gunter brain worms
Aug. 3rd, 2023 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavokay though, krad, why the fuck has gunter of all characters cannibalized your brain?
IN THIS ESSAY I SHALL :D ...
* he's hot (when he shouldn't be). i mean this both in the single-brain cell "send lewds" way that you can't fundamentally analyze and the ... aw hell, here goes three paragraphs regardless. for one, the competency kink is there (i strongly headcanon f!corrin's term for him is Sir, with how perfectly it fits into his knight-title and ah, other uses). two, i've always had a thing for ossans, despite not drawing them sexually as much (walon vau, zaeed, etc) - maybe it was insecurity of doing their body type justice, maybe it was plain ol' shame, maybe i was genuinely interested in their platonic angles first. regardless - gunter's a pattern rearing its head here, and by now i love the artistic challenge of actually drawing hot but unambiguously old men.
the longer psychoanalyzing version is i see ... very very few artists drawing them, versus fanficcers, and the thirst is there, so why not? i love how he's distinctly there as a technically romanceable character but is visually coded as the oddball, the clear "other" for us freaks, especially how young FE casts skew.
there's unique challenges to drawing old men too, like the obvious wrinkles, the sagging, the body language of how they carry themselves, not to mention thinking of scenarios that would hit different ... not that he's inherently kinky, but i get a helluva amount of mileage "off roading" into not-vanilla territory by drawing him. there's a sense of i find him both hot "and" it's very, very easy to step in his mind and subsume his own desire, because this own meatbag of mine honestly functions in similar ways to an elderly person. there's similar insecurities, a similar sort of ... 'your body and daily experiences gets inherently kinky/(strange/othered) to the average person and that sucks sometimes, but is an opportunity at the same time'. really meaty second and third level subtextual shit that i live and breathe.
* he's got a crunchy backstory. i've also been collecting his lines across the gacha game and elsewhere, and there's a lot of contrast. there's a quote in the wild about contrast being inherently erotic. contrast of him feeling very insecure about being an "old man", versus his experience as a knight. i wonder if he'd be too proud to use a cane until when he falls (does he use one in private?). the respectable wholesome knight-psuedo-dad plus the dirty old man as expanded on below. let alone the tension of him being so old with corrin, his private tensions between despising the nobility versus earning his experience (and again, his feelings for corrin who also didn't choose where she was born).
(i haven't even gotten into the possession slash bad end arc with revelation, which honestly will eventually be its own bullet point. trying to savor this man like a glass of good red wine, heh. but the hints of bitterness there is, whew, potent. speaking of i'm dying to see what the fan-writers wrote in as his revelations supports in that fe:fates mod that i think gives everyone gay options. )
* he's got a very intriguing, unusual mix of being the "respectable" wholesome knight but also saying the most incredibly dirty one-off comments that has ME clutching my pearls at times in the garbage bin lol. me!!! i mean this as the most odd compliment but the man sounds like something out of lolita at times. i talked about this before in a previous post with his whole support chain with f!corrin that started off as slightly off-kilter but went way, way into the incest-sexual territory. like, just today too, nearly spat-take'd irl at one of his FEH quotes aka:
"I'm impressed by the commander of this Order of Heroes here—a keen mind for one still in her bloom." (IN HER BLOOM, MY MAN LOL.)
the best part is he's self aware of it, to some degree -- like i can't not see the "if you loose catch, you have to do whatever I ask' in a filthy sort of self-aware-winking way, i haven't even touched the skinship lines which. ahem.
