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phoenixtakaramono · 3 years

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Does Bing gē Have Descendants in ‘The Untold Tale?’

This topic has come up a few times since The Untold Tale takes place in the PIDW universe (post-Bingge vs Bingmei extra), I figured I might as well compile and archive my official answer here for me to refer my AO3 readers to in the future for convenience’s sake. I hope everyone doesn’t mind. :) I’m always happy to answer questions!

TL;DR

Q: Will we see Bing gē having fathered children with his harem of 600 or so wives in TUT?

A: For TUT, the answer is a definite “no.” There were a lot of factors which’d contributed to my decision. I’ll try to explain my reasoning down below.

Context

In PIDW, it is canon that Luo Binghe has a bountiful number of descendants with his harem of 600-or-so wives. It is a detail that has been mentioned even in ch1 of SVSSS and in ep1 of the donghua.

(SVSSS Excerpt - ch1)

(SVSSS donghua - ep1)

I like to plan things ahead of time. So from very early on, I knew this would be something I would have to decide on whether or not to address when I’d finally decided to expand TUT from just a prologue into a full-blown story. And after contemplating it, I decided against adding children into the story. It is because 1) it would make the situation more complicated, and 2) it would take TUT in a different direction that wouldn’t be fun for me to write.

I’m a very decisive writer, meaning when I make my mind up about something, chances are I won’t change my mind. This is because I would have already planned it into my plot outline, which means changing a decision would require me to change other details in the other chapters I have planned for that story. (I’m typically not a spontaneous writer; I try not to write spontaneously because when you’re a writer who rotates through multiple WIPs with different characters across different genres or writing styles, you inevitably have writer’s block because you probably won’t remember all the ideas or the direction you had whenever you return back to a different WIP. To reduce this shortcoming, it helps me personally to have a plot outline. This way I can return to any WIP, read my notes and then transcribe them into legible paragraphs, find a way to transition between the story beats I have to hit for that chapter, and then eventually post the final draft to AO3 when I feel it’s ready.)

Having made a decision, I knew I had to set it up in TUT and give a “reasonable explanation in-story.” Hence, in ch2, we see:

(Excerpt I - ch2)

Basically the set-up is TUT takes place post-Bingge vs Bingmei, but between “the third or fourth book” of the hypothetical PIDW webnovel series aka before Airplane wrote the fanservicey chapters where the luckier of LBH’s wives give birth to children during the harem drama plots and the children are probably rarely, if ever, mentioned again in the story as a lot of stallion novels tend to do.

(Excerpt II - ch2)

(Excerpt III - ch2)

Contrarian Tendencies

You know the saying: Monkey see, monkey do? In my case, it’s monkey see, monkey do not do.

A little fun fact about me as a writer: if I have already seen a fanfic where someone has already written a concept or idea into their story, chances are I will just avoid it entirely in my own stories. I don’t know why this aversion exists, but I’m assuming it’s because of my counterculture hipster inclinations and an intrinsic fear of plagiarism which has been beaten into all of our skulls since adolescence. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by other people’s works. Technically everything’s been done before in writing so, as a writer, a good rule of thumb is to always try to give it your own unique spin on things. So for me, my brain somehow interpreted this a step further. This is a reason why I try to avoid reading stories from whichever fandom my WIP is from during the writing process of updating a fic, because this is how I get influenced. Once I see an idea or interpretation from another fanfiction, it influences me to not want to write it into my own. This is a very strong unconscious impulse for me. I guess this is just the neurons in my brain’s thinking that this way, it won’t be something my readers will have read before and the story idea will come across as different or fresh, and mine. In a way this is also how I show respect for fanfiction writers in the same fandom—by being inspired to not be inspired, ha. I like to think every story in the world serves a niche audience, so seeing a diverse range of originality and interpretations in a fandom is a good thing. This is also how I feel when I am able to identify certain popular tropes or depictions or patterns in a fandom; 99% of the time, it makes me feel a compulsion to “go against the grain” or write the opposite. For example, you have no idea how long it took me to come around the idea of incorporating the fanon “A-Yuan” into TUT. However cute it is, the moment it dominated the fandom (well, “dominated” is an exaggeration; it’s more like I’ve seen enough, especially in the Original LBH/ SY | SQQ tag), my gut reaction was to nope out of using it. But after seeing a lot of comments in my inbox with readers affectionately calling SY “A-Yuan,” I’d contemplated it for a long time and it wasn’t until ch4 that I decisively decided that yes, I can have Bing gē calling SY “A-Yuan” in TUT—but it has to be at the right moment for maximum dramatic and emotional impact. (See this thread that started it all. And this is the small sneak peek I wrote where LBH will call SY that for the first time.) <- This is the rare 1% where I actually conformed to what’s popular.

In this case, when I finally decided to expand the prologue into a full-blown story, coincidentally I had just recently read a good Binggeyuan (Bingyuan) fanfic which featured a kidnapped Shen Yuan interacting with Bing gē’s harem and LBH’s children/descendants. I’d liked their portrayal and even thought the children were cute. <- However, with me having reading this, the problem came up: I felt the familiar stubbornness in me rearing its head. So knowing myself, if I had included children, it is very likely the direction that I would have gone down for TUT would have been the opposite. To further complicate matters, you have to keep in mind the kind of writer I am. I tend to like grounding stories with a semblance of realism, no matter if the genre is pseudohistorical fantasy, romance, sci-fi, etc. And this writer has seen and read quite a few harem and palace intrigue Chinese dramas/ premises.

For further context, in those types of “historical” C-dramas^, in that sort of environment which fosters scheming, competition, jealousy, etc, it is almost expected to see heirs aka children aka descendants harmed along with the women. Innocent parties are often victims in these sorts of cutthroat premises, to underscore the underlying message the show or novel wishes to present. (See Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace. See Yanxi Palace. See The Legend of Haolan. See Nirvana in Fire. See The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage. Etc.) And me being me, this would be the direction I would take. Remember, while TUT is meant to emulate a legitimate danmei C-novel reading experience in a fantasy world, I do drop pseudohistorical and cultural Easter eggs into the story. So trust me when I say you would not like the direction TUT would have gone down in, had I made LBH have children with his harem. I mean, theoretically yes, we could’ve seen endearing children characters from me, but you would have also seen me addressing a lot of the baggage that comes with (see Comment III Excerpt down below).

The situation with dissolving Bing gē’s harem is already complicated enough. As his romance with Shen Yuan develops, I didn’t want to have an additional headache thinking about how to address the issue of LBH having children already. Divorces in a pseudohistorical context is already a heavy topic—even more so when it’s divorces with children in the mix. Naturally I will still have SY and LBH eventually discuss the matter of legitimate heirs since LBH will essentially become the Sacred Ruler of all Three Realms and it’s a traditional precedent for an emperor to bed his empress, noble consort, and imperial concubines until he has his heirs (plural, because the rate of mortality was high in ancient China). In TUT’s case, at that point in the story SY will remind LBH that he’s essentially an immortal sovereign so there isn’t any need for an heir unless he wishes to retire. Furthermore, he will inform LBH that he could set a new precedent since he’s already different from the other emperors from history (with him being of half-Heavenly Demon and half-human cultivator lineage); as long as LBH is fully aware of all perspectives of the situation, he doesn’t necessarily need to conform to all traditions if this is something he really feels strongly about. But this future conversation(s) is likely the extent of it.

