he’s not scared, and Aziraphale’s idea about using human operatives and his discovery of the book are split across several scenes and a fair chunk of time passing. Tv!Crowley watches him go into his shop into a sort of confused way, where book!Crowley is “feeling very alone” after not getting a real answer to two questions in a row.

In the show, lines like the Eden dialogue and “Crowley, do something, I’m the good one,” and “I don’t even like you” etc, are heavily offset by a wider range of scenes showing how obviously in love Aziraphale is, with both Crowley and with Earth. His love of food and clothes, his obvious joy in dancing, the adoration in his expression over and over when he looks at Crowley, and the pain in his face when they fight. And when he says “I’m soft,” after his jogging conversation with Gabriel, I didn’t get the impression he was talking about physically, even thought that’s what Gabriel was talking about. To me, that line sounded a lot more like “I don’t like conflict and unpleasantness, I’m too nice, I care too much, I’m a soft touch.” And for tv!Aziraphale this seems largely true. We see a lot of his softness, on an emotional and philosophical level, and a lot of investment in both Earth and Crowley. But the book only gives us little clues towards that. Mostly in little Earth details Crowley brings up while trying to convince him to influence the Antichrist, or notes about his learning the gavotte/helping with book translations/ those lines of, He ought to tell Crowley. No, he didn’t. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven, directly after which he admits to himself they have more in common with each other than respective sides.

The show also completely cuts out some of his more oblivious caustic-ness towards other people. Tv!Aziraphale watches that French executioner go to death in his place without any apparent care, and he stands by as terrible things happen (the flood, the crucifixion, even Armageddon in the start), but he worries about it more. He’s not smug about it, he’s concerned that maybe—maybe this isn’t right, even though it’s Heaven doing it. In both versions he seems to tell himself that any time something really bad is happening, it’s some one else’s fault and he can’t really do anything. But for all that he admonishes Crowley about not wanting to help Anathema and hypnotizing Mary Hodges, book!Aziraphale is quite smug (“We’ll win, you know”/ evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction/[..] and everyone knew Heaven would win in the end –literally there are two times “smug” is used in the book and they’re both about Aziraphale) and he’s pretty blithe about the use of guns, terrorists freedom fighters, the idea of killing Adam (at least until Adam is in front of him), and just straight up saying that Heaven doesn’t really care about humans at all (most obviously when he’s speaking through the television evangelist while body-hopping). For me, the “softest” we ever see him is at the air base:

“There are humans here,” he said.

“Yes,” said Crowley. “And me.”

“I mean we shouldn’t let this happen to them.”

“Well, what-” Crowley began, and stopped.

“I mean, when you think about it, we’ve got them into enough trouble as it is. You and me. Over the years. What with one thing and another.”

And I agree that he really needs to go through this whole trial with Armageddon to realize that he might be a bit wrong, about himself and especially about Crowley, and also about Heaven, and that he can afford to be a bit more compassionate and considerate and ask a few more questions all around. It feels like he’s learning things about himself that Crowley figured out a long time ago (Crowley gets a lot more description and character insight than Aziraphale does), and I love that. But I also feel like tv!Aziraphale is approaching from the opposite direction. That what he learns from the whole ordeal is to be firmer. To take a stand and act with more confidence and conviction. Which feels really weird to me. I like them both, but I watch tv!Aziraphale awkwardly pick up the sword and tell Crowley to do something and it feels like a completely different story, because book!Aziraphale is the one who initiates doing something, and he’s dreamy when he picks up the sword. He muses about “the good old days” and sets it aflame on purpose, and reaches for Crowley’s hand. And Crowley feels “free at last.” Finally free of fear, not terrified and desperate, and he takes Aziraphale’s hand and they turn to face Satan together.

It’s a good moment that illustrates what they’ve accomplished internally, and I’m actually really disappointed it was changed for the show, and the emotional payoff shifted to their trials.

