Dan Plays Games 9

In the last installment, Arnold suggested writing some bits of gameable material at the end, and I think that's a pretty good idea. Only got one bit for this one, but that should hopefully change for the next.

 

Date Everything (Update) 

I promised a Date Everything tier list, here is that tier list. 

Open link in new tab to actually read the damn thing

My thoughts on the game are basically the same as in the previous post. I respect the hustle, and when I finally got to the end my feelings were generally positive, but overall I’d point people towards Teenage Exocolonist or Slay the Princess instead. Neither of which, I admit, would be strictly called dating sims.

Further notes:

• Dolly is a gem and her story the one that felt most like an actual romance. I like the anthropologist character, who could have possibly guessed this would happen.
• Tydus Andromache being the off-brand detergent pods + Amazon + speaking in iambic pentameter is the kind of layered gag I live for.
• Bobby is NB and so should be labeled as HELLO, BOSS, of course, but it didn't feel right giving them anything lower than top tier even if they're on the same color grade. Just imagine it's on the right hand side.
• Barry Styles gets an award for most positive surprise: didn't think I would like him at all, but then it turns out he's the ADHD character written by someone who Gets It, and I appreciate that a lot.
• Part of Mac’s storyline involves them asking you to delete  quote "terabytes” unquote of poorly-written self-insert erotic fanfiction. I crunched the numbers on that, and 2 TB of plaintext files (with 40% lopped off for whatever bespoke formatting the Valdivian text editor uses, estimated) is roughly equivalent to the entire career output of Stephen King 8733 times over. All because they want to update to the newer, definitely enshittified corpo operating system. Nah, mate, I’m going to offer Lyric a profit-share editorial job and we are going to make bank.
• Curt and Rod’s storyline is bugged still, and for me was uncompleteable. Thankfully you don’t actually need to get an ending with everyone to finish the game, but I was deep enough in that they where the only ones I hadn’t finished.

Islanders: New Shores

It’s Islanders with a slight/modest amount of new content. One of those sequels where it kinda outmodes the original, but also I don’t know if it does enough to really stand out against it, either. But that’s only an issue if you’ve played the first game, and even then it’s probably not a huge issue.

Silksong

Silksong is what happens when your devs are entirely isolated from anyone who isn’t an absolute freakbeast. It is perhaps the most player-hostile game I’ve encountered in recent memory, and it was made so with intention. I’d be more forgiving if it was jank, but in this case the cruelty was the point. Here’s a run down:

• Lightly nudging a boss with your toe does 2 masks of damage, just like all of their attacks (which is double what a typical Hollow Knight boss does)
• Lengthy boss runbacks are both present and often extremely tedious - even FromSoft got rid of them in Elden Ring, and for good reason.
• Exploration is less rewarding - most of the tools and trinkets are locked behind the rosary bead currency dropped by certain enemies, which favors grinding out trash mobs to afford anything until you hit Act 2.
• There are no real rewards for bosses or enemy gauntlets (which can sometimes be tougher than bosses themselves) - they don’t even drop shards.
• Speaking of shards, I understand that they’re supposed to be a mechanic where you are forced to take a break from a boss to go do something else, but again like…there’s very little incentive to explore. You get so little in the way of exploration rewards, and you’re likely to get frustrated or stuck on some bullshit or another anyway.
• Minor enemies have bloated health pools, and some of them also do two masks of damage. And the flying ones straight-up just read your inputs so you’re stuck trying to hit an extraordinary precognitive little fucker.
• Some environmental hazards also do two masks of damage (which they did not in Hollow Knight) - makes sense for lava, not for anything else. They fixed one of these in a patch.

I managed to beat Widow before I installed the reduced damage and Stakes of Marika mods; there was no satisfaction in overcoming that fight, merely relief that it was over and I would never have to do it again. These mods made it tolerable for a while: the Last Judge fight was actually fun, when I'm certain it would have driven me to uninstall if I had tried to do it clean. 

This lasted until I got to Mt. Fay, played for 10 minutes more, and uninstalled. Putting the technically-optional double jump (something that is helpful for people who are having trouble with the platforming) behind an extremely tough and tedious platforming challenge (of the sort that if you're able to do it, you probably don't need the double jump) is a level of cruelty beyond what mods can solve. My wrists are shit, Team Cherry, throw me a fucking bone.

All the parts I liked of the game - the visuals, the music, the exploration - were constantly up against a compounding set of choices I could probably endure individually but less so all at once and definitely not all the time: it’s a death by a thousand cruel cuts. Difficulty and frustration are different things, a lesson that Silksong does not seem to have internalized.

The game's difficulty is still tuned for "postgame DLC" and there are no options without mods, and that mars what is otherwise a stellar experience, leaving me with an end result that waffles between the extremes of fun and frustration in some kind of quantum superposition. Some moments, like the Lace fight, are downright sublime; but then you spend three times as long fighting the Moorwing and the experience starts to sour. All the fun I had with the game was in spite of the game, not really because of it, and the disappointment is deep.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because anyone with a tolerance for its specific style of bullshit either already owns it or already has it on their wishlist.

Hades 2

The anti-Skong, as far as development is concerned. It’s Hades 2, which means it’s Hades 1 but more Hades, which has worked generally in the game’s favor but also means that my main issue with Hades 2 is the same I had with Hades 1, similarly magnified: shit’s big, and I’m a man liable to run out of steam. Especially here, where the game is quite literally twice as large as the first game. Runs are long and require a lot of sustained focus, and the resource treadmill means you will be making a whole lot of runs.

Some folks had issues with the ending, I dodged that since I still haven’t finished the game.

It’s an extremely slick game and a lot of fun to play, but I find that I have to be in a high-focus state of mind to really settle down and play a run.

Every single new character to show up, even when their inclusion was a foregone conclusion, elicited a “oh shiiiiiiiiiit!” reaction just from the excitement of seeing the new character design, which was a fun thing to work towards. As before, these iterations have more or less become my canonical (or at least primary) versions of the characters.

Binding of Isaac: Repentance (Continued)

I put so many fucking hours into this game since August I had to uninstall and hide it from my library. Wrong game at the right time, and while there are worse things to be addicted to god damn is there a lot of game in this game and it knows how to get the hooks in. I was getting into stuff I didn’t even know existed (the Tainted characters) and overall it was feeling good to be back, but also kind of a checklist treadmill (I literally had an achievement spreadsheet I was tracking progress with) and in retrospect it was very much one o' them maladaptive coping strategies. 

Decktamer

"What if Pokemon but a deckbuilder and also had the fucked-up (positive) monster ecology of Made In Abyss but didn't have all the other, fucked-up shit (negative) of Made in Abyss?"

I was sold on this game from the monster art (your tutorial beast is the Hell Rat, which looks like a naked mole rat with a cookie-cutter shark mouth), and it’s been great fun so far on top of having a killer bestiary of gross-cute beasties. Some issues with difficulty that have since been evened out with patches, and I'm looking forward to what gets added later. There's a lot of room for pulling off some wild combos with abilities and team comps, but to get those you have to be both lucky and good at thinking on your feet.

Hell is Us

“What if Death Stranding was an exploration/puzzle-first Soulslike set in a fictional analogue of the Bosnian War?”

I'd asked some folks, a short while before this game came out, if there was a Soulslike with no boss fights. Something that was wholly set on exploring an interconnected and detailed environment without combat gates (or at least with milder ones). They didn't have an answer for me, but lo and behold, Hell is Us emerges to fill this exact niche. The game is good. Deserves its own post.

Peak

My partner and a couple real-life friends picked it up so I figured why not. Was a good choice. Losing is fun / hilarious and that carries so much of a game. There are just enough moving parts for chaos to creep into a cascading disaster of four people making small sub-optimal choices over time. It's a strong chassis to build on top of.

Not a fan of the Roots area they added, though. Visually great, but the spores are just kinda one difficulty element too far for me. No clear distinction for when you are actually in danger zone vs in the margin of the cloud until you’re actually taking damage.