* to which, the ship dynamic with f!corrin is amazingly depraved for nintendo. it also somehow hits on my long list of every single secret favorite badwrong iddy tropes short of like, alutegra itself which is "the" ride or die OTP. (man, I don't see people using the acronym OTP anymore...) anyway, i'd be down for other gunter crackships if/when they appear, but there's something delicious about the explicit repeated psuedo-incest mentions with his possessiveness and history with corrin.
the funny thing is, i'm not normally an incest shipper (fashkink is more my problematic bread and butter), but there's been moments where i've been intrigued by fictional dad/daughter (psuedo) incest ships for the age gap angle, for the weirdly ... warm? protective? possessive angle? that is definitely still A Taboo. and this has been a great ship to actually start poking at that more with a stick.
like, what's up there! how does society react to them going public? do they, or are they essentially closeted the whole time? does gunter and/or corrin have hesitations and/or guilt about their feelings? how long have those feelings been there? do they give in to the sexual tension and fuck like bunnies in empty corridors whenever they get or is it sweetly-agonizingly dragged out? gunter was willing to go to the grave keeping his mouth shut about something he clearly knew was a taboo, there's so much mileage there.
(also this is the most romantic shit i think i've seen in a FE game and i'm still not over it)
* there's just enough absences (absence of fanworks, absence of character writing through large chunks of the game) to actually scratch at and want to invent wholesale. old games, and old fire emblems are particularly good at this, and lua and i have talked about how textual absences make it more fun to create for, versus something you still may enjoy, but there's nothing to add to.
as an example, was just thinking last night how niles is almost certinally the one to let corrin know there's whatever fates version of viagra (lol) is, once when niles gets the gossip of them hooking up, which would make for both an incredibly funny but also weirdly romantic and sincere fic since i really really want to scratch at the realism angle of erectile dysfunction. i fully intend on writing this.
* it's fun to be obsessed about a character (and by extension, a game) again. it's been a little ... hm, not depressing, but melancholic for the last ten years of just not being able to "get into" fandoms with a whole-brain obsession post mass effect era. i miss that feeling! foaming at the mouth for a character has a way of kicking out other life stresses. it feels good to warmly think on my nolstagia of being unhinged over sephiroth, and alucard, and others. (zihark feels like a separate bucket since he's more ... all-encompasing, but there's a lot of this feeling there too). embrace the fangirl cringe! as my younger self used to think, you can't spell fangirl without fang :P (wakka wakka)
what's also lovely is that fire emblem is one of my long-term comfort series, for better or for worse. been at it for 20 years in this series of sandboxes, and so there's a weird part of it that feels like putting on an old leather glove that's already been moulded to your hand (subtextual id intended). like, i don't have to ignore the gameplay to just go ... trash-can-ape-shit over the characters, or i don't have to ignore what canon does with the plot or ships. i find i need a positive feedback loop to create stuff, and re-playing the game has been a perfect de-stresser to start daydreaming about potential "what ifs" that are the perfect kernel for art and fic.
IN THIS ESSAY I SHALL :D ...
* he's hot (when he shouldn't be). i mean this both in the single-brain cell "send lewds" way that you can't fundamentally analyze and the ... aw hell, here goes three paragraphs regardless. for one, the competency kink is there (i strongly headcanon f!corrin's term for him is Sir, with how perfectly it fits into his knight-title and ah, other uses). two, i've always had a thing for ossans, despite not drawing them sexually as much (walon vau, zaeed, etc) - maybe it was insecurity of doing their body type justice, maybe it was plain ol' shame, maybe i was genuinely interested in their platonic angles first. regardless - gunter's a pattern rearing its head here, and by now i love the artistic challenge of actually drawing hot but unambiguously old men.
the longer psychoanalyzing version is i see ... very very few artists drawing them, versus fanficcers, and the thirst is there, so why not? i love how he's distinctly there as a technically romanceable character but is visually coded as the oddball, the clear "other" for us freaks, especially how young FE casts skew.
there's unique challenges to drawing old men too, like the obvious wrinkles, the sagging, the body language of how they carry themselves, not to mention thinking of scenarios that would hit different ... not that he's inherently kinky, but i get a helluva amount of mileage "off roading" into not-vanilla territory by drawing him. there's a sense of i find him both hot "and" it's very, very easy to step in his mind and subsume his own desire, because this own meatbag of mine honestly functions in similar ways to an elderly person. there's similar insecurities, a similar sort of ... 'your body and daily experiences gets inherently kinky/(strange/othered) to the average person and that sucks sometimes, but is an opportunity at the same time'. really meaty second and third level subtextual shit that i live and breathe.