But wait, you say, what about a certain someone who’s going to be transmigrated as an imperial crown prince? Isn’t he going to be in that sort of vicious upbringing? <- Yes. But that’s an entirely seperate matter. In a way, since I’ve decided Bing gē will not have had any children or descendants in TUT, with Airplane, this now presents an opportunity for me to show the consequences of being one of the many children of an emperor with a harem of women vying for one man’s attention—and the power struggle that’d ensue in this kind of environment. It’s an interesting What-If parallel, if you think about it.

AO3 Comments

Although these are just small excerpts from replies I’ve written before, it’s nice and orderly to just compile them here for everyone since these will be buried underneath all the comments as TUT updates:

(Comment I- ch3)

(Comment II- ch4)

(Comment III- ch4)

Because of seeing comments that have asked me for my thoughts on whether or not I will include LBH’s children, I’ve had so much fun seeing theories thrown around: from LBH’s blood parasites being able to control conception, to someone’s headcanon about LBH being a hybrid and all that entails scientifically (think: mules). I will say in TUT, it’s more the former since in PIDW he’s supposed to have descendants; we’re pretending Bing gē doesn’t have any yet (and now definitely won’t, especially after having heard SY’s “prophecy”) because he subconsciously does not want children due to certain fears, trauma, etc. And his Heavenly Demon’s “blood parasites” (blood manipulation) is a convenient story device to explain why no wife has gotten pregnant yet.

I hope this explanation makes sense! Mainly I just wanted to have this archived on tumblr so that I have this post to refer to moving forward.

On a side note: especially since ch4 had been posted, quite a few people have actually mentioned they’ve read my replies to other comments and/or I have seen different people having hopped onto other readers’ comment threads (for example, imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw a reader you lovely person, you helpfully jumping in to respond to another reader’s questions about TUT, and their answers were actually aligned with what I would’ve answered!), so it’s always such a thrill whenever I see this level of engagement happening. I can’t explain why, but seeing this happening is just so cute to me. It really makes this writer feel so warm and fuzzy inside!

#svsss #bingyuan #bingqiu #the scum villain's self saving system #luo binghe #the untold tale #phoenixtakaramono #ask #technically not an ask #but i like to categorize it there #I mainly wrote this lengthy explanation on tumblr #bc I wanted to link this as ref #anytime someone asks me in the future regarding LBH’s kids #lol it’s actually not cinnabar pills hidden in a bracelet #it’s some sort of seeds which supposedly stopped concubines from being pregnant #I discovered this when I rewatched Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace #Do you all notice you have a unique writing syntax/ style #that’s how I can identify that you’re all diff ppl in the comments #one time an anon guest wrote something for G&G #and in the comment thread as another guest anon they supposedly agreed with the prev anon #in that case it was obvious it was the same person pretending to be another guest anon #and I can tell because their writing syntax/ voice is identical #which is why I’m so pleasantly surprised to see this phenomenon in the SVSSS fandom #you all have diff writing syntaxes #seeing you all interact with each other’s comments or my comments to other comments #is just such a delight ahhhhhh #I love the SVSSS community #you guys are so warm and welcoming

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jcfoxington · 3 years

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@sambambucky : “pls... Pastels, Peaches and Pain??? among us first draft??? marvel meets warframe meets a bunch of tumblr posts (it’s not an au!?!??!)

hi jo !!! Pastels, Peaches, and Pain is one of those sambucky wips i have mostly fully fleshed out in my head because of one (1) extreme moment of clarity after a rogue ‘what if’ tangent thought but havent written anything of yet out of restraint / knowing i need to finish at least one of my current sambucky wips before i start it or none of them will get done

this was the rogue tangent thought: “what if Sam is haunted by Figaro’s ghost and has been since he was a kid?”. i’ve changed the ghost cat to not be Figaro but that’s the premise !

i refer to the fic as the cat fic ‘cause the whole plot is based around sam’s ghost cat companion insisting he adopts nat’s cat Liho after endgame and then Figaro later and then [insert redacted because plot spoilers but just know it relates to Alpine]. no im not projecting my feelings about cats idk what youre talking about

here’s some note snippets just for you:

the cat, inexplicably, takes a liking to bucky, which is really annoying bc sam doesnt know how to explain to him that all the oddly soft gusts of wind are actually sam's dead cat insisting on getting pats

bucky getting shade thrown at him by said ghost cat during all of tfatws + them making up (and not out. yet)

starts when sam's a kid & follows him as he grows up w/ a ghost kitty as a companion only he can see & interact with + angst with an undertone of comedy + getting together

he whispers to ghost kitty, who simply mmrrs happily

for the among us first draft thing, what basically happened is i saw this tweet and this video and my brain latched onto these dynamics so hard i had to write about them.

here’s a sketch of my two main imposters, Black (left) and Cyan (right):

and here’s a snippet:

The thing having Cyan pause and stare out at the asteroid field is how the colors stretch to family. When they and Black came aboard, they had thought every crewmember was an adult working on the planet-change project. That the patch of off-white with a black something-pattern-or-shape signified status. In a way, Cyan supposes it does, but just not the way they expected. They had expected it to show what rank an individual held within the hierarchy of the crew, from deckhand to division leader to captain, not to show that you're family of the crew and not actually part of the crew itself.

There are innocents on this ship. Children. It was not something any of them had anticipated, and not something Cyan had been prepared to deal with. They and Black boarded this horrible place to eradicate a threat, believing each and single one of the humans were accomplishes and dedicated to the goal of destroying Cyan and Black's species, and their planet. But, now?

marvel meets warframe meets a bunch of tumblr posts... doesn’t have a wip title or seperate document for itself yet cause it’s been stuck in my ‘story ideas’ document since its creation. so ‘marvel meets warframe meets a bunch of tumblr posts’ is literally just me describing the vibe of an original world gjkerfkds

the world came to be for two reasons. firstly, i want to do make take on a superhero universe because the plot and complete lack of communication in both the dcu and mcu piss me the fuck off. secondly, needed a place to dump ocs with elaborate backstories or fantasy / sci-fi abilities that dont fit into any of my existing worlds

which sounds super competent but trust me, it isn’t. it didn’t gain any solidity at all until i decided to do a personal ‘how different can i make spn castiel look & still retain the same vibe?’ challenge. i have my own cas now

however, the reason i said ‘marvel meets...’ is because i’ve snagged a couple of different things from the mcu, most notably: enemies to reluctant coworkers to lovers, yes our best friend have the same name. no they’re not the same person, secret evil org is controlling the government, and the assassin that tried to kill you several times is now your best friend

warframe was added to the world because i got attached to my Volt build, gave them a name, and have some headcanons idk what to do with because i refuse to interact with that fandom. also because the friend i made through discussing warframe lore + plot dicked me over so it feels Bad to create for

the glue to this whole mess is that one “in every friend group there’s a mean bisexual, an even meaner lesbian, a she/they, a he/they, a himbo, an astrology bitch, a short king, and a token straight” tumblr post. my main group of superheroes ala the avengers consist of these people. the token straight is the only one i havent figured out who is yet

ever since i figured that out ive been throwing story / character ideas and weirdly specific aesthetics from popular tumblr posts into this world’s notes. here’s some examples:

sword grandmas

that trope where someone’s really nice and acts super well-adjusted to society but then they do something super whack and dangerous and you realize ‘oh they’re secretly a little bit insane, actually’

anti-gay group’s leader’s wife leaves him for another woman

superhero who swore to be the best hero [city / planet / solar system / continent / ????] has ever seen ever since he lost his wife. not because she’s dead but divorce just sucks & the hero-to-be is terrible at coping

dishevelled swamp witch

that one person who runs around with an amulet all the time & isn’t aware it’s cursed

an exasperated, tired superhuman assassin running after their husband and their husband's best friend. their husband and said husband's best friend both have wings. chaos ensues (yes, this one is a sambucky post)

ask me about my WIPs!

