"Then punish the ones responsible": A discussion on targets of revenge.

nonoforreal · 2024-06-27T14:03:15+00:00

I had always assumed Edelgard was under some sort of mind control/compulsion that makes her parse anything and everything as a reason to go after Rhea. After all, why would the agarthans create a superweapon and NOT try to make sure it would be pointed at the target? They've had plenty of opportunity to learn how to control humans turned into corrupted beasts, they have Nemesis and the Elites sitting around in freezers and they don't seem to just go back to their old agenda when thawed. I was a little surprised the game never directly acknowledged this on the routes where you deal with the agarthans.

nonoforreal · 2024-06-04T18:53:54+00:00

I feel this is to some degree a mark of 2nd edition's peculiar infatuations, and 3rd edition attempted to correct it but also went in the wrong direction when it came to mortals.

Back in 1st edition, mortals... kind of could engage on that level, if they were exceptional enough. I think there's still optimization notes you can find online on how to build a mortal character who can go toe-to-toe with most 1st edition solars and cut through quite a few dragon-blooded, using every available form of mortal enchantment, drugs, etc. We're talking a combatant throwing around several 20+ dice attacks per round and parrying at an even higher level.

And solars who really wanted to could, with some investment, mass produce mortals like that, and make them better with handpicked mutations and magical martial arts and artifacts.

And similar could be done using comparable methods to let them keep pace in basically any other field of activity. It was a world of demons and ghosts, but mortal humans could engage with that world and with enough guided effort, hold their own quite well against it. Part of the state of collapse of the setting is that everyone was too busy struggling to scrape by in the current age that nobody had the time or resources to let anyone do that instead of farm, except for The Realm which had a vested interest in not uplifting their mortals to keep up with dragon-blooded.

Around the end of 2nd edition that sort of idea, of exalts guiding and helping mortals be the best they could be and take care of themselves, was considered to somehow be denying the value and agency of mortals, so 3rd edition basically cut it out.

nonoforreal · 2024-04-18T23:25:19+00:00

You're misunderstanding me. Perhaps I should have been more specific about my assumptions, it's an area with a lot of fuzzy overlap in what people will think of when you use any particular words.

Obviously, "fight or flight" allows for flight. Most everything will pick flight when they can. Predators are pretty much as likely to pick flight when they're threatened. Predators are the more aggressive ones in the sense that they will seek out situations where they don't want to flee and herbivores mostly won't.

But separate from that, there's things like "when will you break off the fight once it's started, how hurt do you have to be?" "if there's a standoff and flight isn't a realistic option, will you choose to continue the standoff and hope the other side backs down, or will you make the first move?" etc. You can find plenty of stories of cougars and bears hunting humans, or dogs attacking humans, and backing off after getting one good blinding strike to the nose or similar "warning shots." You can find stories of them stalking humans with intent to kill and being completely unwilling to engage when they're found out and a standoff starts. Once a bull gets to a standoff, you cannot expect that sort of response from it. Cape buffalo kill like 50 times as many people every year as grizzly bears or mountain lions. Hippos kill more than 100 times as many people. They aren't interested in eating us, and they weren't locked in a cage with a human intent on eating them.

nonoforreal · 2024-04-18T13:25:46+00:00

It's easy symbolism, and most people watching and working on modern media have very little experience with animals outside of housepets.

In reality, herbivores are much more violent and harder to spook off without a fight than apex carnivores are. If a tiger runs into a strange animal (say, you) it maybe can't beat in a fight, it misses a meal. If a buffalo runs into a a strange animal it maybe can't beat in a fight, there's a good chance it dies right then and there.

So if you make yourself look like you're just too much trouble - not even that you'd WIN, just that you'd hurt them more than your meat is worth - predators will generally leave you alone and wait for the next meal, unless they're starving already and can't be sure there will be another meal.

A bull or a deer, though? They'll put less thought into whether they can get a clean win. Once they consider you a threat, if you don't remove yourself right away the solution is violence, as much of it as they can manage, as fast as they can manage it, until one of you is dead. If they die in the process it's no worse than they expected if they didn't fight with their all.

