• They/Them

Producer & Programmer at https://www.sunsetvisitor.studio/

Made 1000xRESIST, now making [REDACTED]


Gamedev and Gundam shitposting (sometimes the shitposts have a lot of effort behind them)


Avatar from "Space Cuties Picrew" by Gabby DaRienzo https://linktr.ee/gabbydarienzo


Bluesky
@cyn-cedilla.bsky.social
goblin.band (fediverse)
@cyn_cedilla@goblin.band
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in reply to @Cyn-Cedilla's post:

  1. alright. do it. elaborate.
  2. the iambic pentameter is SOOOOO FUCKING GOOD it pops back into my head and won't go away whenever i think about it they did such a good job and when Dario Coates-as-Oersted finally gets to speak outside of Battle Grunts at his lowest and he comes out swinging it drives me nuts

(unmarked spoilers in the comments I guess)

I've cooled a little on this thought since having it, but I'll still share. The thing they both do is wring Tragedy out of taking characters from one genre and forcing them into another. A "genre" in this analysis is a sort of well-recognized shorthand recipe for the way a certain type of fictional world and setting can be expected to behave. Twin Peaks is doing A Lot and this is a pretty narrow lens, but one of my thoughts after watching The Return was that the town and people of Twin Peaks were playing by Soap Opera rules. As soon as Laura Palmer washes up on that beach, the Soap Opera gets invaded by other genres (Police Procedural, Slasher Horror) and the characters, being little fictional genre-rule driven automatons, have no ability to cope and the wheels start falling of.

So Oersted is a High Fantasy JRPG silent protagonist and he would've been fine if he was in a High Fantasy JRPG genre story, but as soon as people start talking in iambic pentameter and having even slightly complicated emotions, he's not just out of his depth but utterly doomed because whoops turns out you're actually a Shakespearean Tragic Hero. And then to twist the knife, we still have one foot in the High Fantasy genre world, so at your emotional nadir you can literally manifest your hate and anguish and petulance as a potent wellspring of dark magic (n.b. the Author can pick and choose the Worst Possible Genre Rule to apply in every single moment to twist, torment, and contort their characters)

It rocks so much. This is tinged with personal opinion, but I feel like the VO is just straight-up better in this chapter than the others and I think that's partially down to production process. A common problem with VO in games is that there can be a real lack of direction for the voice-actors, or the direction they do get is very disconnected from the original creative intent. (I say as I work on a VO-heavy game). But I feel like if you put a theatre kid in front of a microphone and give them something that scans like Shakespeare they instantly and immediately know how to sell it

(wondering too if this is part of the original sauce, old Willy Shakes writing stuff in poetry because you can put it in front of a fresh actor and get a good performance without too much direction)

i think the 'wrong genre' view's really neat - certainly makes a lotta sense to me. when oersted woke up that morning, do you think he noticed ev'ryone speaking in iambic pentameter constantly and went "well that's kinda weird" to himself? or is he just too focused on the ol' JRPG adventuring that's sure to come and make everything alright. i doubt the Bard existed in Lucrece, 'cause if he did then Oersted coulda known and tragedy would have been avoided

yeah honestly it's really kind of a winning formula for VO, y'know? poetry really does just say "ayo! read me with PASSION you big fucking nerd" and then it works because Oh Hell Yeah Babe. it's really hard not to read ol' Shakespeare in your head without dramatizing it, and i think that translates to speaking too

A fun thought, though the theory sort of requires you to think of the characters entirely inside the text. This conception of Oersted is too imaginary to have woken up the morning before the plot. "Less than dead, he never was" etc.