BONUS:

@sambambucky : #i want to have a coffee and listen to synopses of all of these.... #i miss the discord wow #WRITING TAG #waitttt time jumping dream movie? lmao I'VE READ THIS LIST FORTY TIMES and every time i rediscover something i wanna know about #outfit doodlesss ugh i need to go

couldnt not respond to your tags because they make me go ghrkjfnerknf but in the good way. we miss you too jo !!

the time jumping dream movie was one of the first vivid dreams i had and the whole thing was so stupidly coherent and whacky i had to write it down. it grew plot, a queer love dynamic, weird sci-fi apocalypse elements, anti-military propaganda, questionable science, and a sequel while i wasnt looking and now i just. have to make it a real movie or i’ll combust

outfit djoodlles.png is only on there because my best friend sent me a ‘draw this outfit’ meme and space kitty, my current character brainrot, stole all the outfits for himself. otherwise, that file just sits there until im feeling like designing an outfit or wanna see how a stupid thing looks on my oc patrick

here’s one of the two poses-to-doodle-outfits-on of space kitty ive made so far:

and here’s one of those stupid things on patrick (that then turned into an actual outfit of his because i have no self control):

#.jax speaks #.my art #.my writing #tysm for the interest jo !!!#if you have literally any questions or if youre serious about the synposes thing...#i love rambling abt my stupid brain people #i WILL answer all your questions #even if the answer is 'good question! ive got no clue'#.patrick mortensen #.space kitty #.pastels peaches and pain #.the among us thing #.marvels meets warframe meets tumblr posts #.time jumping dream movie

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panharmonium · 4 years

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Hey, do you ship merthur? I have conflicted feelings about it because Merlin does love Arthur but also their relationship is kinda shitty.

short answer: i do not

longer answer: i might not be the right person to ask about this, because i don’t really “ship” anything? it’s not how i engage with fandom. (disclaimer: this is not a value judgment of folks who do engage with fandom that way. just an explanation of how my own brain works.)

extra long answer: under the cut, because i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked me about merlin/arthur, and i might as well put my entire response in one place so that next time, i can just link to it.

questions like this are a little tough for me to answer, because i am completely uninterested in romance as a premise. if it’s not there, i don’t care. if it is there, i often wish it weren’t, because it’s almost never developed in a way that lives up to my standards. i don’t always mind if something contains romantic relationships (provided they’re written well), but i don’t want them to be the point of a story. i honestly cannot think of anything less interesting to me than a story that has as its main plotline “x character falls in love with y character.” for me, in my brain, it’s like, “okay...that’s it? do you have anything else to say?” there is literally nothing about that that i care about.

this can be a little difficult to navigate in fandom, because one of the oft-heard commendations of “fandom” is ‘gosh, fandom is so wonderful, we can watch the same two characters fall in love again and again and again in a million different scenarios!’ which is true, for the people who care about that sort of thing, but that’s not actually ‘fandom.’ that’s shipping. and there’s nothing wrong with shipping, but shipping and fandom are not the same thing, and they’ve become so conflated that it can be very difficult to engage in the latter without being absolutely swamped by the former.

many times, for me, fandom can feel synonymous with shipping. there was a post i reblogged recently whose tags described shipping as often feeling like a prerequisite to engaging with fandom, and that is often what it feels like to me, particularly in fandoms where one ship is so ubiquitous that any and all other material is utterly dwarfed by it in scale. (for me, my last two major fandoms have been merlin and teen wolf, so - i’m sure you see my dilemma, heh.)

all of that said, in terms of arthur and merlin specifically...

disclaimer: everything i say here is relevant to me only. these are my own feelings. i am making this post on my own blog, in my own space, in response to a question about my own thoughts. i do not want, expect, or need anyone else to share these thoughts. any commentary i make about fandom trends is not equivalent to condemnations of individual people’s opinions or shipping habits. i do not mind or take issue with folks who ship these two characters. i am glad you are having fun. please do not @ me about something you disagree with. i promise you it is not necessary.

okay. with that out of the way.

part of me is reluctant to expound further on this question, because my personal philosophy is that merlin and arthur as a ship have had more than enough time and space devoted to them in this fandom (way more than their share, frankly) and i generally prefer to focus on merlin and the other people in his life, as a deliberate counter to that. but, since you asked, and because i have been experiencing the “i’m tired of romance” bug more strongly lately, here is the long-form version.

the number one reason why i don’t ship arthur and merlin is what i already outlined above: i don’t really “ship” anything. i have never looked at two characters who were not already together/on an obvious potential path to being together and said “i want them to fall in love.” that has just never happened to me. (again - it’s not a BAD thing to have this happen, it’s just not something that’s ever happened to me. i can’t relate to the experience.)

therefore, when i do appreciate a romantic relationship, it’s pretty much always because canon has shown me something romantic (or clearly pre-romantic) that i find to be well-written and compelling. (it’s rare - as i outlined before, i would usually rather not deal with romance at all - but it happens.)

arthur and merlin, then, never had that effect on me, because arthur and merlin, as depicted in the canon, are not in love.

[to anybody reading this who just snatched up their keyboard and started furiously typing, i beg you - please go back and re-read my disclaimer.]

they’re not in love. the truth about these two is that if i had watched this show without having grown up in fandom as a culture (and without knowing exactly what kind of ships fandom immediately sees EVERYWHERE) the idea of anybody shipping these two together would never have even entered my mind.

(and like. because i DID grow up in fandom, and i DO know exactly what kind of ships fandom sees everywhere, i knew before i even started this show that arthur/merlin was going to be an inescapable thing. but that would not have been the case, if i had watched the series in a world where i didn’t know what fandom was.)

arthur and merlin, in canon, are not in love. the show never does anything to give me an inkling that either of them are harboring romantic feelings for each other. that is never what is happening onscreen. literally the last thing on merlin’s agenda is romantic attachment, ever, and arthur is never, ever shown to be in love with anyone who isn’t gwen. the show, onscreen, never tricks me, teases me, or leads me on. i was never under the impression that merlin and arthur were in love with each other, because they weren’t.

but that DOES NOT MEAN their relationship matters less. just because they aren’t IN love with each other doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and one of those things is not bigger or better or more powerful than the other.

i struggle a lot in fandom (all fandom, not just merlin) with the persistent idea that romantic attachment is the peak, the natural endpoint on a scale of “how deep is your love?” i am constantly running up against posts where the commonly accepted structure is to cite a moment of devotion or caring or some instance of basic connection between two characters, and then add a caption or tag saying ‘because they are JUST FRIENDS, right?’ or ‘^^totally platonic interaction between characters who are not at all in love, sure jan.’

and honestly? i hate that. that is one of my least favorite things about fandom. it makes me so tired.

i am completely disconnected from this idea that there are like...things you can do that are too caring to count as friendship. like - that there is too much devotion you can show, and if you go over the limit, then it’s laughable that you would do those things for “just” a friend. that’s so unpleasant to me.

