capriciouscorvid said

People accept animatronic death ray animals but not motorcycles? joking aside it’s interesting to see where people draw the line. 

Sure, there were complaints back when BotW was first released about the Sheikah tablet slate and the robotic enemies, but I think the Divine Beasts mostly got a pass because giant animal robots are already a theme in certain Japanese media like Voltron or the shows that became Power Rangers in the West. That, or everyone was too busy complaining about them because they’re too short or not “proper” dungeons, whatever that means in this context. It’s really pretty silly when I think back to discussion of Skyward Sword and how most people’s favorite region of that game was the desert formerly inhabited by sapient robots and littered with similarly magi-technical set pieces.

The second DLC for Breath of the Wild dropped rather abruptly on Friday…so much for commemorating it in any fashion although I still might go through with that series once I’m done with Jugdral anyway.

I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s alright I suppose. Not enough to push it out of the #2 spot in my personal ranking, but it’s not the death knell of the series like certain overreacting fans seem to think.

For the first time in nine years it snowed in southern Louisiana today. Courtesy of a ride further into the storm I got to experience some very peculiar sights: snow piling up on sugarcane fields, freezing mist over the bayous and estuaries beneath the road, fishing camps buried in white up to the water’s edge, and frozen puddles with waterfowl picking their way uncertainly over the ice. Everyone is quick to capture photographs of St. Louis Cathedral or the Vieux Carré in snow flurries just for the sheer peculiarity of it all, so today’s sights made for quite a change for this decade’s snow day.

demesejha:

amielleon:

gascon-en-exil:

A bit unexpectedly, the latest Heroes banner has gotten me thinking about Soren. Whenever we try to contextualize him within the series as a whole it’s usually by looking backwards: he and Ike are the (almost) explicitly gay culmination of the Marth/Merric dynamic along with added elements of Sigurd/Deirdre, and he plays the August to Titania’s Dorias for portions of FE9. What I’m thinking of instead are the later characters he may have influenced, the characters I’ve tentatively started calling the Tharja archetype. Like both her and Rhajat, Soren is a mage in black strongly defined by a single-minded obsession with one person that transcends heteronormative expectations. Hell, Camilla has the personality and color scheme down too as well as dark mage as a secondary class set.

Did Soren inspire Tharja and her ilk? …That thought is entirely too disturbing to contemplate.

“thanks for ruining everything, gascon”

That said, I think Tharja and Camilla differ substantially in that the target of their affections is clearly the self-insert character. Also, despite their resultant quasi-bisexuality, they’re clearly meant for the male version of that self-insert character. They have much clearer roots in female yandere waifus than Soren, who finds deeper roots in the BL codependent uke trope instead.

Basically, with Tharja you’re fapping because you want her to hex you up. With Camilla you’re fapping because you want her to step on you. With Soren you’re fapping because he’s crying in his buff mercenary boyfriend’s arms.

It’s a pretty different dynamic, both in-text and with the audience.

Consider: Flanderization

Tharjas are trope decay of the soren archetype.

Its not that Soren created Rhajat/Camilla/Tharja.

These three are all Flanderizations and bastardizations of his archetype. While they may stem from Soren’s archetype. Ultimately they are a case of trope decay because they didnt come from Soren (or I guess by extension Merric) organically.

So its less accurate to say They came from Soren. And more that IS wanted to create another Soren. Whether they failed or succeeded is up to you.

(Also Isnt Katarina also by proxy a Soren as well?)

Katarina is like some strange hybrid of Soren and Nino, with the whole assassins subplot tacked onto FE12 as a rehash of the Black Fang arc. And despite her appearing in the latest banner the romantic element of her character feels very downplayed compared to Soren and certainly to any of the women who follow her. 

