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Vashiane

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    PICTURE THREAD

    in Far from the Forest...

    Posted · Edited by Vashiane

    tumblr_njuh58xjoK1tx9dieo1_1280.jpg

    Warning: This selfie makes me look Deceptively Cute, actual Vash has a serious case of Resting Bitch Face.

    Results may vary.

    This was also from months ago bc I do nooooooot look good rn.

    SF's "Write Your Butt Off!" Writing Competition XIV

    in Written Works

    Posted

    Title: Of Holds Stronger Than Steel

    Fandom: Pokemon

    Words: 2,436

    Weapon: Aegislash

    [spoiler=Of Holds Stronger Than Steel]

    No one has heard from Calem in seven days.

    It's typical for Calem to vanish. Either metaphorically into the depths of his Pokedex or literally into the depths of caves, but he always resurfaces after a day. Two, at the very most. He never answered calls while he was researching and hardly ever checked his messages ­- let alone respond to them - so a sudden burst of activity on his end after a day of silence was typical. He would call, asking where did she want to meet again and when a good two days after she'd initially arranged it. He'd be late by about thirty minutes, dragging his bag behind him along the ground and slumping into the chairs he sat in. The exhaustion would be etched into every line in his face, and he'd only stir himself in liveliness at the mention of Pokemon and food, but he would be there.
    Even Calem's record disappearance - three days and two hours with only one text to Trevor asking the Pokedex entry for a Sableye - was nothing compared to this. He'd long since blown past that and doubled it, all without a single message to anyone. Not an "okay", not an "i'll see you later". Nothing. Complete silence.
    By now, Serena's concern had bloomed into a full-out worry.
    She had called Shauna twice on the dawn of day seven, since she was the only one even remotely near Vaniville and could maybe swing by to check on him. She was off with a Trainer she had hiked through Route 17 with at the time, and Trevor and Tierno had practically anchored themselves to Lumiose City. Serena had even peppered her pleas with pleases, but Shauna calls at sunset with a friendly hello and hangs up with a tittery I forgot, and Serena remembers the old adage of "if you want something done to do it yourself".
    She bids Trainer Anna farewell once they arrive at the Pokemon Center, explains it as she retrieves her Talonflame, and sets a swift course for home.
    It only strikes her as silly once the sun's dropped behind the horizon and the red roofs of Vaniville are in her sight. Maybe Calem decided to go deep into the Whispering Woods, maybe Calem simply broke his phone. Maybe Calem's joking about how he's finally gotten to be too good for them became a reality and he's cut them off. The last one's a stretch - he's a jerk, not a jackass - but anything's better than the crippling worry sinking into her bones, tightening her grip on her Talonflame's reins until her knuckles are the color of snow.
    They descend onto Calem's lawn with grace, and Serena dismounts with weak knees and a promise to return shortly. She strokes the soft feathers along the base of the bird's neck (three times in quick succession, a Kalosian tradition for good luck), turns to the front door, and freezes.
    His light upstairs is on.
    Relief melts into anger swiftly enough. By the time she's gathered the resolve to move forward, she's storming, heavy steps thudding against the concrete with the clicks of her boots.
    She hits the front door a little harder than she should have, skin washed yellow with the glow of that damned upstairs light. She's going to tear into him, she decides then. She's going to stomp up those seven steps to his bedroom, yank open the door and tear him apart. If he has the audacity to lie there on his bed, reading his damned Pokedex, and not reply to any of her messages simply because --
    Serena knocks on the door twice more. She waits. Shifts her weight from one foot to the other while the minutes tick by and there isn't an answer. Up above her, the light dims, then goes dark. He doesn't have the right, she thinks, and her hand drops down onto the knob just to test it, already bending down to lift the mat for the key with the mindset that it won't work.
    It twists under her grip. She looks up just as the click sounds and the door budges open slightly under the force. Now she's concerned again, for even in the eventless town of Vaniville, Calem's mother does not leave her door unlocked.
    Serena doesn't wait for an invitation anymore - she shoves upon the door and all but stampedes inside, listening to the ambiance and waiting for a sound, a word. Any sort of outcry (she did just break in, after all), but other than the slow, steady drip from the leaking faucet there's nothing. She calls out his name, a loud, firm shout that's bound to catch his attention if he were up there. It should catch his attention - she’s by no means quiet and everything else is, so why is there no answer?
    If he’s ignoring her, she’ll wring his neck. She’ll wring his neck with her shaking hands as to why he made her suffer through seven days of worry.
    So she takes to the stairs, goes up them one at a time and makes sure each time her foot comes down it’s loud. I’m coming for you Calem, she thinks with each resounding thud. I’m coming for you Calem, and you better be okay. You better be okay. She pushes open the door to his bedroom and the thoughts turn into a roar, into a stampede of panic so broken-up and static-y that she has to stop just in the threshold so she can breathe.
    She expects nothing.
    So why is she so scared?
    She expected nothing, and on a first sweep of the room, that's what she receives - nothing.­ All of Calem's books are stacked on his dresser, in Calem's typical haphazard fashion. Clothes are strewn across the floor, most of them oozing from a knapsack half opened. Jackets, pants, shirts - some of them spotted with flecks of soil and stained with something dark, others untouched by grime but discolored. His map is hanging off the back of his chair with his notes smeared into unreadable watermarks - and it's then the smell hits her. The smell of rancid swamp water, the smell of Route 14 etched into every damp thing and into the carpet that squelches under her feet.
    But while the water smells - it stirs in the swamp. It doesn't stagnate to the point where the smell concentrates like that, coats the air like that, unless it's been soaked into something motionless for days.
    So in other words, none of this stuff has been washed.
    Serena's first thought is disgust, then confused. Calem's always clean - except when he's knee-deep in caves of course, but even then he tries. She shudders, rolling her shoulders back and the quick glance over her right one causes her to find him, stretched out on his bed with his hands folded over his stomach. Even from here she can see that his hair is greasy, unwashed, and his clothes are still stained with grass and soil.
