#unique moves | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ganondoodle · 8 months

Text

as i was awake in the middle of the night for like 2 hours bc i felt sick i had more somewhat random totk thoughts

one being that i really hate how raurus response to concerned zelda is, after sonia died in that almost funny how little impactful it was way, "im sure you are here for a reason" (actually, i hate how often this sentence is used in general to .. idk i guess its supposed to be inspiritational???)

bc what does that mean actually? him saying that to someone who got there absolutely by accident really just sounds like "i dont care go figure it out yourself bc i dont want to think about anything concerning you or your troubles lol" i guess its meant to sound like OOOOH fate has BROUGHT you here bc you have to furfill a role you dont know yet (spoiler its being a sacrifice girl with no personality) and besides me hating the 'inescapable fate' trope in general (at least the way its usually done in these games, which is not to struggle against it but willingly accept whatever you are told and pretend thats good) its really jsut goddamn boring and is really only an excuse to well .. ignore her and her trouble; shouldnt you, if you were actually such a cool guy like the game wants me to believe so bad, do everything in your power to get zelda back to her own world before shes pulled even further into the war you caused now that her only ""mentor"" that could help her get more use of her pretty much useless sudden powers is gone too?? i know shes basically dead wife sonia replacement (can of worms ugh) but it still grinds my gears whenever i think of that cutscene, bc i cant help but hear it as the lamest excuse in existence to not care about her and just kinda .. see what happens which in this case means leave zelda completely on her her own since both rauru and mineru die as well (honestly shouldnt rauru have thought about like .. any plan to defeat gan besides dying himself, given hes the oh so cool and goodest guy king whos only mistake was not stabbing gan the second he stepped into their kathedral castle thing, like even if you had a plan it can still fail but it seemed like he just kinda went in with a handful of people that didnt seem to know each other at all, never got names or faces -or unique voices for that matter- to fight gan face to face inlcuding the girl that came from a different time and had nothing to do with any of this conflict and couldnt even really control her sudden new powers just seems pretty stupid)

thought 2

how totk really feels like botw but for the people who didnt like shiekah tech, its not a sequel, its botw again, but version of only sonau, its like a pokemon game that had two versions but one has weirdly incoherent story and acts like the other never existed jsut as a whole its like retreading the same points but worse, all shiekah tech that was so integral to the world and had such a long history just vanishing and no one caring about any of it like it never happened, HELL the titans were called divine beasts in english but i guess they werent divine or important enough to keep around LOL champions WHO and isntead a never before seen or even heard of race for that matter showing up and planting their ass in every place the shiekah were before, dare i say it feels weirdly manipulative, like either them or some outside force erasing every fact about the ancient shiekah and replace them with sonau stuff bc they are the hot new shit now

this is a point that just doesnt stop bothering me, how the shiekah tech seemed so carefully designed and integrated into botws world and story, its a difficult to keep balance after all, integrating high tech stuff into a medieval setting, but they made it work! and then totk comes around and throws a bunch modern day tech into it puts some vague greenish stone filter on its exterior and call that even better more ancient tech; why did they even bother to make pottery inspired laser shooting spider legged robots so well integrated when they throw a car and rockets into the next game without a thought and call it a day, what was the fucking point

it feels like someone was dead set on having a set of legos thrown into the game it had no place in, if you want players to build whatever they want make a building game instead!! especially if you are just gonna throw it in with seemingly no consideration how out of place it feels togehter with the fACT THAT YOU ALREADY HAD AND ANCIENT HIGH TECH CIVILIZATION WITH A VERY DISTINCT AESTHETIC THAT WAS ALREADY WELL INTEGRATED INTO THE WORLD YOU ARE PLANNING TO REUSE WITH ALOT OF MYSTERY AND UNKOWN STUFF ABOUT THEM TO EXPLORE FURTHER YOU COULD HAVE USED!! but i guess they just "didnt want to play with you anymore" and that so much so that they went out of their way to erase every trace of it, i dont think the words shiekah tech are ever used in the game, and the purah pad and her towers just drive me more isnane bc they are the same shit but called different and also much worse, liek the purah pad isnt some more developed shiekah stone, no its a glorified camera with a teleport function and thats it

(i know i said this before but i really cant stand how obsessed every single NPC is with sonau shit, you get told to your face every second line of dialog that they are so cool and are so mysterious that it just makes me annoyed of them even more, the game is obsessed with shoving them everywhere and telling you over and over you too should obsess over them, they werent weird like that about the shiekah stuff in botw?? the biggesst talking point in botw was calamity ganon ..... which makes sense and in totk its like ... gan is mentioned what, in a newspaper article??? once???and then not even by name i think???)

