December Days 2020 #07: Memery Maybe Interesting

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

There was one of those "comment and I'll pick some interest of yours" things going about, and bladespark asked me to talk about three things:

Discordianism, 1000 Blank White Cards, and pot pies

Two of these things are related to each other, so I'm going to start at the bottom and work my way around from there.
( Pot pies, Hail Eris, 1kBWC )

So there you have it, three things off the interest list. If there are others that you might be interested in hearing, feel free to ask about them. There's still plenty of space left to talk about things, and if you don't supply the questions and content prompts, that leaves me to my own devices to talk about things, and that may or may not be what you want to hear about.

December Days 2020 #08: To See Again With Fresh Eyes

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

From james:

What movie or tv show (or play, musical, etc) do you wish you could go back and see again for the first time, with no spoilers?

Oh, without spoilers? That's a good question. It would have to be something that I was absolutely delighted with the first time I saw it, and not something where there were things I really didn't like about it and would have wanted to know about before experiencing them.

The first thing that comes to mind might be the original Batman: The Animated Series, since that sticks out in my childhood as a show that did its things very well, although these days I might have a bit more of a complaint about how everyone seems to be designed from the same model and then given different costuming pieces to differentiate themselves. (Yes, that's pretty rich coming from someone who enjoys the LEGO video game adaptations of various properties and who is a fan of animation in general and knows full well that a lot of shows reuse their animation assets, just with different things to tell the characters apart.) It's been so long since I saw it, however, that I could probably go back and watch it again relatively unspoiled from having forgotten most of the episodes themselves. There''s something about its deliberate anachronisms with visual fidelity to the Art Deco style that makes me think of it as a program that really hasn't had an equal since it came on board. (Even though it had a sequel series in Batman Beyond and the same style was used in other Timmverse creations. Maybe that's why I wasn't surprised to see another movie of that series coming out...this year, I think?)

I suspect a lot of people would want to experience The Good Place, or at least the first season of The Good Place again, without spoilers, because it took advantage of the medium of television and the expectations of the audience to lead them completely astray from the place where it would eventually reveal the truth, but I don't necessarily need to re-experience that again. It was good, but not the sort of thing I'd want to do again unspoiled.

There's a few interactive experiences I probably wouldn't mind seeing unspoiled for the first time again, but some of them would be things where I'd want to see them unspoiled after time has progressed to the point where they could be given a proper treatment, if that makes sense. The Dream Oath Opera (or Maria and Draco) of Final Fantasy VI, but instead of synthesised voice banks, a version where the opera itself actually plays out, with singing and acting and Celes having to hit her cues through the dialogue prompts, so that we get the full experience that time has allowed us to craft and improve and perfect (specifically because of the popularity the original has had.) For gameplay reasons, of course, it would have to be either specifically the parts that require Celes, or it would conveniently turn out that the part the party is there for is the very beginning of the opera, but I'd want to experience it fully with the instrumentation and orchestration behind more modern games rather than the limitations of the Super Nintendo system. Or to re-experience the entirety of Chrono Trigger, but redone completely graphically and sound-wise from the ground up with what twenty-plus years of advances in technology and ability have given us. Give us Final Fantasy VII Remake's battle system and graphical and sound fidelity with Chono Trigger's characters and storyline. I think if I got to see it again unspoiled, I might be a lot more surprised at the willingness of the game to have everything happen all up to a fated encounter, and then, to have the protagonist we have been interested in to this point simply disappear, and his retrieval being completely optional for the party. (At which point, also, he can be interchanged with the rest of the party and loses his status as the character that has to be in the party at all times. I kind of wonder what it would be like to experience Chrono Trigger unspoiled in a post-Undertale kind of world, where messing with the narrative and subverting certain expectations is much more of a normal trope rather than an odd one. And, I suppose, I'd have to figure out whether I had the appetite for the Woosleyisms compared to having a more accurate translation available.)

One of my heterodox Chrono opinions is that while Chrono Cross is a mess in terms of the storyline, and it feels like it's too long of a game to force someone to play through 2.5 times to collect all of the characters, I like the idea of timeline collisions and multiple entities fighting for control over which timeline is the canonical one and the idea of the Time Devourer being a threat across all the timelines until it's resolved properly.

So, I suppose the thing that I want to experience unspoiled is one of those classic games that I really enjoyed in the era where the available graphics weren't up to the story that they wanted to tell, but not one where we made the experience a lot better by having to imagine it instead of having it play out in front of us, if that makes sense?