(and i do think [when it comes to non-canon queer ships, anyway - straight ships unfortunately have no excuse, sorry y’all] that part of this probably has its roots in pushback at the tendency of people who try to “gal pal” actual queer ships (or literal real life relationships), so this, at least, is something i can understand. i’m queer myself; i get that. and that is why i will never like - attach myself to someone’s post and start complaining. people can vent however they want.)

it doesn’t change my own feelings, though. i hate seeing every meaningful friendship i’ve ever been invested in talked about like it’s just a romance in disguise.

other things: i am uninterested in romance as a motivator.

truly, from the bottom of my heart, i don’t care.

we are, at least in my corner of the world, oversaturated with romance, to the point where any piece of media that doesn’t include it in some fashion is shockingly bizarre. it is EVERYWHERE. it is in EVERYTHING. i cannot pick up a book without running into a romantic plotline. i cannot watch a movie or a tv show without being forced into multiple romances that i don’t care about. (rare exceptions apply, as always, but i’m speaking generally.)

this oversaturation, for me, means that romance as a storyline no longer holds any meaning for me. i see it EVERYWHERE. it is in literally EVERYTHING. making merlin into a “love story,” for me, makes the show so much less interesting, because there are billions of love stories out there. love stories are practically the only kind of story our media remembers how to tell! why would i take a story that is so unique in its exploration of deep friendship (that isn’t even quite friendship, because it’s not real, but merlin wants it to be real, but making it real would also destroy it) and loyalty (that isn’t necessarily deserved, but is still offered, but is damaging to the person offering it) and love (that exists in spite of arthur’s position as the oppressor, but still cannot erase merlin’s oppression, and is patently not a magical fix for the very real problems merlin is facing), and then want to water it down to “and then they fell in love”???

merlin bbc has so much to say about the transformative, redemptive power of love (not just romance), and the bonds we form with each other despite the fact that we don’t always deserve each other, and what we can do to make ourselves better, and how do we make amends for the ways in which we hurt the people we care about, and it is so complicated and there is so much beauty there and i adore it specifically because it is one of the rare pieces of media out there that doesn’t prop up romantic love as the most important and powerful force in the universe. romantic love is not what moves the story. merlin’s love for the people around him is based on compassion. it’s bigger than the familiar and overused ‘i am desperately in love with this one individual person and that’s what drives my actions,” which is a premise all of us know has been done to death. merlin’s love is not about romantic attachment. it’s a deep, abiding love for humanity. it’s based on hope, and faith, and the inherent belief that everybody matters, even in their worst moments.

condensing that kind of story into “and then they fell in love” erases its meaning for me. it makes it trite. uninteresting. i have seen “and then they fell in love” fully sixty thousand times. “and then they fell in love” has been done so often that it is utterly devoid of power for me. boring. i literally do not care.

other people might feel differently, and find a romantic love story compelling. i don’t.

i’m guessing the message that prompted this essay is asking me to evaluate how i feel about the “goodness” of the merlin/arthur ship, aka whether it’s worthwhile to ship it or not based on how healthy/unhealthy it is, which i definitely can’t answer, because i don’t think whether it’s “good” or not really matters. i am definitely too old to be riding the newer wave of, uh...idk, purity culture type stuff that is so oft-debated on here, lately.

but you’re absolutely right, anon - merlin and arthur’s relationship IS kinda shitty! it 100% is. it doesn’t mean you can’t ship them, though, if you want; otherwise i wouldn’t be invested in any aspect of their friendship, either.

the fact that merlin and arthur’s relationship is kinda shitty is an essential element of the show; it’s the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic problem merlin is trying to solve, and even with that being the case, we can see clearly that this also doesn’t preclude them from having real moments of connection and care and love. this is the contradiction i have to keep in mind whenever i engage with them in the friendship sense - merlin has been wronged by arthur in so many ways, and yet he still loves him and believes arthur can do better, and yet his dedication to arthur really does destroy his life piece by piece, and you really have to walk a line between those extremes and be thinking: in what ways was this a noble, honorable path for merlin to take and in what ways was this damaging, and was it all worth it in the end?

we probably wouldn’t still be watching this show if we didn’t ultimately think the answer to that last question was yes. but there are also equally valid ways in which the answer is, truthfully, no, and i think really the only important thing when dealing with merlin and arthur’s relationship (in whatever capacity you prefer) is to keep that dissonance in mind.

so, to more directly address your question, when it comes to my interaction with the source material, i don’t ship merlin and arthur romantically because i don’t see romance when they interact in canon, and i don’t think their relationship could be improved or made more interesting/more meaningful by adding extra-canonical romance into the mix. that’s really it.

but the other side of things is this: even if i were granted someone else’s ship-goggles to somehow see romance between these two (eg, once, in the distant past i read a harry potter fic that was so well-constructed it sold me on a relationship i didn’t [and still don’t] actually see in canon), i still wouldn’t choose to ship merlin and arthur, and it’s not because they’re a “bad” ship (no such thing, folks - tag your stuff and let people live their lives, thank you), it’s because this fandom has already been swallowed by them and i cannot bring myself to make that imbalance worse.

trying to be in the merlin fandom without shipping merlin and arthur is just...a little bit difficult sometimes. i think probably even people who do ship merlin/arthur are aware of that. sometimes it can feel like merlin/arthur is a given in this fandom, not one of many options - as if you’re not in the merlin fandom, but rather the merthur fandom, and you know you really, really do not belong there.

and it’s not even a canonical ship! it’s not even real. and yet if you like this show, and you want to engage in the fandom, your experience is, without exception, going to be chock full of merlin/arthur content by default.

essentially, my struggle with the merlin/arthur dynamic in fandom is two-fold:

1) the strikingly imbalanced content distribution

the merlin fandom, in terms of content distribution, is a pretty accurate mirror of merlin’s own existence, to be honest, in that pretty much every aspect of it is eventually taken over by arthur pendragon, and in that there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether or not that’s a good thing.

(spoiler alert: it’s not.)

even so, it is what it is, and as i said before, me commenting on fandom trends is not meant as a condemnation of individual preferences. people like what they like! that’s just how things are. shipping arthur and merlin isn’t a Bad thing to do, by any means, and the fact that so many people do is just, you know, bad luck for me, lol. but at the same time, the wildly unbalanced distribution of content does make it more difficult for folks who don’t ship merlin/arthur to engage in fandom with quite the same level of ease, and even though it’s nobody’s fault, it is still perfectly reasonable for people who don’t ship merlin/arthur to be frustrated about that.

fanfic is a pretty good case study for how this plays out. i saw a post a while back that was titled something like ‘merlin bbc gothic,’ and the first bullet point was “canon ships are rarepairs,” and HOO BOY, that is true. stats-wise, merlin/arthur makes up ⅔ of the merlin fic on AO3. ~25,000 fics. the next most popular tag after merlin/arthur is arthur/gwen, but arthur/gwen have ~2,900 fics in their tag. and when you remember to exclude any instance of merlin/arthur from the arthur/gwen tag, that number drops by another thousand, to ~1,940.

that’s buckwild. come on. merlin/arthur has twenty-three THOUSAND more fics than the next most popular (and CANONICAL, i might add) ship? and every other ship’s numbers are even lower than that?*

and if you don’t want to read shippy stuff in the first place, like me - the merlin “gen” tag has less than 8000 fics in it, by comparison, and then you STILL have to filter merlin/arthur out of the gen fics, leaving you with about 6300 - which number has to be filtered down further to remove OTHER ships that still make it past the gen filter.

in comparison to 25,000.

like. i’ve been in fandom long enough that i’m not surprised - mean, i came into merlin directly off a teen wolf phase, and boy, that’s a whole other bowl of noodles right there, with added squick factors that are irrelevant here - but i’m still just...man.

it still makes my head spin. and it is still frustrating, every time.