Picto Quest: The Cursed Grids

Uncharitable reviews would call it shovelware; It was $1.50 on sale, and I have certainly gotten $1.50 of enjoyment out of it. No frills, no extras, just ~120 picto puzzles. I’d never tried this type of game before and ended up really enjoying it for what it is. A very good game when you’re having a shit day and want to think about nothing more complex than some numbers and an unambiguous problem.

 

**

 

The Gameable Content Bonus

Speak with Tsukumogami

 You call up the spirit of an object for a short conversation. Default chance of 1-in-6, add 1 if:

• The object is over 100 years old.
• The object is regularly used or in contact with humans.
• The object possesses some perceived importance to humans.(regardless of actual importance)
• You make an appropriate hospitality offering (ie something the object would like)
• You take 1d6 fatigue damage (healed only after sleep)

Failure does not mean the spirit doesn't exist, only that it isn't interested in talking.

Recent damage to an item reduces the roll by 1, as do insults, general mistreatment, neglect, and so on.

Tsukumogami are basically people, but very lightly two-dimensional people. They have knowledge of their surroundings, their trades, and their personal histories; anything beyond that will be gossip they've heard from the other object-spirits. They do not care one bit about the ramifications of their existence. 

 

Fear and Hunger 2: The First 45 Deaths (Plus Game Design Notes)

I picked up Fear and Hunger 2 back in December, and I've been keeping a running tally of all the horrible ways my characters have died since then. A couple months and thirty some hours later, I've got enough for a good post out of it.

So as to not just have a table of random information that only makes sense with the context of having played the game, there will be some notes about game design at the end.

Entries are listed as Death # - Date - Character - Cause of Death

1. 12/16 - Levi - Infected wound from a Moonscorched
2. 12/17 - Levi - Smashed in the head with a pesticide canister.
3. 12/17 - Marina - Smashed in the head with a pesticide canister, again.
4. 12/17 - Levi - Tackled into submission by armless villager after sleeping in the wrong bed, then fed to pigs.
5. 12/18 - Levi - Shot by sniper outside of town.
6. 12/18 - Marina - tackled to death by the Woodsman after getting freed from the well.
7. 12/20 - Abella - Tackled to death by armless villager.
8. 12/22 - Marina - Shot by rifleman, only had one arm left anyway.
9. 12/22 - Levi - Gummed to death by headless wolf
10. 12/23 - Marina - Killed by Father Oscar's //hurting// spell, which crashes the game if it kills you.
11. 12/23 - Levi - I am not kidding, that motherfucker can crash your game with the amount of //Hurting// he can deal.
12. 12/23 - Levi - I told the mayor that the sausage looked like a penis and he stuck a meat cleaver in me.
13. 12/25 - Levi - Starved to death in latrine pit.
14. 12/25 - Marina - Stabbed by manic villager.
15. 12/25 - O'saa - Brutalized by an ogre in a flashback during character creation.
16. 12/27 - O'saa - Choked to death on pesticide fumes.
17. 12/27 - O'saa - Stabbed by Henryk.
18. 12/27 - O'saa - Shot in the head by Needles.
19. 12/28 - O'saa - Again with the pesticide.
20. 12/28 - O'saa - Grappled into submission by Fr. Oscar, de-legged, strung up on a ritual crucifix, rescued, crawl away only to get killed by the Vile and his pesticide again.
21. 12/31 - O'saa - Bitten by rats, which were summoned by a Rat Hag
22. 1/1 - Marcoh - Pesticide gas, again.
23. 1/6 - Marcoh - Needles fucked me up, again.
24. 1/9 - Marcoh - Killed by //Hurting//, via Dysmorphia.
25. 1/11 - Marcoh - Punched myself to death after getting mind-controlled by a Crimson Father.
26. 1/11 - Marcoh - Shot by an Elite Trooper
27. 1/12 - O'saa - Shot and power-sawed by a mob.
28. 1/14 - Marcoh - Dysmorphia and //Hurting//. Should probably mention that there's a monster named Dysmorphia.
29. 1/14 - O'saa - Machete'd by a Death Mask.
30. 1/15 - Marina - Tackled to death by Karin.
31. 1/15 - Marina - Clawed to death by a Moonscorched.
32. 1/15 - Marcoh - Bludgeoned with a meat mallet.
33. 1/15 - Marcoh - Gutted by the knife of a Crimson Father, right after I shot Marina in the head due to mind control.
34. 1/18 - Marina - Impaled in trap pit while running away from an Owl Cultist in the woods.
35. 1/18 - O'saa - Police brutality.
36. 1/18 - Marina - Landmine.
37. 1/19 - Karin - Machete'd by Death Mask, but not before he cut off both my arms.
38. 1/21 - Karin - A great run ended by a Death Mask machete. Got too greedy.
39. 1/22 - Karin - Decapitated by owl spirit.
40. 1/23 - Abella - Gnawed by a Crimson Father.
41. 1/23 - Karin - Shot by a mob.
42. 2/2 - O'saa - Slapped to death by a sewer monster that screamed "Choke on my balls" when it attacked.
43. 2/4 - Marina - I thought I knew how to handle the Vile. Hubris, etc. My characters, apparently, have not built up any resistance to pesticide.
44. 2/10 - O'saa - Impaled in a spike pit while wandering the woods at night.
45. 2/19 - O'saa - SHOT BY A FUCKING TANK

As you can see, this game will result in a lot of character death. What this list doesn't show is the stuff in between.

I was not frustrated by any of these deaths, not even that great run with Karin at #38. The key to the entire experience is that every character death means you have learned something about the game. Even if it's just "there is a horrible monster in that building, don't go inside it" - that's useful knowledge! You explore, you take notes, you die, you reload the save, you repeat until you decide to abandon the run and start with a new character.

The items you get from barrels and chests are random, but the rest of the game isn't. The map is stable. Enemies are always in the same locations. NPCs are in the same locations at the same times on the same days. Special items will always be in the same place and with the same means of getting them. Your accrued knowledge will always be useful, and it will only ever get more useful as you gain more of it. Challenges that used to be brick walls can be taken out with good luck and good planning, totally avoided, or even entirely trivialized. You're handed a puzzle box, a mystery to unravel, and as you gain mastery of its workings in one way you can apply that knowledge along another path.

If this sounds like idealized OSR game design, you are correct. It is. This game is a masterclass on it.

Let's look at an example.

Very early in the game, you come across a locked gate that leads into the city. You're told that there are two keys, and that's generally going to be your way to go in the beginning. One of the keys is easy to find, while the other is behind a particularly nasty enemy who is well beyond anything you've fought this far in the game.

It's possible to beat the encounter with minimal losses, if you get extremely lucky, fight extremely dirty, or already have figured out some ways of getting overpowered (I have managed, in later runs, to beat him in two turns without getting hit - it is possible!)

But you're not likely to learn those strategies without a lot of trial and error. More likely you're going to explore the rest of the available areas, maybe with different characters and in doing so you'll find that:

• If you have the lockpicking skill or a small key, you can get into the sewers and use them to bypass the gate.
• If you have the Skin Bible of a particular god, you can unlock a shortcut through the woods that takes you directly to the city.
• If you have a shotgun and ammo, you can just shoot the lock off.
• If you got miraculously lucky and picked up a pair of bolt cutters in Tunnel 7, you can do the same.

And once you know those other methods, you can plan around them according to your player character, your items, and the other choices you've made in the game so far.

Now just keep multiplying that by all the other decision points to be made in the game and you get an idea of what the experience is like. Despite being 30+ hours in and close to the end of the game, there's still lots of stuff I either haven't tried or haven't discovered. While there is inevitably an end state of system mastery where there is no more to learn, it is a very long road and if you're the kind of person who likes long hikes and fucked-up sights, it will be an enjoyable one. And the difficulty itself can be surmounted both by the allowances of Eas(ier) mode, or the multiple methods by which you can absolutely break the game with relatively little effort. 

OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST


ITEMS

As a survival horror game, F&H contains a whole lot of scrounging in barrels and rationing out your items. You're juggling depleting bars of health, mental state, and hunger for up to four characters at a time. Beyond healing items it's a game of using what you have: no cloth for bandages? Well, if the wound is already infected, you can use the dirty toilet paper and a green herb to patch yourself up.