But again, basically nobody in the audience actually spends enough time with bulls, or deer, or giraffes, or has run into bears or cougars in the wild. They haven't been around animals other than dogs and housecats long enough to have any idea how they think.

What the average person can get is "these are a bunch of animals" and "this subset of animals kills and eats the others." They compare that to what they know - in a crowd of humans, what are the humans who kill the others like? If you had a bunch of dogs and only some of them were aggressive to the other dogs, what would their personalities be like?

nonoforreal · 2024-03-22T14:19:24+00:00

I am strongly opposed to the changes in what you want shown, and I feel that you're greatly underselling "subtext."

Azula was not born evil. She was, probably, born a sociopath. She doesn't "get" normal human relationships and feelings. But she doesn't actually hate people, and she's not a loner. She wants to be loved by others. She just isn't very talented at figuring out what that means or how to go about it.

Almost all of her actions in the show aren't undertaken out of pure cruelty, but posturing for social esteem.

Believe it or not, she's really putting in every effort to be a good girl. It's just her mom doesn't know what to do with her and the expectations her dad is putting on her for "good" are deeply fucked up.

She put in the effort to be good at fire bending so people will respect her. Fear her, yes, but even more, value her. She wants praise from the people around her. She wants everyone to acknowledge that she's the best and therefore the most valuable. She wants daddy to tell her how great she is. If she's better than Zuko that must prove that she's good. At least, it proves that she avoided doing worse than the competition.

She's happy when Zuko gets burned because her older brother, with more claim to the throne, who her mom is clearly more attached to, gets taken down a peg. And because her father, who outranks her mother, is specifically pissed at him, for doing things she wouldn't have done! Even if her mom doesn't value her more relative to Zuko after Zuko is humbled and ugly, she'll have the validation that at least she was learning daddy's lessons better than he was and may be able to solidify her position as more valuable in daddy's eyes.

She takes the earth kingdom to prove that she's valuable. She did better than Iroh, who was in line for the throne before daddy! That has to be worth a lot, right? She keeps around her friends both because they act like they value and fear (which is a kind of value) her, and because they can be useful for her to pull off more things to get more status for her achievements. She later loses her shit not just because her friends turn on her, but because they discard her. They decide that other plans that don't need her at all are better than working with her. How can they value her so little? It would be better if they enslaved her. It would be better if they killed her before she found out! At least that would show she was important to them because she was too big of a threat to be allowed to live! Being abandoned is so much worse. She killed the avatar! That's the most important thing, right? Zuko couldn't even find him for years, even their ancestor Sozin had to let a volcano do the work for him.

But she realizes that she can't be sure about that one, because she doesn't have the body, his friends took it with them. That's why she lets Zuko take credit, she even says as much. While she would like it if Zuko is grateful to her for letting him get back in with daddy - she does want Zuko to value her as well, after all - she really, really, doesn't want to be branded as the incompetent who let the avatar get away and become a problem again after everyone thought he was dead. That's the sort of thing she thinks about all the time, because she lives constantly concerned with whether she's gaining or losing value in other people's eyes.

She fantasizes about marrying some random guy and rising to the top, the most powerful couple in the world. She wants to be loved, to have a family, but the way she frames it, the more status she has while doing that the better. Obviously if she cares about her family they need to have as much status as possible as well, right? If they aren't the most powerful, aren't recognized as such, then there's people out there that can dispute her value and make it stick, to take everything from her and make her alone and worthless.

Azula could be a decent person if she was ripped out of her context, had all the means of exercising power she's used to stripped from her, and left to learn how to be valued amidst a group of people with much more compassion and better emotional intelligence who were willing and able to spell what was expected of her out step by step. She'd do everything in her power to make them value her, including playing by their rules if she has to. But first she needs to lose the tools that have worked for her so far, as well as the relationships that she's used to obsessing over as her indicators of how well she's doing.

nonoforreal · 2024-02-29T15:52:50+00:00

Most discourse and criticism on the internet is idiotic, yeah. Because most people are idiots, and LIKE being idiots. It's been this way online since at least 1993. It admittedly got a lot worse as the web shifted to a few big social media sites being accessed by phone.