* he's got a crunchy backstory. i've also been collecting his lines across the gacha game and elsewhere, and there's a lot of contrast. there's a quote in the wild about contrast being inherently erotic. contrast of him feeling very insecure about being an "old man", versus his experience as a knight. i wonder if he'd be too proud to use a cane until when he falls (does he use one in private?). the respectable wholesome knight-psuedo-dad plus the dirty old man as expanded on below. let alone the tension of him being so old with corrin, his private tensions between despising the nobility versus earning his experience (and again, his feelings for corrin who also didn't choose where she was born).
(i haven't even gotten into the possession slash bad end arc with revelation, which honestly will eventually be its own bullet point. trying to savor this man like a glass of good red wine, heh. but the hints of bitterness there is, whew, potent. speaking of i'm dying to see what the fan-writers wrote in as his revelations supports in that fe:fates mod that i think gives everyone gay options. )
* he's got a very intriguing, unusual mix of being the "respectable" wholesome knight but also saying the most incredibly dirty one-off comments that has ME clutching my pearls at times in the garbage bin lol. me!!! i mean this as the most odd compliment but the man sounds like something out of lolita at times. i talked about this before in a previous post with his whole support chain with f!corrin that started off as slightly off-kilter but went way, way into the incest-sexual territory. like, just today too, nearly spat-take'd irl at one of his FEH quotes aka:
"I'm impressed by the commander of this Order of Heroes here—a keen mind for one still in her bloom." (IN HER BLOOM, MY MAN LOL.)
the best part is he's self aware of it, to some degree -- like i can't not see the "if you loose catch, you have to do whatever I ask' in a filthy sort of self-aware-winking way, i haven't even touched the skinship lines which. ahem.
* to which, the ship dynamic with f!corrin is amazingly depraved for nintendo. it also somehow hits on my long list of every single secret favorite badwrong iddy tropes short of like, alutegra itself which is "the" ride or die OTP. (man, I don't see people using the acronym OTP anymore...) anyway, i'd be down for other gunter crackships if/when they appear, but there's something delicious about the explicit repeated psuedo-incest mentions with his possessiveness and history with corrin.
the funny thing is, i'm not normally an incest shipper (fashkink is more my problematic bread and butter), but there's been moments where i've been intrigued by fictional dad/daughter (psuedo) incest ships for the age gap angle, for the weirdly ... warm? protective? possessive angle? that is definitely still A Taboo. and this has been a great ship to actually start poking at that more with a stick.
like, what's up there! how does society react to them going public? do they, or are they essentially closeted the whole time? does gunter and/or corrin have hesitations and/or guilt about their feelings? how long have those feelings been there? do they give in to the sexual tension and fuck like bunnies in empty corridors whenever they get or is it sweetly-agonizingly dragged out? gunter was willing to go to the grave keeping his mouth shut about something he clearly knew was a taboo, there's so much mileage there.
(also this is the most romantic shit i think i've seen in a FE game and i'm still not over it)
* there's just enough absences (absence of fanworks, absence of character writing through large chunks of the game) to actually scratch at and want to invent wholesale. old games, and old fire emblems are particularly good at this, and lua and i have talked about how textual absences make it more fun to create for, versus something you still may enjoy, but there's nothing to add to.
as an example, was just thinking last night how niles is almost certinally the one to let corrin know there's whatever fates version of viagra (lol) is, once when niles gets the gossip of them hooking up, which would make for both an incredibly funny but also weirdly romantic and sincere fic since i really really want to scratch at the realism angle of erectile dysfunction. i fully intend on writing this.