    That's not right, she thinks as she approaches him. Stands tall over her and lets her eyes rake down his form.
    She clears her throat once and calls out his name. "Calem." She makes she's loud, loud enough to pierce through the too-heavy air and reach his eyes, wherever he might be, and hen the boy doesn't open his damn eyes a part of her snaps.
    Her hand goes to grab his wrist - she's going to yank him awake if she has to, how dare he not call her, how dare - and suddenly there's a flash of white across her eyes. Pain. Flares of it are going up and down a wrist that's being turned wrong and Selena has to blink thrice before she can see the reason why.
    Calem is grabbing her wrist. Calem is twisting it.
    She doesn't have time to dwell on the fact that he's hurting her, because he speaks. He speaks with his voice but it's a voice that's been altered, layered with another that clangs, sparks, grinds against her ears like metal being smelted. It's an old voice mixed in with his young one, and the contrast rings in a way that hurts.
    "Do not lay your fingers upon my host," he says, and the words hurt. They pop up too many questions too fast. Selena clamps her other hand to her head, then stamps her foot down and yanks. She's out of his grip soon enough, stumbling back, her fingers throbbing as the blood rushes back into them.
    What is going on? What is going on?
    "Host?" Serena shakes her head. She's going to just pretend this is a game and she's no longer a child; she's not in the mood to play and eventually he'll relent, won't he? "Calem, this isn't funny. Why haven't you called me? Or - or anyone, really." He fixes his eyes upon hers, brown eyes dark and blank, and speaks again.
    "You speak to my host. Not I." Calem is still lying there, his arm now back down at his side, just as it was before he grabbed at her. There's something cold about the way he speaks when he looks back to the ceiling and says, "I will only accept your audience if it is I you wish to converse with."
    "Then who the hell are YOU?" It bursts out of her, breaking at the end as panic kicks her heart into overdrive. She reclaims those steps she staggered back with far more confidence, with much more demand, prepared to snatch him from atop navy covers and shake him until his sense returns. If this is a game, she is long since through playing it, and she reaches down one more time to take a hold of his arm --
    She stops.
    She stares.
    She suddenly understands.
    For wrapped around Calem's arm is a black scarf, tapered with purple, and on the scarf's other end lies a golden sword.
    Serena pulls in a ragged sigh and curses under her breath. She warned him, she warned him. She warned him about the whispers of the dark, to stand away from dark pulses cast and from the creeps of shadows stalking. She warned him about listening, listening to the spirits of old and their whispers of deceit and death, the way they pulled at your soul and spun it through their voice like yawn through a spindle --
    She warned him. Explicitly. Repeatedly. Ever since the day she got her Litwick and was plagued with an exhaustion so deep it sunk into her bones and she didn't know why -- she warned everyone who would listen.
    There's an appeal to reforming darkness. The problem is that it may draw you down instead.
    "Why do you want him?" she asks. "He's not a king. He's not... royalty, he's just a boy -" Her words hitch and she has to stop, hold them in her throat while she thinks of what to say. If Calem's been under its mercy completely for seven days he may very well be gone. The hold of a fully evolved Aegislash is one that's poisoned the strongest, most unbiased of minds for years after its control has been severed. It takes kings, politicians, it takes people of importance and she has to ask -- what does a sword of kings want with someone who was almost something?
    "I hold him not for what he is, but what he can be." The sword rattles, tassles gently stroking his arm and Serena feels sick. How dare it, how dare it, how dare it use him, her mind screams as it ignores the fact that she used his own knowledge to surpass him. She, who last year, didn't know how a Poke-ball worked, took his advice and shaped herself with it until she became Champion. She took him and all but threw him away until she needed him, and now that someone else has picked him up, she won't let them have him.
    It. It.
    It's not a them, it's a sword --
    "What he can be..." she whispers, and Calem's used voice rings.
    "He is one of capability, of wisdom and knowledge spread wide throughout a mind always turning. He is a solver of puzzles, a reader of intercies; he is only weak to those who value strength in numbers and not words. He finds power in an unused medium and strikes from areas unexpected. In him, I see a soul older than time, revived again like traits in a dominant animal. Its tenacity enables it to live, and his tenacity enables him to thrive still." There is a pause, brief but poignant before it ends with: "He is not a king yet. But he shall be a Champion."
    "But -" Serena stops. She claps a hand to her mouth as the sword's tassel tugs on Calem's arm and makes him move. He sits up with the stiffness of something robotic, swings both legs over the side of his bed. His feet touch down and he stands, unused joints popping, each crack in his neck like gunshots as he rolls it across his shoulders. The sword lifts itself into his open hand and Calem slides the blade across his knuckles, the lines it makes blooming beads of blood that burst and spill over his hands.
    He sets the blade against, this time raising his hand so it rests level to her heart.
    She suddenly, again, understands.
    But oh -- if this hunk of metal thinks she's going to accept that, she won't.
    She reaches into her bag and grasps the Pokeball she has in mind - and just from touching the surface she feels the slow drags of a burning exhaustion. Good, she thinks. Drain it until it's dry, until its soul is an empty and charred as a blackened desert.
    Whatever mercy - or pity she felt, that she always reserves for Ghost-types gone awry is dead.
    "Sure," she challenges, fishing the Pokeball out and holding a thumb just so over the button. "If that's your ambition." She grinds a foot into the ground, staring down the golden blade and right into the eye of the thing with its grip on Calem's soul. She speaks to it, not to him. The parasite, and not the host.
    "But if you want it," she says. "We're putting up a fight first."
    We, she says, because she means it.
    She is not the only one who has a demon to battle, and she'd be damned if he won't fight it with her.