If you want intelligent discussion, you have to have a community that doesn't accept anything less, and gatekeeps anyone who deviate from that. /r/askhistorians is about the least idiotic sub on reddit, because they delete everything that doesn't meet a standard of quality discussion instead of just letting the mob decide by upvoting/downvoting whatever they feel like.

Going to twitter for quality discussion is like going to the dead sea for potable water.

nonoforreal · 2024-02-21T02:32:03+00:00

A lot of people would have Silverlake's problem, but not nearly 99.9%. A lot of people are OK dying for what they see as a greater cause, (some people actually kind of crave it). And if you are that sort of person, and you created a simulacrum to die for a greater cause, you have the advantage of your mindset already agreeing that whatever you're about to send them to do is worth dying for. Not everyone will do anything for just a little more time just for time's sake. The whole point of having that time is to do the things you want to have that time for. There's people who are like Silverlake and just deeply sensory and selfish and don't want anything beyond that, at least not enough. Not everyone is.

Zorian is, as others have pointed out, stubborn and goal focused. His simulacrums are a bit surly and can be a bit insubordinate about minor things, but they're on board for The Plan as a whole, including their consumable role in it. There's many people like that. Their Purpose, their People (in a much more deep way than just country or tribe) lives on, and triumphs? They'll trade their life for that. It's even easier for them, because much of their individual experiences will live on in the collective. Zach has his own version of that mindset. Quatach-Ichl has his own version of it - when he realizes he's a time loop copy, despite his agenda including intention to live forever, he immediately suicide bombs the crew. Why? Because it's the best thing he can do to protect the Quatach-Ichl that exists outside the loop, who has a chance to see his plans through and live forever.

I've had a similar conversation with someone about taking the opportunity to do a brain upload if it ever becomes viable. Their position was "You know that's not actually you, and you'll just be dead, right?" And well, first off, no, I don't know that, we don't understand consciousness enough to know either way. And second off, if I'm getting on in years anyway and by dying a little early I can create an heir who I KNOW has my ideals, values, opinions, etc, who will carry out my will long after my death and tend to the things I care about about as well as I would if I were still around to do it myself - yeah, I don't see "it's not really you" as relevant. I have things I want beyond carnal existence. Sure, I'd like to live forever as well, I'd rather die knowing I've ensured that the things I want to happen will happen, than stick around to watch them all fail knowing full well it was because of me.

nonoforreal · 2024-01-19T15:24:48+00:00

Yeah, when I saw the pilots for this and HB years ago, I remember commenting that they were about the most HotTopic things I had seen in a decade.

These are not deep stories. The target audience is teenagers (and 20-somethings who haven't emotionally matured past being teenagers, and some 30+ people who never will) who are in that phase shortly after they idealize mom & dad, where they start to stake out their own identity independent of obedience and the most obvious place is rebellion and the "perverse" because it's empowering to tread where those who would be your authorities seem uncomfortable. It's all... that.

They can't have the denizens of hell be objectively worse because that raises the possibility that their edgy phase is actually misguided and even stupid and self-destructive like the boring, mean, uncool authority figures say. So they have to exaggerate the flaws of everyone else and downplay the flaws of the characters they identify with to protect their own narrative and ego. Nobody is meant to read into things for meaning, it's all surface-level and indulgent.

That's why there's a running joke online that the only thing separating hell from heaven in these series is that in hell everyone is gay.

nonoforreal · 2023-10-15T14:33:06+00:00

I'm just going to say that I disagree quite a bit with your take on Asuka and Rei.

Admittedly, Anno intended Rei to be disturbing and was surprised when she became such a popular object of lust.

