SirNicee's Notebook (Essays, Splices, et cetera)

Yeah no, this thread has been derailed too damn much.
@SirNicee, if you want your thread to be unlocked, please let the mods know. Thank you.

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Right, I’ve deleted a large amount of the irrelevant conversation and tentatively re-opened the thread. For my own role in this, I let my hot head get the better of me, which I apologize for. One user who was involved has been banned, and would likely have been banned even without my provocation, from conversations I’ve had with the rest of the staff who agree I went a bit overboard.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me by DM, or to another member of the staff if you aren’t comfortable coming to me personally.

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At its simplest, feminism is just the belief that women should have equal rights to men.

If you believe in equal rights, you are a feminist. :+1:

Sure, there’s a lot more introspective unpacking to do beyond just that, and you may not always agree with feminist advocates on a specific issue, but at its core it is pretty simple. No one’s telling you to join advocacy groups or anything :sweat_smile:

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My take on FE8 is that the perception that Ephraim is made out to be better than Eirika is more an issue with how weak the overall narrative is than it is an issue of gender portrayals. The entire third act of the story is meant to hinge on the Twins’ conflicted feelings over Lyon. But the plot never actually does the work of making the player/audience care about Lyon enough to be able to identify with what the Twins are going through. If the player actually cared about Lyon, then Eirika being willing to try anything that might save him wouldn’t read so much like her being naive and stupid because if that moment was properly built up to, the player would also be carrying the smallest of hopes that the stone might save Lyon. But for most, the scene will read like Eirika being an idiot because the player never cared one way or another whether Lyon is saved.

A bit unrelated, but what I consider the most egregious thing about the scene in the lava caves is it trivializes a good chunk of what led up to it. So much of the plot is centered on protecting the Twins’ bracelets, but when they’re finally used to retrieve the stone, it gets broken a short time later. And it ultimately doesn’t matter because Rausten’s stone is enough.

As for the difference in the routes with Ephraim’s journey arguably being more important, because of all of the Gaiden references in FE8, I think the devs were just emulating Gaiden’s story where boy’s story is about war and conquest and girl’s story is about lore and spirituality. The problem is, again, FE8’s weak writing. Eirika is never shown to be a spiritual person, so it doesn’t feel particularly meaningful to her. Her journey would have better fit an arc where L’arachel (or Natasha) is the main character. And while Valentia’s religion is nothing mind blowing, the lore of Magvel doesn’t feel fully developed and doesn’t amount to anything. There’s an entity called the Great Dragon and…it really has nothing to do with the plot. Fire Emblem is often kind of vague about what the priests actually worship, but Magvel is especially weak in that regard.

As for Ike and Micaiah, sequels that are set shortly after a completed story tend to fall into two pitfalls. One is that the sequel can seemingly trivialize the plot of the original, both by trying to up the stakes from the original and by destroying the peace that was fought for in the original story so quickly that it feels meaningless. The Tellius games don’t fall into this one (at least when it comes to Micaiah). The Dawn Brigade’s struggle feels like a natural consequence of the plot of FE9 (though the beginning of the Laguz alliance arc feels a bit contrived). Also, through Sephiran’s speech, FE9 ends on the note that Ashnard was just a mook and there are bigger trials ahead.

The second pitfall is that it can be hard to get an audience excited about new characters when a lot of them will just want to see their old favorites come back. It’s easier to lean on the popularity of a returning hero than it is to get the audience to see the new hero as being just as good. And depending on how powerful the old hero was, it can be hard to set the power level of the new hero without the audience feeling like their old favorite is being arbitrarily overshadowed.

This is the pitfall that most who are familiar with Radiant Dawn will agree it falls into. Micaiah is barely present in the final act, and she doesn’t even get an endgame PRF weapon. But I honestly believe the outcome would have been much the same if she had been a man. Once Ike was back in the picture, no one was going to get to stand on equal footing with him because the story treats him like a perfect human being. Ike’s low points come from others not believing in him as much as they “should.” And the root of any mistakes he makes are framed as coming from others not acting in accord with how he sees the world. So Ike is always morally correct, he just didn’t (yet) have the power and influence to be allowed to tell certain others that he’s correct.

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What’s your favorite female character from anything. I’m curious.

And to add to the discussion: Dishonored did a gender equal in its DLCs and Sequel. Specifically in Dishonored 2 there a bunch of female guards to hack to pieces. Problem is that whenever the game wants to show that the guards are bad folk they use a male. I find this is somewhat counterintuitive given the claim of equality but what do you think. Why is over correcting on this “issue” so common.

I don’t have a favourite female character for the same reason I don’t have a favourite character in general – I don’t usually find it a valuable metric to use to think about writing. I’ll maybe have a favourite character within an individual work, but I’m rarely interested in comparing one character agaimst all the media I’ve ever consumed, each of which I enjoyed for very different reasons and each of which was created with very different goals.

talia2
A small update for now, but I went ahead and fixed the frames on one of my original mugs and also edited the palette a bit. No more missing strands of hair when she blinks. My project’s Lord should finally have a proper mug.

As for whenever that next write-up’s going to be, I do have an interesting idea for it, and I do have the time since I won’t be going back to university until January, it’s just a matter of motivation. Hopefully it’s not going to get the thread locked again.

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You might want to make a separate thread for graphics and keep this one for essays.
Up to you, of course

It’s something I’ve thought about. I just figured that for now I’d keep them together because I really don’t have much done or created in either category. If it gets to the point where things get too cluttered I’ll probably spin off one or the other.

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talia2antab with a black band

Might as well show a few splices I’ve worked on since this started, plus an updated one. I have a few others in some other projects, but since one’s a Telephone hack, I figure I should wait until that has a public release before showing that off.

So spoiler alert, no, I didn’t leave the community. It turns out finding things to write about is about as difficult and draining as actually finding the motivation to hack. I was considering doing a write-up on the Camus archetype and typical fan reactions to those in said archetype, but I was lost beyond that. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something to rant about in the coming months, but if not, I have other projects.

To end off, I'll show off a preview of a hack I've worked on and off again for like a year and a half. Have a good one.



(Portrait’s a recolor of one by LaurentLacroix by the way)

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I find this Female Lord Syndrome very interesting. And coincidentally, my current hack project has a female main lord, and I want to avoid this syndrome her.
Hopefully I can write her in an interesting way

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baaforrest gump 1994ieri actually don't knowfla updated

The above are all F2U/F2E, as usual. Credit to Goldblitzx for some advice on the second-to-right and also making sure I didn’t accidentally just clone Marius from DOOT on the second-to-left.
Sadly, I don’t have much to show beyond my progress in making my splices actually look decent. My project is still at 4-5 playable chapters out of 28, so I’m not feeling confident showing much from it at this time. Once I do, I’ll be more than happy to post it to its own thread.

Spectrum The Initial ROM.emulator-14
We do have food dialogue though, so you know it’s going to be good.
(Mugs shown are by CanDy and AmBrosiac (left and right, respectively).)

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Not sure if it counts as a necro if it’s my own thread, but I’m digging this back up to confirm that my actual project is finally ready to be shown off to an extent.

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