One theory I have re: the objects of these characters’ obsessions is that Ike in his own way was the closest thing to a self-insert FE had seen at the time barring Mark the tactician from FE7 (and even that’s arguable, since Mark has no dialogue, s/he can’t affect the game except by the player simply playing like any other FE, and s/he’s not even mandatory for the main story campaigns). I think Ike was intended to be more personally relatable than previous lords at least for Western audiences; his hostility toward nobility and his naïve approach to racism and tense race relations feel very Anglo-American in particular, far more so than any other lord other than FE15 Alm who sometimes gets compared to Ike. Sure, I find his behavior irritating and not very sympathetic, but I believe that thinking of Ike as an audience surrogate type of self-insert is helpful in explaining a whole bunch of things about fandom reception of his character, from the size of his fanbase in spite of his commercially underperforming games to fans’ willingness to vilify Micaiah as a Mary SUe for nearly identical characterization issues to the popularity of crack ships like Ike/Mia and Ike/Marcia that feel like nothing more than wish fulfillment for straight guys. And, of course, the backlash against Ike’s same-sex paired endings that’s somehow still in force more than a decade after Radiant Dawn’s release.

Ike/Soren does play into a certain fantasy like you said, but it’s ironically one that alienates him from the fans most likely to personally identify with him. Radiant Dawn’s ending has a lot of curve balls like that, though: interracial sex is bad, organized religion is pointless and even spirituality is of limited use, surrogate sons-turned-brothers make great husband material, and sometimes beefy alpha male heroes leave everything behind to travel the world and screw their boyfriends.

In spite of work and DA: Origins (combat still mediocre, but I slept with Zevran, whee) I’m slowly making my way through FE4 Gen 2. I’m realizing that the expanded form of judgment I’ve been doing since FE15 isn’t very well suited to a setting where there’s usually not that much to go off, but I do what I can to advance this most crucial of endeavors.

I’m still going to cop out on about half the Thracia cast like I did with FE6 because there’s just nothing you can do with some of those guys.

A bit unexpectedly, the latest Heroes banner has gotten me thinking about Soren. Whenever we try to contextualize him within the series as a whole it’s usually by looking backwards: he and Ike are the (almost) explicitly gay culmination of the Marth/Merric dynamic along with added elements of Sigurd/Deirdre, and he plays the August to Titania’s Dorias for portions of FE9. What I’m thinking of instead are the later characters he may have influenced, the characters I’ve tentatively started calling the Tharja archetype. Like both her and Rhajat, Soren is a mage in black strongly defined by a single-minded obsession with one person that transcends heteronormative expectations. Hell, Camilla has the personality and color scheme down too as well as dark mage as a secondary class set.

Did Soren inspire Tharja and her ilk? …That thought is entirely too disturbing to contemplate.

A Switch and Skyrim – or any other games, for that matter – are a little far off for me at the moment, so as a sort of compromise and/or means of breaking into Western RPGs that aren’t WoW I picked up the first Dragon Age game on Steam. Knowing nothing about the series aside from it being yet another pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG that just so happens to have graphic sex scenes of a potentially progressive nature, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what else to expect. Thoughts so far:

  • I made a elf mage only to discover that most of this world hates both elves and mages. I suppose we’re going full-on anti-Tolkien, then.
  • On a more real-world level of discomfort, Ferelden is not!England restructuring itself after the setting equivalent of the Norman Conquest, right? I hate the way most of the characters so far have talked about Orlesians; hopefully later on they’ll be opportunities to snark at how dirty and uncivilized the Fereldans are.
  • The Jesus equivalent is also the Blessed Mother equivalent? That’s probably been done before, somewhere.
  • Speaking of the Chantry, it would have been nice to have a priest class. Without it we’re apparently stuck with rogue initiates (pun intended) and warriors with some anti-magic abilities calling themselves templars.
  • I don’t think DA has an actual morality system? I’m aware that some major plot events can be affected by your choices, not to mention who you get to sleep with, but I don’t think this is one of those games where you can be legitimately evil.
  • The blood effects and giant spiders make me a little queasy, but at least the former can be turned down somewhat. It’s something I’d have to get used to in Skyrim too, I believe.
  • Alistair is hot and snarky but apparently straight unless you mod. It’s like Xander from FE14 all over again. *cries*
  • The combat is…strange, and I can’t really say I care for it yet. It’s similar to WoW but with clumsier targeting, and instead of a group of other players of varying degrees of competence you indirectly command several other characters all at once via a tactics interface I haven’t played around too much with. I hope it improves soon, or at least improves in the later games if I decide to pick those up.

I’ll probably have more updates like these as I go along. I may be almost a decade behind, but I suppose since I’ve been dropping Bioware into meta about depictions of queerness in video games for years without ever having played any of their games it’s about time that I did something about that.