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Have you ever played a video game that just made you so fucking angry?

Yeah all of them, every single one, even minecraft. Fuck minecraft.

part of what delights me about the goncharov joke is the inconsistencies. because it’s not an actual movie, different people are imagining different versions of it. some posts claim katya dies, others claim she fakes her death and survives. some ppl say there was real passion between goncharov and katya, others say it was a loveless marriage. the outlines of the film are the same, but the details are different. i like to think that they’re all true. somehow, impossibly, everyone’s posts are accurate, even when they directly contradict each other. goncharov is large, it contains multitudes. 

Two friends sharing a quiet moment in th evening light.

i hope ebony dark’ness dementia raven way, age 33, is enjoying the my chemical romance comeback and live tour,

Ranni and Rykard as narrative foils: an unnecessarily detailed deep dive

Ranni and Rykard both seek the same thing; the end of the Erdtree’s reign. In the past, the two collaborated on the Night of the Black Knives toward this purpose. But nowadays, the siblings’ paths are diverged, and they seem to follow completely separate agendas. Why? What happened? What drove them apart?

A main point of difference between Ranni and Rykard immediately post-Shattering is that Ranni is said to have “cast aside her Great Rune,” while Rykard kept his. Regarding the Great Runes, Finger Reader Enia says: “Tainted by the strength of their runes, [Marika’s] children warred.” The Great Runes are a source of power that corrupts, which Rykard fell prey to while Ranni removed the temptation.

As collaborators and as siblings, it is likely that they fought about this; Rykard believing that the strength of the runes is necessary to carry out their goals, and Ranni seeing the corrupting power of the runes for what it is. The resulting circumstance is, of course, Rykard’s participation in the war of the Shattering and his descent into power-hungry madness. Ranni, however, never strayed from her original goals, patiently plotting from the shadows.

Set on these diverging paths, the siblings’ actions shape them into narrative foils of each other… putting the rest under the cut because I can’t shut up:

Though both Ranni and Rykard seek to bring down the Golden Order, only one of them is ever called blasphemous. One definition of blasphemy is specifically “the crime of assuming oneself the rights or qualities of God,” and I think this is the definition that most applies to Rykard.

The Taker’s Cameo item states that, “when Rykard turned to heresy, taking by force became the rule. The gods themselves were no different, after all.” Here, we see Rykard directly imitating the behavior of the gods, though he curses them.

But not only does Rykard imitate the gods’ behavior; he also imitates Golden Order and Erdtree practices, albeit in a corrupted way. He utilizes weapons and sorcery that are both intelligence and faith-based, much like his father Radagon’s Golden Order incantations. Even the very concept of the God-Devouring Serpent can be seen as a perversion of the Erdtree… Rykard’s practice of devouring heroes to be togethaaa as famileee echoes the practice of Erdtree burial, where in both instances, a great mass of bodies is brought together to merge into one whole (the Serpent King and the Erdtree, respectively). The Serpent’s actions actually fit the Golden Order Law of Regression shockingly well: “all things yearn eternally to converge.”

The point of these comparisons is to show that Rykard isn’t actually making any meaningful change to the current world order… his plan is to essentially devour the current corrupt gods, and replace them with a new corrupt god (himself) that perpetuates the exact same practices. He and Ranni once sought to free the Lands Between from these corrupt gods, but he has become precisely what he hates most of all!

Ranni, on the other hand, does the opposite. Since the beginning of the Shattering, she has staunchly refused to engage with overt power grabs and warmongering. Instead, she has extricated herself from the system entirely, slaying her empyrean flesh and casting her Great Rune aside.

Regarding her new order, Ranni seeks to “betray everything, and rid the world of what came before,” tearing up the system from the very root. Her master plan is to completely remove the influence of the gods from the Lands Between, so rather than stay and rule as god-queen, she leaves: “As it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but I would have them at great remove. […] I would abandon this soil, with mine order.”

In Ranni's new age, life and souls are no longer directly tied to or influenced by the ruling order like they were during the age of the Erdtree. It makes perfect sense why Ranni would want to remove this influence, as she was born an empyrean with the Two Fingers' influence in her very flesh — one of her most crucial lines of dialogue in my opinion is when she says of the Two Fingers, “I would not be controlled by that thing.” with the most iron conviction in her voice.