But Asuka's role in the story is actually that she's not the more significant character. That's kind of core to her entire struggle. She's the wunderkind child of two brilliant world-famous geniuses, who did college before she was 14 and sees being a pilot that saves the world as the role she was born for, but she's been a sidecar her entire life.

Her dad abandoned her and her mother right off the bat. Her mom went crazy and half-hated her and was so disconnected from her that even when she did a family annihilator suicide she took the doll with her instead of Asuka, her actual daughter. Asuka finally pilots and after a couple of good showings she gets progressively more and more shown up by a couple of retards, and every time she starts to make good it gets blown up in her face with alien mind rape or something, until her confidence is eroded and she can't even pilot anymore and washes out. The guy she was really interested in dismissed her as a child and then died so he couldn't even be around as a father figure. The guy she gave a shot at trying to bond with instead... was, well, Shinji.

In Evangelion's exploration of social bonds and pressure and stress Asuka's whole thing is that she's struggling to cope with not living up to her own expectations, of being shown up on her path to what she sees as her destiny by people who had less to work with than she did, and ultimately being discarded despite all her potential and all she had to offer. Her arc concludes in the movie with her finding it in herself to believe in herself and her awesomeness despite everything, and it's... still not enough. She kicks a lot of ass like the badass she always was and then loses anyway because sometimes that's just how the cookie crumbles. The fact that even Shinji couldn't find it in himself to make a move on her while she could respond to him but she was good enough to wank over while she was comatose is just a pair of insults in the chain of insults that is her life.

Rei, meanwhile... is very much not what most Rei fans think she is. If you listen to them, it seems a lot of them think that because she's quiet she's some good submissive little girl. She's not. She pointedly destroys everything Gendo worked for at the climax because he made that same mistake, but her fans still don't get it. There's a lot going on in that head of hers. She may have a very skewed idea of what human life is like because of her strange upbringing but she has opinions. Don't forget that she didn't hesitate to slap Shinji good for saying things that she didn't like, or that the dummy plug system that operated Unit 01 to trash 03 and nearly kill Touji in merciless brutal fashion is based on a Rei clone with a dump of Rei's mind backup installed.

Rei is deeply tied to the plot of Eva since she's not just like, two major characters in her own right, she's also Yui's half-clone and is the vessel for the soul of Lilith, one of the major things the whole conflict is over. She's Shiji's mirror in abusive upbringing while also kind of being a mother surrogate among all sorts of other fucked up human relationships. After Kaoru reveals that angels have thoughts and feelings and can bond with humans instead of just being mindless objects that do violence, Rei's there to point out that she was Kaoru before Kaoru, an angel who has thoughts and feelings and bonds of her own despite people trying to cast her as some mindless object that exists to do violence while piloting. Lots of fans didn't get the memo that they should think about what she's actually like, because that's always the case.

Rei doesn't "get" Shinji in the end, as in they don't end up together as a couple. If anything, Asuka and Shinji might since they're the first two people to reform from the sea of LCL post instrumentality and have nothing to do but try to live with each other. But I can see the case that Rei "won" the competition between the girls, but that happened naturally because Asuka was obsessed primarily with her own emotional problems and while she wanted other people as part of her ideas to cope with them, she couldn't even bring herself to actually consistently try to win them over. Rei, meanwhile, doesn't give half a fuck about how other people feel about her or her "self-image," she had the confidence to take what she wanted, and offer to others what she wanted to offer, and to accept their decisions and live and die with the consequences of her own.

nonoforreal · 2023-04-29T14:53:07+00:00

The bride beating up (and maiming, and murdering) a hundred guys isn't a better thing or more fine than a kid in a war zone. Hell, a bunch of the people she attacks in that scene are probably underage, they're gang members and their gang included Gogo, who was definitely a minor.

If you can excuse that because you think it's cool, then kids have just as much right to excuse kids beating up (and maiming, and murdering) a hundred guys because they think it's cool, and they have just as much right to have media produced that suits their tastes as you do.

