farla

Chapter Fifteen, Progress, of Butterfly Wings is up.

Half of it was typed a while ago and half of it typed up just now. We're up to very the end of my written notebook stuff, which means I'll have to play the game again before continuing.

In some ways, Kingdom Hearts is dark because it really shouldn't be dark. In a darker videogame, that progressing further in the game coincides with destruction (not simply in storyline terms, as the narrative arc usually worsens before it gets better, but also, and more, strikingly in pure gameplay terms: progressing tends to involve breaking open chests, triggering once-only scripted events, and otherwise removing everything interactive along your path.) would not be so noticeable, but in story with a Disney motif, it really hammers in that there is no alternative for you to take.

Current chapter review pattern, preserved because it's so very pretty and posting a new chapter is liable to mess it up:

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Short chapter. That's what happens when you suddenly realize that you've just invalidated a half page of notes and need to replay the entire section to see how things are different if you don't get the fourth box. (Difference: the queen doesn't say the bit about having a lot of evidence. So worth an hour! Please kill me now.)

Also, because I'm irrationally gleeful at the review pattern (and because I doubt it'll continue longer) Current reviews-by-chapter:

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I don't know why, but random patterns are deeply, deeply pleasing to me. It's a good thing you're not allowed to delete signed reviews, or I'd be really tempted to abuse the power faced with things like this.

Then I'd be in the position of trying to explain that I really did appreciate their review but I was trying to keep a cool binary sequence, so...

It's taken eight chapters, but Sora's finally gotten on the gummi ship to explore other worlds. Take that, pomegranate!

The gummi theory is something that occurred to me randomly. Now I'm sort of curious how well it'll be supported as I play the game. The first time, the general impression I had was that gummi ships were a way of bypassing the whole "connected, tied to the darkness, no getting offworld without going being corrupted" bit and therefore Good. But since we learn at the end of the game that the worlds need to say isolated to protect them, even the gummi ship's connective ability seems suspect.

The gummis seem connective, since they work by sticking to each other. While your gummi ship seems good, the heartless seem to travel by gummi ship in droves. And gummis first show up on Ansem's world only after the heartless have been there for some time. (And the king shows up after those gummis appeared, so it's quite likely this was the first time gummis existed across Kingdom Hearts) Special gummis are also spat out by closed keyholes, and required to access certain locked off worlds. So the gummi ships are both explicitly tied to the heartless, and indirectly, to the whole connection metaphor that's the main problem of the games. (And they're thematically linked by name to Riku's raft, which in turn is linked to the whole good-turning-evil thing he had going on...) They seem to be a byproduct of the general breakdown of Kingdom Hearts' worlds.

In the fifth chapter, Sora wakes up in an unfamiliar bed surrounded by strange adults, one of whom beat him up and abducted him. Oh, canon. You really just get weirder the more attention I pay.

Possibly the last of these stacked updates, since I'm running lower on pretyped material to plug into the chapters. Or not, since I think Ch6 will be short.

Chapter Two of Butterfly Wings up. This is what NaNoWriMo is good for, really.

Currently I'm naming chapters based on game stage. I have the sense this will fall apart fast.