In this way, Ranni is Rykard’s narrative foil: Rykard falls victim to the corrupting force of power, but Ranni resists the temptation. Rykard ends up imitating and becoming the gods which he hates, while Ranni is able to truly remove their influence. While Rykard trapped himself within a vicious cycle, Ranni was able to escape, freeing the Lands Between from the cycle as well. It's such a tragic end for two siblings who used to work together.

one of my favorite parts of moby dick is when ishmael wants/needs to tell us something but he desperately doesn't want to have to talk about it, he just buries it in a bunch of irrelevant information.

at the very beginning, he goes to church. a place filled with "silent grief... insular and incommunicable." and he sees these marble tablets on either side of the pulpit and says 'I don't really remember them all that well' (which is likely a lie. at the least it's extremely out of character for a man who directly quotes the internal monologues of other men) and proceeds to give three paraphrased examples. the first tablet is for a teenager, lost overboard off patagonia. the tablet was paid for by his sister. the second is for 6 men, taken by a whale they were hunting in the pacific. the tablet was paid for "by their surviving shipmates." the third is for a captain, killed on his own boat by a sperm whale off japan. the tablet was paid for by his widow. all seemingly normal.

except they're not. the first one is a red herring, seemingly irrelevant to our story. but the second? a memorial for a crew lost to a whale, left by their surviving shipmates? that's exactly what we're reading. the surviving shipmate is ishmael. he's all that remains. and then he pivots, drawing our attention to the much clearer parallel- the captain who loses his life on his own boat to a sperm whale. and we all immediately go "oh I know who that is! ahab!!" and ishmael succeeds. he needs us to see the sailors remembered by their surviving crew, but even more he needs to not address it. he needs us to not ask him about it. he wants this story to be told but he doesn't want to be the one telling it. he wants to pretend to be someone else, to be someone other than the one who survived. and for 135 chapters, he gets to be.

Played with the endings of Elden Ring and ai-generated arts, and since it combines surprisingly well, here it is. All six endings.

Elden ring or God of war for game of the year?

Oh boy, it's a close close call. I’m gonna rant. 

In some ways, Ragnorok is an infallible game, it’s so perfect that poking holes in it seems so nit-picky that you just come off looking like a little jackass creature. I loved every second I played of it and I can't think of a better written, better performed, more charismatic experience. I've seen morons complain that the game has too many cutscenes, as if they didn't know what type of game they were buying into. I would whine about the cutscenes more if they sucked or if the game lacked actual gameplay but it most certainly does not. This game is CHOCK FULL of things to see and do, and all the flavor-text and optional dialogue is insane, on top of that, the game feels amazing to play and the move-set is sexy. When everything is going crazy, there are few games as exciting as this one. At the end of the day I can't think of a more satisfying experience, with one of the most thematically satisfying endings ever in a game.

Elden Ring on the other hand has its problems. It has a difficulty-scaling issue, it's buggy on every platform, it most certainly looks worse than Ragnorok, it has less endearing characters, and what little dialogue it has is pretty mediocre. That being said, Elden Ring is my GOTY. This game is kinda like my dream-game made real, an open world souls-like made by Hidetaka Miyazaki the legend himself - a game with the mystique of Breath of the wild without the shortcomings of content and variety. This game, in my eyes, is the single best example as to why a game should be open-world. So often in games I feel like an open world is a crutch. -- In ghost of Tsushima the open world disconnected me from the pacing and character-growth of our MC, the objectives felt so systematic and ubisoft-esque that it 'gamified' itself as you played, removing the atmosphere and experiential qualities of the experience over time - this effect can also be seen in Horizon Forbidden West, and Dying light 2. Elden Ring uses the open-world to surprise you, you learn so much, you need to be aware of your surroundings, understand the lay of the land, and find things without guidance. It does what Dark Souls did to adventure games and it removes the handrails from the experience, in this case, Elden Ring unlocks the open-world experience. As a result, there aren't many games that evoke such a CANDID experience in me. I've never had so much fun exploring a world, and I've never been so surprised by a game's sheer amount of content. I could go on and on but ultimately it removes the burdensome systems that typically plague games of this scale. I think the game has the best reward-feedback-loop ever, where every item is invaluable, versus the generic inundation of materials in other games, etc etc etc... At the end of the day, Elden Ring just another valuable lesson for the gaming industry; I feel like Fromsoft pops up and teaches the whole industry a new lesson every once in a while - like they know what people want at a fundamental level.

On paper, Ragnorok could be seen as the better overall package but as a result of it being linear, it lacks the candid experience that Elden Ring delivers in spades and I think, despite Ragnorok being one of the best-ever narratives put into a game of this caliber, Elden Ring captures what it means to be a video game better.

Gif version of my Angela cat breakdancing video lol

Link to video