aside from that big point which will never let me go, its also just .. its not moving forward anything, it actively walks BACK the progress that was made in botw, call me dumb but i dont really count moving one step up in the social roles of each race as a character development (for the side characters like the champions desc- ahem SAGES) but mainly zelda ... god how dirty she was done, totk pretty explicitely makes her regress any development she made in botw aside from she likes link uwu and some people like her too, but also not enough to notice that that weird zelda being all evil and weird isnt her (INLCUDING THE CHAMP- SAGES WHO YOU ARE SUPPOSEDLY FRIENDS WITH??? you dont have to be a genius to pick up on that my god, were you all given the mc dumbo potion or what)

she gets put back to square one, back into the little itty bitty princessy maiden role forced upon her by her royal parentage, this time rauru edition, back into a white little dress, back into the scared puppy eyed teenager, back into a situation she cant handle, back into losing everyone around her (tho honestly botw made me care more about rhoam than totk did about rauru), back into being forced to do a big sacrifice- but worse actually

in botw she went to FIGHT AND HOLD GANON IN THE CASTLE SO LINK HAD TIME TO RECOVER AND IT WOULDNT DESTROY THE LAND!! and you are telling me in totk rauru takes up her botw role and she bascially killed herself to ... restore the mastersword.

......... she ... she did that only to be a glorified version of the stone pedestal in the forest. and then she gets returned to normal itty bitty girly no problem via magic sparkle beam at the end and

DOESNT

EVEN

REMEMBER.

it really is just botw but worse, you even get yet another ghost king of hyrule to guide you around (rhoam did it better fight me ... we dont talk about the questionable choice to make himself darker skinned when posing as just some guy)

i honestly dont think i was ever truly taken aback by anythign that happened in botw, while in totk, the further i played, the more i had to fight with myself to keep the feeling of unease, disappointment and betrayal down

its such a god damn shame, totk should have stayed a DLC, i will forever mournfully dream of a game that explores more of the ancient shiekah, doesnt erase integral parts of the world, developes characters more instead of making them regress back and make them end up even less developed than at the start of the game, dives into buried secrets and mistakes of dark pages of history without giving into a weirldy nationalist(imperalisitc?) narrative and lets characters have some agency for once

if it werent for the yiga i might have actually considered refunding the game, just to be at peace with myself

anyway, aboslutely incoherent word vomit.

#ganondoodles talks #zelda #totk #ganondoodles rants #old man yells at cloud #i know im repeating myself in alot of points #but some things just wont stop rotating in my head #ngl i felt like nintendy was trying to gaslight me in totk #what noooo the shrine of life was ALWAYS just a barren cave with a puddle of water in it #noooo dumsda (hundson) NEVER had a funny quirk of how he talks #nooooo purah NEVER cared about shiekah tech or that stone she used to have in her lab in hateno #noooooo robelo NEVER cared about the shiekah oven he named cherry #nooooo yuno was never not dumb like a rock and ridiculed by the narrative worse than koga #noooo yuno never had inheretited an ability unique to daruk #nooooooo zelda never had any character besides like white dress waifu #nooooooo the dekutree never actually played a central role #nooooo there never was any shikeah tech #noooooo there never were any champions we were actualyl friends with #why is this series so damn allergic to moving the world or characters forward #you literalyl showed us that zelda companion is doable #you made 5 fram rate killing ghosts that are more useless than useful in any fight but noooo cant do zelda #she gotta be the little maiden uwu #you could have shown us the past without sendign zelda back #you could have revealed the sonau without erasing the shiekah #you had such a good setup from botw #and isntead chose to focus 3 years on being able to glue a stick to a stick in a game that isnt about glue or building

134 notes · View notes

seventh-fantasy · 5 months

Text

friendships as marital ties (and other notes on relational ties) in mlc

this is sort of a third installment in the series of meta on 'mlc as an exemplar of constructing queer narratives out of chinese ideological frameworks' (1. jianghu as queer space and 2. how it manifests in li xiangyi) - focusing on the nature of relationships in it. (which I've briefly mentioned in the first one and finally actually getting to it!!)