SKILLS

It's technically possible for any given character to learn any given skill. But in order to get those skills you either have to raise your affinity with a god (requiring a ritual circle and the appropriate Skin Bible, both limited resources), or you have to kill one of the other contestants in the Termina festival and absorb their souls (which unlocks their branch of the skill tree); for both methods you need soul stones, which you get by trading in the heads of defeated enemies (so long as you have a bonesaw to cut off their heads) and you need to rest in a bed (which moves the world into the next time-state).

As with the rest of the game, once you come to grips with how all these interlocking parts work you can start plotting out a path to get what you want, and that path is specific to how the game is progressing. A F&H character build is a time-sensitive hit list where you have to juggle "can I reach and recruit/kill X before they die by other means" with "are they more useful to me in this run as an ally or as their skills."


LORE 

In the manner of games that actually use lore well, it is optional in F&H. It's there if you want to dig into it, and when you start digging you will keep on digging, but if you just want to play a fucked-up battle royale and vibe, that's an option too.

(The lore does have some fantastic old god / new god shenanigans going on. once again I recommend Worm Girl's overview, especially if you are interested but unlikely to play the game itself - she weaves together all the variables into a coherent, though not "canonical" throughline.)


FINAL THOUGHTS 

Game good. Said it before, saying it again.

This is Technically Not a Homestuck Reread Post

Prior revisit posts: Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Wizard of Earthsea, Book of the New Sun pt 1 (Shadow & Claw), Book of the New Sun pt 2 (Sword & Citadel (plus Urth)

At the recommendation of longtime friend-of-the-blog Ivy, I started listening to Homestuck Made This World. It was recced to me as a thorough critical analysis of the comic with a focus on contextualizing the Great MSPA Mania in its cultural moment, and it succeeds very well at this. My listen is on-going as I write this introduction, having just gotten through the Intermission, and I will be writing as I listen along.

As I am not rereading Homestuck for this review (I have more than enough things to read and all of them are time better spent), this post's commentary will be built upon what I remember of the comic, personal reflection of that era, HMTW itself, and rewatching some of the animated entries.

Let us return to the trenches, and pour one out for all those comrades we lost during the Vriska Wars; let it never be said that we let the spider march forth out of quarantine thread unchallenged.

(Note: Michael and Cameron are the hosts of Homestuck Made This World, they are not characters in the comic.)

**

Some of you are likely among that blessed company of people who do not know what Homestuck is. This is good, in the way that not knowing about a certain play titled The King in Yellow is good, and I highly recommend you maintain this ignorance. But if your curiosity of the abyss cannot be swayed, a description in brief.

Homestuck is a very long multimedia webcomic about an increasingly-unweildy number of teenagers trapped in an increasingly-complex series of time loops brought about by their participation as players in a video game called SBURB, which is the mechanism by which the universe propogates new iterations of itself.

It contains more text that War and Peace. Most of that text is teenagers yelling at each other.

**

For the purposes of my own sanity, I will only be commenting on the part of Homestuck that I read back in the day. This lines up nicely with the premise of it being a reread, and saves me a whole lot of time because I only just got past the halfway point.

(For those unaware, Homestuck has 6 acts, plus an epilogue. Acts 1-4 constitute a quarter of the comic, Act 5 another quarter, and act 6 is a full 50%. The pacing is not good. i will be listening to HMTW until the end, but that will remain for my own bile fascination and I will not subject you to it.)

**

Character Overview

The Kids

• John - A real goofy goober
• Rose - The cool goth friend
• Dave - Not nearly as cool as he thinks he is
• Jade - Head in the clouds (this is funny because it is literal)

The Trolls

• Karkat - Performative anger, all the time
• Aradia - A ghost, and sometimes a robot
• Tavros - Designated punching bag
• Sollux - No one gives a shit about sollux
• Nepeta - Feral catgirl and shipping enthusiast
• Kanaya - Very polite lesbian vampire
• Terezi - Probably not the best depiction of blindness in media
• Vriska - Causing Problems on Purpose (TM)
• Equius - HUGEQUEST.mov, but less funny
  
• Gamzee - A juggalo and that it, until the murders start
• Eridan - Aristo reddit niceguy. Not a wizard
• Feferi - Was late when they were handing out characterization

Some Other Kids

• Jane - Another goober
• Roxy - Crippling teenage alcoholism
• Dirk - Slightly cooler than Dave, maybe
• Jake - Adventure time ?

The Exiles

• Wandering Vagabond - Post-apocalyptic mayoral canidate
• Peregrine Mendicant - Postal worker
• Authority Regulator - A narc
• Windswept Questant - Royalty in hiding

Antagonists

• Jack Noir - Bureaucrat turned mass-murderer
• Doc Scratch - A charming man with a cueball head
• Lord English - Lord British after Scotland, Wales and North Ireland leave

12 More God-Damn Trolls

• We have entirely lost the plot by this point.

The Cherubs

• I nearly forgot about these
• I am now cursed to remember them
• Absolutely the worst
• Bad design
• Bad characters
• Bad

All of these characters have multiple iterations across timelines and universes, and none of it matters.

**

Plot Overview

BROTHER MAY I HAVE SOME LööPS

**

Things Andrew Hussie Is Good At

• Distinctive character voices
• Visual humor
• Shot composition
• Compsci and game-logic jokes
• Mechanistic worldbuilding
• Elaborate Rube Goldberg puzzles
• Identifying what will make the most people the angriest
• Acting on the above impulse

Things Andrew Hussie Is Not Good At

• De-escalating situations
• Non-mechanistic worldbuilding
• Knowing when to stop
• Getting to the point
• Avoiding pointless antagonism
• Breaking kayfabe
• Sincerity

Granted, I feel some sympathy for Hussie in that they were blindsided by extreme success they were not prepared for (including all the ways that can get pretty ugly online), but there were several big exit ramps on the road to dissolution and none of them were taken by any parties involved. As my listen through HMTW continues, the bare-faced cynicism becomes more and more difficult to ignore.

**

Acts 1-4 are still very good.

Act 5 is a drastic tonal shift and despite having some good and memorable components is really where the rot sets in.

Act 6 I have no positive opinions about

**

The music remains utterly unimpeachable. Toppest of tiers, greatest of greats, its what makes the whole thing tick. Sburban Jungle remains ingrained, along with all the rest, in the neurological equivalent of granite slabs fifty meters high. It's so fucking good.

FAVORITE TRACKS

• Showtime (Original Mix)
• Sburban Jungle
• Beatdown
• Dance of Thorns
• Descend
• Sunslammer
• At the Price of Oblivion
• Rex Duodecim Angelus

There are doubtless many I have forgotten

**

I wouldn't necessarily call the Homestuck fandom a cult, but it was certainly cult-shaped. (Edit: apparently Hussie said in an interview that they consider the Homestuck fandom to have been a cult they inadvertently started.)

**

While certainly a disaster for internet historians, I must admit that the loss of the MSPA forums comes as something of a relief. Tears in the rain and all that, but wow were a lot of those tears stupid.

**

I found Homestuck through TVtropes in...late 2010? I think that was it. I caught up during the hiatus right after Alterniabound, joined the forums immediately after.

It swiftly became an obsession, and it was not a healthy one. Emotional over-investment was the name of the game, and I was deep in.

**

I dropped Homestuck extremely early in Act 6, but I can't figure out when - it was before the ancestors showed up, which would put it somewhere between November 2011 and April of 2012, least according to the wiki. I had honestly thought I was in it for much longer, but it seems like I burned out flash-fire style. It certainly felt like an incredibly long time, but that's likely just the case when you're logged into the forums for most of your waking hours for a year and change. Timeline matches up with a swerve into much greater involvement with the SCP wiki, but I really thought it was longer than that... I hung around the forums for a little while after that but eventually got wise to how miserable it was and booked it for better pastures, that probably explains it.

Was an ordinary page that did it, something about Jake's inventory introducing some new mystery box and me realizing that no, Hussie was never going to break out of his closed-circuit storytelling and I had long ago reached the end of my patience for a matrioska mystery box. The overwhelming artifice, no matter how intentional, could not sustain itself and I was making myself miserable in my hopes that it would suddenly be something that it wasn't.

