ChocolateRob

One relevant thing I did not include in the FFX story description above is the cycle of souls in the world (Spira). Upon death souls escape the body in the form of Pyreflies - rainbow-like glowing wisps of energy that float around. It is the duty of Summoners to put these souls to rest by performing a Sending ritual that ushers them to the Farplane (realm of the dead). As I mentioned above Summoners are basically necromancers that manipulate dead souls, though usually for benign purposes. Souls that are not sent to the Farplane roam the world resentful of the still living and will eventually coalesce into monsters called fiends that will attack anyone. More powerful people are likely to retain their human form but still be mindless fiends with maybe a few leftover abilities. Those with particularly strong wills however become true Unsent, they retain their human form and their minds, usually powered by a single goal they wish to accomplish before moving on. Even rarer/stronger still are Unsent Summoners who not only retain their human forms and minds but can manipulate pyreflies to alter their bodies into more dangerous monstrous forms while still being in control. With all of the above There are many parallels between the book and the game. 1) First off Brandon has said what he most liked about FFX's worldbuilding is that Yuna has a magical (to us) occupation (Summoner) that is important and necessary to the nature of the world she lives in. In crafting a fantastical world a fantastical occupation in that world naturally arises and becomes a natural aspect of that world. This is how Yuna directly inspires the role and even the name of Yumi. 2) Secondly are the parallels of self sacrifice that both Yuna and Yumi are brought up in. They are taught that sacrificing their own wants for the good of all people is their duty to the world and they never even question it until someone from outside their system begins to influence them. 3) Yumi and Tidas are living in a simulation of civilization that once existed many centuries ago but is now long dead, its presence has become a poison holding the rest of the world from advancing. For Yumi she lives the same day over and over like a groundhog day that she does not remember. For Tidas his Zanarkand is less a prison and we aren't explicitly told if it exists in a looped period or something more organic. Is it only ever the same souls being reborn over and over? Are new souls born into it like a natural world and the city simply prevents its people from looking to its borders? We know little of the details on how Dream Zanarkand operates, only that Jecht managed to leave and ten years later so did his son (probably the Fayth managed to intervene in Jecht's case in order to eventually trigger their own escape/rest). 4) The false realities of both stories are both sustained by the power and substance of trapped souls formed from the 'soul soup' of both the Shroud and Pyreflies. 5) Yumi and Tidas in the end must sacrifice their own existences and everything they grew up knowing in order for the 'real' world and its inhabitants to be able to move on. 6) The souls of the dead are trapped in a half dead state that coalesces into monstrous forms that stalk the living in a near futile attempt to regain their own former humanity. 7) The Spirits/Fayth that power the simulated world are tired from their long imprisonment and beg Yumi/Tidas to free them so they can finally rest. 8) Yumi and Tidas somehow manage to hold on to their existences at the end of the story and reunite with the one they love (In Tidas' case it is only strongly implied until the sequel). In both these cases there are also strong parallels to the story of Pandora's Box. Pandora is tempted into opening a mysterious box that she should be protecting and she unleashes evil into the previously sinless world (seven deadly sins and all that). After making this costly mistake she recognizes her own folly but hears one last quiet voice from the box begging for freedom. Warily she open the box one last time and releases Hope into the world as well. The reason that I bring Pandora's box into this is that the good intentions of people (building a machine to attract spirits, summoning a city of people back into existence) unleashed catastrophic disaster upon the world but also releases a tiny sliver of hope as well, Yumi and Tidas get their happy endings. These three examples are also paralleled to Cinderella, that one last bit of magic that doesn't fade away and brings on the happy ending, despite everything else turning back to rags at midnight the glass slipper remains bringing hope. There are probably more parallels that could be made but they aren't coming to mind right now. I'll add any more that I'm reminded of while re-reading again.

Now I've slept properly and moved the above into its own thread. Time to be on with it. Going forward with this thread there is no point not spoiling the events of FFX as this whole thread is about them. I'm leaving the spoiler tags in place for the initial comment above because 1) Members can understand the point of this thread by reading it without getting into spoilers of the game if they choose not to and 2) It nicely breaks up the structure of the gargantuan post into easier sections. So be warned. Final Fantasy X spoilers will not be hidden ahead.

