The Prison of His Days

I haven't posted in a while because a) no one was responding anyway and more importantly b) my friends got me into FFXIV and I've been playing that intensely. Not that I've gotten very far in the plot, but there's so much Stuff one can do. Also it's nice to be run through dungeons by people who have verbally agreed to put up with me not knowing what to do.

But it's down for maintenance tonight, and I'm unwillingly awake, so back to the Thunder Plains it is!

( Read more... )

I'm grinding in the Omega Ruins in my other save, and mildly frustrated because Tidus has the highest strength in the party but......chocobo racing sucks, so he's capped at 9999 damage. Meanwhile Auron in yellow HP is doing 50k and hit 99,999 with a crit. Just the once, but it got me that trophy.

( Read more... )

Currently Purrcy is crouching on the windowsill, ears twitching to get a better angle on all the bird noises. He wants to hunt. (But not to go outside; he doesn't like it out there, which is good because we have coyotes in this area.)

But anyway, Besaid temple!

( Read more... )

More tomorrow/later tonight, depending on the Sleep Demons.

Because it's so late in the game I sometimes forget how many things there are to love about the scenes at the top of the Pharos:

Vaan not letting Ashe have her dramatic speech. There is very little funnier to me than a melodramatic character being constantly interrupted mid-drama.

The juxtaposition of illusory Rasler with Vaan works really well as she's trying to come to her final decision - royalty vs the people, dead vs living, and of course false vs real.

I have to say, Ashe tends to take a while to grow on me, but the reasons I'm not all over her are the reasons she has a great character arc, with this as its climax: she tends to get tied up in what she wants and feels due, and conflate those things with what's best for Dalmasca. Nobility, man... But I love that her arc addresses that, as a problem and a flaw, and that this, her world-changing choice, is about setting personal rage and vengeance aside in order to be a worthy ruler.

Fuckkkkk Ashe/Rasler tho. That she's so torn by seeing his face. That it breaks her heart not to be able to give "him" what he wants. That the Occuria finally overplay their hand, because Ashe knows that Rasler, her Rasler, the Rasler who lives in her heart forever, would never urge her into senseless cruelty.

Ashe's speechlet about the Dalmasca she wanted back reminds me of Faramir in the Two Towers : "I would see [...] Minas Tirith in peace: Minas Anor again as of old, full of light, high and fair, beautiful as a queen among other queens: not a mistress of slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves." There can be no higher compliment.

Whoops suddenly I am also Emotions about Gabranth. Because I will always read his behavior here as - he wants Archadia to burn. He's been living twisted up in hate and despair for so many years, and he has never forgiven the conquest of Landis, any more than he has ever forgiven Basch for fleeing before it fell. At Ashe's age, he would have given anything and everything for a Stone, for a way to make them hurt as he hurt. There are wounds in him that have never been able to heal as Basch's wounds have healed, whether because of different circumstances or temperament, and those wounds have festered for so long that sometimes he feels that he's nothing but hate beneath a metal skin.

Wow Cid way to twist the knife there. "You make mockery of Lord Larsa's trust. You are unworthy to serve him as sword or shield."

I also really like the parallels between Reddas and Gabranth here. They've both done things that cannot be made up for, cannot be forgiven. "History's chains bind us too tightly." Reddas sees the similarity, sees how other roads are closed off to them - sees, I suspect, that neither of them can survive this.

The #1 relationship in this game that doesn't get enough attention is Fran & Penelo. It's subtle, but Penelo asks more questions of Fran, and Fran answers them, and as here, when Fran is collapsing or in danger of collapsing from Mist exposure, Penelo is the one to notice or to ask if she'll be okay. I ship it

I swear, Cid manages to make "Fool of a pirate" into a paternal endearment. That last little exchange...it's so quiet, especially compared to Cid's Cidness just previously, and there's such a wealth of words left unsaid.

Overall I just love how this scene, while it doesn't stop acknowledging the importance of the beloved dead, reconfirms how...they're dead, nothing can change for them now. The wants of the dead should never take precedence over the needs of the living.

As mentioned a few days ago, I'm going to actually take apart and examine the reasons why I decided that Dona deserves an entire prompt list worth of positive attention. But, since aiming low is not in my otherwise extensive vocabulary, I don't just want to talk about Dona. I want to talk about some female characters I like, and the reasons why.

( Read more... )

So I am totally going to write my Aeneid paper on Virgil fanfic. It will be EPIC (badump-ching!).

I am debating how to handle the aca/fen distinction: I have an urge to avow Virgil-as-fandom and use fandom terms (which are much better for discussing fanfic), but on the other hand there's the problem of the teacher not knowing what this fandom thing is (I don't think), which leads to a)having to identify a whooole bunch of terms before I can get down to brass tacks, and b)appearing to be on the wrong side of the Academese Line. And though I hate the Academese Line, when I'm not sure how the person grading my paper is going to respond, discretion is kind of the better part of valor.

I think I am going to compromise by dressing it up under "transformative fiction", but citing the OTW glossary to define the term, and generally referring to fandom sources to explain why all this fanfic (because where else would I *find* discussion on what makes fandom happen?).

But still. Totally writing about fanfic for a grade. This is why Classics is an awesome field. It's fandom all the way down!

Actually wrote something, whee!

For kh_drabble, prompt "Walls". There were basically two places I could have gone with this, and I took the other one. Which is good, since someone else picked up on the Pink Floyd, and I would've looked silly. So.