Dodged a bullet on that.

**

Two Best Friends Play SBRUB is the defining artifact of this period in my life, and it remains probably my favorite HS fanwork by a country mile.

**

Michael brings up Intermission-specific fans in that episode of the podcast, to which I say "Yes, hello, it is me."

Intermission remains one of my favorite parts and this is because it's basically Problem Sleuth II, and Problem Sleuth is great because Problem Sleuth is the kind of comic that invokes Hussie's strengths as an author. Incredibly silly, rapid-fire jokes in a nesting doll of absurdist game-logic time loops. Much of Homestuck contains this, but the Intermission wins out in the end because it is extremely fast and contains none of the padding that came to characterize the rest of the comic.

**

Opinion: The comic should have ended with [S] Cascade.

**

Best Character: None, asterisk

None, asterisk because all of them are more or less on equal footing when I look back at them - they are collections of traits and tropes to be compiled and recombined as needed for the circumstances around them. It's the reason the fandom grew as massive as it did - the best version of the characters is the one that exists in your own head, because you have built them into something that may or may not have support in the text.

That said, Wandering Vagabond. He hates monarchy and never has an annoying YA romance subplot, and thus combines two of the most noble and admirable qualities a person can have.

Also Karkat, everyone's favorite angry little shit-goblin. He's good too.

**

There was this guy I knew back in college, only other Homestuck fan I knew in real life. We were friends, and you'll note the loaded past tense. I didn't realize that it wasn't a particularly great relationship until years later. He was an ass; always had to be in the right, always had to be the cleverest. (Now who does this remind you of?) Did that condescending thing where someone talk around someone else's emotions to build up an argument of how they're irrational and how their view is correct. Should have cut ties with him a long time before I did. We might have bonded over Homestuck but we had very little else in common. At least two shouting matches over politics, and if you know mine you can guess what his side was. I invited him over for a couple game nights with some friends who didn't know him and got requests to boot him because he was being a sexist ass. (He got the boot.)

He would cosplay as Bro Strider for conventions, and I find myself instinctively recoiling at just seeing the character because of the correlation. What strange things brains are.

Last thing I heard, the guy was bitching about private organizations having mask requirements. He self-selected himself out of the one environment I was liable to cross paths with him in, and that's good.

**

An advantage of such a bogglingly huge fandom is that there was an equally bogglingly huge amount of high-quality fanart. I might still have my archive somewhere on a semi-bricked hard drive deep in storage, or perhaps it is gone for good.

I do legitimately miss the crazy things people would get up to in the image manipulation thread - HS has nothing if not a whole lot of easily-modified image character templates.

**

Despite it being a decade plus since I dropped the comic, I could still probably channel most of the character voices with a reasonable degree of accuracy. 

cG: ALL RIGHT CHUCKLEFUCKS ONE MORE TIME
cG: JOHN IS GETTING LO MEIN
eB: yep!
cG: ROSE IS GETTING FRIED TOFU
tT: Correct. Two additional spring rolls, please.  
cG: DAVE IS GETTING GENERAL TSO'S
tG: how did he become a general anyway
tG: like
tG: was he commissioned officer
tG: or was it a battlefield promotion
cG: JADE IS GETTING SHRIMP FRIED RICE
tG: did he have beef with kernel sanders
tT: *Colonel.
gG: wait! could i get the takoyaki instead?
cG: YEAH, SURE, CHANGE YOUR ORDER FOR THE THIRD TIME
eB: dave what about the burger king?
eB: where does he fit into this?
tT: I believe that the Burger King is currently embroiled in a proletariat uprising led by the younger MacDonald.
tT: His head will be delivered it to Wendy on a silver platter, as John the Baptist was given to Salome.
cG: AND I'M GETTING CRAB RANGOON
gG: pffft you guys :D
cG: ORDER PLACED
cG: FUCKING FINALLY
eB: so karkat where are the other trolls?
cG: AS PREVIOUSLY ESTABLISHED IN A CONVERSATION WE HAVEN'T HAD YET   
cG: ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD
cG: AND IT IS VRISKA'S FAULT
aG: You rang? ::::)
cG: GOG FUCKING DAMN IT

**

The people demand justice for Nepeta.

(Note: I do not know, at time of writing, if justice for Nepeta was ever achieved. I only know that the people demanded it, and thus it was never granted.)

(Note: Nepeta's death remains a...well, it remains the brutal murder of a child whose main crime was being a dork. Bludgeoned to death with juggling pins. Killer gets off scott-free. People were, predictably and rightly, upset by this (she wasn't the only death in this sequence, either) and they were mocked for it.)

**

Best Fandom Joke - Pantskat

(A coloring error on one page made it look like Karkat - who was far in the background of the shot - was wearing his pants all the way up to his chin. People had a field day. It's fucking stupid and I think it's great.)

**

Lots of people praise Hussie's mythbuilding, and for the most part I find that to be extremely generous overstatement of importance. The one exception to that - and probably the only part of Homestuck I would point to and say "yeah, this part has some real value outside of itself" - is the reveal that the universe has cancer.

This is literalized in the comic - a tumor of Plot Contrivance embedded in a vast cosmic frog - but the principle remains, transcendent of its surroundings.

You do not have to dig deep into my own writings to see the echoes and after-images of this idea; I'm certain somewhere I invoke it outright, and if I haven't before I am definitely doing so now.

**

Now, I wrote an entire essay about how my creative methodology is about breaking things down into components and then re-assembling them in new and novel ways. You might recognize this as exactly what Homestuck is founded upon, but I do have a coherent justification for favoring one and not the other.

Homestuck is a closed circuit: everything that exists within it is connected to everything else and nothing exists outside of this network. Any potential expansion of scope will inevitably turn back inwards upon itself. It is the Star Wars expanded universe spun out to its final form. No matter how much material you put into it, it will never break beyond the boundaries of the circuit.

This, plus Homestuck's penchant for repeating patterns and providing numerous overlapping categorical schemas for those patterns to fit into, makes it incredibly good for people who want to make stuff using only those provided components (see: enormous homestuck fandom), and signficiantly less use to me, who likes settings to be messy and organic.

**

This closed-circuit design is part and parcel why, among all the media I will occasionally use as writing practice, Homestuck has never appeared - it cannot function in an open circuit setting, because its characters are just collections of tropes without any exterior circumstances influencing them. To put them in an environment where external setting matters would be to immediately watch the waveform collapse. The characters stop working and must become entirely different characters in order to function, thus negating the point. Like in that little bit I wrote above - if I didn't write Karkat according to his steroarchetype, he wouldn't really be Karkat anymore.

**

Homestuck is like Neon Genesis Evangelion: valuable as a piece of art, mediocre-to-bad as a coherent narrative, and will collapse entirely at the mere implication of real-world logic.

**

A theory: there is no outside world whatsoever in Homestuck. Earth is empty. Alternia is empty. No one else exists beyond the players of SBURB. It is the only appropriate state for a work as solipcistic as this.

**

Troll typing quirks are legitimately a fantastic way of getting across vocal nuance in text, but also I side with jan misali in saying that they get pretty excessive and make text to speech accessibility functionally impossible.

**

Serialized storytelling and the cycle of hype and disappointment are the worst and we are trapped in this World Homestuck Made. Thrice I have been burned greatly by it. I have learned my lesson.

**

I will accept the bitter pill Michael and Cameron have set on my plate: Equius is a fascist creep and the fandom's re-interpretation of him as weird but ultimately protective big brother figure to Nepeta is significantly more uncomfortable in hindsight.

Thus is fandom - eternally dulling the sharp edges to achieve the state of perfect blorbo.

**

So. This is the part about Vriska.

Now, while I will strip my sleeve and show my scars and say "these wounds I had on Troll Crispin's Day, holding the line against Vriskathread" a decade free from the Great Mania has cleared my head significantly. To condense a lot of thoughts into a small amount of space, Vriska the character is entirely separate from Vriska the narrative function.