I suppose in the end all of this is to say: I miss Aziraphale, when I watch the series, and I miss that story. The one that ends in crystal clear moments of taking responsibility for who you are and the role you’ve played and knowing yourself better, and then doing something with that knowledge. The series is fun, it’s a love story, and those versions of Crowley and Aziraphale are enjoyable to watch, but they feel very much wrapped up in each other, reflecting each other. I’ll probably play in that universe a bit. But it doesn’t hit the same chords, and it doesn’t speak to me the same way the book does, and I think the softening of Aziraphale’s character plays a huge role in that.

#aziraphale #good omens meta #good omens #tv omens #good omens spoilers #irisbleufic

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tigerkirby215 · 4 years

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5e Draven the Glorious Executioner build (League of Legends)

(Artwork by Riot Games)

Not Draven, Draaaaaven~

You ever just sit around and think “hm. I should do this for some reason?” Well that was basically the thought process behind deciding to make this build. Draven is a champion I’ve been on-and-off with and I’ve never played ADC much to begin with, but I randomly decided “hey what would a Draven build for 5e look like?”

But obviously the main reason I’m making this build is because Draven is the pinnacle of human perfection and the fact that he wasn’t my first build, last build, and every build in between just shows how little I recognize his greatness.

GOALS

Got axes, need victims - It wouldn’t be the glorious executioner without his glorious axes. We’re going to need to be able to throw them with style before having them fly back to our hands.

#DravenBigPlay - We need a few tricks up our sleeve to up the damage and “secure” the kill for our fans.

Let’s admire me - Of course it goes without saying that we need to be the hottest champion on the Rift, or in this case the Forgotten Realms. If the party needs a face who’s a better face than Draven?

RACE

While “being of pure charisma and beauty” is a race in 5e to an extent (Aasimar) truthfully you’re only human. Fortunately Variant Humans are quite talented in their own right. Bump your Charisma and Dexterity score with your two free points and take the Persuasion skill to flex some of that natural Charisma. For your Feat take Inspiring Leader to bolster your party’s confidence around your aura of natural awesomeness and force them to listen to you for at least 10 minutes if they want that temporary health. You also get a language and while you should always pick something useful if you want to have a conversation with the big man Abyssal is probably your best bet.

ABILITY SCORES

15; CHARISMA - You are the most important person in the room. Heck, you are the only person in the room. Welcome to the League of Draven!

14; STRENGTH - You don’t survive as a Reckoner if you’re weak, and Strength is the main source of our damage. And man have you seen those muscles?

13; DEXTERITY - Draven is deceptively nimble and agile, and we need dexterity for medium armor which would be the most in-flavor.

12; CONSTITUTION - You can take a hit, but who’d ever want to hit that pretty face?

10; WISDOM - Draven is pretty hot-headed and often starts fights that his brother has to finish. And Draven players are rather well known for flaming their supports and running down mid...

8; INTELLIGENCE - You were an orphan in Noxus which definitely means you aren’t attending any school reunions.

BACKGROUND

As a Reckoner you fight down in the Noxian Gladiator pits. Your By Popular Demand feature lets you go on tour to whatever dingy fight pit is available, putting on a show in exchange for a place to stay. Your adoring fans also follow you everywhere, making sure that the commoners know how you are.

Additionally you get proficiency in Acrobatics and Performance to put on a show for your adoring fans, and know how to use a Disguise Kit to put on a variety of skins or just wax your mustache. "According to lolesports.com, 100% of you think that Draven will win!"

You also get a musical instrument I guess and while Drums would probably be the most in-flavor it’s not like Noxus is well-known for the arts. Just take whatever you fancy.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

THE BUILD

LEVEL 1 - FIGHTER 1

Draven started out fighting alongside his brother in the Noxian army, which is why we’re starting out as a Fighter. You get proficiency in two skill from the Fighter list: take Athletics and Intimidation to be the face of a more traditional army.

You can choose a Fighting Style at this level and of course we’ll be throwing our Spinning Axes: the Class Feature Variants Unearthed Arcana presents several new fighting styles including Thrown Weapon Fighting. You get a +1 to damage on thrown weapon attacks and can draw a weapon as part of the action to throw it. This won’t help you catch the axes when they come back to you but if you have a bunch of spare axes on your belt you can fling them out as you wish.