Daughters in Boxes/A Box Without Walls

The chief thing the prompt stirred up in me was by-now-slightly-vague memories of Kishida Toshiko's famous (and yet unavailable online in English, as far as I can tell) feminist speech "Hakoiri Musume", or "Daughters in Boxes". Specifically, I thought about her entirely justified complaint (at least at the time) that women were not taught even the things necessary to run a household, that they were imprisoned in boxes where they could not see out, and even in a very comfortable box, without windows it was a prison. And I thought about her exhortation for women's education, so that they could live in a box without walls, though she did not yet suggest that women should or could compete with men directly. And then I though about the Princesses of Heart.

So, there's Cinderella, and Aurora, and Snow White, who go in a minute from servitude or (apparent) poverty to royalty. Aurora lived in a cottage in the woods all her life! What do they know, what will they do, as royalty? But they got their happy endings, because they are beautiful and therefore married well. What they're to do after that does not enter into the question. They seem to have bought into it.

And there's Jasmine, who doesn't know exactly what has been kept from her but knows at least that something has, and hates it. She tries acting out against her upbringing, but because she was never taught, for example, self-defense, she can't do a very good job of it. And that's sad, because she's stuck and knows it. (At least her marriage is likely to be an improvement.)

But there are also Belle, and Alice, and Kairi, who are none of the above. The thing everyone knows about Belle is that she reads. No one has kept her from learning things, at least in theory. And it shows. She knows what she does and does not want, she makes choices. Her appearance in KHII is incredibly true to character: unlike the above princesses, she's capable of saving herself. And then there's Alice, who's...a seven-year-old girl from Victorian England, who goes on this ridiculous dreamworld adventure. And does quite well, for her age. She's been educated (even if only some of it stuck), she does things, she has firm ideas about what should be and should not be. And she's no kind of princess at all. And then there's Kairi, who has one game of princessly distress, one game of us learning a great deal about the difference between a princess and a witch (none), and one game of flatly refusing to be anything but active.

But it's not that they're in some way different. It's not that the first four are weak for putting up with it. It's that even if you're strong, you need something to be strong with, some suggesting that strength is possible. It's that they've been put in boxes, while the last three have those boxes without walls that Kishida talked about.

It's a bit soapboxy of me, I admit, but KH fandom is so very focused on the male characters. People often dismiss the girls as weak or uninteresting, and that's just not fair. Until we take a good long look at what makes them that way, we're just perpetuating a problem of women in fiction. "Why are the female characters so boring?" is the cry. Well, they damn well didn't make themselves that way. But my soapbox is much more interesting as fic.

So, I saw ST:Reboot with the fam' on Sunday. This was entertaining, as it's always good to have old-school fans to do these things with and deepen the discussion. Also, the Mominator is a K/S fan from waaaaaay back (we have piles of actual on-paper fanzines around the house, no lie), so there was that.

Before going behind the cut tag, I am going to say two things:

1. The movie had a poor plot, but very, very good dialogue, so that I wasn't put off by the shoddiness by the plot. Fanfic heaven.

2. Part of the problem is that this is being sold as an adventure. This is false. The movie is not an adventure. It is a romance.

Huh? You may well ask. "But, Cygna, isn't a romance centered around a love story? This is centered around things blowing up, so it must be an adventure!" Well, yes, but then again, no. First of all, subtext so thick you can cut it with a knife. Further, I dispute the standard way of defining genre in this case.

An adventure story is about one person who changes the world. A romance story is about two people who change each other.

That's all it is, when you stop looking at sex as a prerequisite for emotions, when you strip away all the heaving bosoms and virgins and man-titty from the word "romance" to get at what, in my opinion, differentiates a good romance with an adventure subplot from a good adventure with a romantic subplot. And by those standards, Star Trek is a romance.

( There be Spoilers in them thar woods )

The best thing about this movie: it afforded me an opportunity to redefine genre.

That feeling where there's an idea swimming lazily about the deep-sea vents of your head that's so beautiful seen in fragments from afar it almost hurts, and as much as you want to show it to others you're afraid that they won't see it as the beautiful, fragile thing it is, or worse that in bringing it to them or them to it the idea in its freedom and music will be damaged beyond repairing?

This is the prologue for The Electric Things Have Their Life Too, a KH AU that looks like being fairly epic and is to be honest mostly the product of running across a bunch of very, very good cyborg/android/robot AUs in SGA fandom. Right now the idea is bubbling in me, sweet and tragic and so very perfect, and I'm terribly afraid that I'm not equal to the task of bringing it up to the surface. But I can't not write it; that would hurt more than a failure, would hurt like being pregnant and, because I was scared of birth and being a mother, carrying the baby inside me for the rest of my life. I can't not try, even if I fail. (Part of my motivation, too, is that there are precious few in the fandom I'd trust even as much as I trust myself to bring this incredible, fragile thing into the world.) Besides, if I don't write it, I know nobody ever will, and having this story never come to be would be worse than maiming it through my own clumsiness.

With luck, this will be the first seriously multichapter thing I finish. Wish me luck; this is going to be a beautiful dive.

Someone asked me my thoughts on yaoi Eriol/Tomoyo.

I feel kind of sorry for the E/T fans who're about to read my attempt-to-not-explicitly-say-they're-all-complete-morons-but-make-my-opinion-of-them-clear-anyway.

Do not ask this kind of question if you don't want me to give a multi-paragraph, increasingly sarcastic answer.