This too entirely too long to finish. But finish it I did!
I've added a title to each track appropriate to how it fits into MSF, and added commentary blurbs in a collapsible at the end of the post.
General
The Legend of Ashitaka
(Joe Hiashi, Princess Mononoke OST)
Skylark [1]
(Arnaud Roy, Endless Legend OST)
Endless Skies
(Kumi Tanioka, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles OST)
Prologue
(Kow Otani, Shadow of the Colossus OST)
To Call Our Own
(Joris de Man, Horizon Zero Dawn OST)
Delver's Hymnal
(Joris de Man, Horizon Zero Dawn OST)
Drums of Poundmaker - Cree Theme
(Geoff Knorr, Civilization 6 OST)
Pōkarekare Ana; Ka Mate - Maori Theme
(Geoff Knorr, Civilization 6 OST)
Hard Times Come Around No More - America Theme
(Geoff Knorr, Civilization 6 OST)
Scotland the Brave - Scotland Theme
(Geoff Knorr, Civilization 6 OST)
To The Stars
(Darren Korb, Pyre OST)
Surviving Exile
(Darren Korb, Pyre OST)
Path to Glory
(Darren Korb, Pyre OST)
Tatara Women's Work Song
(Joe Hiashi, Princess Mononoke OST)
Themed
Drinks in a Lilu Dive - Smoldering Corpse Bar + Alternate
(Mark Morgan, Planescape Torment OST)
A Glimpse of Greater Powers - Dread Design [2]
(Darren Korb, Pyre OST)
Numinous Encounter - Regal Ancestor Spirit
(Tsukasa Saitoh et al, Elden Ring OST)
Ancient Song- Psalm 51 [3]
(Seraphim Bit-Kharibi & choir)
Morning; Workshop District - Fanfare for the Common Man [4]
(Aaron Copland)
The Lioness of Orlei - Lace [5]
(Christopher Larkin, Silksong OST)
Ayo's Theme - Damn it
((K)NoW_NAME, Dorohedoro OST)
Theme of Themiskrya - Amestris Military March
(Akira Senju, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood OST 3)
The Amazons Arrive - Nikutai Kaizou Bu Sanjou [7]
(Kenji Kawai, Mob Psycho s1 OST)
The Rocket - Ten Wo Tsuke [8]
(Taku Iwasaki, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann OST)
The Cycle of Lu
To Catch the Sun Where It Sets - Walo Yamoni
(Christopher Tin, The Drop That Contained the Sea)
In the Court of the Forest King - Deku Palace
(Theophany, Time's End II)
Into Winter - The City Must Survive [10]
(Piotr Musiał, Frostpunk OST)
The Longest Night - One is All, All is One
(Akira Senju, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood OST 1)
"Inti, my son..." - Adagio for Strings
(Samuel Barber, String Quartet, Op. 11)
The Bringer of Day - We are All Guests Upon the Land[11] [12]
(Austin Wintory, Banner Saga OST)
Arriving in the Lands of Spring - When You Believe (Multiligual Version) [14]
(Stephan Schwartz, Prince of Egypt OST)
The War of the Bull
The Ballad of Molly Ironshanks
**
Battle II - Violin Legionary
Battle III - Magnamalo Theme
Battle IV - Let The Battles Begin!
Battle V - Silver for Monsters
Battle VI - Dark Lord Ganondorf [31]
Battle VII - Pillars of the Underworld
Battle VIII - The Sluice [32]
Battle IX - Flamelurker
Battle X - The Owl
Battle XII - Sir Alonne's Theme
**
**
Commentary
[1] In the grey pre-dawn of Mother's Day, the women of the village will gather at the church. There they will take up an icon or statue of Lu and process out past the edge of town, out through the spirit-gate, to the shrine that is kept for all spirits of the world and its wild places. There they will make offerings of hospitality, and the witches and shoulderwomen will lead the group in renewal of the Compact. The men and boys of the village will remain at home, rising from their beds only when the procession has moved past.
[2] The occasional mention of the Greater Powers will only ever be just that - it defeats their narrative purpose to give them names or faces or any real interaction at all with the human world. I would hesitate to call them Lovecraftian, given the connotations aren't entirely true to how I use them.