I would like to first call attention to chinese ideological frameworks as a premise of queer reading in mlc. the goal of chinese philosophy is to explore the becoming of human, taking two broad paths of the (mainstream) secular vs. escaping the secular. (these two paths are not a strict dichotomy, and rather, are ever in flux and in conversation with each other.) as said by @markiafc too, chineseness is so much about the rigidity of structures, and in equal part, a desire to break out of them. thus, chinese ideological frameworks can very much offer a rich reading of queerness - that mlc, a story very deliberately structured based on chinese ideologies (more accurately, with good reasons for me to believe that it is as such), has managed to materialise.

if the conceptualisation of queerness is premised on a defiance against mainstream norms, then a reliable way to read queerness in chinese ideological frameworks can be to deconstruct it by the mainstream confucian frameworks.

in mlc, this is implicitly set up with its stage of wulin/martial jianghu. then it is further broken down by asking, hey wulin jianghu is still closely related to the hegemonic values and the mainstream structure of authority (historically, 侠 xia being politically involved says a lot about this), so what is the true meaning of jianghu? what does it then really take for jianghu to be a queer space offering comfort and freedom to those who have escaped to it - to be the space that allow the transcendence of rigid roles and labels? mlc took a step further to resist the proxy to mainstream values that wulin jianghu has become.

this is why there can be a very strong buddhism reading of mlc (suggested here, expounded in the A+++ meta by @markiafc here and here, and also what I've seen discussed by cnet as well), given that buddhism is one of the 'extra-secular' ideologies, alongside (philosophical) taoism. I've also touched on a taoist angle in this meta. both schools are articulated in different sets of languages, but ultimately convey a same ideal of what it means to be human and how to live well - that is, to resist the roles and labels defined by the norms.

so, back to confucian frameworks.

a lot can be discussed about mlc with it. but in the context of this meta about relationships in mlc, it's specifically drawing on how confucianism conceptualises social relationships with familial ties as a cornerstone, and how these relational ties are inextricable from the conceptualisation of the 'self'.

as such, one of the things about mlc that has fascinated me is how deliberately it seems to ignore and reject the conventional familial ties (the kind by blood and marital ties). I've joked about how it is a miracle for me to love mlc as much as I do, as a prime dysfunctional family story enjoyer, despite none of its main characters struggling with any complicated feelings about their (biological) parents. but on closer examination, mlc is also making a comment on the model of familial-based relationships that dominates mainstream society - but through the absence of it.

with this, I want to talk about 1) how mlc rejects the conventional ties; and then 2) how it repurposes these ties in its own ways.

the five relational ties in confucianism:

father and son 父子有亲 - (natural) affection between father and son

ruler and subject 君臣有义 - righteous relationship between ruler and subject

older and younger brothers 兄弟 (长幼有序) - this is actually about seniority within the family; the order between older vs younger family members

husband and wife 夫妇有别 - differentiation between husband and wife (demarcated by the 内外 spectrum of gendered inner-external spheres)

friends 朋友有信 - trust between friends

logically inferred, all these ties are hierarchical and familial-based except for the last one: friends. ruler-subject is sort of an extension of the natural familial ties, while friendship is the inverse space of 1-4 (ie. you fall back on 5 to define a social relationship outside of the familial sphere that cannot be qualified as 1-4). while all are premised on mutuality, it is only no. 5 that is defined by a sense of choice and equality.

on the surface, 1-4 don't quite exist in mlc in particularly meaningful ways to the narrative or are even outright overlooked, and friendship is the relational tie most valued by mlc. we can tell it's true just by looking at the most meaningful relationships in mlc of difanghua. but at the same time, it is more nuanced. we can take a closer look at how the story plays around with most of the ties as part of a broader queer narrative.

1) how mlc rejects the conventional ties

mlc's rejection of mainstream relational ties can be best seen in fdb escaping from marriage. and it was not just any engagement with anybody but an engagement with the imperial family. he struggles with the prospect of being married to princess zhaoling, but generally, it's about the idea of complying to mainstream conventions and expectations that includes compulsory heterosexuality. all these point not only to a defiance against amatonormativity - the resistance of the traditional husband-wife tie, but also an irreverence for the ties of ruler-subject (the engagement being an imperial decree) and father-son (matters of marriage being sole decisions made by parents).