On that note Handaxes are simple weapons with the Light property, meaning you can wield them two-handed. They also have the Thrown property with a base range of 20 feet and a maximum range of 60 feet. Draven’s no sniper... at least not yet.

You also get access to Second Wind which lets you heal 1d10 + your fighter level as a bonus action once per short rest. Personally I’d rule this as a bit of life steal from your Bloodthirster keeping you safe, or your adoring fans cheering you on.

LEVEL 2 - BARD 1

Yeah we’re not taking Bard level 1 which I’d normally never do, but it makes sense in context: Draven started as a soldier and became The Glorious Executioner afterwards. Also proficiency in Constitution saving throws is always helpful. Regardless: as a Bard you gain access to one skill and one Music Instrument. Again the instrument doesn’t matter but I’d suggest taking the Insight skill so you can know when your opponent is truly terrified of you: the crowd loves that.

You also get Bardic Inspiration which lets your natural awesomeness radiate onto your allies as a bonus action, giving them an extra d6 to roll on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw. “Perfection? I got that.”

You also get access to Spellcasting. You get 2 cantrips: Vicious Mockery is the quintessential Bard spell which lets you brag so much about how awesome you are it actually causes pain to your opponents. You can also take Prestidigitation for some stage theatrics for your entry.

You also know four level 1 spells: You don’t need magic to Charm Person normally but having a spell to do so guarantees that it’ll work, Healing Word lets you shout some words of encouragement to your allies to keep them in the fight, Longstrider lets you catch up to your enemy with Blood Rush, and Dissonant Whispers is a good way to make an enemy run to excite the crowd.

LEVEL 3 - FIGHTER 2

Now that we’re a proper performance artist let’s learn how to catch those axes? But firstly: second level Fighters get Action Surge which lets them take an additional action once per short rest. So chuck two axes instead of one! Don’t worry: we’ll be getting more axes soon.

LEVEL 4 - FIGHTER 3

Level 3 Fighters get to choose their martial archetype and Soul Reaver makes it pretty obvious that Draven has some capabilities as an Eldritch Knight. Despite being an Intelligence-based casting class the spells you get won’t matter too much. Regardless you get 2 cantrips: take Dancing Lights and Control Flames for more stage tricks. You also get three level 1 spells, two of which have to be from the Evocation or Abjuration school. Take Shield to expertly block an attack with your axes, and Magic Missile for some guaranteed damage with some expertly-aimed axes. For your generalist spell I’d recommend a utility spell of some sort since any attack roll or saving throw with your Intelligence is likely going to fail.

What we’re really here for is Weapon Bond which lets you bond with one of your axes over a short rest. You can’t be disarmed while wielding the weapon, and you can summon it back to your hand as a bonus action if you throw it at your enemies. You can have a maximum of two axes bonded to you at a time, which means yes you do have to take two short rests to get two spinning axes. But afterwards you can throw them at your enemy before recalling them as a bonus action: not quite “catching” the axe but it gets the job done.

LEVEL 5 - FIGHTER 4

Feel free to take this level later if you’re fine with your stats but I think you’re going to want to buff your Strength with an Ability Score improvement, seeing as it’s your attack modifier for your spinning axes.

You also get another spell, so grab Protection from Evil and Good to give those goody two-shoes Damacians trouble when fighting you and your brother.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

LEVEL 6 - BARD 2

That’s all the fighting we’re going to do; now it’s time to put on a show! 2nd level Bards get access to Jack of All Trades, so Draven can be amazing at everything. You also get access to Song of Rest which lets you tell some stories of your amazingness by the campfire so your party can bask in your glory.

You also get another spell at this level: Heroism makes sure you and none of your friends get antsy during a show.

LEVEL 7 - BARD 3

3rd level Bards get Expertise in 2 skills. I’d recommend Performance and Intimidation to awe the crowd and terrify your enemies.

But much more importantly you can now go to Noxian college! And no college is better than the College of Draaaaaaven Swords. As a Swords Bard you get access to a fighting style and of course with two axes you’ll want Two-Weapon Fighting.