    Should Casual Return?

    in Fire Emblem Fates

    Posted

    You lost me when you started claiming FE was art.

    As for incentives to play Classic, how about a Golden (or Best) Ending which is only accessible through playing Classic (kind of like FE6's Golden Ending which required you to unlock and complete all the Gaiden chapters)

    It's a creative medium.

    Because artistic expression isn't just about pure enjoyment. Imagine a painter. A painter aims to elicit specific emotions and impressions from their audience. Not only do they want others to appreciate their work, but they want others to appreciate their intention and expression. Imagine a work that is supposed to be about the evils of consumerism and a bunch of young people like it because they think it looks cool or has nice colors. The artist isn't going to connect with those kids. They are going to connect with those who understand what the artist wanted and appreciate it for the artist's intention.

    You would give the option of choice for all kinds of reasons. For one, people feel better when they think they came to a conclusion on their own. A lot of the time people are more receptive to an idea if they feel that they chose it from a selection of other options. Giving people options is a powerful manipulative tactic. One of my favourite reasons for giving options is to demonstrate the fact that choice is an illusion and send that message in itself. Consider the inclusion of luck and RNG in Fire Emblem. In reality there is no luck involved, but you still get upset because you personally don't know how to predict the outcome. In that case, why include RNG at all? Why not make it pure logic and rules like Chess? Because despite luck being an illusion, people enjoy it.

    The question is, does adding the option help you with your artistic expression, or does it enable people to take their own meaning that you do not empathize with? If it's the latter, then adding the choice would be detrimental to your goals.

    That is assuming the goal is artistic expression. If it's making money, then pure fanservice is the way to go. To hell with your inspiration and connection to fans. Hello, Awakening.

    Personally, there are some games where I have a problem with the linear flow, but I generally like the story anyway if it's good. There are a lot of flaws with Awakening, but I wouldn't say this is one of them. Awakening's flaws in story were with the actual content (or lack of expansion on content), not the inability to affect outcomes.