[3] Every single upload of the performance for Pope Francis during his 2016 visit to Georgia has a different name and I have FINALLY been able to confirm that it is, indeed, Psalm 51.
[4] It's common for craftspeople of the same trade to pool their resources and share their workspaces, and in cities the principle is just scaled up. I added this to the setting solely so I could have a justification to invoke the image of union men, lunch boxes in hand, making the morning journey to their shop.
[5] Celestine d'Cygnemont is many things, but perhaps the most important is that she is one of the greatest swordmasters alive today. The winner of the yearly Grande Melee is granted the chance to cross sabers with her, to see how long they can last - so far the record is two minues eleven seconds for all three bouts, and seperately managing to score higher in two of five rounds in a single bout.
She bound a sword-demon herself, purposefully keeping the binding just weak enough enough to give the possibility of escape, to use as practice. It's not yet gotten close to breaking free.
[6] I'm very sorry I haven't been able to piece together part two.
[7] Amazons in MSF have one joke. It is the same joke, every time, and I love it.
[8] I've mentioned it before, but MSF does have a narrative end. In about thirty years, give or take, from the nebulous Now there will be a rocket. Maybe Maggie will grow up to be astronaut, and as the column of smoke rises above the ocean Molly will be down on earth screaming "THAT'S MY GIRL!". Whatever the case there must be a rocket. "If but one star in the sky is our friend, then we must go to meet them," it will be said. Onward and upward.
[9] "The living are united with the dead, for the dead once live as we now live. They suffered as we suffer, they had joy as we have joy. Their pains were as ours, their loves as our own, and we will join them in death, join them in silent procession in the halls beneath the earth. And our faces shall pass out of memory, and our names will be forgotten, and generations yet to be born will show their children our graves and say 'they were like us.'May this be our comfort."
[10] Darkness. Cold. The Crown flickers against the blizzard. Starvation. All is lost. And then: Mammoths emerge from the snowfront like the gods of old.
[11] The death of Inti is a crux moment in Mother Stole Fire - if the gods are to be human gods, if they are to be humane gods, they cannot be above human suffering. Otherwise it would make a mockery of both them and us. It can't be fate, it can't be a cosmic punishment, it can't have a prophecy attached. It must be for the gods as it is for us.
[12] Inti's Christ-parallels are pretty on the nose, and intentionally so. But more specifically, I am pulling from Fred Clark's excellent "Holy Saturday" post, though perhaps to different ends than the original author. Inti is dead and buried: he will not come riding in on a white horse with a crown on his head. If Spring is to come, if Spring is even on the table anymore, the task has fallen to us to bring it forward. There is no guarantee. There is only the great work, and the hope that some generation thousands of years hence might see it to completion.
[12] In perhaps the deepest cut in this entire post, this track is in here purely because of the one AMV from ages past that synced it with TTGL Parallel Works 8.
[13] I deliberately don't invoke the Red Law when talking about the Daemonomachy, because I want to avoid the trope of "oh, the hero has been corrupted by magic ooblek and that's why they're crazy and evil" - Lu's rampage is born of grief, fear, despair and guilt. She's a woman who has reached her breaking point; She's got nothing more to give, no hope left to draw on, left to shoulder the terrible consequences of her past actions. If you go back to the story post, I snuck in a little change; "Let us be free of it!" is now "Let me be free of it!". This is all why her subsequent healing process is long and painful; it has to be, because people do not recover from that instantly. As I said two comments up, the Gods of Man can't be afforded that luxury if they are to remain the Gods of Man.
[13.5] Adding this one months after the fact, because it is just...yeah.
[14] It remains entirely unfair how good Prince of Egypt is.
[15] Bare feet patter on the great flagstones. The hammer rings like a bell. Sacred space.
[16] While I describe Tubalkhan most often as "Neanderthal Odin + Hephaestus", he's got a decent amount of St. Joseph about him via mythic background radiation - the craftsman characterized by his moral character and penchant to stay out of the spotlight.
