Sarcasm Detected.

[rionaleonhart]

To continue my pattern of talking about Nil in every entry I make about this game that, to my knowledge, does not have Nil in it, here's a note I made during my last Horizon Zero Dawn replay:

It's nice to know I can't disappoint Nil. If I take everyone out with perfect stealth, he'll enjoy it. If I screw up and end up in a messy, bloody melee, he'll enjoy it. If I really screw up and get killed in front of him, he'll enjoy that too.

Another note I made during Zero Dawn: Aloy lies on the bed in Olin's apartment before the final battle and wonders aloud how Sobeck slept in this sort of situation and then asks, 'Sylens? Are you there?' and there needs to be fic where they remotely bang.

Horizon's 'no canonical romance, but pretty much everyone is into you' approach is a lot of fun for an indiscriminate multishipper. (Sylens is one of the few characters who doesn't particularly seem into Aloy, but apparently that's not going to stop me.)


And now to Horizon Forbidden West! Here's a bit more rambling about 'The Gate of the Vanquished', because for some reason I absolutely cannot stop talking about this one sidequest.



Drakka has started calling me 'Desert Flame', which is pretty cute. I'm glad I didn't kill him. I'm also glad that you get to follow up with your choice of commander; it makes the choice feel a lot more significant!

I spoke to Ginger about 'The Gate of the Vanquished', and it's interesting to hear about how different that quest can feel based on when you started the quest chain leading up to it.

Ginger met Drakka well into the game; Drakka was just another person they had worked with. When the choice came, Ginger backed Yarra, reasoning solely based on who seemed the best fit for commander. In fact, Ginger felt a bit used when they realised Drakka was leveraging the water situation for a power grab.

I ran into Drakka as soon as I entered Tenakth territory. Drakka was the first Tenakth who spoke to and trusted me; he was my first real experience of the fact that the Tenakth were just people like anyone else, rather than the bloodthirsty monsters people outside the Forbidden West painted them as.

In the end, my decision to back Drakka wasn't based on the question 'who is the better commander?'; it was 'do I want to kill my friend?' And he has his faults, but ultimately I trust that he's well-meaning, that he's genuine in his hope to do better for his tribe and genuine in his warmth towards me, because I see him as my friend in a way that Ginger didn't. I drop into town to say hi to him whenever I'm nearby.

It's sort of fascinating that the same events can have such a different impact based solely on when they play out.



I fell off a walkway (in the game, not in real life), and a Tenakth passer-by said, 'Yes. Do that again, outlander.'

Another quote I enjoyed from a passer-by: 'Is there a reason for all this jumping around?'

Comments

[simplecoffee]

Horizon's 'no canonical romance, but pretty much everyone is into you' approach is a lot of fun for an indiscriminate multishipper.)

I love canons that do this! Mission: Impossible is one of my favourite franchises for doing exactly this, plus an added element of 'protagonist doesn't actually know everyone else is into him, except that one guy he met in Russia once and definitely flirted with while they were trying to kill each other'.

Another quote I enjoyed from a passer-by: 'Is there a reason for all this jumping around?'
I love when background characters are just going about their lives, and we hear about how absolutely wild everything is from their point of view.

[rionaleonhart]

You're the only person I've ever seen talking fannishly about Mission: Impossible (which is a franchise I haven't experienced myself), but you just caused me to wonder how much of a fandom there is. It's larger than I expected! I thought maybe there'd be a few hundred works on AO3; there are 2,300.

Although, puzzlingly, the seventh-most-written pairing in the tag is Clint Barton/Phil Coulson. I'm almost certain that those aren't Mission: Impossible characters. Maybe it's just the destiny of big action film franchises; the fifth-highest pairing in the Die Hard section is Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, and in fifth place for the James Bond films is Sherlock Holmes/John Watson.

My all-time favourite background NPC line comes from the guy who saw me hiding behind a table in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and said, 'I found you; what do I get?'

[simplecoffee]

It's been too big for Yuletide for three years! Wild! (I got into the fandom in its last year of Yuletide eligibility.) I'm not always in step with the fandom in terms of pairing taste or fic taste - my ships are tiny - but there's such a wide variety of pairings and every single one of them is plausible. It's a canon full of sexual tension, and somehow each pairing has a distinct variety of sexual tension, too, so you can often combine pairings into threesomes or moresomes and change the dynamic - truly something for everyone. :D

Those are Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, and Clint Barton is played by Jeremy Renner, who also plays Brandt in Mission: Impossible! You're right that that seems to be the fate of small action film fandoms - there are a lot of fusion fics mistagged as M:I, when they should probably be tagged with the source fandom and "Mission: Impossible AU". (I've seen similar MCU or Star Wars fics in Edge of Tomorrow, The Hunt for Red October, Hustlers, and other small film fandoms - oddly enough, Top Gun seems to have less of an issue with this.)

Jeremy Renner also happens to be one of those actors who are really popular in fandom, and lots of writers like to cross over fandoms in order to write his characters in two fandoms as twins, related, or even the same person. This happens to Karl Urban a lot too! It's an interesting phenomenon.

the fifth-highest pairing in the Die Hard section is Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, and in fifth place for the James Bond films is Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
This is so wild! Fandom is so wild! I'm mostly a small fandom denizen and I'm really not much of a setting change AU girl, but it's super interesting that people seem to have this instinct to write characters they like in other settings they fancy!

'I found you; what do I get?'
😄😄😄 DELIGHTFUL.

[wolfy_writing]

I remember with Jeremy Renner there was a popular fan theory about his character in the “adult men who have been playing the same game of tag for decades” being Hawkeye, because his character was capable of pulling off amazing action stunts and consequently had never been tagged.

[simplecoffee]

MCU fandom likes a lot of Jeremy Renner characters to secretly be Hawkeye! There was a very brief trend of every Scarlett Johansson character being the Black Widow, too, but that didn't last as long.

[wolfy_writing]

That would have made Her a very weird movie.

[simplecoffee]

I think someone once wrote her character from The Other Boleyn Girl as the Black Widow, too. It's always fun to see how writers can make odd things make sense. :)

[necrophilia]

I fell off a highway in real life once. No one was around to make a snarky comment, alas.

I own HZD and kept getting murdered in the stealth tutorial. Then I stopped playing. A one act play, starring me.

[rionaleonhart]

A beautiful and tragic play. I seem to recall I switched down to easy mode extremely quickly.

[necrophilia]

That's probably what I should do too! Okay, you inspired me with your brilliant life hack.