You know, when I look something up in a video game wiki, I don't even want correct interpretations and theories. Why are they captioning screenshots with any dramatic literary quote?
When I asked why they were adding Bible quotes, they said it was fine because they also added Quran quotes to other pictures. The Quran quote they added completely changes the meaning of the scene - it's one where a group of people in the desert find a hidden treasure trove of gold, and start happily talking about how this means they don't have to be subsistence farmers anymore, they could travel or learn new things, or buy new equipment to make farming easier, and the scene ends on that upbeat note. The wiki says that they got greedy and lazy because they thought the gold was their reward, and added a Quran quote from a section where a guy gets killed in an earthquake for not being grateful to God. And then when pressed on why have this interpretation at all, they went 'well, do you want us to just be like Gamepress, only having the game information?' Unfortunately I was blocked before I could say 'yes, absolutely, this is a WIKI.'
Also, Gamepress doesn't only have game information, and the wiki frequently plagiarizes from them... which is the source of some of their flagrantly wrong information. That time I mentioned in the first post where they mentioned (correctly) that a character theme titled "Ständchen" was quoting a piece by Franz Schubert also titled "Ständchen" and then linked to a completely different song because "Ständchen" just means "Serenade" and he wrote so many pieces with that title that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page? (The correct one, which is INCREDIBLY obvious if you listen to the relevant music... or, uh, read the character's story, at all... is D957, from "Swan Song.") The Youtube video they linked was the exact same one Gamepress linked. It takes some real work to be so bad at providing good information that fucking Gamepress ekes in ahead of you by crediting the username of the random Twitter user whose thread they copy-pasted.
just saw someone describe the Temeraire series as having "almost no plot in each novel." I'm not even mad, I'm just baffled.
I wonder if they're talking about overarching plot for the series. Each book is very eventful, but the structure of the series is simpler. Mostly it's "what continent do we have to get across this time?"
they said something like "each book has almost no plot but somehow by the end it adds up to the napoleonic wars." I guess the very broad strokes of each book are pretty similar, but "we try to get from point A to point B while various national governments put us in situations" is a very respectable formula with a lot of flexibility, I feel
Oh, I see the confusion. They think the Napoleonic Wars are the plot of the series. They are not, which is why the war was finally resolved off screen by minor characters. The Napoleonic Wars are the setting. The plot is Temeraire coming of age.
I think modern/coffeeshop AUs would be more fun if most of the character backstories are appropriately adjusted to the less intense setting, except one guy should be identical to canon so you'd end up with a cast of two baristas, a grad student, the guy who owns the hardware store, and a werewolf assassin.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like if you want to opine about the relative morality of different romance routes, in a game where your character is concealing crucial, likely-dealbreaking information about themselves from literally every befriendable and romanceable character (and possibly reading/tampering with their minds), then your definition of "consent issues" should probably extend beyond the one (1) case where a character immediately, bluntly accuses you of violating their consent. But what do I know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fallen Hero! Series of branching text games where you play a telepathic superhero turned villain who is extremely normal about things. It's my favorite identity-porn-and-bad-decisions simulator, and may have slightly eaten my brain for the last year and a half.
We just got a bunch of Sarkaz Lore™ on both the English server and the Chinese server, so who wants a greatest hits of the Arknights wiki admins managing to somehow turn a nuanced and sympathetic exploration of the cultural legacies of colonization and oppression into Messianic Zionist blood libel and then getting proved wrong? :::DDD Original name: The wiki didn't bother to include it. Wiki translation: "Khotza-tikvah" Official translation: "Qui'saršinnag" Original name: The wiki didn't bother to include it. Wiki translation: "Khotza-tutztah" Official translation: "Qui'sartuštaj" Original name: 厄尔苏拉 Wiki translation: "El'shula" Official translation: "Ulšulah" Original name: 哀珐尼尔 Wiki translation: "Ha'phanuel" Official translation: "Aefanyl" Original name: 菈玛莲 Wiki translation: "Ramale" Official translation: "Laqeramaline" None of these have done the slightest to dissuade them from confidently asserting shit like this:
Actual Hebrew: We call this guy Rashi as an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki. Words have 3(ish) root letters that are then conjugated in different ways, but the root letters determine the meaning. The wiki: an acronym can be 4 random syllables that kind of sound like parts from words if you change letters and also take some Arabic words. Also, now that we have some examples of Sarkaz text that's clearly a mix of English, Latin, and conlang, ANCIENT sarkaz is the Hebrew one, and modern sarkaz diverged so much they're totally different and that's why none of the words look like Hebrew. The word 'Wiša' that sounds like Wish and means Wish is actually the Hebrew word for rescue, yesha. We're great at languages.
Also, if anyone looked at a King of Banshees, who in this story are all about death knells and commemoration, being named Laqermaline, and went 'oh that sounds like lacrima, tears, and a feminine ending', you're an idiot! It's ACTUALLY Duh! Frankensteining two languages together is what it's all about! Oh, and since Ulšhula isn't El'shula, they decided it's... actually about the same. Shulamith is not the word for peace. Shulamith is the feminine form of the name Shlomo (Solomon), from shalom. Shula is a nickname, because Shula doesn't mean anything on its own. And, obviously, in Hebrew, L and R are different letters, as well as in Chinese. And you gotta love the vagueness - shin is used to transliterate 'Semitic letters'? I can't say I've ever seen it used to stand in for ayin or chet or tsadi. And, while I'm at it, I don't think I've seen š actually used for sh in translations! No one is writing Šalom instead of Shalom or Šavuot instead of Shavuot, at least that I've ever seen outside of Wikipedia's phonetic transliterations.
One of the most frustrating things is that it's not even like every possible connection that can be drawn here is bullshit, or like deliberate parallels and references would automatically have to have the extremely creepy ideological assumptions that the wiki admins keep bringing to it. There are several countries in the setting that are based on more than one real-world inspiration- sometimes badly (they rolled a lot of the Global South and the whole Middle East together in a pretty racist way), sometimes well (Kjerag is simultaneously Norway, Switzerland, and Nepal, and pulls it off surprisingly seamlessly). A thoughtful story about people who are demonized is going to have relevance to Jewish experiences, because Jewish people are demonized, and it wouldn't be at all strange for the writers to draw on that history. But now I can't fucking tell when they're actually trying to do that, because the wiki constantly bashes things that absolutely are not that into the shape of their antisemitic and wrong idea of what Judaism is, and half the shit they say to support it is cited to supplementary setting guides that aren't available in English and don't even have the Chinese text publicly available, so it amounts to a "Source: dude trust me" that you aren't allowed to argue with. And because they're so wedded to this one interpretation, they'll simultaneously leave out really important and obvious connections, like, oh, say, extremely direct references to Metal Gear Solid, or that there is in fact one fan theory for the inspiration for the word "Sarkaz" that I've seen floating around, which is that it's based on the word, uh... *checks notes*... orc. Meanwhile, when the game is speaking openly and directly about Christianity? They don't even bother to mention that the country is a very clear parallel to literal Heaven. (And got most of the facts about both real life and the game's lore in this screenshot wrong!) And there's not a single fucking word about the fact that one of the characters from the inexplicably good crossover event with a video game series based on a Tom Clancy novel is an Israeli soldier whose name is Ashley Cohen.
Regularly-scheduled "can we take the phrase 'redemption arc' away from fandom" post. (This instance brought to you by Hades fans complaining that [REDACTED] "didn't earn a redemption arc". Opinions on the writing aside, that's... that's not a redemption arc? It's a different thing.)