*(there is a lot more to be said about how gwen fits into all of this, and i know it has been discussed more thoroughly in other places, but yes, another reason i am leery of arthur/merlin as a thing is that i’m just...not super comfortable with what that implies for gwen and her position in the story. even if i personally am slightly more compelled by gwen/lancelot, technically - i still don’t quite feel comfortable taking gwen out of her canonical place. she belongs at the top. she deserves to be the love interest and she deserves to be the queen. and like - people can say that her relationship with arthur isn’t “developed” or “convincing” enough to warrant retaining in fic, and i get it, the show really did fail gwen in S5 - but i still don’t buy that argument. people literally INVENTED a romantic relationship for themselves and put 25,000 fics worth of effort into building it up; there is no reason why an “underdeveloped” canon romance couldn’t have gotten the same treatment. except, of course, for the fact that one [Black, female] character was being shoved aside to make way for yet another two white dudes.)

(and i’m not saying that everyone is doing this deliberately or maliciously. but we all know this is a cross-fandom trend. there is literally no reason for the gap in content to be THAT wide. a canon relationship with twenty-three thousand fewer fics than an invented ship? just...that is a stat that bears thinking about. it doesn’t mean that merlin/arthur is a “bad” ship, or that you can’t prefer lancelot/gwen, but it IS still important to recognize these patterns where they occur, across fandoms, and to really think about what they mean.)

2) the arthur-goggles

my second struggle with merlin/arthur in fandom is the ubiquitousness of the arthur-goggles, aka: the tendency in fandom, as in canon, to make everything in merlin’s life about arthur, and everything in the show about merthur.

this one specifically really gets to me. i am very committed to the idea that merlin is a complete individual, whether arthur is there or not. i write a LOT of meta about merlin being a whole person, specifically pushing back on the idea that merlin was “born” for arthur’s benefit - my motto is basically that “merlin’s life does not revolve around arthur pendragon,” and the way his life begins to revolve around arthur pendragon in later seasons is not in fact touching or romantic or beautiful; it’s a tragedy. merlin does not exist only in the context of his relationship with arthur; he possesses worth outside of his mission to save the prince of camelot, and he was already a complete person before he ever met the prince of camelot, and one of the many issues we have to think about when dealing with arthur and merlin in any capacity is how merlin is told from the get-go that he is supposed to devote his whole life to arthur, but arthur is never given any such reciprocal responsibility.

merlin and arthur’s relationship, just like the distribution of content in this fandom, is wildly imbalanced. merlin spends all of his spare time thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person. he is constantly working to keep arthur safe and happy. but arthur, at the end of a long day, doesn’t spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life. he just goes home and goes to bed. he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’ he is never told his life isn’t his own, that he is supposed to be one half of some two-sided coin. only merlin is told that his entire existence is earmarked for someone else, that his life’s purpose is to be someone else’s better half. only merlin is expected to devote his entire being to someone else’s betterment. only merlin is expected to say demeaning, self-abnegating things like “i was born to serve you.”

arthur, by contrast, is allowed to have a life of his own. he is allowed to exist on his own terms. he is never told that his worth is dependent on how well he can prop someone else up. and while fic might like to imagine merlin being the most important thing in arthur’s life, in canon that is just not the case.

merlin exists on his own merits, and the idea that he does everything he does just because “he’s in love with arthur” will never sit right with me, because it’s simply not true. merlin and arthur’s relationship is important to both of them, yes, and of course it is undergirded by deep love and care, but it is also way more complicated than that. merlin’s investment in arthur’s life - and his grief at arthur’s death - are NOT solely driven by his love for arthur as an individual; they are inextricably bound up with a sense of obligation and duty and self-worth and, eventually, failure, because he’s been told that protecting arthur is a) the only thing that matters about his own life and b) the only way to free his people and save an entire kingdom. and i think ignoring this very real complexity in favor of “merlin does what he does and feels what he feels because he’s in love with arthur” cheapens the depth of the story and flattens merlin’s character.

arthur-goggles automatically make everything about merlin/arthur, though. so the difficulty, for me, with merlin/arthur as a ship, is that it can be hard to make/find things about merlin that people don’t instantly, always try to link back to arthur in some way. merlin is not allowed to have things that are just his, and he can’t exist in a state where arthur doesn’t somehow factor in - no matter how unrelated to arthur something is, or how non-shippy it’s meant to be - there’s someone out there who’s going to loop it back to merthur in some way.

just like - scattered examples of things I’ve encountered:

all of merlin’s non-arthur love interests on AO3 having massive chunks of their ship tags actually being merthur fics, with the non-arthur ship serving solely as a stepping stone on the way to getting merlin and arthur together

readers, on fics that are specifically designated as focusing on merlin+someone else and in which arthur does not appear, leaving comments asking “so how long until arthur shows up,” “can’t wait to see arthur,” etc

meta about how ‘merlin’s time in camelot was actually really bad for him as a person’ being reblogged and modified by someone else with an addition like “but merlin doesn’t regret a second of it because he wouldn’t have known arthur if he were anywhere else,” and the OP having to reblog their own post and explain that this is literally the exact problem they were trying to critique

in fic, merlin’s friends being utilized only as vessels with whom he can have discussions about his developing relationship with arthur

etc etc

it’s not always huge egregious things, but wearing arthur-goggles means EVERYTHING comes back to merthur in some way, which for me is just...really insulting to other characters, and really limiting in terms of story analysis.

so, for example - this is a VERY specific example that few will relate to, because i am probably the only person on here who has ever tried to search the tag for merlin’s friend will from ealdor (a niche fave of mine) - but with him, especially, it is very hard to avoid bumping into a lot of people wearing arthur-goggles, because everybody seems to imagine him as merlin’s ex, who is only upset about what’s going on in 1.10 because he’s jealous about arthur appearing alongside merlin, never mind that will and merlin have known each other since birth and have a relationship that LITERALLY predates arthur by two decades.

so with him, as an example - the other day, i saw some post in the tag that was like “will gets teary when arthur makes his inspirational speech in ealdor because he finally understands what merlin sees in arthur and he can’t be mad anymore”

and that is just patently untrue. it is not even remotely close to a legitimate interpretation of what is happening in that scene. will hasn’t come around to arthur’s way of thinking yet; he literally still packs his things and leaves after this happens, and he is - i mean, first of all, he’s not crying, lol, and he stalks out of that scene weary, angry, and fed up, because he thinks the village is delusional and all of his neighbors are going to get killed in the morning. his arc - his dissatisfaction with what is going on, his anger at the ignorance arthur wields as a nobleman with all of that wealth and privilege, his resistance to the big “let’s fight kanen’s men with sticks” plan - that is about him and his history and who he is. it is not about an (imaginary) merlin/arthur love story.

but when the arthur-goggles are on, all roads lead to merthur. even when the other characters in question (*coughWILLIAMcough*) would be beyond mortified to have merthur, of all things, assigned as their motivation.

