the lizerrrrd @lizardgamer - Tumblr Blog

List of tags, lets see if I can make them links

Quick info, this blog may contain spoilers for games listed in the tags, especially Divinity games, Baldurs Gate 3, and the Xenoblade series, so block those tags if u dont wanna see it

Whats scarier, the ocean or outer space?

ocean

outer space

idk

Remaining time: 6 days 1 hour

#my posts #ty in advance to the 3 people who might potentially see this lol

horsefigureoftheday

Horse figure of the day: Windstone Editions #803-Jet Mother Unicorn – Jet Black

#figurines

dizzyisdizzy

Flamin' Hot Pyra ❤️‍🔥

#xenoblade #art

lylahammar

My take on unicorns! I'd really love to make a mythical creature field guide someday, since the Spiderwick Field Guide is what inspired me to start drawing in the first place 🥰

#whoa cool #art

Ngl id love to write more of my thoughts about games and books and stuff but im not very educated and my reading comprehension and analysis skills are not great, and people are more likely to respond to bad or wrong takes with some variety of "here is why you're terminally stupid and personally ushering in the age of media illiteracy" instead of just politely correcting me lol

#my posts

Hmm am I a poser if I draw Alvis with a key instead of a trinity processor core even though I never played the original on the wii

#am mostly joking but yknow #xenoblade #my posts #xenoblade 2 #this got nothing to do with xenoblade 2 tbh but its technically an out of context spoiler so adding the tag for anyone who filters xc2 #anyway I think the key is really neat tbh #it kinda means something within the context of that game while the core crystal is just for Lore Stuff #love me some lore stuff but i will always prefer stuff to have some meaning within the context of its own story

thatmaggiewhodraws

Day job grind

#xenoblade #art

Big fan of games that have a Big Tree

Xenoblade 2, for example

I made wyll I’m gonna cry he’s so cute 🥹

#oh this is adorable #bg3 #art

threefeline

"You will often be subjected to uncomfortable situations in public and you should learn to navigate that" and "if you play your music out loud in a public hike then the other hikers should be allowed to hunt you for sport" are two sentiments that can and should co-exist

#pls dont listen to tiktoks at full volume on a 30 minute bus ride please i am begging

thetinyscald-blog

"Even if you end up as the world's enemy, I'll be your knight."

#hell yeah #i just finished ff8 for the first time like yesterday and my brain is still buzzing #i love them 😭#ff8 #art

Not to dredge up ancient xenoblade 2 discourse, but all these years later it does bug me how the blade characters are so sexualized compared to the humans because of the Implications

We have these characters who's lives are directly controlled by governments that distribute them to soldiers and used as weapons of war. When in their core crystals, they are literal objects to be owned, inhereted, sold, and distributed. And when they are awakened, they are objectified as weapons. Their personhood and autonomy is casually dismissed by the ruling powers and often by the human drivers who have so much control over their lives.

The story tells us that this is a bad thing, but awkwardly continues to dehumanize and objectify the blades in the story and lore without really calling attention to it. One of the ways this presents itself is in the sexualization of the female blades. Having these characters who's lives are controlled by humans, and not given a choice in how their appearance manifests, be the most sexualized characters in the game has weird vibes. And I think this sucks because it lowkey undermines the point the game makes about blades being objectified and denied autonomy.

#xenoblade 2 #xenoblade chronicles 2 #my posts #kinda nervous about posting this cuz I know this is a reeeeaally contentious topic in the fandom #I am very open to hearing different perspectives on this but pls be nice! ty ty

tennoseihai

it's easy to dismiss being annoyed by the blades all having their names changed in the english localization as just being a pedantic weeb BUT it does actually end up burying some of the underlying nuance in the game's naming conventions, and those have a surprising amount of depth to them!

like, every major blade originally has a japanese name that got changed to a more western name that was usually relatively equivalent in connotation (saika/calamity to pandoria/pandora, etc), which in itself seems fine enough. thing is, the common blades also had japanese names, which the localization doesn't change. again, seems whatever, but it does create some problems.

the humans, meanwhile, mostly have western or at least western-sounding names, and a good chunk of them remain unchanged, with a few exceptions, like meleph to morag, adelle to addam, maruveni (i assume it's meant to be read as marveni and sound sort of italian since he's da pope, but who knows) to amalthus. even then, those changes are usually just to make sort of fake-sounding names sound a little more recognizably western (or to avoid addam's name being famous pop singer adelle), so the theming remains intact , which isn't the case for how the blades are renamed.

and i do think that these naming conventions, humans being western and blades being japanese, was a significant underlying element of the setting that the localization unintentionally erases.

consider that the blades, all given japanese names, are revered and treated as equals in torna, the country with obviously japanese-inspired architecture, alongside japanese-inspired armour that torna the organization continues to use. now consider how all the more western-inspired countries using western names are pretty directly shown to not value blades in the same way, often abusing them. jin describes how blades are treated as slavery, and the systems in place throughout much of alrest pretty much amount to that. amalthus, who is just the pope, which is famously an important guy in a western religion, is deliberately ensuring this systemic oppression remains in place, too. by engineering a system where blades are, in most cases, only allowed to awaken to be used in wars which lead directly to massive displacement and the need for refugee camps, he's even exacerbating the anti-blade discrimination that leads to protests against them in indol. everything he does is ensuring their position in alrest can't improve.

like, by having this strong divide between how characters are named, you pretty directly set up this idea of humans representing. idk, western imperialism? against the blades, who are so strongly associated with more japanese concepts.

(it is worth having a small lmao at the idea that japan hasn't committed any acts of imperialist atrocity, BUT addam does directly mention the idea of torna formerly being a warmongering/imperialist power that used their titan to wage wars, but that they eventually renounced that, so. you could argue there's criticism of former japanese imperialism to be gleaned there maybe?)

admittedly i'm not sure i can articulate exactly what i think is being done here beyond "western imperialism oppressing and enslaving another race" because it feels like imperialism isn't Quite the right word for what's going on. maybe it is idk lmao.

my point is there's definitely something being done with these names. i don't think it's a coincidence that the fantasy-japan country happens to be the only place that treated the race with japanese names equally, while all the countries with western names oppress and mistreat them.

that's a nuance that just gets really muddied when most of the major blades in the game no longer have japanese names. jin is really the only one left, and even then they just moved his name a little to the left from the slightly more japanese-sounding name shin. the rare blades don't have japanese names anymore, either. it's really only the common blades that retain this, and because, flatly, nobody cares about common blades unless they're hardcore suffering in the early game or are a total sicko in the post-game... nobody's gonna be paying attention to their names all being japanese, are they?

as a result,it's a lot harder to pick up on this stuff, even subtextually, i think. localizing all the blade names to roughly equivalent but more familiar-sounding names might have seemed like the right move in the moment, and it arguably is in a vacuum, but they pretty obviously did it without consideration for the broader context of why these characters are named the way they are. it's not like you can't detect that blades are oppressed anymore, but you do lose a bit of the texture of it all, which is a shame.

#oh neat this is something I hadnt considered #also makes sense in this context that Indol was the country to unleash Malos on the world causing a nuclear apocalypse that destroyed torna #xenoblade