Vriska the character is not to my liking whatsoever, but I can understand the appeal in a general sense. She's well written, as far as a Homestuck character will go, and I can't say she's not effective at triggering reader response. There's a reasonably effective tragedy to her story, though I find it not nearly as vindicating as her fans will claim.

Vriska the narrative function is emblematic of Homestuck's greatest sin. Her role is that of a hatchet: whenever Hussie needed to make people angry, whenever they needed to divide up the fanbase and start setting fires because negative engagement is good engagement for the content-hawkers, Vriska would be rolled out, do something heinous, and be rewarded for it. Any of the characters could fill that role, technically, but Vriska was convenient because she had a divisive status since her introduction. She was a deliberately weaponized character invoked in Hussie's eternal war with the fanbase.

**

Hussie really liked making jokes at the expense of anyone with a non-normative body, didn't they?

**

Hussie's repeated abdications of responsibility for what they write - provided in the text itself and in book commentary cited by HMTW - are incredibly tiresome.

**

God I forgot that Doc Scratch's primary narrative role was "well you see, Vriska was being manipulated by Doc Scratch" and motherfuckers he's not mind controlling her, she just decides to murder other children because some weird guy on the internet told her to.

**

Michael and Cameron bring up how even early on there are questions over whether Vriska is going to get her comeuppance, or if this is a narrative that's going to eschew the idea that villainous deeds go punished. I know that later on there's more of this, past where I read, but I think there is a third option that will end up going woefully unutilized: there's no need for karmic retribution on a cosmic level when the other characters have more than enough reason (the reason being that Vriska is an existential threat to everyone around her) to find a way to remove her from the equation for simple self-preservation. Characters having coherent motivations solves this problem, but HS is about determinism or some shit so we don't have those, Things Just Happen.

**

~ Squeedly-dee, squeedley-dum, let's all sing a squeedly song ~

**

I'm not going to write much about Act 6, because I read barely anything of it. It took the forward momentum and grand crescendo of [S] Cascade - all that waiting and anticipation - and sent it careening directly into a brick wall. I do not know what follows beyond, other than I have heard very bad things, and the content warnings towards the end of HMTW get increasingly thorough to the point that I can barely believe it.

**

"Well you see, the ending is about Hussie handing over the characters to the audience and their freedom from his deterministic authorial tyranny."

"So why didn't they put their money where their mouth is and slap a big copyleft license on it in a final act of over the top and self-indulgent showmanship?"

"Uhhh...LOOK OVER THERE, IT'S VRISKA!"

**

Revisiting the comic, even by proxy, I find myself once again confronted with the bizarre, toxic, paracsocial hell of the author-audience relationship that defines the comic. I was part of it, same as so many other people, so take that into account here. I was lost in the sauce.

 

It was ugly. I feel like I should call it abusive, in some new and unpleasant form that was born from the newly-forming (at the time) mechanisms of widespread parasociality. An artist continually mocking and berating the audience for emotional investment, especially when the artist has cynically calculated the ways to maximize engagement in the first place - and especially when the bulk of that audience are teenagers - it ain't good. It's a bad taste I can't wash out, a lingering miasma over the thing.

And everyone bought it for so long, just ate up the lie of "oh it's all an act, it's ironic!"

Nah. Hussie's disdain for the audience was the one genuine thing in this entire circus.

I suppose that's the lasting impression I have of the whole thing; The lingering internalized shame of being duped. Of falling for a grift. Of sticking with the clearly toxic person in your life. The plot, setting, characters - all so thin and sterile already that they can't even be recycled. The comic itself, herald of a maddened world that it did not create but merely ushered into being.

There was good to be had in it, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

They can't all be winners, folks.

Dan Reviews Conlangs

The muse possessed me last week, churned out all of these in the space of a day.

I just think they're neat!

Adûnaic (J.R.R. Tolkien)

John was holding out on us and it's a damn shame. This one's got some A E S T H E T I C. Love me a good û. Westron itself also gets bundled here, gotta give out a shoutout to my man Banazîr Galbasi. I feel like it should be mentioned that, in the work considered the poster child of Euro-fantasy, nearly all of the characters are speaking something explicitly modeled on Semitic and Mesopotamian languages. No Greek or Latin to be seen. That seems like something a lot of people miss.

Toki Pona (Sonja Lang)

Can't get into it. The limited phonology, limited vocabulary, short word length, extreme isolating grammar, and lack of compounding make it so repetitive visually and aurally that it dissolves into white noise for me. The many Tokiponidos out there hacking the language into even smaller wordlists and phonologies strike me as bizarre - there is a limit to how minimalist you can get before information transfer breaks down. Jonathan Gabel's sitelen sitelen is easily one of my favorite scripts for anything, though, gold star on the Good Noodle Board.

Toki Ma (Shevek Urrasti)

The vocabulary and grammar have been expanded into something more robust, which is nice. Close enough for petanque.  Many of the (enormous) lexical gaps of Toki Pona have been filled. The limited phonology is much less of an issue, as the extended vocabulary makes things much less repetitive. A marked improvement (sans the loss of sitelen sitelen) if outside the philosophical bounds of Toki Pona. (NOTE: The main website for the language appears to be down and is being squatted by a phishing scam.)

Ithkuil (John Quijada)

A masterpiece of outsider art. The impracticality of actually using it and the headaches I get when I try to read through it are nothing compared to the fact that Quijada has a vision, and he has been chipping away at that marble block for nearly 20 years, and damn any outside expectations of what it can or should be. 20 years, expanding and refining and improving this thing that, I suspect, makes full sense only of Quijada himself. And that's beautiful to see. Hurts my head to consider, but I keep coming back to think about it. 

Globasa (Hector Ortega)

As a rule, I find International Auxillary Languages a rather dull genre. They trend towards sameness - looking the same, sounding the same, keeping the same grammar and chasing the same fever-dream of "maybe this time, it will work!" That aside, Globasa is probably my favorite in the genre. It has a helpful website, the creator has explicitly released it into the public domain, and generally it has done enough well and avoided enough pitfalls to fill the one slot I have for positive IAL opinions.

Lojban (Logical Language Group)

As with most attempts to use an algorithm to fulfill a creative endeavor, the end result is an ugly mess. That and I'm philosophically opposed to internet rationalism and doubly so against a conlang explicitly designed to prevent puns.

Na'vi (Paul Frommer)

The language is fine. Whatever. One of those high production high polish made-to-order big media conlangs. The context around the language is the sort of bullshit that makes me want to take this entire hobby and dump it into the fucking sea. The absolute fucking...gods can you imagine what you could do with that much money if, instead of dumping it down the black hole of Cameron's ego, you, I don't know, invested it in actual environmental stewardship or language revitalization programs? He didn't even have the fucking decency to make good movies! God damn it!

Klingon (Mac Okrand)

I love Klingon. I love its ugliness, its jankiness, it's weird regularity and odd limitations. It's like seeing a dinosaur in full, majestic plumage - master of an era long since passed. It's weird and idiosyncratic and awkward and the linguistic equivalent of an incredibly ugly dog who's just the sweetest and best boy you've ever seen. No shade to David Peterson, but his output is of a consistent high competence that leaves me without much to say. Of course jank is not always good, and Klingon suffers from the "they use <x> and <q> so they must be warlike" coding that is extremely tiresome. This part I do not love. Also the script is terrible.

Kala (Carl Buck)

I love Kala. Aesthetically pleasing both in romanization and custom script, robust-enough grammar that is still pretty easy to grasp. It's not particularly complicated or out there, but it doesn't need to be. Fulfills a niche that i happen to like. 

Sambhasa (Olivier Simon)

A Proto-Indo-European inspired IAL that makes the choice to keep modern spellings of words to maintain familiarity, which leads to an incredibly complicated system of phonological / pronunciation rules to follow and a sinking suspicion that you might as well just use English.

Dothraki (David J. Peterson)

Like Na'vi, the language is Fine. I don't care for it, in large part for reasons unconnected to the language itself - the Dothraki are the great modern exemplar of ACOUP's so deftly-named "barbarian couture", and so we end up with a Fine language paired with the portrayal of a people as filthy, violent, artless, possessing no culture beyond "horse" and "fight", and altogether Other. They use <x> and <q> so you know they're savages /s.
 