You also get access to Blade Flourish which let you use your Bardic Inspiration die to make some flashy plays for the crowd. A Defensive Flourish will give yourself a shield, Slashing Flourish will let you slash at anyone around you after throwing your axe, and Mobile Flourish will let you knock an enemy aside before rushing at them with Blood Rush. All flourishes will make you do extra damage, so hit ‘em where it hurts.

You also get access to 2nd level spells like Suggestion. You can ask someone to perform an action and they must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or be forced to do it. I think telling them to Run so you can get a clear shot is simple enough?

LEVEL 8 - BARD 4

Level 4 Bards get an Ability Score Improvement and again we’re going to want more Strength to chuck those axes around.

You get another spell at this level and Enthrall is a great way to take the attention while the rest of your team gets stuff done. "Places to go, me to see." You also get another cantrip and Minor Illusion lets you set up some minor stage props both in and out of combat.

LEVEL 9 - BARD 5

Level 5 Bards get Font of Inspiration which lets their Bardic Inspiration come back on a Short rest. In addition your Bardic Inspiration is now a d8, so you can do a little more with your Spinning Axes.

You also get access to 3rd level spells and Fear will make sure your victims put on a show! The spell forces everyone in a 30 foot cone to make a Wisdom saving throw or be frightened by your shear awesomeness and start to run away.

LEVEL 10 - BARD 6

Level 6 Bards get Countercharm which lets you sit around and calm down the newbies to assure them that Draven’s got this. Alternatively you could not do that as you finally get access to an Extra Attack at this level which we’ve been desperately needing. One Spinning Axe per turn really doesn’t amount to much, though it should be noted that you can only catch one axe per turn so recalling the axes might start to get annoying.

You also get another spell such as Leomund’s Tiny Hut which lets you set up your travel tent to keep you and your allies safe for the night. Who the heck is Leomund? This is clearly Draven’s magnificent hut!

LEVEL 11 - BARD 7

7th level Bards get access to 4th level spells like Charm Monster. And Draven bests the mighty beast with his natural Charisma~

LEVEL 12 - BARD 8

8th level Bards get another Ability Score Improvement: cap off your Strength for maximum axe-flinging action.

You also get another spell like Freedom of Movement, in case of a heavy CC team so you can use QSS.

LEVEL 13 - BARD 9

At 9th level your Song of Rest increases to a d8, so your party can bask in the glow of Draven by moonlight. Additionally you can grab 5th level spells like Dominate Person to get an adoring fan to fight for you.

LEVEL 14 - BARD 10

10th level Bards get Expertise in two more skill: take Athletics and Persuasion for maximum grit and maximum charm.

But now here’s where it gets fun: 10th level Bards get access to Magical Secrets and I think it’s time to finally get our ult? Lighting Bolt is one of the few line-based spells in the game, and it fires out a 100 foot line of electricity dealing 8d6 lightning damage, or half if they succeed a Dexterity saving throw.

Meanwhile Gust of Wind replicates the effects of Stand Aside fairly well. You make a 60 foot long 10 foot wide gust of wind blast in a direction away from you for the duration. Targets within the area of effect must make a Strength saving throw or be pushed 15 feet, and movement costs twice as much in the area. It also puts out fires and disperses gasses, and you can redirect the wind as a Bonus Action which is nice.

You also get another cantrip and I’d say get Mending to keep your outfit in tip-top shape. And your Bardic Inspiration die increases to a d10 which will allow for more Spinning Axe damage.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

LEVEL 15 - BARD 11

11th level Bards get access to 6th level spells like Mass Suggestion to get a whole crowd of fans to adore you!

LEVEL 16 - BARD 12

12th level Bards get an ability score improvement and it’s probably time to invest in Charisma for better spellcasting and more Whirling Axe-I mean Bardic Inspiration dice... Draven Inspiration dice.

LEVEL 17 - BARD 13

13th level Bards see their Song of Rest increase to a d10, so you can be sure that your entourage is in tip-top shape. You also get another spell and Draven’s Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion is perfect for the most perfect guy in Noxus. This spell lets you summon a portal to your own private mansion which lasts for 24 hours. A bit of a big spell for vanity but you’re a big guy: you deserve it.

