krad

(crossposted from tumblr, tags included.)

on the Fire Emblem series' general trend towards marrying as a gameplay gimmick, at least beyond the "yeay"/"nay" polarization.

( Read more... )

(crossposting fire emblem meta (mostly zihark, some gunter) from the tumblr ~ )

see i love dissecting zihark for very similar reasons to gunter:

because both of them have their surface level "cute/sweet" ~perfect~ ~palatable~ story - 'oh he's just the northern fortress dad' or 'oh he fights for equality because of his dead laguz lover so tragically romantic ;a;'

and gunter, i've talked about here at length, lol - there is a technical piece of truth to that (he does care for corrin and the northern fortress kids but it is. a teeny part of the actual truth. and man is he deliciously rancid.)

but zihark -

first thing is, there's grieving for That One (and people always will for their whole lives especially if there's a death involved, some folks are just special) - but there's also.... like we have all heard about a Guy Who Is A Little Weird about his ex in a big-ass-red-flag sense, right.

and even if he's not That Kind of Weird about his lover/romantically in general - you start to notice, where's friends for him, where's a home, the plague hit when he was four, did his family die in the plague? how did he survive financially before being a mercenary?

beyond 'where is a single support person/authority figure for you, man' - he's introduced in a constant mindset of being a mole/traitor for vigilantes who would viscerally - hate his guts if they knew the truth about him. (in darker corners of the world, violent thug types who would hunt other living beings for sport get.... really fucking violent about perceived sexual deviance and that is exactly how they'd view it, without mincing words. bleakly, that's assuming if he wasn't found out at least once.)

it takes a not-all-there personality to actually be able to integrate oneself with those thuggish types, survive without being revealed, and hold one's own mindset separate, for what, months? years? he's not mature or particularly well trained before being thrown to the wolves, either.

so you've got that jagged edge, and then curiously, you've got the other extreme where when he is in a position to defect to the laguz army, he .... doesn't.

emotionally paralyzed. he's manipulative and charming enough to survive but there's a curious core of apathy, disassociation, distance, adrift-ness at the smallest sense of conflict. he's not going to lead the charge, but rather weaves in and out of the corners of your eye and wait.

(and between those two extremes i distinctly get the sense he's subconsciously a martyr - do right, yes - but distinctly not giving a real hard damn about whether he's staying on this world or not if things went the wrong way and he fucked up in combat.)

that

that, man - is a hell a lot more interesting to me than that sheen we're given.

okay, fire emblem tellius zihark characterization essay that's been cooking for years, aka this one:


( cracks knuckles. )

i saw a cute tellius shipping meme recently but realized pretty quickly after filling out a few tiers that i would receive the stank eye from most of the fandom for highly unorthodox tastes. :P parking this here instead of other SNS sites since i trust y'all quite a bit more; tellius peeps feel free to gank ~

( anyway, here's the list. beware for dead dove. )

drawing zihark has always been interesting because on one hand he is absolutely a pretty boy bishie, right, lol.

but on the other hand i've always thought he'd have this unsettling... intensity? most of the time you'd assume he's in airhead land when he's intentionally being ~quirky silly~ or not even really see him because he knows how to melt into the background, but he'd look at you and it's simultaneously right through you and too much. i could see some characters being spooked. the scales of judgement are not in your favor, etc, and the times he'd be weirdly confrontational (rare) do not at all line up when you'd expect it too - he'd be placidly smiling when he's truly annoyed, and he'd love to annoy you when he's actually pleased (all the times he teases characters in supports - it can be surprisingly sharp at times).