of course this is on top of how fdb's own biological father is a p-o-s, and the narrative gives fdb minimal struggles in this aspect, allowing him to sever this tie without looking back (I love it, yeap). along the same line is how lxy is an orphan, who came to gain important relationships that are built on natural compassion among people rather than innate, blood-based ties - even as llh. the sense of defiance from the narrative is especially stark to me considering that he could have a completely different familial-based life - as a son, brother, and ruler, if his biological family was still around. the narrative also deliberately treats his biological brother as a phantom, replaced with an older brother who he was bonded with neither by blood nor marital ties. on dfs's front, absolutely nothing is to be known about his biological family. his childhood history with the toxic patriarch of his life - who is not even his biological father - was afforded a clean break and closure.

we can keep going on, but that's pretty much the point.

ritualisation is one of the most important things of the confucianism school, especially to the honoring of these social relationships (and the officiating of social roles). the one ceremony/ritual we saw in mlc involving the main characters - or more accurately speaking, came closest to seeing - was the imminent wedding ceremony of dfs and jlq. even in that case, it was premised on non-mutuality with dfs being the unwilling, passive party. (fem-coded dfs? 25 marks.)

and that brings us to the next part.

2) how mlc repurposes these ties

that particular wedding ceremony gets hijacked by dfs and lxy/llh, and gets turned into an important milestone in their relationship. they consummate - what is on text - their friendship after a long time being more enemies and rivals than friends. it is a clear establishment of the trust they have for each other. and here it is where I circle back to the subject of this post: friendships as marital ties.

in this article, as a part of a feminist, egalitarian reframing of confucianism, there is a proposal for spousal relationships to be reframed as a friendship tie. (this aligns with the interrelatedness of the five ties eg. the ruler-subject mirrors father-son dynamic, with the confucian belief that rulers have an obligation to their subjects alike parents to their own children.) by doing so, it removes the functional, gendered differentiation assigned to marital ties, and shifts it to something equal, and independent of gender. you exalt the value of trust between spouses, instead of basing marital relationships on gendered roles. as such, spouses become more like friends, and conversely, friends can also become more like spouses. (romance not a prerequisite. it has never been about romance anyway.)

given that mlc has repeatedly applied marital motifs to llh and dfs's characters in their joint narratives, this opens up a reading friendships as a marital tie. seeing marriage as a bridge for strangers to become family, marriage in mlc becomes a metaphor for the chosen commitment and mutual trust put in by strangers/friends (non-familial ties) into the becoming of family. the blurring of lines between marital ties and friendship encourages a genuine space of queer experience that goes beyond any pressure for strict labels - of sexuality, and relationships as romantic, sexual, etc etc.

(note: despite the borrowing of a feminist concept, I strongly hesitate to call mlc a feminist story. it's a whole discussion - or debate - on its own. nevertheless, it is definitely a gender-conscious story that lays foundation for a strong queer and egalitarian reading.)

it is to be noted that it is intended - and also beneficial to take the confucian framework of relational ties beyond face value. the framework offers what it believed to be the most fundamental social relationship dynamics, and sees room for extension and matching to other kinds of relationships (all if not, most). a relationship such as teacher-student, which is outside of the five ties stated, can also mirror the affection of father-son ties, albeit not in a literal and identical way.

speaking of which. fdb and lxy/llh.

indeed they're known by others to be good friends. fdb thinks they're good friends too - insists on it, and puts his best efforts in keeping it that way. but does it really go both ways? if it does not, then can it really still be friendship? my humble take is that, ultimately - weighing in with llh's perspective - this is a relationship that is not so much based on trust, and rather, based on an innate affection that is only unique to family. (in this case, not blood/marital-based but one that was chosen and built aka lxy's relationship with sgd.) in other words, less of a friendship, more of a familial one.

it is a lot clearer considering their relationship from llh's point of view: some brat you never wanted in your life came barging in, and whether he was going to bring any positive effect to your life was secondary to the tranquility - which you have carved for yourself in the past decade - that is so integral to your personhood. no way. but the moment you hear that he's family? well, that changes the game completely. even before learning about fdb being sgd's son (then beginning to take initiative in showing greater acceptance), it is apparent in llh that there was an instinctive resonance with fdb as his shixiong's nephew. (eg. he remarked to his shifu's grave about how alike fdb is to himself.) this is unlike with dfs whom he had taken a much longer time to build trust with. you do not apply trust - aka the quality of friendships - to family. family is something deeper, more instinctive than that. if fdb was never family, I find it hard to imagine given llh's personality, that he would have let some brazen, bratty stranger intrude for that long. (boy invited himself to llh's home, sat himself down eating the owner's dinner and nosing in his cooking abilities!!! ily bb but that was uncalled for 😭)

