Master Of Prospero- When He's A Young Adult. Before The Emperor Found Him.

Slowly making my way through the TOTK B roll stream, had a few thoughts on the emptiness of the sky islands. In a way, would it not be more surprising if there were more remains to be seen? Ignoring the whole 'it's a game, decisions were made by the developers' bit, nature can take over surprisingly quickly in the right circumstances. In a way, it's more surprising so much survived in BOTW (like the bomb hut ruins. Fire damaged wood? Should be gone in a decade or two anyway). (contd)

So the thing about the Sky Islands in Tears of the Kingdom is that, not only are the ruins fairly well-preserved - presumably due to having been in the Sacred Realm for the last 10,000+ years - but even with them damaged and tumbledown, it's fairly clear from the layout of the islands and their structures that they were not residences. That's not something that would've been lost to erosion and time, that's something foundational to the architecture of the place.

When the game designers want to show a place people live on the surface of Hyrule, they hit a few key points: distinct-looking homes with beds, places that make food, and an inn for travelers. The buildings are different sizes, decorated or personalized by the residents. They're laid out relative to one another in a way that allows for easy, convenient traversal. It's intentional design that makes the villages feel lived-in, cozy, and worth protecting.

Inside the buildings, little details show the presence of living people, even if the building is empty at the time. Table settings, notebooks, pictures on the walls. They feel like they've been shaped by the influence of people, living and working and customizing their environment.

These are all, to be fair, things that we wouldn't expect to last very long if the town fell to ruin. When we explore the sky islands, we aren't expecting to find well-preserved paper maps or notebooks or anything. But if they were lived-in - if they were Zonai population centers rather than temples, ritual centers and factories - that would still be reflected in the basic layout of the structure itself. A residence is designed to accommodate for every basic need, meaning we'd expect the buildings to have places for them to sleep, to eat, and to relax. On the Sky Islands, we find none of these things.

The most common buildings on the sky islands are these isolated stone one-room ruins. They look and feel like storehouses - a few pots, some crumbled masonry. No doors or interior rooms for privacy, no comforts, no sign of a place to sleep, no adjoining buildings. These things were never homes.

The Great Sky Island is the only really plausible candidate for a place the Zonai might've actually lived, being about town-sized with several buildings, but it's not laid out like one. The buildings are either small one-room storage sheds or the massive Temple of Time, and there's no sign of other specialized buildings that could have been used for things like food, rest or other necessities. The Great Sky Island feels like a large, beautiful public park built grafted onto the Temple of Time.

The larger dungeons are more internally complicated, but not in the way that residences are complicated. The water dungeon looks like some kind of huge open park - wide avenues, plazas, devices built for mobility. It feels like a place meant to be traversed and admired, not stayed in.

The wind dungeon is more clearly built as a weapon platform, nowhere we expect people to live. It makes sense that it feels sterile and lifeless.

The larger, more complicated sky islands are also designed for clear utility. The spheres are some sort of celestial observatories, featuring a control system, a treasure chest, and nothing else.

Wildcards like Lightcast Island were clearly built to serve a single purpose - in this case, a lighthouse and attached microdungeon - but contain no signs of life. Zonai came here for a reason, but they didn't stay.

The glide challenge islands are visually impressive, but ultimately the rings are empty - they don't even have structures on them. They exist for the dive challenge and nothing else.

Same deal with the labyrinths, which exist explicitly as puzzles and challenges.

The mines in the depths are also clearly structured for utility - storerooms, construct part repositories and a lot of conveyer belts for moving zoanite. The purpose of the building is very clear just from the layout, and these are not places where anyone was supposed to be staying outside of work hours.

This, along with the layout of towns on the surface, shows that the designers are very good at constructing architecture that reflects the in-story utility of a place, which means the lack of signs of life in the sky islands is not a limitation of the console or the imagination of the artists - it's an intentional design choice.

The end result of all of this? The Sky Islands feel like somewhere that the Zonai built and visited, but not where they lived. They feel cold and unwelcoming and liminal. There's no sense of loss or tragedy, just a feeling of emptiness - people used to come here, but they don't anymore. There's none of the poignancy of an empty dining table's unused place settings or an abandoned child's toy. None of the Sky Islands that descended during the Upheaval were places where the Zonai lived. At the peak of their power they were mistaken for gods, a massively thriving technologically advanced civilization - I'd expect their homes to be cities, towers of jade and marble bustling with the activity of a post-scarcity utopia. None of the Sky Islands show us anything like that, and given how well the designers can portray a lived-in place even without any people in it, this is assuredly intentional. The Zonai built and visited and used the Sky Islands we can explore, but as a whole they lived somewhere else.