* it's fun to be obsessed about a character (and by extension, a game) again. it's been a little ... hm, not depressing, but melancholic for the last ten years of just not being able to "get into" fandoms with a whole-brain obsession post mass effect era. i miss that feeling! foaming at the mouth for a character has a way of kicking out other life stresses. it feels good to warmly think on my nolstagia of being unhinged over sephiroth, and alucard, and others. (zihark feels like a separate bucket since he's more ... all-encompasing, but there's a lot of this feeling there too). embrace the fangirl cringe! as my younger self used to think, you can't spell fangirl without fang :P (wakka wakka)
what's also lovely is that fire emblem is one of my long-term comfort series, for better or for worse. been at it for 20 years in this series of sandboxes, and so there's a weird part of it that feels like putting on an old leather glove that's already been moulded to your hand (subtextual id intended). like, i don't have to ignore the gameplay to just go ... trash-can-ape-shit over the characters, or i don't have to ignore what canon does with the plot or ships. i find i need a positive feedback loop to create stuff, and re-playing the game has been a perfect de-stresser to start daydreaming about potential "what ifs" that are the perfect kernel for art and fic.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-07 12:32 am (UTC)(I say that, but man, FE has been one of those games that I could never get into...IDK why, the designs are lovely!)
I was just thinking this recently, on how it seems ossans "fandom" (for lack of a better word) seem to be at the corner of Popular Ship Street and Rare Pair drive, and it's the corner you either go to or don't. And they tend to be the "don't" for a lot of writing and art. For example, in the Pumpkin Scissors fandom, you know who's the ossan shippers because you can count them on one hand LOL (and they're all from Japan, though we are a small fandom...) I wonder if it's an age thing; I find myself more interested in older characters the more I age, even though I did like some when I was younger. Hmm. IDK. Someone smarter than me with that XD
Also, "how textual absences make it more fun to create for, versus something you still may enjoy, but there's nothing to add to"
SO TRUE. Some of my favorite characters have become more of a fave because...connecting the dots, adding stuff here and there, then suddenly going A-HA I LEARNED SOMETHING ABOUT YOU...I'm a fan of when there's media that leaves a bit of space for us to add, whether small or big, so it's always fun. With a game like FE, I presume there's a lot of that going!
"It's been a little ... hm, not depressing, but melancholic for the last ten years of just not being able to "get into" fandoms with a whole-brain obsession post mass effect era. i miss that feeling!"
I don't know if you've felt it too, but for me, this is half a mood. I tend to get into things still, but it's depressing to see how modern fandoms just pack up and move when the thing ends. Like, I just got here and y'all leaving? Y'ALL LEFT FOOD UNEATEN, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU
XD
Like, I'm an oldtaku. We kept a lot of fandoms alive, even the lurkers. But now it's like even the attention span has affected this so much that unless you're an absolute runaway hit, there's almost no...no loyalty? For lack of a better word. It's just well this ended, so bye. No! Stay! There's fans who want to create a fandom too, why is everyone else leaving?
To not say of when you go back to old fandoms and see how much it's changed, for better....or for absolute worse :'D (But that's a tangent.)
It does say something however, that for the old fandoms where stuff has changed only in terms of maturity but still welcoming of different opinions, they are still way easier to slip into than modern fandom nowadays. I've been "getting into" my old stuff again for the past few years. Lot of it nostalgia, of course, but also, just wanting to see how new fans interpret a thing you've taken for granted and get a good convo out of it. Or new things to share!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-13 03:21 pm (UTC)(handshake emoji with the appeal there 'as you get older' too- since we've been talking about hans elsewhere, feel like the vibe of ... life experiences adding nuances and flavor and relateability is a huge thing there.
Not a worry at all re: FE -- i've got a number of friends who say the same thing; it's got a very specific/rigid/unforgiving gameplay. thankfully it's also one of those where it's easy to spin off into fanworks out the wazoo ~
"y'all left food uneaten" JKSJSJSHS THAT'S EXACTLY IT THO LMAO."it's just the appetizer course y'all!!"