(imo the best zihark fanfic writers like neotula & queenlua & a few others of you here) understand that implicitly. <3 bless u)

so i've been leaning into that askew-ness, the off-kilter like quality a little more recently in this feh strip. remember this mini essay on sleaze and trying to dial more into it with art? leaning deliberately on a lot of that since this flavor/themes the strip touches on selfshipping cough, but also the coercion factor with gacha summoning contracts is very much all in the territory. this is home, in some ways.

and idk it's fun experimenting how to pull off that intensity stylistically. exaggerating and pulling certian expressions. pushing back against the omnipresent habit of making people "pretty" first and instead bringing the subtext of expression to the forefront.

shit's the crunchy side of drawing i love. :D

zihark's such an interesting take on the nabarl archetype since most of them are about bettering their blade skills, bettering themselves in some fashion or another. bettering themselves by getting revenge.

and at first blush zihark's whole character arc (like tellius deconstructing everything else) is him dedicated to bettering the world/bettering his country. not himself. (it's funny. i hate idealists as characters. so many things about his character i should have bounced off on.) except....

this is also tellius, and that's not quite the entire story, is it?

he's an idealist at his heart but he's a sellsword like every other nabarl. he fights for a better world for laguz but he's more daein than he wants to admit, and can and does stick with them until ideals are warped beyond recognition. on the flip side he fights for a better world but makes jokes about cutting down humans in port toha. he also has a tendency to waffle/stall enough that he can pretend that blood is out of his hands (the quote unquote quasi-bad ending of him staying with micaiah's army in p3 of radiant dawn is, quite illuminating. my heart aches for him there but it's also a very very needful view of one angle of his character).

honestly it's zihark's constant hypocrisy (tension, inherent contradiction) that's the most fascinating part of his character - he's deft and light (distant?) enough that it never quite rings as the blatant hypocrisy that it is, or hint of the real dark side that i do think he contains but more or less steers himself away from. (he's very libra like that. judge, jury, smiling executioner all in one). i think he has a deliberate, cultivated tendency to skitter away (from himself, from others) before seeing emotional consequences - a necessary defense, learned the hard way. none of us wants to feel hurt, but there's almost a certain empty, restless extreme quality to it that only catches up to him in the P3 bit mentioned above.

paints quite a bit different of a picture than the selfless idealist, doesn't it.

in this essay i shall -

i was lazily googling around for zihark's kanji and this old radiant dawn gameplay essay absolutely sends me:

- "zihark, the overlooked god" as the TITLE. you are CORRECT gamer bro sir, the only valid gamer bro

- 'how to train your zihark' LMAO

- 'he's good if you give him two robes, a dracoshield, an energy drop, and all the best skills-' i mean. yes. this is also how i treat mine but also gamer bro i think the dawn brigade might need those more than him :D;;;;;

(it's funny because it straddles the line of a troll post i was surprised it didn't have the "humor" tag but also like.... it's just sincere enough in that '15 years post release microanalysis cope' i can truly see somebody writing it.)

.... now this is making me want to do the zihark&ike RD solo again ..... (it's doable and it is so, so funny)

I finally reached 2,100 orbs in the FE gacha.

mentioning here since a) it's been fun, i've been playing since 2020 and sunk an ungodly amount of hours in it, certinally more than most mainline games especially with looking up FEH news, but i'm. tired. i'm done. and b) i've been wanting to "audit/clean" where i spend my time (will do a dreamwidth spring clean too), and that was a big negative time-sink/activity on the cutting block. 

it's bittersweet as that was my specific goal of putting it on ice/indefinite hiatus. ( Read more... )

not a rant per se but an observation (ok it's totally a rant) :P

( fe fates stuff, minor fandom harasser mentions )

it's really wild finding prolific fates/gunter posters who have been inactive for years now

cuz on one hand i really, really miss not being able to chat/shitpost with the best of them (we would have gotten along so well lol)

on the other hand that was uhhh, 2014-16?

and i don't know how to say this politely, but even as horny as fates is as a whole, gunter fans (and the everything with the S support) are .... next level pervy/kinky lol. like, you gotta be comfortable with several kinds of dead dove at minimum - you gotta walk in cracking up at viagra jokes.

and i only barely got comfortable drawing kink art in 2018-19, not even in the least bit the same amount of years.

so it's just wild going 'mm, man i would have not been mature enough to even remotely approach this, even probably 3 years ago.'

duality of fen?
i suppose it's the new generations of folks picking up the games that keep the flame alive.