SO. now that i’ve gone over both the canon and fandom aspects of my reasoning, the succinct summary in response to your question is just that no, i don’t personally ship merlin/arthur. because:

a) i don’t see it b) the fandom is already trying to drown me with it and i choose to center other characters out of spite c) i just think merlin deserves better lol

however, as i said in my disclaimer - that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t ship and enjoy it! merlin/arthur is very much not my cup of tea, but that’s no reason why other folks can’t have fun with it. i think the best portrayals of it, probably, will be those that keep in mind exactly what you said - that merlin and arthur’s relationship is “kinda shitty” - but this is fandom, so if what folks really want to write is just lots of happy AU’s with no issues, then they should go for it! the point of fandom is to have fun connecting with people over a shared love of something, so i am happy to let others have fun doing their thing, and i will just be over here doing mine. 🙂

#thanks for the question!#hope this is helpful #fyi to everyone else; this is the most space i will EVER devote to this subject so #wave goodbye as it flies past!#XD #the once and future slowburn #meta #(sort of? fandom analysis? idk)

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fireinmywoods · 5 years

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I'm really curious how pit-monster-verse is going to compare to p-verse. Since you have such an internal head cannon of how the characters in p-verse became who they are and formed relationships, did you just tweak that for a different story? Like, same characters and basic history with just a few details/events changed, or did you go complete blank page with different core motivations, etc.?

Did...did I get drunk and send this to myself? Because this is kind of EXACTLY what I want to be talking about right now.

Warning: spoilers for palimpsest below the cut.

Here’s the thing: two years ago, when I had like -3 followers and had just gotten into Trek fandom, I started writing palimpsest and monster fic pretty much simultaneously. At the time, I thought of palimpsest as the goofy comedy version of McKirk and monster fic as the serious and tender [GENRE REDACTED] that would provide a more complete picture of their relationship.

At some point I ended up turning my attention almost entirely to monster fic and got it to a point where it felt nearly complete with the exception of a few gaping holes...annnnnd then I realized that palimpsest HAD to be the first story I posted for McKirk, because the whole premise hinges on a particular understanding of Jim and Leonard’s characterizations and relationship dynamic, and anyone who had read monster fic first would almost immediately be like, “...hold up.” So I went back to palimpsest, thinking I’d finish it up and then return to monster fic in short order.

What I didn’t foresee is that some people really LIKED palimpsest. And the more y’all liked it, the more I liked it. You cared about this particular iteration of Leonard and Jim, and you asked questions that tricked me into writing more about them, and along the way I fleshed out their history and examined the soft inner workings of their relationship in ways that no longer fit so neatly into the “goofy comedy” box.

All this means that today I see pverse Jim and Leonard as the default, the archetype. When I tag or answer asks or daydream about silly adventures I’ll never get around to writing, it’s them that I’m thinking about.

So it was a weird experience going back through monster fic last week. It had been so long - almost two years! - that I was a little worried that I would hate it, that I’d ventured so far along pverse McKirk’s path that I wouldn’t like or even recognize who they were in monster fic, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. The fic itself still needs some work, but I care deeply about this version of Leonard and Jim, and I think you will too.

So now, at long last, to answer your damn question.

In many ways, monster fic’s Jim and Leonard are much like their pverse counterparts. They have a very similar history up to a point (more on this in a moment), and their dynamic will feel familiar to you. There is banter and grumbling and reluctant adventure and hair stroking and grossly enmeshed inner lives, and there is never any question that these two fools are STUPID crazy for each other. In terms of tone as far as their relationship is concerned, I think it’s closest to anagnorisis and perhaps stellae fixae: emotional, soft, devoted, inevitable.

However.

Monster fic begins some time before palimpsest, when Jim and Leonard are in an earlier phase of their relationship, and events unfold differently from there. And also - you know those mock trailers that reimagine a movie as if it were a different genre, like re-cutting The Shining as a romcom or whatever? This is kind of like that. Monster fic isn’t just a new story; it’s a new KIND of story. Who Leonard and Jim are at their cores, how they feel about each other, the role they’ve played in each other’s lives up until the point our story begins - all this remains more or less the same, but the nature of the plot is going to focus the spotlight on different facets of all those things and highlight different qualities.

Also - weirdly, considering that palimpsest was supposed to be the comedy - monster fic gives less attention to our heroes’ preexisting damage and baggage. That’s not to say it’s not there; it just doesn’t really come up as much. Trust me, you won’t miss it. They’ll be busy with...other stuff.

Anyhow. This is much more than you asked for, but I hope you don’t mind my blathering. Writing this out helped me unpack some of the dissonance I’ve been having myself as I delve back through monster fic with two years of pverse canon rattling around in my brain.

Oh, and one last teaser, just to be a real pain in the ass: palimpsest is two love stories told simultaneously. Monster fic is one love story told on two axes.

#did i mention i have the best anons? because i have the BEST fucking anons.#thank you anon!! this was such a wonderful set of questions #and i know you exist b/c i don't drink and therefore could not actually have blackout-anoned myself #ilu very much whoever you are #fic related #otp: bedside manner #ask #anon

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unpickingthetangles · 6 years

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Influence Tag Game

I was tagged by the wonderful @fatal-blow!! Thank you so much for giving me a platform to be this pretentious! I am deeply ashamed of myself, ahaha!!! This turned out SOOOO LONG so I am going to link to the summary of Hadrian.

Rules: Give a short summary of your WIP, name seven sources of influence on your story, and tag seven people.

Hadrian the Scholar summary.

There are probably a billion mistakes in this. I didn’t proofread it because I am running late for work. FORGIVE ME.

1. When I was 18 I got an amazing opportunity to stay with my sister in Beijing for over four months. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese or Mandarin and I was still a ridiculous teenager. I had been sheltered as a kid; the farthest I had gone outside of the US was to Niagara Falls (which doesn’t really count, right?) I went from a spacious farmhouse to an apartment no bigger than a college dorm room that I shared with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my five year old nephew. I was able to experience another culture and a people so foreign to me that I had to adjust my whole way of thinking. Best part, it was at a very influential age, so many of these new feelings stuck to me like glue. I remember going to a wedding, walking through the city at 2am, climbing parts of the Great Wall that hadn’t been reconstructed.

Oh, let me tell you the moment that really got to me. We were stay at this little freckle of a village, very small, very old. It was settled in a green valley and the Great Wall wrapped around the hills everywhere you look. My sister and I followed this trail into the mountains and came to the wall, where local men were working on keeping it standing. I sat down with a very old man and he gave me a popsicle, drew a map of the US in the loose dirt, and gestured to it. He was asking “where are you from”. And somehow over about a half an hour, I talked to this old man without speech, sharing a moment of connection over a popsicle, with this grand old structure that will outlive us both in the background. This had to be one of the most profound moments of my life, really. It was my sister (for all her many, many faults) that suggested that I write. She liked the way I used language and the way I saw Beijing. That trip has been extremely influential to me.

That’s the wall on the mountain back there!