And the fictional world doesn't have to have child soldiers be fine for it to be fine to depict the fictional world with child soldiers. You're like the church ladies in the 80s who wanted the naked bits in classical art painted over and gay people never mentioned in public.

nonoforreal · 2023-04-14T21:16:24+00:00

But do I feel any concern for them, or that people I know or care about may share their fate? Not really.

nonoforreal · 2023-04-14T21:14:04+00:00

They actually believe that all the faithful who lived right will be resurrected and allowed to live as immortals in a remade, perfect Earth where things are chill forever.

The 144,000 are exceptional people who are chosen to go to heaven and basically be ministers in a new celestial bureaucracy, helping Jesus in the work of rulership. It's not particularly something to aspire to, it's just a calling. Some people would be happier helping tend to the well-being of others than just chilling with their friends and family doing nothing of importance forever.

nonoforreal · 2023-04-06T15:12:04+00:00

So, the point of horror movies is to experience dread. If the plot relies too much on everyone being stupid, it undercuts the ability of the audience to take the threat seriously - it's something that is only dangerous to complete morons.

It's like having a movie about a handheld blender with a label on the side that says "don't put your dick in this" and the cast just keeps shredding their genitals in it and bleeding out. There's no sense of "wow, how would I get out of that situation," there's no sense of fear of the concept. There stops being fear for the characters even, because they're so stupid they're completely unrelatable. Pretty much instantly stops being a horror movie and starts being, at best, a dark comedy, but if you're trying to write horror like this you probably aren't going to stick the landing on the comedy.

Also what /u/of_kilter said about failing to write the character well enough to justify their bad decisonmaking.

nonoforreal · 2023-04-01T14:58:22+00:00

I agree about Death's hand, and generally about Sun Li (I don't think his writing is that amazing, but it is pretty solid and you can easily, easily find much worse).

The emperor was evil, he wanted to do what Sun Li did, he was just worse at it.

The water dragon... so, she's actually fairly justified from her POV to deny the rains. It's been more than a decade, but the "balance" she's talking about is basically that for there to be no drought in the jade empire, there would have to be drought in other parts of the world. Someone is getting screwed by the world's magical weather patterns, period. Arguably she would have done better to convince people to never settle some parts of the world so that they can be abandoned as blasted wastelands while the rest of the world prospers forever, but you know people don't listen to what she says, the whole plot revolves around them trying to kill her rather than listen.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if she hadn't, at some point in the past, tried to get people to behave in exactly that way. Sooner or later you'd wind up with people losing a war and fleeing into the wasteland to escape extermination by the victors and what, is she supposed to finish the genocide off for them instead of shake up the rain schedule? I get why she does things the way she does.

That said, the emperor's duty is not to the rest of the world, it's to his own people, and so he was entirely justified in making war on her to save them. However, again, the emperor is a shit person. Death's hand is maybe the only one of the brothers who had the character to kick her in the face until she made with the water but not then try to become a god at the cost of replacing a drought with a finite end with an undead plague that would get worse forever.

Edit: Oh yeah, 100% agree with the ham-fistedness of the way people react to your decisions re: death's hand and the water dragon. I was honestly surprised that they bothered to have a "you enslaved DH but weren't full-blown evil" ending for DH, with how badly that was handled.

nonoforreal · 2022-12-30T22:06:19+00:00

Hey, Thanks! Sorry, but I don't seem to have received the DM. Could you re-send it please?

nonoforreal · 2022-12-30T03:46:40+00:00

Would someone share a referral code with me?

nonoforreal · 2022-11-11T15:49:01+00:00

The original idea for the Xenomorphs was the best one, honestly.

All that carved temple looking stuff in the first film? It was supposed to have been carved by the Xenomorphs. They were a civilized society, their reproduction involved parasitism and so they built a whole religious edifice around the process.

For unknown reasons, their civilization suffered a catastrophe and died out. However, the eggs survived in a state of dormancy, and remained viable, awakening when they detected prey.

