professor_tammi

... actually I'm not too sure if it even is whiny, but. orz

1) Srs shipping question! I don't think I'll get any answers to this, but um - am I the only person who finds the idea of really shipping two characters while only really caring about half of the ship a little odd? Actually, "odd" probably isn't the right word at all for this, but. Personally, I can't really imagine, say, OTPing something if I only really like one of the characters in the pairing. I can understand liking them to various degrees (in fact, this is very common), or merely liking the way they interact with each other, of course. But if I'm going to pair up two characters, I feel I should be at least somewhat invested in them both; there's not that much of a point to shipping if I can't really get into their heads, imo.

(Then again, I am notoriously bad at truly understanding most characters, I think. It's easy when there's something personal for me to relate to, but otherwise... I just tend to have a lot of trouble with it. I guess this is why I'm not a writer!)

2) ( This is another short Avatar rant. But it's slightly longer than the last one. )

3) ( I can't seem to keep quiet about japanese FE9/10 fandom it seems so instead I rant about it )

4) Firefox 5 is kind of cool! Or, well, I'm not sure if it's because of FF5 or not, but my Firefox is currently not lagging and crashing like crazy which hasn't happened in more than a month since I upgraded to Firefox 4. Also, it uses up less memory than FF4. That is pretty awesome. Um hopefully I didn't jinx it by calling it awesome. Every time I think I've solved my ~Firefox problems~ they seem to appear again, so. Yeah.

... right, now I just need to figure out why my computer constantly freezes :D

(Apologies in advance if this post seems incredibly messy and disorganized. My posts are pretty much always like that, but)

( I think this was supposed to be meta on how FE fan fics deal with homophobia but then I go off-topic like always. Then again, I'm probably not the right person to even talk about this, so. )
(Edit: I always feel terrified of discussing things like this because somehow, I feel like I'm going to unintentionally offend someone no matter what I say. ;_; And also because I'm terrible at clarifying my thoughts and getting them across.)

A-also I watched the Glee season 2 finale, and uh
( This is only cut for really mild spoilers. I don't have much to say at all. )

This is pretty unrelated to the rest of this post, which is already kind of random and disjointed, but... after searching for Ike/Elincia fics for a while because apparently I'm a masochist who wants to see my OTP get broken up or something idgi, I've concluded that, yeah, while I don't really understand straight!Ike at all, that's not the only reason I didn't find most of them interesting. There's also the problem of him constantly being portrayed as a romantic sap, and I'm just like "nnnope I don't even know who this person is"

And I've finally figured out why Firefox 4 was crashing roughly once every 5 minutes earlier today - apparently it was because I had hardware acceleration turned on. Good to know, I suppose, but it would've been nicer if it hadn't kept crashing while I was searching for a solution to the problem, forcing me to restart it the entire time which is incredibly frustrating because I have around 100+ tabs open at any given moment, and every time it crashed I had to reload everything and argh
and now it still crashes every few hours
We're not friends anymore, Firefox. :|

That title is probably going to fit pretty well, actually. This is going to be a very messy and disorganized post. I think.

( Where I rant about FE fandom newbies and fandom!secrets and emblanon. I don't even know. )

And, uh.. is it just me, or is FE really really easy/fun to randomly crossover with everything? I mean, I've seen it get crossed over with Pokémon and Persona and Tales of and Glee and itself and
well
almost everything

( But why isn't there a random FE/Twilight crossover yet, and why am I thinking about this )

I, uh... I actually don't have many characters I really hate, most of the time. Sure, there are several I'm indifferent towards, and some I dislike, but outright hate? - nope.

But do I have a least favorite character in the FE series? Yes. Roy. It's a rather mild dislike, really, but I still don't like him.

Perhaps the main reason is his personality, or lack thereof. I don't know if the translation patch is making his dialogue seem more wooden than it's really supposed to be (I'm very glad that such a patch exists at all, of course, but I definitely don't believe the "localization" portion of it was perfect), but to me, Roy never felt like a proper character. I just can't find any words with which I'd describe him; I could certainly describe his actions as, well, mostly just and befitting a hero, but his personality? No. It's just not there, imo. Which makes it even more bizarre when half 7 of the game's girls can potentially fall for him in no time flat. What do they even see in him? This kind of reeks of typical harem anime-lead syndrome, to me. The women all fall in love with the main guy for no real reason at all. Welp.

