Frozen and the art of unlearning
If you don’t like it, I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but I question your decisions.
I was born as a child of winter, in the midst of a blizzard. I feel it down to my bones, feel rime creep in around the corner of my eyes when I close them, feel my skin exult at the biting air that blows in when October starts to die and make way for November. When snow falls, I smile. The cold really never did bother me anyway.
That is not why I feel a connection to Frozen. But it certainly makes the film’s chill landscape feel that much more welcoming. A kingdom of ice and frost looks less like a lonely wasteland and more like a comfortable place to be, if not forever then at least for a time.
But the connection goes deeper than that, and it ties into the fact that both of the main characters in the film have such a profoundly personal journey that you kind of half to check yourself on occasion to remind you that is, at its heart, a film for children. The themes of the movie are a lot deeper than you’d expect, and for me – for a lot of people – this is a story detailing the same journey that adult life has already put us through, but with a great deal more compassion and acceptance than you’d think possible.
Telling Stories: The attraction
Anyone who thinks that sexuality doesn’t define you as a person has never been a teenager.
I don’t mean that as a positive or negative thing, but as a statement of fact. Sure, my experience as a 16-year-old boy staring at girls and being very interested in them isn’t the sole defining characteristic I have as a person, but it had a lot of influence on my development as a person. It informs some of who I am now as an adult, half a life later. It affects a lot of the person I am, and my comfort level with it affects the things I’ll do and talk about.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure that no one reading this is terribly interested in a detailed self-analysis when it comes to my particular bedroom preferences. That’s not the point here; this is a roleplaying column, after all. It’s about the way that your character’s sexuality can influence your character, and how broad a field that can be overall. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you don’t intend to have your roleplaying circle around it, it’s worth addressing.
The fault of modern gaming is our own
Taking a bold step of bringing in stubble-covered white guys, but this time they’re wearing hoods.
We’re in the wake of another year’s E3 when this is being published. Maybe you’re reading it after. Maybe you’re reading it at an E3 long after it’s been written. Maybe you’re even reading it during another convention, or just on an otherwise idle day when you’re thinking about the state of video games, wondering how it all turned out like this. How did we get to a landscape with all these generic shooters, with games that run longer and longer with less and less to say, how did we get to all of this?
Simply speaking: we asked for it.
I don’t mean that in a snide fashion, I mean that we, as gamers, asked for exactly what we got as modern gaming developed. Each part came down to us asking for something en masse, then deciding after we had it that we didn’t want it much to our detriment. And rather than blaming developers for doing what we asked, if you’re not happy about the state of games, it might be time to look at what we asked for and admit that really, this is what we said we wanted.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen: I’m in some real trouble here. I kind of expected that by this point in the project I’d be halfway-ish through the game, like I was with Final Fantasy II, but darn if there isn’t a lot of good stuff going on here and if we’re not even at the second of four crystals. This is not going to be a shorter jaunt, it seems. I’d be much more upset about this if Final Fantasy III weren’t a joy to play.
Albeit one with some reservations. I mean, we’re up to the Tower of Owen now, and this dungeon pulls in a lot of stuff that really could have remained by the wayside. Sure, it was cute when you had me turn my entire party into miniature versions of ourselves for about a year, but now you’re asking me to turn the group into a bunch of toads. Toads! Go home, designers, you’re drunk. At least it’s not something you need to keep up for the whole dungeon.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 