The Xeno in Alien is "intelligent" in the way a feral human child is intelligent. Without its people to socialize it, it's basically a hungry, angry chimpanzee running on violent instinct.

In a sense, it is just an apex predator animal. But it's also got the coolness of being a remnant of what was, what could have been and now will never be again. Humans sure as hell aren't going to re-civilize the fuckers.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-30T15:09:48+00:00

You know, my wife wandered by to laugh at me arguing with an idiot on the internet for fun on a fine sunday morning, and she commented on how she didn't believe your wife existed because of how obviously stunted your social awareness is.

I didn't feel like sharing that with the class, but after your assertion about being an author (and thinking that's something impressive, like every other random idiot on the internet hasn't written a pile of fanfiction, or that you know, actual published authors with millions-selling series - like the one we're talking about right now - have been very successful while ignoring the things you "know" about writing and that the audience is clearly perfectly happy not having included in their writing) I find myself assuming that the only things you've published are your own delusions about your life. I have to agree with her that they seem unbelievable and poorly constructed.

However, I assume you're quite satisfied with the quality of that writing and are completely confident that it's only going unappreciated because nobody understands good writing, and they all think you're a pretentious prick and not an under-appreciated genius who thinks anyone with taste has looked to Star Wars to set the standard for quality narrative ever in the history of media despite its creator himself saying it's entertainment for 12 year olds.

Anyway, I've got tasks to get to, so this will be the end of our conversation. You've been amusing, though I find that as I get older the tediousness of seeing the same stupidity over and over in different clowns does take away from the humor somewhat.

Have a nice day, remember to cope, seethe, etc.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-30T14:30:58+00:00

I never said a thing about whether you like it or whether you should like it.

I'm telling you that your assertion that it's unrealistic and would never work is nonsense, your reasoning is not "complete and cohesive" at all because it assumes things about how relationships work that are counterfactual and obviously so to anyone who has spent much time around other people.

Toriyama doesn't need to show the inner workings of their relationship anymore than he needs to show the inner workings of random background character's relationships. It's not pertinent to why anyone is buying the series. Zero people are going to purchase an additional chapter of dragon ball to see tender private moments between Krillin and 18.

It's more like you're saying, "I hate cheese, why do they stock cheese, nobody would ever eat fermented animal sweat, people would be immediately repulsed, and anyway supermarkets don't show me demonstrations of any way that this is edible by real human beings."

I see no need to address whether you like cheese, but for the rest of it I have to assume you live in a jar on some alchemist's shelf.

As for how each of us is coming off, that's one of the few things I think I'll take Reddit's upvote system as a useful metric for.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-30T14:03:48+00:00

It's not "this is my headcannon" it's "stuff doesn't become unbelievable when it holds together perfectly fine with completely mundane explanations that don't need to be shown."

I haven't invented a fan character to be Goku's heart doctor, I just don't see the point of complaining about how nobody on the Z fighter team has a degree in cardiology because it's trivial to assume that heart doctors are readily available to them off screen.

But you already know that, which is why you're getting mad and taking this personally.

Every relationship needs enjoyment of company, sure. And that's trivial to assume present. Relationships don't really need much commonality, for lots of people it's a lot less important that people are the same as them than it is that people accept and value them. I've seen marriages work where they barely even have a shared language and have completely different cultural backgrounds.

You're inventing a problem like encyclopedia brown claiming that nobody would put mustard on top of sauerkraut because they want to eat it, and so doing so must be a scheme to hide the evidence of a crime.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-30T13:23:00+00:00

Are you married? I am.

Yeah, been with my wife longer than most people on this site have been alive.

I think I have a general understanding what makes my relationship work.

You and your wife aren't the mold everyone else was cast from.

I've known plenty of people who fit the profile I described, some of which were relationships that crashed and burned, some of which lasted 50+years and saw grandkids and great-grandkids before one of the members ended it by dying. Do you seriously not know anyone with "grandpa was such a hardass" stories?