This is a bit of a tangent, but... the above makes me feel really annoyed when I see people talking about SSBM!Roy as if he did, indeed, have a personality. The almost shockingly common characterization of him as a hotblooded, reckless young boy I've seen in the SSB fandom (which, to be perfectly honest, is pretty unavoidable - if you spend a lot of time reading about games on the 'net, you're bound to come across SSB fanwork eventually) is just plain wrong when compared to his self in Sword of Seals. But on the other hand, do I really want people to fawn over what I see as a rather boring character instead? I guess I can't really fault others for making up their own personality for him. Especially when, no matter how clichéd said personality is, it's... still better than his canon one, because at least it's something.

Toning down the criticism of Roy for a minute, though, I have to say that his supports with Wolt are actually quite cute. He seems to share a common trait with many other FE lords, that trait being his ability to only truly open up around his closest friend. As most FE players probably know, the lords usually have some kind of childhood friend (of the same gender) they're very attached to; Roy is no exception in this regard, but in those particular supports I always felt that the slight hint of an actual personality was starting to shine through. Which makes sense, given that childhood friends should probably feel at ease around each other.

I've always found FE lords rather fascinating, in the sense that so many of them have very subtle personalities in spite of being surrounded by incredibly colorful casts - which I've mentioned before, but I think it bears repeating. There are some obvious exceptions to this, such as Lyn and Hector, but the vast majority are rather subdued - the Renais twins, Eliwood, and occasionally Micaiah all have this in common - and to really understand them, you might have to dig around a bit, giving special attention to certain scenes and supports in particular (for example, compare the way Eirika acts with Forde to the way she acts with, say, Seth; there's quite a difference). Then you get lords like Roy or Sigurd, who, as I said previously, just don't feel like true "characters" to me. (And then there's Ike, who I feel is a bit of a blend of the colorful and subtle types, though I've seen plenty of people call even him personality-less, so... meh. I guess I'll just have to disagree.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is... I usually expect very little from lords. I go into most FE games assuming they won't be particularly interesting characters. I usually try my hardest to find anything that could possibly prove these expectations wrong, and many times, I do. But when I don't, I have the same dilemma as with Roy - an incredibly bland main character surrounded by lots of colorful secondary characters who, more often than not, constantly sing his praise. It feels wrong to me. In these cases, the lord just feels out of place.

(... ugh I'm probably not making any sense I only slept 4 hours last night, please forgive me orz
It seems like I always go kind of meta-y when trying to answer rather simplistic meme questions? Umm. I think I'm just weird like that. And then I still end up failing to get my point across

I just tried looking up the definition of meta-discussion, by the way. These explanations are giving me a headache.)

... well...
it's kind of... lol

I think "ridiculous" works too (just in case "lol" isn't a good enough adjective for describing this sort of thing).

I guess I don't really care about most of the hate. I mean, I actually enjoyed Code Geass, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World so obviously my taste in storytelling must be terrible (at least according to most of the internet), but. This is what bugs me:

( Cut for spoilers [I finally have a good reason for using a cut. Awesome!] )

I just don't understand why people think obviously opinionated and flawed characters (Kurt in particular; I like him a lot but he is kind of a jerk) are supposed to be some kind of role models, I guess. Why does everything have to be a "message"? Am I being too idealistic when I expect people to realize that this is a fictional high-school romcom about singing and shouldn't be taken overly seriously? Idk but I wanted to get this off my chest.

I guess I could understand why the last one is somewhat annoying, because the subplot itself was mostly pointless and Kurt was proven "right" in the end (instead of learning something from it), but as long as it presents several views on the matter, I don't really see the need to feel offended by this.

Then again, this is fandom!secrets I'm talking about, where people get offended by My Little Pony, but still. I've seen the same arguments in several places and I am completely confounded by this hate (I can understand disliking the show for many other reasons though, I'm not trying to say it's ~perfect and shiny and awesome~).

I was going to say that I'm glad FE doesn't usually have this kind of hatewank but then I remembered seeing the comments to this video just a few days ago. Seriously just at look at these comments. The general stupidity/wank/weirdness is kind of astounding. And hilarious. (I still think that last exchange is awesome, though. I can't stop laughing at it!)

Given how prone I am to defending everything I like I should just stay away from the hate altogether. I'm sorry I keep seeing this everywhere and I just feel I have to say something about it sometimes. I just feel the need to explain why I like certain things orz

And... it's actually a fun game. Even in single-player. I guess I don't really understand why some people insist it's impossible to play without others, but. I don't know. But I'm a lonely nerd so I doubt I'd ever get to play with anyone else either way. :)

( Gigantic rant, mostly about the portrayal of the FE characters. And also about me actually enjoying the Subspace Emissary. Especially the cutscenes. ♥ )

I'm glad I bought the game, to be honest. I was very reluctant to do so at first, but it's a cute game as long as you stay away from most of the internet drama.