A long-overdue set of linkiness - November-December 02019

Greetings, once again, and welcome to a spread of links for your feasting. This is probably the last linkspam for the year, and so I hope to have been informative and to have exposed you to interesting things this year.

The Dead Pool is saddened to report that Dorothy Catherine Fontana has been transported to the place where we cannot follow, and the Star Trek (and other) families are lessened by her passing. Because D.C. Fontana did a lot of stuff with regard to the success of Star Trek.

In that same space, we must also bid farewell to René Auberjonois, known for roles on M*A*S*H and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, among many other roles that he appeared on. (Including Warehouse 13, for a little bit.)

Let's start with some advice on the writing of a doctoral thesis, which, while updated last in 2006, still appears to have good advice on how to structure the paper. Those who have written a doctoral thesis can say aye or nay to it, but it would probably have been helpful to me in writing my undergraduate thesis as well.

Comic conventions featuring indigenous creators and their works! I'm glad this event exists and continues to be popular enough to continue to exist. Related, a journalist examines how they became a fan of BTS, even though they weren't initially trying to, and how having a bias for K-pop often means being both connected (with fans) and disconnected (from people who scoff at the idea of K-pop, much less its popularity) at the same time.

( And there's more. Always more. )

Last for tonight, stained glass with very queer themes (and butts!). And fashion houses starting to design for queer folx and to have them as models.

Also, wish granted to a resident of a care home to get a fireman-themed stripper to perform for her. Yay for the care home deciding to go through with the plan!

And finally, several stories from 2019 that suggest things are perhaps less of a trash fire worldwide than they are in very specific localities.

Some matters of politics - October-December (maybe longer) 02019

This post can be excluded through the exclusion of the tag "political links," if you have a Dreamwidth account level that can exclude tags.

This is likely the last politics link roundup for the year. I hope it's been informative, even if the material contained within has often been more upset-making than happy-making.

( Mostly the UK and the US inside )

December Days 28: Keyblade Graveyard

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. There's only a couple spots left before we're done, although I hear from many of you that I am perhaps more knowledgeable about these things than y'all. I don't want this to stop you from making suggestions.]

It was announced as a collaboration between The House of Mouse and Square. "It'll never work," was the general, if cautious, consensus around the matter. Disney, after all, had built itself an empire in cartoons and princesses under its own name. That the empire also included a lot of other things in all the other names that are also part of the Disney family might have been a sign to the skeptics that there was something more going on there than appeared at first. Square was responsible for the Final Fantasy series of role playing games, and tended to produce epics involving saving the world with a ragtag band of young adults with special abilities. Disney was bright, Square was dark. Disney was explicitly a family-friendly kind of company, and Square had no qualms about permanently killing the cute White Mage at the end of the first disc of a four-disc game because that was what the plot needed. How would these two very different companies find any sort of common space where they could both tell a good story?

Well, you can see the beginning of the series, which has muted the pop song in the opening (I'm okay with this). A child on the edge of destiny dives into the depths of his own heart and finds the power within himself to fight against the darkness in his and other hearts.

Kingdom Hearts, as a game, takes the idea that the stories of the various Disney movies and properties are separate worlds, with each of their characters intact. King Mickey rules over all of them from Disney Castle. Normally, the worlds stay separated by barriers that prevent their crossing, but both the forces of darkness and light can cross between worlds using technology or magic. The encroachment of the darkness and its consumption of various worlds is part of a much bigger plot involving time-travel, trying to absorb the primal energy of the cosmos, and a whole lot of people trying to discover, experiment on, and unlock the secrets of the hearts present in most beings. The actual plot of the series spans several games over many different systems, including mobile phone games and games for the Web / Android platforms. Most of the plot itself is carried by characters created specifically for this franchise, and, regrettably, as the plot goes on, the Square characters, from the various Final Fantasy incarnations, drop out significantly to make room for the story being told. The Disney characters stay, because their worlds are the destinations of the various places (with a couple of new worlds created specifically for the game), but Square's contributions to the game are more and more the original characters created, including the various Keyblade Masters, the Organization looking to consume all the worlds in darkness, and a mysterious group who are behind all the various incarnations of Xehanort, trying to prevent another Keyblade War like the one that destroyed so much in its wake.

Also, many of the opponents in this game hat Sora and company have to deal with are downright cute, even as they are completely lethal. The character designs for the game are really rather stellar, and Sora and his companions have enchanted clothing that allows them to look and act as if they were an inhabitant of the world they have landed in, so there's a pretty significant amount of costume changes throughout all of the games for that trio.

There's also a lot of really gorgeous music for the series, that continues through all of the games, with themes and battle variations and a whole lot of great stuff that comes with it. Since I enjoy having a good soundtrack to play games to, the care and craft that happens with the audio is very handy to have. (Even if for other people, the background loop of music is a thing that is a problem for audio processing or just having something dig into the brain.)

One of the things that doesn't go so great in the Kingdom Hearts franchise is that the overarching plot and storyline are really carried through all of the games that have been released. If you were a person who had just played the numbered games in the series, instead of all of the non-numbered games ((Re:)Chain of Memories, (Re:)coded, 358/2 Days, Birth By Sleep, Dream Drop Distance, Final Chapter Prologue, and (union) cross), then after the games of I and II, which cover Sora and Roxas and their fight with Organization XIII, Kingdom Hearts III (which came out thirteen years or so after II) then reintroduces the Organization, but also has a new incarnation of Xehanort to contend with as well as the appearance of characters that have never been referred to in any of those previous games that are clearly very important to the plot. There's so much that gets missed out on, and so having a lore document (or one of the summary videos, or spending a lot of time in Lat's Plays) is essential to understanding not just the plot, but also getting it in a form where the whole of everything can be understood and things that are only resolved across different games can be figured out.

And, if you are a person who enjoys turn-based RPGs, Kingdom Hearts is not that. It's more of a stylish combat game or an action RPG, rather than the turn-based things that Square was much more known for. However, if you're salivating at the remake of Final Fantasy VII that will be coming out in March of 2020, I suggest running as much of Kingdom Hearts as you can before then because it will give you practice on how to handle the stylish combat system of the FFVII remake.

Kingdom Hearts was a game that didn't seem to have a chance of working out, but Disney and Square managed to put together a series for the ages. And there will be more of it, as all of the games discussed so far, with the exception of (union) cross are just the sequence they've called the Xehanort Saga. There's a lot more out there for these worlds to explore, and now that the Master of Masters' apprentices have returned to the current time, there's still another Keyblade War that needs preventing and worlds that need protecting.