of course there are many more layers in their relationship. there is a substantial degree of their history as (unwitting) teacher-disciple: fdb is still healthy and alive all thanks to the existence of lxy as a spiritual teacher role model in his life, regardless it being one-sided or not. there is also indeed some part of friendship in it, especially from fdb's point of view. he sees llh as a kindred spirit who he could enjoy a life of freedom with for life. but llh never reciprocates. he knew this was short-lived. and so ultimately, the hierarchical layer of their relationship overpowers the equal one, where llh's treatment of fdb as a nephew/小辈 younger family member and a disciple is the one that sealed the fate of their relationship.

if (blood-based) familial ties are irrelevant in jianghu, then the closest proxy to a father-son relationship in the martial world would be a teacher-disciple relationship. lxy and his shifu are a clear, indisputable example. for fdb and llh, their teacher-disciple tie is murkier and not consistently applied. they were also never ritualised as teacher-disciple, and thus are not teacher-disciple in any official capacity as far as confucian ideas are concerned. yet in crucial moments, it is invoked by llh as a card of authority over fdb to get out of sticky situations with fdb. and there was their final scene together: in a moment of sincerity, llh gives the approval to fdb as his disciple - then entrusting fdb with the secret manual of his techniques, up until his final letter in which fdb was recommended to dfs as a successor to his martial abilities.

in an imperial setting, this would have been the relationship of an emperor and his crown prince that straddles both ruler-subject and father-son ties aka a tag-team of disaster. the teacher has an obligation to nurture his disciple as a successor to himself, and love him like a son too. on the flipside, he holds the final power in their relationship - withholding knowledge and feelings from the younger one. they are only equals in a way a parent-child can be. they are only equals as much as the parent allows. and this is how fdb got left behind in the dust of llh's departure. he was the child treating his parent like a friend, supporting him emotionally and begging to be loved back the same way he loves his parent - but the parent had a lifetime way ahead of him and stayed out of his reach, physically and emotionally.

llh and fdb operate with the trapping of a friendship but have always been family in the core. llh had known that way before fdb did, just like everything else he had known and put out of fdb's reach. because. fdb did not have to know. fdb is different and will forge his own path. and that's a kind of love llh has for him that nobody understands (in fact not even fdb himself) - one that is on a different plane from friendships.

by repurposing the framework of relational ties, mlc showed that the essence of familial relationships aka its intimacy and closeness can be independent from biology and formalised rituals. and it is important to myself for stories to say that people can build close ties and deeply meaningful relationships even without being born or ritualised into any.

then back to how these relational ties are inextricable from the conceptualisation of the 'self' in confucian worldview: the roles you play in these relationships are intended to define you. there is no 'self' independent from it. while the concept of a social, relational self is fully rooted in reality, being locked into social roles can be a painful way to live - a way that llh has experienced as lxy the sigu sect leader. so, in order for lxy/llh to realise a sense of self that exists outside the norms, it inevitably points to another way that requires a cut from these relationships. that is then the buddhist (or taoist) answer of looking past attachments to the world such as the confucian idea of relationships defining your being. only with a dissolution of a sense of 'self', can there be true liberation.

#莲花楼 #mysterious lotus casebook #lhlmeta #lhl #my posts #dihua #can't believe this is how i choose to spend an inordinate amt of my free time 😐😐 being a broken recorder of brainrot 😐#anw the handful of fanghua moments that have moved me are the ones that are about the unbridgeable gap between them as 长辈小辈 as 徒弟师父 #(me realising lxy telling fdb 这个徒弟我没有白收 actually drives me nuts)#me: a brainrot-level dihua shipper first and foremost. also me: dedicating more of this meta to fanghua than dihua #about how fanghua's relationship is its own unique kind in the story. equally deep as dihua. just in a wholly different way.#dihua are friends and married and familial. but fanghua is family through and through #-> tl;dr of this meta actually #i just have extremely strong feelings about fanghua as a complicated little family unit.#which is independent of “shipping” FOR ME. but for anyone else though you can make anything out of it.#(gotta admit i'm a bit antsy about posting this and is uncertain how it's gonna be read. bc my reading of fanghua is so specific...well)#anyways. obsessed with dihua appropriating the heteronormative rituals <3 #edit: I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT DIFANG aaaAAAGHHHHHHHHHH #but. it's true they're very purely friendship-based i think

97 notes · View notes