vkalsen
@vkal.bsky.social
220 followers 560 following 2.4K posts
Another soul weighed down by gravity. I love to think about RPGs and manga. I have a background in political sociology, but I try to keep that off the tl. Here’s to hoping for a better world. (He/him) 🇩🇰
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vkal.bsky.social
Made a new 3x3 for the sky.

Kept it to one title per series/studio. Titles in the alt text.
First row: Pentiment (2022), Kingdom Hearts (2002), Prey (2017).

Second row: Trails in the Sky FC (2004), 13 Sentinels: Aigis Rim (2019), Disco Elysium (2019)

Third row: Virtue's Last Reward (2012), Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), Metaphor Refantazio (2024).
vkal.bsky.social
I'm back to looking forward to getting around to it.

The most annoying thing about its popularity is that I'll have to wait longer for a discount.
vkal.bsky.social
I hate whenever I realize that my criticism of a piece of media is actually incredibly common and not at all the insightful gift to my peers I thought it was.

It makes me feel so vain.
Reposted by vkalsen
love2thetest.bsky.social
at the point of doomerism where i just feel thankful that we got a good run of 50k years of art without generative ai
vkal.bsky.social
my gf is the funniest person in the world, but everyone around her think she’s a very serious person, so when she deliver a funny line everyone just nod and go “interesting point, I had thought of that”.

Ironically, this is the height of comedy for me
vkal.bsky.social
Literally me rn fr 😫
vkal.bsky.social
The music in Hades 2 is the tightest shit, because it’s meticulously timed so that the panflutes kick in right as the boss turns on asswhooping-mode
vkal.bsky.social
It’s so good man
vkal.bsky.social
Is it a hot take to say that the Freddy/Jason curve is skewed too far toward Freddy?

I need more of my boy
vkal.bsky.social
And I’ll take a 1000 “King Arthur is actually a girl” over a boring, straight depiction.
vkal.bsky.social
Man, I was thinking about TM when I wrote this, because Nasu is such a good example of artistic depiction of myth.

Like there’s nothing he won’t change, but it is often in the service of introducing you to some weird or interesting aspect of the original myths.
vkal.bsky.social
IF YOUR ODIN ISN’T THIS, THEN I DON’T WANT IT 😑😑😑✋✋✋
Demon King Odin from Odin’s Sphere
vkal.bsky.social
Extremely weird shit to write, yeah.

Like sure, we also have weird LARP’ers who pretend to belief in dead religions, but that stuff is very explicitly revival projects.

No one is getting mad that Dyonisos talks in a funny voice in a video game.
vkal.bsky.social
Yeah, it is extremely weird to treat mythology as if there’s some official canon like it’s a comic book adaption or whatever.
vkal.bsky.social
The implied reverence seems extremely Christian to me.

Like mythology isn’t an institution, it’s folklore. There’s no arbiter of canon here.
vkal.bsky.social
I mean, there basically isn’t any definitive source material for this stuff.

Even the prose Edda was written by a Christian scholar. It’s kinda pointless to obsess over whether it follows the established canon like it’s a comic book adaptation or something.
vkal.bsky.social
It is this part that I kinda take offense to.

I’m not Greek, but from my own experience of growing up in a place tied to Norse mythology, this sort of reverence is antithetical to folklore and myth.

That shit is whimsical and weird and saying you can’t depict it as such feels distinctly Christian.
vkal.bsky.social
People fucking LOVE to point out perceived inconsistencies like Frey being a man or Sutr residing in a frozen castle, like they’re mistakes and not just the depiction the creators decided to go with.

There’s is no obligation to be true to mythology. It’s pointless.
vkal.bsky.social
It was vague on purpose
vkal.bsky.social
Yeah, I thought we had left the era of stuff needing to be dark & gritty behind us.

And it’s especially weird in the context of mythology, because that stuff has always been extremely whimsical.
vkal.bsky.social
This type of criticism reminds me of when people would complain about the mythological depictions in games like Odin Sphere or Valkyrie Profile.

“Uhm akshually Odin didn’t have a healthbar and three phases in the original texts 🤓”

No shit, this isn’t a documentary.
vkal.bsky.social
The music in Hades 2 is the tightest shit, because it’s meticulously timed so that the panflutes kick in right as the boss turns on asswhooping-mode
vkal.bsky.social
when the theremin kicks in
Image of Pacha from Emperor’s New Groove expressing that this is some extremely dope shit
vkal.bsky.social
Real curious about this Porn thing