2. I also believe the concept of ‘J.K. Rowling Revisionism’ has played a huge part in how the story’s characters have greatly evolved. Despite how you might feel on the subject, I have taken the concept of it and used it to be more inclusive with my characters. I remember seeing a post on Tumblr years ago that was said, ‘What? Did Dumbledore have to be staking around Hogwarts in a rainbow flag for you? Did he need to be playing house music and raving the whole time?’ and it listed about a dozen more egregious gay stereotypes. As a queer person I was so insulted by that. It clicked for me that ‘it takes a single throwaway line to help identify a character as (x)’. I didn’t want to play it safe anymore. I didn’t want to write ‘subtext’ and instead was compelled to make it fully ‘text’. If I wanted to read about queer people in love, I should have the wherewithal to write it myself. But I also had to think of other people who needed representation as well. I know this is more of a popular discussion today, but five years ago it was rather new, and it changed the way I write.

(Let me be specific here: Lissy and I have had numerous conversations about Rowling Revisionism and if it was (broadly considering) ‘Fair’ to criticize her for it. It is an extremely complex conversation concerning the long-lasting effects of representation or lack thereof, in my opinion. That is why I am using the word ‘concept’ here, as in it should be more of a literary discussion had by creators and not a polarizing debate set in simple black and white tones. (looking forward to the many anons I get about how it isn’t black and white.))

3. It is my belief that strong, believable characters far outweigh the plot or premise of a story. While the latter two are important, it is the characters that the reader is going to attach themselves to. A writer must introduce the idea of them as complex people in the world to get that special relationship the reader has with specific characters. The first thing I ask when I hand off my book to a beta is, “Who is your favorite character?” and I’ve gotten a different answer every time. That is a phenomenal thing! I am proud of that. When you look around fandoms, the fans are not drooling over the plots, they are defending characters and championing their causes.

With that being said, I’d say a major influence is in characters in media that made me rethink how I should approach writing characters. One of those would be the movie 12 Angry Men. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. This movie changed my goddamn life. Every single time I watch this movie, I find something new, something I missed the last 20 times I watched it. Hell, I watched it with Lissy once and she pointed out something so huge that I missed it. (ps. Still mad about that baby. How dare you be so clever?)

So how did that happen in a single-room mystery with 12 characters, none of which have names (save two at the very, very end) hit me so hard? How did this movie sink into me so deeply when it is mostly dialogue? I asked myself this over and over again. The answer is in the characters! At 1:10 into the film you are given a wide shot of the whole cast, a judge lazily prattling off his lines. Then the camera pans over the 12 Jurors: you see who is fidgeting, who is paying attention. Juror #5 looks off reflective of his decision to condemn a man to death, Juror #3 looks angry – why is he so angry? These are details that breathe an ever-expanding life into their characters. This whole cast is amazing, with Henry Fonda as #8 and Lee J. Cobb as #3. You know everything you need to know about them, without much backstory at all, without any grand declarations of their motivations. Hugely influential to me. It taught me that every character I write needs a strong introduction. If they are a weasel, they should be introduced as a weasel. If they are goodhearted, show an act of kindness. Hell, the first thing Hadrian does is show up at a funeral to mock the corpse. When he is introduced to Douglas’ character, he is dressed as a trickster god for a party. That tells you so much about him without putting exacting words to it.

4. While I had the meat of Hadrian the Scholar already planned out, it wasn’t until I read the works of KJ Charles that I really felt that I could be a writer and do it well. See, I’ve always been fond of those beautiful illusions like “my love for him was like a vein of gold in marble” (that’s from A Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, by-in-by). But I had no talent to write such pretty pretty words, not unless I work very hard at it, and even then it’s clumsy. KJ Charles doesn’t write in such a way. But what she does have is fantastic characters that react to situations in believable ways. She won’t be caught writing a character that doesn’t have his share of faults. As much as I loved A Gentle’s Guide because it is written in a style that I admire and love, it is Seditious Affair by KJ Charles that I reread the most. That’s because when I finished that book, I found that I missed the characters. It is also incidentally about two people who should be enemies because of their politics, yet they fall in love and fight for their partner’s beliefs, because they are important to their love. This basically sums it up. It really helped me think about Hadrian and Douglas’ relationship. Bless this author, seriously.

5. Waking Life is an indie film that is an interesting watch, though to me it hasn’t aged very well. However, it is this one brief segment that stuck with me most. Here is the full transcript:

Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, "water." We came up with a sound for that. Or "Saber-toothed tiger right behind you." We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say "love," the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.

It made me think about how language is used when it is applied to complex thoughts and ideas. I took a lot of what she says about language and tried to absorb it, pick it apart, and elaborate on with my own works. What I am doing when I am writing is a grand act of translation. How can I translate my own experiences with grief onto this scene, onto these characters? How can I best write love? Or anger? How can I tell a believable story of one character’s decades of emotional abuse? I am using my own life as this huge canvas of events and painting over it with different faces, different places, different heartbeats. And then I take that canvas and show it so someone else, who then will in turn see something entirely new. Language is inert! What a concept! Complex ideas must be first translated! This is a fantastic summary of how I view writing.

6. The painting In Bed, the Kiss, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

What a gorgeous painting, showing such an intimate moment between two people. It’s invocative of a full, well-loved life shared in love. It becomes even more powerful to me when I remember that it is widely believed that Toulouse-Lautrec only had relations with prostitutes. He had a life of health problems, having broken both is legs that did not heal properly, he was also abnormally short. Because he couldn’t participate in sporting like his friends, he turned to painting. It was a life of indifference and difficultly. Yet, he made one of my favorite paintings for its depiction of the serenity that comes with intimacy.

In the same vein, it is believed that Van Gogh was colorblind. He created some of the most recognizable paintings in the world while he was mired in depression and lonesomeness. Monet’s distinct style towards the end of his career is believed to be caused by cataracts. So much of the beauty in the world has been brought to us because of friction, tension, pain, anger, grief, depression, illness, isolation--- all the things that are believed to make the world ugly place. And yet, it was these artist’s ‘impediments’ that made their work powerful--- unique. All of creation is frustration, as said above. I believe that’s true, and it is something I think of while I write. I’m dyslexic, I make many mistakes, my relationship with language is a weird one, but I never forget that it may be the one thing that sets my writing apart. Through the struggle, I will create. My sense of humor? Because of my shitty childhood. My characters? Because for most of my life I wanted to be someone else. My writing style? Because of a reading ‘disability’. Creation is in conflict! That’s some inspirational shit right there.

7. Aaaand… Muppet Treasure Island.

Let’s see..

I will tag @queerloveandspaceships, @coveofmadness, @drderange and anyone else who wants to do it! I am sorry I am so fried after all of this.

#something I posted #text post #text #14th #June #2018 #June 14th 2018 #ask #long post #ask meme sorta #tag game #thank you again!

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Disintegration review – a quirky but troubled sci-fi shooter • Eurogamer.net

Back at last year’s E3 – an event that now feels like a lifetime ago – I had a chat with V1 founder Marcus Lehto to pin down what Disintegration was all about. Due to the game’s dystopian sci-fi setting and Lehto’s background as the co-creator of Halo, I came away thinking Disintegration’s narrative had the potential to explore some fascinating topics, including post-humanism and the threats to our world today.

Disintegration review

Developer: V1 Interactive

Publisher: Private Division

Platform: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Out now on PC, Xbox One and PS4

In the end, Disintegration doesn’t ever delve too far into these ideas: but what I didn’t expect was a silly yet genuinely convincing shooter hidden beneath the surface.