[17] The Anaye (arriving here via Navajo legend) are a newer generation of demons, formed after the dispersal of humanity into the world beyond the Land of Daro. They are common antagonists of stories involving Lu and Tubalkhan's children, and are central to the Hero Twin story-cycle.
[18] Alternate title: ONE NIGHT ONLY, KNOSSOS AMPHITHEATER [18a] [18b]
[18a] "O Calliope, O Queen of the Muses who caught the lightning in her lyre - we with callused fingers salute you."
[18b] I describe Calliope as "the emo teen of the family" and "if the Minoans invented death metal", and that just about sums it up.
[19] Man am I glad I dropped AoT when it was revealed that the antagonists were teenagers with superpowers. Dodged a crock of shit, so I've heard.
[20] SHE IS HERE.
[21] King of the Monsters is a trainwreck on every level including moral but god damn if this mix doesn't capture the very essence of "the mother of all humanity is here to fight the ogdru-jahad at the end of time", which is more or less a literal description of the underlying what this entire project is all about.
I swear that I am choosing songs with a three-syllable chant entirely by coincidence.
[23] Budâch, chief of the Aisinai, has gathered the greatest teulu Dayr ever known to her banner. Old enemies bury their swords. Warriors from all corners of the north country flock to her column as it marches south.
[24] The shared name was a coincidence, or at least a subconscious borrowing. The same with Orlei, I think there's a place named that in Dragon Age, a series I played one game of and remember very little of.
[25]"I have asked so much of you already, and time and again you have answered the call. But I fear I must come to you one last time, with one final request. One last push. One last march. One final effort. We are so close, my friends. Just a little bit more." [25a]
[25a] I am blatantly invoking "Search for the Last Great Secret", yes.
[26] The whistle screams. Up, up and over! Take the hill! Take the hill, or all is lost! And so they go up; over the trench, into no-man's land; over the trench, into the hail of cannon shot and the streams of machine gun fire. Over the trench; to take the hill; to secure the road; to make way for the cannons, to lay siege to Hell. Up, up and over.
[27] Horns in the distance. Sun glittering on shields and spearheads. Hooves thundering like the earthquake. Ia, Amazonia! Aia, Themiskrya! The Maid rides at their vanguard, banner in hand. [27a]
[27a] Yes, it's repainted ride of the Rohirrim. Steal from the best, eh?
[28] I can't remember if I have mentioned it before, but I have settled on a reason as to why Darvatius waited so long to appear: while no one can really prove it, the suspiscion is that Darvatius only manifested very late in the war - possibly only just before the siege of Dis - and that his appearance was not so much to defend the city, but to kick off a renewed conquest after the Maid's defeat. The image of him walking out of his own temple is very, very fitting, I think.
[29] This is the lone miracle within MSF - the event that cannot happen, and yet does. And like any good miracle, it is not going to entail an easy answer as to what it means.
[30] I have flip-flopped multiple times on exactly what Molly and Zaid's relationship is to be. First they were going to marry, than they weren't, now I am leaning towards it again. While he still owns multiple swords, I don't think life as a warrior fits him. Molly needs someone to serve as an anchor against self-destruction, and I don't think I can really get that if both of them are out fighting.
[31] Far in the frozen north, the Band of the Lioness finds the lost Lord of Hell.
[32] Amelia, belt clenched in her teeth, thrashes in the grips of le grande mal as the bones of the town's dead rise to once again protect their home. Zin's coffin crawls about on too many limbs. Molly shouts orders to the militia over the clang of the church bell and the squealing of the horde. The swine are upon them.
[33] Freedom at last.
Did you know you can select non-contiguous text by holding down CTRL?
ReplyDeleteI'd love one of these for the Unnamed Mothership Setting (expansion sphere?) (CTA-verse?).
ReplyDeleteStay tuned, there's one in the works.
DeleteI look forward to it.
DeleteOne good match, just because it was in my youtube algo recs lately. I can really see Nemesis from the Halo 4 soundtrack for a Celestial dreadnought appearing at the edge of a system, ready to pop off an RKV or two at an unsuspecting colony.
DeleteHow much of it will be Julia Ecklar/ Leslie Fish? 60%, 80% or 100%? :)
Delete