But throughout it all, there's this pervading unease - the fact that there's no obvious tragedy makes the sky islands feel more unnerving. We know just enough of the story to infer that something happened to the Zonai - something bad, if we read into Rauru and Mineru's reaction - but whatever it was left no scars. The Zonai constructs don't even realize anything's amiss. The buildings have been damaged only by time and gravity; the forges and mines and observatories and temples are silent and abandoned, like the Zonai all went home one night for dinner and just never came back.

The Sky Islands don't feel dead, they feel lifeless. A place people passed through but didn't leave their mark on. When Link traverses the islands, he isn't just alone - he doesn't even have the comfort of signs of life. The only evidence he has that anyone ever came to these islands are the fact that somebody built them in the first place. They left no marks, no art, no notes, no diaries, no toys, no graffiti. They're just gone.

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

Am I blind or is that a reverse turn card not a skip turn card

I love the analysis tho!

I'm gonna do some Uno reversing theorizing here y'all. I think Pyotr was gonna win this match. I also think he's won 98% of these Uno matches. @meo-htp made an in-depth post detailing the vamp's hideout.

Picture courtesy of Meo-htp:

One of the details was how their table has huge dents in it and a big bite out of it. Shitbeard has gnarly marks on his arm, so I think he's the one who made the dents in the table.

And I think Kevin was the one who took a chunk out of the table. He's the only one who has the most pronounced canines out of the four of them.

I originally thought it would be Ape Boy, but his teeth aren't..big enough for a bite like that. He couldve caused it due to his excessive hunger, but the others mentioned him "over feeding" so he shouldn't even be hungry enough to bite the table.

I believe Shitbeard and Kevin got into an intense Uno match and now it was Ape Boy and Pyotr's turn.

Ape is clearly looking at Pyotr waiting for him to make his turn, thinking he's 100% gonna win. He's only got one card left in his hand while Pyotr has three.

Unfortunately for Ape Boy, this is a 2 way game. Meaning all Pyotr has to do is use his skip turn card, use the change colour card to red, then put down his red card. Winning him the Uno game.

It just makes me think about how much stuff Pyotr could plan out and his ability to think ahead when he's calm.

Not my white ass locked in the duke’s dungeon again because I fucked his favorite jester 😩

I didn’t know he was so territorial over the silly little guy 🙄

ARE YOU A BONE OR BLOOD PERSON.

ARE YOU A VOID OR ABYSS PERSON.

ARE YOU A ROT OR DUST PERSON.

arthuriana and swords<3

(or ellian’s procrastinating so it’s time to talk about my favorite swords!)

The most famous of them all is Excalibur (or Caliburn depending on the text, however some argue that Caliburn is an entirely different sword) and i get it — it’s the sword in the stone, the sword that is proof of Arthur’s heritage and legitimacy over Camelot. What’s interesting is that a lot of other medieval texts (Layamon’s Brut and Wace’s Brut) describe Arthur’s childhood as one in which that he was always royalty, or at least, was aware of it — Malory’s Le Morte and possibly Suite du Merlin from the Vulgate (don’t quote me on this it’s been a year since I last read Suite du Merlin) discuss over how Arthur grew up alongside Kay under the tutelage of Sir Ector. Various different texts have different reactions towards Arthur pulling out Excalibur — some have it that the nobility fell in line right away and others have it in that there was ultimate discourse that erupted forth as there was disbelief that the squire of Sir Kay WAS the person who truly pulled the sword out, and thus, belonging to the throne.

That being said there isn’t much talk of Clarent, which is another sword of Arthur’s. Clarent is not a sword used to fight with — Clarent is the sword that Arthur uses to KNIGHT people with. It’s a purely decorative sword that is symbolic more than anything. And yet, THIS is the sword that Mordred (and sometimes Guinevere) steals in medieval texts and uses against Arthur at Camlann. THIS is the sword that Mordred swears his kingship on and his inheritance to the throne. The implications that it is a CEREMONIAL SWORD (that was thus used in the knighthood of Mordred itself) being used to kill Arthur is thus… it speaks a lot about the mortality of kingship and just how Arthur, at the end of the day, despite being king is also a man, and also one that can be disposed of, and that while Excalibur may have been the one to herald the start, it is Clarent, purely decorative and ornamental and political, is used once again to throw Britain into ruin.

Shoutout also to THE best swords though: Galatine and Secace. Galatine belongs to Gawain and is of equal power to Excalibur — the Lady of the Lake gifted it to Gawain as being the other half of Excalibur. Personally, it cements my own idea in that Gawain, Arthur’s beloved nephew and one of his most trusted advisors, was always meant to be his heir. Secace is Lancelot’s sword and in true Lancelot fashion he only named his sword because everyone else was and he didn’t want to be left out. The Red Hilt Sword (which belongs to Lancelot) is discussed here and here by my beloved friend Lou Gringolet.

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.

My favorite blonde swordsman with identity issues

please read Aurora by @comicaurora it’s so good and I’ve been reading it for 3 years