    Weeeeeeee're probably just gonna have to agree to disagree at this point.

    Because as long as someone enjoys and appreciates my work, I don't really care what they took from it. I entertained someone. I brightened their day. That's all I really need.

    But I'm getting too subjective here.

    Should Casual Return?

    in Fire Emblem Fates

    Posted

    You didn't answer the question. The goal is to get them to appreciate the same thing as me. When developing a game, I have to make decisions that will affect the player's choice and steer them towards the one I want them to make. Same with any work of art and interpretation you want them to get from it.

    But why would you do that?

    I mean, if someone sees something or does something the same way you do, that's great, but that's the thing about art. It's up to different interpretations, seen in different ways through the eyes of the very different people who view it.

    Why would you include the option of choice if you want the person to pick a specific thing? Isn't that one of the complaints voiced about Awakening? That no matter what choice you made in the game, you didn't actually affect the story? That's the same case here, if you didn't think there was any benefit to giving a choice, why give the choice then?

    I think you're missing the point. No one's calling anyone else less of the player, and that was never really a point of contention.

    That's kinda how some of those earlier posts came off.

    Should Casual Return?

    in Fire Emblem Fates

    Posted

    If you want people to enjoy the pleasant feeling of tension that you enjoy (you being someone who loves Classic, like the devs and many fans), will adding Casual mode help you convert them, or will it make them feel even more comfortable in dismissing Classic mode indefinitely?

    If they choose to do so, that's their choice. Sure, it would be nice if they went and played Classic mode and I'm sure people do, but if they just want to pick up the game for a bit while they have the time and finish a chapter, they can use Casual mode for that.

    Doesn't make anyone less of a player for what mode they pick.

    Should Casual Return?

    in Fire Emblem Fates

    Posted

    Finally. I'm glad someone else in this thread favors Intelligent Systems introducing Rich Mode, Skip Mode, and Casual+ Mode. Should make for a fun time.

    My god, chill.

    How little of a life do you have to where the way someone else plays a game bothers you so extensively?

    Step outside, breathe in the fresh air, it'll be good for you, mate.

    Should Casual Return?

    in Fire Emblem Fates

    Posted

    God, y'all want more people to play the games and fret about the fanbase being too small to sustain the series and then you want the games to cater exclusively to your fucking elitist standards.

    I think it should stay, because if you don't like the mode - guess what? You don't have to pick it!

    I'm tired of people saying games are too easy these days.

    in General Gaming

    Posted

    If any game wants the award for Most Painful Tutorial, Skyward Sword's not taking that medal home.

    That's going to Kingdom Hearts 2.

    And actually, if there's any series I can look at and say, "Okay I like this but it's got its flaws like damn," it would be Kingdom Hearts.

    And for a game that's more centered for a kid's/teenager's demographic, the difficulty level is bullshit.

    The actual 13-year-old shouldn't be rage-quitting over the second world in the game.

    Videos games as a form of escapism? The heck is this?

    in General

    Posted

    Alright, but how many gamers tend to pick up their games more after a long, stressful day?

    A lot of them, I bet.

    But there's a massive difference between picking up a game to destress and feeling like it's a good escape for a while than literally not being able to put it down and being unable to go back, which is extremely rare.

    Although really to summarize my view on this, the quote's got it covered.

    I don't really see how this is insulting. I don't think the journalist is insinuating that most people who play games are detached from reality or are seeking an "escape" from the real world because they have no life. I think what he is trying to say is that the reason games are so appealing is that they make you actually play the part of a hero or whatever unlike passive forms of entertainment like movies and so on. Which is something you would never be able to actually do in real life and its enjoyable in moderation.

    FE4 THREAD

    in Far from the Forest...

    Posted

    Hey I'm not the one who said it!!

    Actually, idk if it could definitively be considered either good or bad~ It's all a matter of preference w-well, I guess that's what good/bad depends on anyway but bluntness would be even more vague than others imo

    Though a mix of tact makes it even better, I definitely think there's much benefit in candidness

    Ahhhhh okay listen to Ein not me I don't know how to words~

    It's fine... [/shrugs]

    I'm not offended at all.

    FE4 THREAD

    in Far from the Forest...

    Posted

    Vash has become a lot more blunt now

    Good~

    WH-WHOA

    MODS

    ..... okay fine, like only one or two people have ever called me fray

    Yes you are~

    As Balbal said, the one who always gives Florina her mead~

    ... I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY a good thing. But okay.

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