Disintegration bills itself as a first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements, half campaign and half multiplayer, set in a future version of Earth ravaged by every bad thing under the sun. Climate change, pandemic, war – all things so alien to us here in 2020… The premise is that swathes of the Earth’s population have chosen to “integrate” in order to survive the harsh conditions: a process of transplanting someone’s brain into a robot body to preserve their consciousness. It was intended to be a temporary measure, but a nefarious group called the Rayonne decided integration was actually the future of humanity. The motives for which aren’t really established at the start of the campaign, unfortunately, but at least you can tell they’re bad guys from their glowing red eyes. As Romer Shoal – a celebrity who previously convinced people to integrate – you and your band of robot outlaws team up to take down the Rayonne using a combination of your Gravcycle (a weaponised hoverbike) and ground units, each of whom boast special abilities and can be commanded to attack specific enemies.

Here is Black Shuck, antagonist and Rayonne thug who menacingly thrusts a robot switch-blade at you when angered.

Disintegration’s story blurs into a jumble of missions, but the levels are such a romp that I didn’t really care about the narrative reasons for being there – I just knew I was having a good time. Each one introduces new challenges, with varying team compositions, Gravcycle weapons and enemy types which force you to reconsider and evolve your tactics. Thanks to the hybrid nature of the combat, you can opt to just shoot your way out of trouble, but the secret to success is managing battles through the RTS mechanics. It’s about knowing your enemies, and which ones to prioritise. I soon discovered aerial units and snipers could easily destroy my Gravcyle, which was also hard to heal and would instantly fail the mission if blown up. I started commanding my troops to prioritise those units first, and later learned how to manipulate the Gravcycle’s mobility to swoop behind cover. It’s easy to be overwhelmed during the chaos of these battles, and sometimes the best approach is to methodically pick off enemies while keeping your Gravcycle distant, rather than flying in guns blazing. As I learned to my peril.

The enemy AI is surprisingly responsive, with enemies ducking and rolling behind cover when shot. The player’s own units, however, can sometimes be a little slow to react when directed to certain areas. Yes, that is an enemy there, you can shoot them.

Some of the main tools in your arsenal are unit abilities, and these are deeply satisfying when used to good effect: landing a mortar barrage on a bunched-up group of enemies results in a satisfying crunch of robot bodies, while a time-slowing dome creates a shimmering Matrix moment amidst the disorder. Adding to the chaos is the destructibility of the surroundings, which shatter and explode across the screen. It’s not just about cool explosions, however, as destroying enemy cover will make it far easier for your team to get a clean shot.

In classic video game form, someone’s left dozens of hazardous exploding oil barrels around the place. Who keeps doing this?

The level design in Disintegration’s campaign forces significant changes in gameplay style more broadly, some areas requiring the player to ferret enemies out of hollow brutalist buildings, others providing life-saving refuge in the midst of a heavy aerial battles. One tense rescue mission requires precision flying and sneaking around in tight spaces – without backup from your team – armed only with sticky grenades. Another sees you shepherd your team between protective domes, or risk being stunned by an EMP pulse mid-battle. And there’s just something rather lovely about the use of scale and perspective in these levels. One of the earliest sees you fight amongst ruined wooden houses and a graveyard, like directing toy soldiers between doll houses. Later in the mission, you skim over vast golden plains to explore the wreckage of a vast, burnt-out spaceship which dwarfs you and your crew. There’s storytelling within the levels that feels enjoyably dramatic in a Call-of-Duty way, with my personal favourite mission seeing the outlaws ascend grassy hills to fight a climactic battle atop a dam. Despite the world feeling desolate and barren, I kept wanting to explore and admire the gorgeous North American landscapes.

It’s hardly a narrative masterpiece, but Disintegration’s campaign is about putting a new spin on the classic sci-fi shooter… and letting rip on waves upon waves of robots. The mechanics alone are novel enough to keep you entertained, and once the ability to multi-task the FPS and RTS elements clicks, there’s plenty of room to keep refining your techniques. Once I’d finished the campaign, I went back to replay levels on a higher difficulty with my new-found knowledge, and found myself thinking more carefully about timing my special abilities, and how to smoothly manoeuvre the Gravcycle through levels. In short, it not only entertained me for the nine hour campaign, but kept me coming back.

The multiplayer is, unfortunately, where all this good work comes unstuck. I played a brief two-hour session before Disintegration’s release, but I wanted to test the multiplayer in public matches before writing this review. After three days of trying, I have been unable to connect to a match on PC. Judging by comments left on Steam and Twitter, I’m not alone in experiencing this, although I cannot say whether the problem lies with a technical issue or a simple lack of players.

It’s a shame, because I felt I’d only just scraped the surface of Disintegration’s multiplayer experience. It’s a team-based shooter, kind of like Overwatch if everyone played Pharah. You can pick between nine different Gravcycle crews, all with different perks, strengths and specialities, in three different game modes: Zone Control (capturing zones), Collection (basically team deathmatch with tags), and Retrieval (attack/defence). The modes themselves are fairly standard stuff, but the complexity comes from the ground units, team composition, and maneuvering your Gravcycle. In the first few matches, I initially focused my attention on enemy Gravcycles – which you would, seeing as they’re the enemy player. Yet that’s only half the story, as the ground units are often essential in completing each mode’s objectives. In Collection, for instance, points can be gained from killing enemy ground units rather than just other Gravcycles, and it makes more sense to target these as they’re much easier to kill – and there are simply more of them. In Retrieval, only your ground units can carry the core to the drop-off point.

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I tried flitting between a few different crews to get a feel for them, and went with the obvious tactic of choosing faster crews for attack, and tankier Gravcycles for defence, but I found some of the lighter crews would simply crumble into dust when put under any kind of pressure, and the increased maneuverability wasn’t enough to balance it out. I enjoyed experimenting with the different abilities for each crew, but in the end I found myself favouring high-damage crews like The Ronan to keep up with the carnage. Or maybe that’s just my playstyle – dumping a load of rockets on a fellow journalist’s Gravcycle is quite fun, what can I say?

There were moments in the demo session where I felt the team genuinely start to pull together: people were healing each other, moving as a group to target weaker Gravcycles, and setting up proper defences on zones using proximity mines. To Disintegration’s credit, the multiplayer did make me want to improve. The battles are frantic and not immediately readable to new players, and I imagine there’s a fairly high skill ceiling. This might be where the problem lies, as the multiplayer doesn’t instantly grab you, but becomes more interesting over time.

In the end, of course, I wasn’t able to spend more time with the multiplayer – and it’s disappointing, because Disintegration’s campaign gameplay is so compelling that I would happily recommend it to anyone who asked. Yet it’s hard to justify a £39.99 price tag when half of the game is, for many, currently unusable. I also fear Disintegration’s realistic art style and gritty sci-fi setting makes it appear run-of-the-mill, when its gameplay actually has quite a lot to offer. This might be a case of holding off until later (or perhaps until V1 makes the multiplayer free-to-play), but if you do decide to take the plunge on Disintegration, I can guarantee you one thing: somehow, inexplicably, you will never get tired of smashing robots.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/disintegration-review-a-quirky-but-troubled-sci-fi-shooter-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=disintegration-review-a-quirky-but-troubled-sci-fi-shooter-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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