LEVEL 18 - BARD 14

14th level Swords Bards get access to their final ability Master’s Flourish, letting you use a d6 instead of your Bardic Inspiration die on a Blade Flourish so you can always have an axe at the ready.

You also get access to more Magical Secrets and Sunbeam lets you turn on the practice tool to fire your axes all over the place! You shoot out a 60 foot line of light and every creature inside must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or take 6d8 radiant damage and be blinded until your next turn. If they succeed they take half as much, but undead and oozes have disadvantage on the save, so be sure to shoot your ult at the enemy Zac or Karthus. You can create a new line every turn as an action until the spell ends.

Wall of Fire lets you rake the ground with your axes so that it leaves fire in its wake. You can either make a 60 foot long line or a 20 foot diameter circle of fire that deals 5d8 damage to people on the line, or half as much if they succeed a Dexterity saving throw. You also choose a side of the wall to still be dangerous after the fact, and anything that comes within 10 feet of that side of the wall or goes inside the wall takes 5d8 fire damage as well. Truthfully though look into all the wall spells as they do some crazy good damage: Wall of Light was one I considered but it didn’t seem as in-flavor.

LEVEL 19 - BARD 15

15th level Bards see their Bardic Inspiration increase to a d12, so you can get a big crit with your Spinning Axes.

You also get access to 8th level spells like Dominate Monster, so no one can resist Draaaaaaven.

LEVEL 20 - BARD 16

16th level Bards see our last Ability Score Improvement, so I’d suggest finally maxing out that Charisma modifier for maximum spell-casting, Bardic Inspiration die, and Draven-brand charm.

FINAL BUILD

PROS

Man, I'm good - With a maxed out attack modifier as well as maxed out Charisma for maxed out Bardic Inspiration Blade Flourishes you can do some crazy damage.

Draven's just showing off now! - Even though you’re not the bulkiest brawler Shield and Defensive Flourish can skyrocket your AC to remarkable heights.

Draven does it all... with style - You have tons, and I mean tons of Charm spells. Basically every single one a Bard can grab. Top that with Expertise with every single Charisma skill (except for Deception) and you will never fail to be the face of the group.

CONS

Definitely some miscommunication there - Because of the restrictions of Standard Array you end up spending all your Ability Score improvements on maxing out both your attack modifier and spellcasting mod. There are also several scores (notably Dexterity) that you only have a score in because of cosmetic reasons: it would make way more sense for you to wear plate mail like your brother, even though what you wear can be described as half plate at best. If you have the option to use point buy getting a 15 in Strength, Charisma, and Constitution is totally an option if you want to spend less on ASIs and more on Feats.

Buying time for the rest of his team - The only thing you’re really getting out of a 4 level investment in Fighter is Heavy Armor (which we should use but aren’t), a fighting style (that barely helps tbh), Action Surge, and the Shield spell (which you can just grab with Magical Secrets.) The Eldritch Knight dip is almost exclusively for the ability to return the axes you throw to your hand, and it’s not like throwing axes is exactly a practical fighting style anyways. Regardless if you have a Heimerdinger (Artificer) on your team who can build you a Returning Weapon ask them to make you a Returning Axe since that will accomplish the exact same effect without 4 dud levels.

Draven out! - Pretty much all your eggs are in either the Strength or Charisma basket. Your skills are all in Charisma while you’ll often only need one or two Charisma abilities to get by, and you have very low mental stats which means that you’re likely to fail any Wisdom or Intelligence saving throw.

But when your only cons are “you’re so awesome the rules can’t contain you” there’s not much to complain about. Clearly as Draven you should have an 18 in all stats and your maximum for every stat should be a 50 bare minimum. But until then be the face of the party with a throwing arm to match your ego. Just don’t flame your support and run down mid as that’s a quick way to get permabanned.

(Picture of T1 BABYYYYYYYY!)

#dnd 5e #dnd #dnd build #dnd guide #dnd multiclass #dnd bard #League of Legends #league of legends draven #draaaaaaaaaven

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