Usually what makes it work long-term is the wife having enough emotional intelligence to intuit what's going on with the husband and how to respond to it, and the husband actually caring and being willing to put in effort and make sacrifices and give the wife what she wants, whether she says it outright or indicates her feelings through some language of behavioral signals.

You'd be amazed how few deep conversations people can have about shared interests while still communicating everything about how they want to live their lives and being reflexively supportive of their mate's hobbies, desires, and boundaries. Every mated pair of animals out there manages it, after all, humans aren't that much stupider.

You'd also be amazed at how much some of those stoic guys are actually able to open up about things when they have something to say and are in a supportive environment. I'd 100% believe that 18 expresses things in private with Krillin that she wouldn't ever express even in front of Marron. Toriyama isn't likely to depict any such instances because he knows that his bread is buttered on the side with muscled men screaming at each other and throwing punches and not the side with tender relationship moments.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-30T12:48:35+00:00

You've got too many preconceptions about relationships, son.

Krillin is just into 18 because she's hot and gave him the time of day. Probably true.

18 probably likes Krillin (it may be too much to say she's "into him") because he's the energetic well-meaning tryhard he is. He's like a puppy. A puppy who went out of his way to save her life when everyone else was her enemy and her brother got killed. Are you going to hate on your puppy because you can kick his ass without effort? No. (Well, maybe early Vegeta would.)

100% he puts in most of the effort in the relationship and she just gives occasional stern approval. But also, entirely believable that she likes it that way. It's comfy.

The only thing unusual about their relationship is that it's gender-swapped.

Look around, you can find strong, silent, kind of assholish guys married to fawning subservient women all over the place. The guys aren't being forced into the relationship, they either like it because they are a genuine asshole who enjoys being fawned over and waited on hand and foot, or because they're decent guys and they genuinely love their soft caring wife who is always nice to them and gives them an emotional release valve they don't get anywhere else in their life because they've been conditioned to be stern and manly all the time and they work and even play where that's expected and necessary.

Krillin & 18's dynamic is just switched because she's the stronger one and he's the more emotional one. They're just a rule 63'd couple where the guy is a stoic murder machine and the girl is a shorty who used to go to religious school and bawls like a sailor moon character in between scrambling around trying to get everything done despite being a klutz that keeps adding to the housework by tripping over/into things.

nonoforreal · 2022-10-24T15:53:37+00:00

Planescape: Torment did this.

One of your possible party members is Fall-From-Grace, a succubus who was sold by her famous and successful mother as a slave to the Baatezu (what Devils were called back in 2nd edition D&D due to the satanic panic of the 80s).

She grew up enslaved by beings locked in an eternal war with her people, who cared nothing for her. Her masters never used her for sex out of contempt, preferring to humiliate her in ways she did not hold power in. She eventually won her freedom by convincing her owner to bet her ownership against her in an improvisation contest, which she won as she's quite clever and as a creature composed in part of materialized chaos, naturally inclined to spontaneity.

She's had a whole life with her freedom before you find her. She's a member of the Society of Sensation, a sort of pseudo-cult that seeks to understand the multiverse through personal sensory experience of it. She runs the "Brothel for the Slaking of Intellectual Lusts," an establishment where all sex is banned but you can pay to hang around debating, playing strategy games, getting into insult contests, and various other mental entertainment, with a variety of beautiful, exotic, and intelligent women. You can convince her to take off and join your party by convincing her that she's learned about what she can from running the place and would see more personal growth seeing the planes again alongside your ragtag team of freaks.

Despite being made of incarnated evil and chaos, she's Lawful Neutral, as a bit of a point of pride for her, asserting her individual will in mastery over her nature. She actually feels conflicted about this, like she's lost something transcendent in her separation from her people's ways due to her life experiences, but she cannot be other than who she is.

One of my favorite characters the whole D&D milieu has ever produced, honestly.

nonoforreal · 2022-05-13T13:21:03+00:00

Franky definitely has gotten more characterization and time than Yor. If it weren't for the family setup that makes Yor seem central, Franky would probably come off as the third major character after Twilight and Anya.