If I had a nickel for every conlang made for a major media IP whose existence is predicated on perpetuating racist stereotypes, I would have fifteen cents. Which isn't much but it's indicative of a pattern. Could get a full quarter if I added the conlangs written by out-and-out white supremacists.

Ido, Neo, Interlingua, Lingua Franca Nova, Et Cetera

At last, conlangs willing to ask the daring question of "What if French, but also Spanish and / or Italian?"

Asa'pili (Hans Widmer)

It's really just a short wordlist instead of a language, but I think it's neat as a little exercise in utopian thought - that wordlist plots out the broad brush painting of a society. 

Esperanto (L.L. Zamenhof)

I am obligated to mention Esperanto here. My opinion is thus: it is historically important, a bad conlang in a a few mildly interesting ways, and ultimately irrelevant to me.

Edun (Biblaridion)

I love the script, love how frustrating/absurd the in-setting lack of spelling reform is. And, has been previously established, I love any conlang that sounds like Enheduanna is about to start singing hymns in it. Why? Not a clue. Guess I just like Gilgamesh vibes - ill-defined as that is.

 

Siwa (Etienne L. Poisson)

I'll be honest I have barely looked into this one, on the grounds that the grammar is 739 pages long and incredibly thorough. But hot damn has it got a slickly-designed and thorough grammar document. 

Belter Creole (Nick Farmer)

Confession time: I don't like the The Expanse. I like parts of The Expanse, and this is one of them - it offers a welcome dose of cultural flavor to a setting I find dominated by the plain skinless chicken breast elements of sci-fi (grumbles in space-grognard) Unlike a lot of future-slang deals, Belt Creole feels like a natural component of life in the setting, rather than just some randomly-assembled words shoved into English. 

Old Daevite (LonLangLin)

Love the Daevites, one of my all-time favorite things to come out of the SCP wiki. It's a solid base grammar, and includes some fun stuff like stop mutation types according to social class, a custom script, and a truly weird numerical system used by the upper classes (Base 7, but the first 7 digits are limited to prime numbers 2-17 and anything non-prime is just a combination of prime components. There's no numeral for 1). Plenty of footnotes, as is right and good. The first word in the noun list is "human sacrifice" which, yeah, checks out for the Daevites. On the whole, a good crossover between conlangs and the stories of the wiki.

Ämärangnä Language (Adytite) (User Deleted)

Another SCP conlang, this one regarding a Siberian language of the old Sarkic cults. Different tack from Daevite, as this one is focused primarily on the conlang's position as a fictional descendent of Proto-Uralic. There's a much greater focus on sound changes and compared vocabulary than in Old Daevite. I know significantly less about the Sarkics (after my time) so the connections to the greater setting pass me by. There is a sizable error / oversight in the noun section, where it says that there are 14 classes, but then only lists three. As with Old Daevite, this is mostly a sketch, as it too is serving dual purposes (conlang, but also a tale).

Sahrian (Greg Kasavin)

Despite how little detail we have, I think that Sahrian is one of the best examples of what a conlang can do, despite avoiding most of the things that are associated with the medium. The lexicon is small, limited to voice clips that rarely reflect what is actually being said. There's no released grammar or wordlist (Greg mentioned a spreadsheet he kept of all the words and phrases with their English equivalents, but never got around to sharing it. Fan reconstructions have not gone far. Ah, pipe dreams.) So for the player, Sahrian is a thing of recognizing words and filling in their meaning from tone, delivery, and context. It's an excellent example of how a conlang can function as a component of a larger work: it gives flavor and depth to the setting and characters, without becoming a stumbling block that players have to muddle through to get anything out of it. There's an incredible amount of meaningful variety underneath - dialect variants between characters, archaisms, speech impediments, little personal quirks. Jodariel uses formal speech. Falcon Ron has a speech impediment. Sir Gilman uses archaisms. Pametha always uses the affectionate form when speaking to you. All combined, the effect is remarkable, and probably my favorite of the entire lot reviewed here. The folks at Supergiant went A & B the C of D, and that ought not go unappreciated. Noxalas!

Earthsea Reread Post

Luke Berliner

 

Prior revisit posts: Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist

**

This format has proven itself inadequate for this series - as shown by the months it's taken me to write this post, despite having taken thorough notes.

**

Diverging from the other revisit posts near-immediately, I have no recollection at all of when I first read the Earthsea books. I will presume some time in middle school but it is a blank for me. When I went into the reread I remembered barely anything of the books themselves besides a few loose images and the general impression that I enjoyed them. I know I read the first three and then I think I read Tehanu, though if the first three are barely remembered Tehanu is blank entirely. I will get around to the back half trilogy at some point.

Since I took notes this time, this will generally go in chronological order. Though I must not have taken the right kind of notes because actually compiling them into a post has taken far too long. Whatever I did for LotR, I need to figure out how to do it again.

 

A Wizard of Earthsea

The map has always given me a certain feeling of claustrophobia when I look at it. Too small by far, despite the occasional reference to possible lands beyond the ocean. Regardless of that more than in most books the map is a necessity here, considering how much navigating there is - the copy of Wizard I was reading had smaller, more focused maps at different points of the story, which was welcome.

**

I really appreciate how swiftly the book establishes a narrative voice, and begins what will be a repeated technique of establishing Ged's character through both the present narrative and the events to happen in the future (as for the narrator, both of these are in the past).

**

When magic is described, especially here in the first book, it tends towards these big lists -"the crafts of finding, binding, mending, unsealing, revealing", "tricks and pleasantries, spells of Illusion" - it's got a poetic flair to it.

**

I love the image of weather-workers shunting a storm cloud between villages, absolutely love it. We get more of the same magical overflow when we arrive in Thwil, and this sort of common magic is necessary for making the magic feel like part of the world.

**

The Hardic language has 600 runes. Possibly a logo-syllabary? Logo-abugida? Couldn't say.

**

Ged in the opening of Wizard is sketched very well (like most things in Earthsea, LeGuin astounds with her succinctness - so, so many modern fantasy authors fail hard in the words to total length ratio) - he's a gifted kid from a poor town who had a bad family life (neither his father nor his aunt are particularly great people), who ends up doing some dumbass things because he's a dumbass teenager who wants validation from his older peers (Jasper and Vetch). He fucks around and finds out, and carries that with him for the rest of his life

(Of note also is how Vetch, being Ged's friend and bond-brother, returns later despite the time and events between. Jasper vanishes from the narrative and from Ged's life, as forgotten as any figure we falsely think so important during school)

**

Throughout the books, LeGuin is always building sacred space - this feeling that this place, these actions, these words are important, and there are ways to pass into the sacred from the mundane. (Those of you who have read ahead know it comes back in Book 3 with the subtlety of a cinder block)

**

I have never seen the Ghibli adaptation of Earthsea, but I feel much more kindly disposed toward it after this re-read. No one else could do it

**

Interesting biology note: male dragons watch over the eggs, while the females move on.

**

"Where is men's greed gone?" is such a good line for a dragon to drop.

**

Another thing LeGuin does with such skill and consistency that it falls into the background is dropping the details of the world (not only who lives where and the great diversity of cultures and peoples therein, but what they believe via stories and songs and lore) and just letting them be. So you'll get offhand references to "the lawless lords of interior Horsk" and so on and they are left alone, permitted, all that and more to exist in the open spaces off the boundaries of the page.

**

There's a very naturalistic bent to the powers of Earthsea - dragons take the sky, the Nameless Powers are of the deep earth, and the sea stands alone. I like that - the sea needs no gods or greater powers, good or evil - because this is a seafaring culture and the ocean is powerful enough to stand alone.

**

(ed: I initially thought this was Ged, turns out it was a different character) Serret straight up turns a man's bone marrow into hot lead while escaping the court of the Terranon holy shit.

**

I kept imagining the servants of the Stone to be pterodactyls, or something very much like them.

**

The hut on the islet is both heartbreaking and particularly terrifying to me.

**

You will notice that I have not mentioned the gebbeth at all in this segment of the review. I'm saving it for the end.

