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Finished Rorona recently. Really sweet game, enjoyed it a lot except the drinking/groping cutscenes, which were out of place and weird. Also Esty is good and doesn't deserve to be the butt of a translator's joke. Rorona is great and I want the hot gossip on who Lulua's father is. Sterk? They'd be a cute couple if they got together when Rorona was older and Sterk mellowed out a bit. Hope it isn't Iksel, that jerk had no respect for Rorona's responsibilities when he forced her into his competitive cookoff. Even Tantris might be a better option.  Just started Totori, already missing the trimonthly assignments. Having the clearly laid-out goals and subgoals and plotting ahead how to divvy up time was a fun system. Clearly haven't gotten out of the tutorial section for Totori, but hope the main game has a similar goal structure to it.
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Feb 8, 2019 14:51
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Didn't realize the series was so much about subtext over text. Normally that'd be whatever, but the game's all about personal relationships, so not letting Cordelia have a girlfriend or whatever later on just seems sad. I hope the kid is Rorona's and isn't a homonculus, just because following Rorona from teen to adult to mom with teen kid would be badass and still pretty unprecedented for a video game protagonist, let alone a female one. Moms are tough but not tough enough to avoid getting fridged without character development all the time A Sometimes Food posted:Also Cordy is bi as hell, she is thirsty for Rorona, Sterk, Gio, Esty and Lionela at points.
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Feb 9, 2019 02:28
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Most of the time I'd say no, it doesn't matter. The reason I think it'd be neat in this case is because there's a precedent of biological moms getting the shortest end of the stick when it comes to stories. I can think of some examples of adoptive moms shown as heroes, but almost no biological moms come to mind without it ending with their tragic death. Relatedly, there's also the trend that female characters need to be seen as pure, which historically meant they had to keep single, with the only other legitimate relationship option being to pair up with a player stand-in. Rorona ending up in an adult relationship with an NPC and having a kid with them would buck that trend, essentially allowing Rorona to grow up instead of being kept as a pure child-waifu for the player -- something Rorona in particular has had historical trouble with from what I've heard of her role in... Meruru? Whichever turns her back into a literal child. None of this is meant as a slight against gay relationships or adopting -- those are separate, worthy issues in their own right and unrelated in the context I'm thinking of. This is only about the fact that moms are tough is a joke because of how well it sums up the way most non-waifu women are treated in games, and how this seems like a nice opportunity to show a counterexample. Edit: grammar Greyarc fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 04:01
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U-DO Burger posted:i didn't care before but now im hoping she's adopted just to spite you I... What? These are loaded topics we're talking about, yeah, but I genuinely don't get where this hostility is coming from. I've already said this isn't about being anti-adoption, at all.
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Feb 9, 2019 05:49
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U-DO Burger posted:sorry, that was way more venomous than i meant it to be  To clarify, I think adoptive moms are also badass, as are all good parents/parental figures both adoptive and not. I just really want more diverse good characters in general. Also, glad to hear that about Totori's mom! She was mentioned in the opening as being an adventurer that went missing, but that's as far as I've gotten. It's already a nice step up from usual to have Totori following in her mom's footsteps.
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Feb 9, 2019 08:58
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Endorph posted:I understand where you're coming from but saying 'this character needs to be explicitly paired with a man in order to not come across as a child' is some uhhh, bad mojo. Like, again, obviously that wasn't your intent and this is an extremely uncharitable read but, if Rorona's written like an actual mother - not completely sapped of her personality or anything, just more competent and mature and an actual authority figure for her daughter, even if she still has all her goofy pie traits - then she wouldn't be written like a child. The people who don't want Rorona to have an explicit pairing are people who know their preferred pairings for her wouldn't get confirmed, either because they're gay (Cordelia) or because the character's completely fallen off the face of the earth due to their unpopularity (Tantris), which is a pretty different angle than the 'player self-insert' thing you're pushing. I definitely didn't mean to imply Rorona needed to be straight and married with a child to be an adult, though I realize my argument could be seen that way given a different context than intended. My previous statements were made focusing almost solely on general storytelling tropes rather than societal standards, so I was coming into the discussion hauling a whole different load of baggage. The way I was thinking it, having Rorona be a biological mother still running her alchemy business and being rabid about pies while her kid was running around would be a subversion of having a woman's role reduced to Mother after childbirth. For Rorona, the whole kid and kid's father thing wouldn't subsume her old self, but just be added to the rest of her personality. It would be a positive example for women who want to have both kids and a life outside of said kids. The focus on the father and the importance of Rorona being with a guy was, in my view, not really relevant (despite me starting out talking about who she dated -- I was asking for fun, not because it's actually important). In regards to Atelier, it is coming from a better place than most media since it's largely by women for women, but while looking up Rorona stuff I'd heard a lot about how the Arland trilogy was pandering to the otaku market more than before, especially with the de-aged Rorona bit. That de-aging idea matched up with a cultural stigma I was already familiar with, of men obsessed with the purity of women and treating non-virgin women as terrible or unworthy of note. I'll admit a big part of the reason I thought Rorona being an older biological mom would be neat was because it'd be a swing in the exact opposite direction from that. I can't speak to character popularity or other fandom things because I'm not very familiar with the topic, so if I made some wrong assumptions, that was probably me being unaware of something. I think your points are valid and agree with your views on cultural problems. So far as I can tell we're just taking two really different approaches to the subject. In the end I completely agree with your final sentence about Rorona being a biological parent or not. I'm fine with Rorona either way; I was chatting about the subject with a tone of "hey, this would be neat", not "this is the only good way to do this". Greyarc fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 10:49
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Endorph posted:I mean, the main thing I'm not getting is the tie into the 'biological' stuff, as if you're more or less of a mother based on that. It's tied to two things which I already mentioned: First, the notion of purity of women, which... I'm not sure whether it's an issue in Japan, but it's got a long history in certain areas of Western culture. Basically, certain subcultures would essentially only consider Rorona worthwhile if she stayed an innocent virgin. Rorona could subvert that simply by being onscreen, doing things and having opinions and not simply fading into the background. Since this is very tied to experience with these Western subcultures, I definitely don't expect it to take precedence over Japanese cultural issues in a Japanese game. Second and more relevant, biological moms in particular have an abysmal track record in fiction. Adoptive moms are more likely to survive and be seen as scrappy can-do types, while biological moms are usually just there to die and be an inspiration for their surviving kids/husband. Rorona could subvert that by not dying and having goals of her own. Anyway, again, I don't have super strong feelings on the subject either way. I'm mainly just writing all this out because I worried my initial statements were overly flippant considering how sensitive the subject matter is for a lot of people.
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Feb 9, 2019 11:39
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I get the impression you're attaching a subtext to my statements when in reality, that subtext just isn't there. Again, I feel like we're coming at this from really different backgrounds even though I think we both fundamentally agree with each other on this whole thing. Like, I'm not exaggerating when I say I agree with you on all your cultural opinions. I never, ever intended to imply that straight relationships or biological birth were better. My absolute only reasons for bringing up the whole thing are the two reasons I just mentioned. We obviously have come into contact with pretty different media, but from my perspective, reason number two is laughably blatant.
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Feb 9, 2019 12:02
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 09:04 |
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Honestly you just seem to want to be antagonistic for the sake of being antagonistic. I told you my opinions and you've refused to believe me. You also seem to refuse to believe a different background would cause misunderstandings despite shared ideals. Imposing subtext on another person's words is normal, but you're obviously throwing so much subtext into my posts you're arguing with a shadow, not me. I'm genuinely sorry my comment struck a nerve for you.
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Feb 9, 2019 12:32
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