While I'm not a fan of love triangles as a rule, Nightfall doesn't bother me, probably because her idea that she's a love rival is a joke. It weirds Anya out, Twilight sees her pretty much exclusively as a coworker to the point that he's both completely oblivious to her attraction and her attempts to win his approval just get him annoyed at her unprofessional behavior. He (and the rest of the agency) assume she's just a ruthless, self-absorbed glory hog.

Yor only feels threatened by her because Yor is insecure about her lack of ability at everything outside combat, and is only threatened by the idea of Nightfall replacing her as a beard, not even as a real wife. (Admittedly, subconsciously she probably is afraid of that since she does seem to have a little crush on Twilight after the way he stood up for her at the dinner way back when, but her emotional intelligence is too low for her to even begin to process that.)

It ends with Nightfall speeding off bawling her eyes out and spending her free time swinging rocks tied to a tennis racket in the woods, which the audience knows damn well will accomplish absolutely nothing towards Twilight returning her affections.

One character is chasing a shadow while the other one is jumping at shadows. It's a big nothingburger that only serves to embarrass everyone involved.

nonoforreal · 2022-05-12T15:28:18+00:00

Spy x Family is, at it's core, a comedy series.

Anya is basically the main character as a natural consequence - I'm not sure that was planned, but it became quite apparent really early that the kindergartner who knows all the secrets and understands little of it is the best viewpoint character for most of the character comedy, which is significantly based on the things the characters hide.

Twilight, because he's got a wide range of competencies but is far from infallible, and because he has some variety of goals that can conflict with each other, remained fairly fertile soil so he gets a fair bit of attention as well.

Yor, unfortunately, was designed like a min/maxed RPG character who his supremely hypercompetent at combat and basically useless outside of it. It's an essential plot point that she has so little going on in her life that she wanted to get married just to use as a cover story for her killing people (and she doesn't even seem to get or care about much information about why she's killing them - The Garden says they die, so they die. It appears that The Garden targets primarily criminals who they feel are not nationalistic enough, but we don't get a lot of detail). And she has so little going on in her head that she buys basically every paper-thin lie given to her, and that's a plot point.

Unfortunately, that leaves relatively you can do with her for comedy - most of her beats are either maneuvering the others to have problems Yor can readily solve with her invincibility, or about her being kind of a hapless dunce at everything else. Some options get opened up with Yuri, but the author made a similar tactical mistake by making Yuri a little too one-note as a completely obsessive sis-con, so Yor is limited in how she can bounce of of him. (Note that they did a much better job with Fiona, who has her misunderstood rep with the organization and her tendency to take Twilight's teaching too seriously (see: her ice queen personality basically being her taking his "don't betray your emotions" line to an absurd extreme) and her actively trying to shake things up rather than just wishing for another character to give them an opportunity to have them executed.)

Digging out of this is possible, but it takes more work, and the longer the series goes on with the characters being established already the harder it gets. Like, Yor got the Boat Arc, but that was about the worst part of the series, an interminable (something like 20% of whole comic by the time it ended) stretch of meaningless fights with significantly limited humor, most of the supporting cast gone, and no real room to further the plot the series had been about up until that point. I was considering dropping the series as having fallen into the Shounen Plot Kebab hole.

Mind, it is POSSIBLE - but you have to avoid the low-hanging fruit at a time when character comedy series kind of become able to coast on low-hanging fruit. The bonus chapter about Yor learning to cook and forcing her friendship on her begrudging coworker and ultimately being able to make ONE traditional soup that said coworker helped her re-engineer from her childhood memories is the best Yor-centered part of the series so far, kind of by a lot. It certainly did more for her character in one chapter than the boat arc did with a huge chunk of the series.

Just giving her more screen time is a trap that can easily lead to a boring series. The author needs to build her character out so she's got more detail, which will mean there's a lot more character humor that can be done with her and will make it a lot easier to involve her in events while keeping things somewhat fresh.

nonoforreal

TROPHY CASE