Tombs of Atuan

I think this one might be my favorite of the three. It's an adventure story - complete with dangerous ruins, dark gods, and magical treasure - but so unlike the typical fantasy adventure story. It's also a minor episode in the life of Ged despite being a major one for Tenar, and that keeps with the "the world goes on" aspect. And this sort of reversed parallelism (perpendicularism?) just keeps going throughout the book, woven back into Wizard to strengthen both themes and world.

**

The ritual where Tenar's name is eaten is the first time (potentially only?) we have seen anything made of steel - specifically the sword.

**

I feel it noteworthy that both Tenar and Ged had abusive fathers who swiftly pass from the story. And likewise they both come to have substitutes - Ged has Ogion, Tenar has Manan. But where Ged found a teacher, Manan is still a slave, and for all his kindness and care for Tenar she often treats him poorly, up to the very end.

**

I appreciate this book a lot for showing us what the Kargad lands are like on the inside - we have up to now only seen their raiding ships, but now we get what they think about those raids, how they view the outside, how they view themselves, and how their spirituality works.

(In short: Their empire is only about 150 years old, they have long-standing animus towards archipelagans (citing wizard-led raiding parties out to kill dragons). They worship a God-King, twinned divine figures the God Brothers, and the Nameless Ones. They believe in reincarnation and that they alone have souls. They have no magical practices of their own, distrust those of the Archipelago, have little in the way of writing and are deeply misogynistic.)

In later conversation we see Tenar's curiosity about the Archipelagans contrasted with the ignorance of her teachers' and the answers they take to be true - one more openly bigoted than the other, but both operating under what little information they have in their isolation.

**

The way the labyrinth is described makes me think of sites like Gobekli Tepe - structures and enclosures that have been buried, so that the paths between them are now tunnels. Given the age of the Place and the practices therein, this makes a good deal of sense to me.

**

The Undertomb is a reversal of the sacred space - not in that it is a place of the profane (that comes in Book 3), but because those who enter it are thrown into a radically different ordering of the universe, one that ultimately has no place for humans in it.

**

Penthe doesn't show up much but I enjoy the parts she's in. Good foil for Arha.

**

Even the keepers of the Place do not care enough to sweep the dust from the steps of the throne in the temple. I love how this theme is gradually woven into the narrative as Arha grows up - we the readers follow along her trajectory of learning that the Place is, while the center of her world, a backwater that the rest of the world has passed by.

**

"Very few are the precious things that remain precious" - in regards to the Ring of Erreth-Akbe in particular, but I think this is just a very good line in general.

**

Arha, like Ged, has her teenage rebellion. Where his was rooted in the desire for validation from others, hers is based in the desire for self-actualization. As Arha she is not allowed to have a self, and despite how important she is told she is, she knows that it's a sham. But then when she is confronted with that fact (through Ged), she clings to that shell of identity she's been forced into. For understandable reasons: Tenar is a provincial teenager who lashes out at learning about the world beyond because it makes her feel small and stupid, and false as Arha is, it is the identity she has kept herself afloat with.

**

I love how Ged just appears out of nowhere, right in the middle of his own adventure. He's remarkably casual about getting locked in, too, till the Powers drain his strength. And even when that has happened and Tenar has chained him down there, he remains calm and patient - though he's still a young man at this point, we get to see a fuller picture of who he became over the course of the first book (he does seem a good deal older).

**

Are the birdlike figures in the Painted Room kin to the servants of the Terranon in Book 1? Devoured humans?

**

The feeling kept returning to me that the influence of the Powers on Tenar is akin to an addiction. Her desires are split between wanting to leave and go out into the world as Tenar, or to remain with the Powers - not because she loves them, but because she fears what they will do to her in parting. There's a struggle against a hated dependency.

Parallels with the One Ring might be drawn here - inasmuch as Tolkien and LeGuin coming to the same conclusion on the human relationship with evil.

**

The ring is a humble thing, despite its importance. Innocuous to us and to the characters, despite its age and inscrutability. This, I think, is a good move. The story here was never really about the ring. The loss of the rune of peace between nations is a problem for the outside world, not Tenar.

The Farthest Shore

This book, breaking tradition of the prior two, opens in spring and goes into summer, and doesn't contain any great elisions of time (except for the weeks of sailing in the back third, but that is weeks instead of years.

**

I noticed early on, and I recall it continuing through this book, that there was more exposition from characters, rather than from the narrative voice - another diversion from the preceding two books.

**

"Fortune telling and love potions are not of much account, but old women are worth listening to."

**

On reread I immensely appreciate how the three books reflect each other without repeating. Each of the three main protagonists is faced with a different adolescent conflict. The Land of the Dead appears in 1 and 3, the Nameless Powers in 1 and 2. Things from offscreen in the past will always be relevant but it is different each time. On and on. Dragons appear directly in 1 and 3, but fill the spaces between all three.

**

I remember this book being my least favorite of the three from my first readthrough, finding it confusing and disconnected from itself. While I get what it's going for now (and appreciate it a great, great deal), I still feel that the sequence in Hort Town is a strange curveball, where things are happening (often only apparently) and I cannot tell what things they are or why.

But, I also suppose the disconnect is the point. Our introduction to the loss of magic is sharp and swift and brutal. The robbery and slave-ship and the man who was once a wizard croaking out "Yes, I remember being alive" in a drug-fueled haze.

**

I'm finding Farthest Shore to be the hardest one to write about (it is the cause of a multi-month delay in getting this post out) - my notes seem particularly irrelevant to the text at hand. 

I think this is in part to Arren being my least favorite of the three protagonists of the trilogy, combined with the central conceit's possession of a gravity well reserved for supermassive black holes.

**

"The council of the dead is not profitable to the living" is an absolute BANGER of a line.

**

 

The central conceit of Farthest Shore is like a lodestone drawing everything else to it, to the point where trying to do my typical scattershot bullet point review cannot do it justice. This is likely why it has taken me months to actually finish this post despite having all the notes written out.

The loss of magic in Earthsea is not played for melancholy, nor nostalgia. It is violent and sudden, a wound in the world, a patina that descends upon everything. Ged and Arren cannot afford wistfulness. The world is collapsing around them, because humanity's ability to know the world - of the world knowing itself - has been damaged. A support has been torn out and there's nowhere to turn to, not that anyone knows. There are islands burning on the horizon. (Haunting imagery there)

It is apocalyptic, well and truly so. The veil has been torn off (or perhaps it has been lowered upon us?)

I think, perhaps, the most meaningful thing I can say about the matter is that Arren's episodes of despair during their long boat journey in the south are familiar.

**

We do not get words for the meeting with Orm Embar at sea. That would be an intrusion of the profane. We've already gotten enough of that with most dragons reduced to mindlessness.

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The bit about the servants of the Anti-King principle embodying "Let the world burn so long as I live!" is, ah, yeah that's on point. Certain was the case in the 70s, certainly is the case now. Despair will drag everyone else down with you.

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Cobb is, appropriately, a pathetic figure. Embodiment of everything that Ged and Arren have been discussing, and of all the ruin that's beset the world. That thematic throughline makes up for him being introduced at the eleventh hour, I think. He's another symptom of the world's sickness, not it's true architect.

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I was actually quite surprised that Ogion was still alive. Either wizards live very long in Earthsea, or he was younger than I thought in the first book.

 

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It would have been very pat, perfectly perfunctory, to have Ged die at the end of this book. I am glad that he doesn't. Noble sacrifices of that sort do not fit with Earthsea.

 

Joshua Carson

Final Thoughts

Earthsea is a difficult thing to put into words, as most beautiful things are. It goes into the same category as Lord of the Rings, as is right and good. But it approaches that place from a different angle, mirroring the steps taken at a different pace.

It is a trilogy very much concerned with death, of what life is like living under its shadow. But it is death as great and as empty as the night, a thing of vast, terrible dignity. A work's attitude towards death is one of the primary points I might hang a critique of whether or not it is truly great, or simply good - does it understand, can it give voice to those agonies we hold close to our hearts, that bubble up when we are deep in our cups or too long away from home. Death and the fear of death - the gebbeth and all that comes with it.

And therein is the power in these books. We are, all of us, bound to our own gebbeth. We will all have to walk the blind track where the Deep Powers sleep. We will all reach the furthest shore.

I have not seen the Ghibli movie, but after reading the books and watching Beyond Ghibli talk about it, I am more kindly disposed towards it. I would not trust an adaptation to anyone else's hands - that even that did not succeed fully, I would say that it is unadaptable.

Good.

The Elden Ring Post

Govy9807

Elden Ring is 60-70 hours of one of the best RPGs out there, with another 20 hours of linear, tedious, content-poor and poorly-balanced chaff tacked on in the back third. 

So it's a typical Souls game. The ur-Souls game. The best-of Souls game.

Spoilers to follow, obviously.

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Many games try to be like Dark Souls through the inclusion of lore - background information intended to supplement or frame the narrative and setting. Such attempts almost always crash and burn, subjecting audiences to a large amount of text that is not interesting in the slightest and adds nothing of value to the work as a whole. What makes Souls games succeed?

• The lore is opt-in. Don't care? Don't worry.
• The lore is short (being primarily 1-3 sentences in item descriptions)
• The lore is fractal - connections between points just keep branching off and making new connections.
  
• The lore supports the themes - each of our endings involves a different belief of how the world should be, and the building blocks of that belief are found throughout the world and its lore.
  

There are distinct branches to the lore, areas of uncertainty, dead ends and lingering mysteries (who the fuck is the Gloam-Eyed Queen?). It is not clean, it is not neat, and so it invites exercises like this to put it all back together. 

This is, I think, the best way of dealing with high-level, (that is, large-scale) worldbuilding: there is no singular order / schema / design that can hold everything and provide all the answers. Concepts come into conflict with each other and produce knock on effects, further conflicts, people with beliefs and motivations.

And they support the fucking themes.

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I appreciate ER's sense of humor a whole lot. Wizards who wear absurd-looking stone heads, cartwheeling albinaurics, warrior-jars filled with fermenting human flesh, somersaulting sheep, land octopi you can make hats out of - it's all very playful and willing to step outside the expectations of the genre. I welcome that attitude in a game.

Souls games have always had an undercurrent of silliness to them but here I think it's the most they have ever done.

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Turtle pope is best pope.

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Did Ranni's ending, though nearly missed the part where you have to talk to the doll at once specific grace.

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Beating Agheel for the first time is an absolute rush, well-fucking-done

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Post-Morgott, the game loses most of its ability to let you go and explore a new area if you are stuck (much less to explore), which is a shame - that was critical to making the early and mid game as fun as it was.

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I forgot Godwyn existed as a character and still cannot regularly remember that he's different from Godfrey and still want to call him Godrick. The naming conventions were cute for about 30 seconds before they became a huge pain.

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The Halingtree feels like a DLC area they finished early and then stuck behind the worst area in the game. 

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Guard counters are the best. Playing older Souls games will be a lot harder now.

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Torrent is the other major highlight of the gameplay additions.

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Fashion souls is alive and well in this game

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Leyndell might be one of my favorite areas, visually, in all of FromSoft's body of work.

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I went INT/DEX (later INT/STR) and I feel I made a mistake. The game really wants you to build faith. Sorceries felt underpowered and grew less-useful over time. Maybe my build was just bad. Gonna respect for STR/FAI for NG+

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Siofra River Well mustered an audible "oh shit!", and when a simple area transition can do that, you know you have perfected exploration in your game. Ainsel River was the same, with the ants.

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Goldmask discerning the mysteries of the universe by T-posing is way funnier than it has any right to be.

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Early on (Weeping Peninsula, specifically), I was able to spend half an hour on my lunch break and clear out one or two mini dungeons or other things of note, and that level of "even if you invest only a little time, you will get something out of it" is both hard to come by and very appreciated.

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Commander Niall is the worst boss in the entire game and the only way it could be worse would be if he had albinauric archers fighting with him.

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The Haligtree is easily the part of the lore that interests me the most. Miquella tried and failed to create a second Erdtree by using his own blood, intending it as a sanctuary for Misbegotten and Albinaurics (those outside or ignored by the Golden Order). This leads to other questions: what fertilized the Erdtree? Does it need to be an Empyrean? Is it related to the jars around the minor Erdtrees? Is Mohg planning on repeating the process?

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We know Placidusax was Elden Lord before the coming of the Erdtree; Faram Azula is his mausoleum and guarded by beastmen. So that is likely the pre-human ordering of the world. Maliketh is referred to both as Marika's half-brother and as "a shadowbound beast given to his Empyrean". The latter we see also in Blaidd. Blaidd goes mad when Ranni rebels against the Greater Will, so it makes sense that the Will was the one who gave Maliketh to Marika. The half-brother part is more confusing: did they share a father or a mother, or was it more esoteric? Was that union part of the Greater Will's usurpation of the prior order under Placidusax? It says that Placidusax had a patron god (outer god associated with lightning, I suppose), who fled. Greater Will chased it away and merged the two lineages?

Maliketh's boss arena has a statue of a woman with three wolves, and an image of an expanded Elden Ring,. The former might be Marika (which means she might have two other wolf-siblings), the latter I think might represent the Crucible and the structure of the Elden Ring under the Great-Tree (as opposed to the later Erdtree)

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So what gods were the Godskin cult skinning? Unseen members of the Golden lineage? The whole tail attack makes me think there's some connection to the Crucible there, though from a different angle than the Omen and the Knights.

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Melina's red-gold hair is worth noting. Malenia has red hair, and Miquella has blond in the opening cutscene. Honestly we don't know if M&M were born before or after the Radagon + Marika fusion dance. If they were, then Melina would make sense as coming after, but then that brings up the question of why M&M seem especially vulnerable to outer god influence.

Don't ask me about the eye, though. That would seem to imply some connection with the Gloam-Eyed Queen, which could kinda work, but if she is what I suspect (an attempt by Marika to arrange her own death)...kinda? It kinda works.

I am not a fan of how unceremoniously she gets written out of the story, it feels like we never really got started. The Doll remains the best level-up lady.

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If Miquella is actually St Trina (and I believe he is), he might be in thrall to whatever outer god is associated with sleep (as all of them have a status effect), but since he was also the one who invented the gold needle, he could have made a second one for himself.

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We know there was civilization prior to the arrival of the Erdtree, and damnably little beyond that, other than I suspect the beastmen and demihumans were the basis of it. The ancestral followers too.

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The Onyx and Alabaster Lords are an enormous question mark. I've got nothing on them. Love the design and their fights, though.

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Rennala's boss fight is actually a scathing indictment of the modern Harry Potter fandom in this essay I will...

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I get what they were going for with Radahn, but I wasn't a fan of the fight. Ended up laming it out and letting the summons do all of the work. I do appreciate the detail that he doesn't have feet (because they rotted off during the war against Malenia)

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Helpful tip: Godskin Apostles are super vulnerable to sleep. 

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Helpful tip: Alexander wrecks the Fire Giant's day. 

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Malenia is a very well-designed boss. Never was able to beat her, but I felt like I was actually able to learn (many other bosses cannot claim that honor). Maybe I can go back and manage it.

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Hell yes they do the opening theme for the final boss encounter thing.

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I wonder if the golden trunks we see in the Elden Beast fight are representative of other worlds that the Greater Will has settled with an Erdtree. Or just a neat visual.

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The Elden Beast fight is beautiful, thematically and narratively important, and a big wet fart to end the game on. Dull as hell. Shoulda let you use Torrent. I struck a win by relying on Tiche's life drain, which wasn't all that fun, but I was well past the point of wanting the fight to be fun.

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Haven't got even an inkling of where or when they might go with the DLC, or what it might expand upon. My hope is to get more information on:

• Any of the outer gods, but most specifically the ones associated with sleep and blood.
  
• The era of beasts + literally anything about demihumans
• The Gloam-Eyed Queen
• The Deathbirds and their cult
• Other members of the Golden Lineage, at least enough to plot out something of a family tree without the enormous gap between Godwyn and Godrick.
• Just more information in general, please and thanks.