I commented this thread into the reactions thread last night (under too little sleep) before this morning (better rested) realising that it should be its own thread so I'm moving it here. But basically Yumi and the Nightmare Painter shares a lot more DNA with the game Final Fantasy X Brandon has so far implied. I'm not saying anything crass about it being a knockoff of FFX's plot (because it isn't) but there are strong parallels between them throughout. (copied over from my firstpost) - Well I've not been on these forums since the start of 2019 but finishing this secret project makes me want to discuss it. Mainly due to the DNA from Final Fantasy X weaved throughout it. For those of you who are involved in the 17th shard podcast you should really include someone with a good understanding of the thematic content of FFX when you film the Yumi and the Nightmare Painter spoiler episodes. (Copied from the much longer second post) - OK, so below are massive spoilers for the game Final Fantasy X. Brandon has made clear how it was an inspiration for this project (one of many) in the section after the epilogues and has also spoken of the game recently but there are further parallels than the ones he has mentioned. I'll try to sum up the plot and themes of the game both for anyone who has no interest in ever playing it and therefore won't care about being thoroughly spoiled as well as those that do know the story but might want a reminder of some points. Definitely not for anyone who may want to play it for the first time in the future without knowing spoilers for the major plot points, so be warned. The following paragraph is mostly spoiler free as it covers the beginning events of the game, I'll spoiler tag the few spoilers that are at the end then the second paragraph will break the narrative of the game in a Very spoilery way. The game itself it told as a story from the perspective of the main character Tidas to his companions as they approach the end of a long journey they have been on, he is telling them how he got involved in their lives and reached this point (not particularly relevant to this thread but as good a starting point as any). His story begins in a futuristic fantasy mega-tropolis called Zanarkand where he is a famous sports star, he is in the middle of a game when the city is attacked by a gargantuan creature with devastating gravity powers which quite thoroughly wrecks his home city. During the attack he is guided by a friend of his missing father towards the creature which he names as 'Sin' and both of them are pulled through it into a dreamy reality before Tidas wakes up alone in the middle of nowhere by an abandoned temple. After managing to start a fire he is 'rescued' by strangely garbed people speaking another language, after finding one who speaks his language he explains how he got here but is told that Zanarkand was destroyed by Sin 1000 years ago. Before he can really process that he is somehow 1000 years in the future the ship they are on is attacked by Sin and he gets separated. This time he washes up on a small tropical island called Besaid. Here he meets a few more people who he will end up traveling with, primarily a woman his age (17) called Yuna (the character whose role Brandon has spoken on and even based the name of Yumi on). She has trained as a summoner and is about to embark on a strengthening pilgrimage that will end in the ruins of Zanarkand far to the north where she will gain the power to defeat Sin which has been devastating the world for the last 1000 years. The full details of the pilgrimage are only drip fed to Tidas/us but basically So this is Yuna's story as much as it is Tidas'. Time to break the narrative by handling them chronologically rather than how the story tells them to us. - OK that was a lot. This last section is about Tidas' story and ties together the above two sections. So that was all a very long recap of Final Fantasy X with oodles of the game missed out but gimme a break, its a 45 hour game. I think I've recapped it thoroughly enough to show the similarities it shares with Yumi and the Nightmare Painter for those who can spot them, along with enough that its story hopefully makes sense to those unfamiliar with it. but now it's 2:30am and I've been typing for way too long, maybe with this as a base I'll be more specific with the similarities tomorrow

edit - Moved to its own thread. Simply put my reaction to this book was to think on its connections to FFX, a game that I know very well. Brandon was clear that it was a major inspiration and I was struck with an urge to discuss it.

edit - moved to its own thread. Yumi and the Final Fantasy X connections.

Been a year or two since I was last here but my understanding from way back when was that hemalurgic spikes could steal multiple attributes from a person (assuming they had more than one attribute relevant to that spike's metal) but the restriction was that the spike will only grant whichever attribute was relevant to the bind point it is placed in. So if you used a bronze spike on a mistborn you would steal all their mental allomantic abilities (rioting, soothing, smoking and seeking) but you could only use that spike to grant one of them to someone else depending on where it was placed (the 4 mental powers having separate bind points). If this is so then using a lerasium spike would have the same restriction, it can steal all the abilities but only grant whichever one is relevant to the bind point it is placed it. Making it a colossus waste of potential (like nuking Scrooge McDuck's money bin to hide that you stole $5 from it). As no-one seems to have mentioned this I assume I've misunderstood somewhere or the rules changed when I wasn't paying attention?

What I appreciate is that he believes he is in One Piece (or the like) but he's found himself in the Game of Thrones. He is woefully unprepared for everything he faces and it is taking a very realistic toll on his sanity. While I'm also getting annoyed by his attitude I find it very realistic of someone whose mind is hanging from a thread. He's denying to himself and the world how out of his depth he is, he has a very heavily overpowered advantage but it has an equally overpowered price. The things that he has endured and seen could break any person, he is literally unable to speak with anyone about what is happening and he doesn't even have the option of suicide to escape. His handwavey grip strength isn't really anything, it was mostly surprise that gave him a brief advantage over the three thugs and lifting the club barely did anything either, all the real threats his faces are well over his threshold. Recently Emilia has been questioning who he is and what is going on but he's unable to tell her and so she is suspicious of the situation I can ignore a lot of the generic traits that are found in anime, I just expect to see them there, it would be nice without them but nothing is perfect.

Is anyone watching Re:ZERO Starting life in another world? Holy Crem! That show can be intense. It starts out ordinarily enough; a teen is out getting groceries when he suddenly finds himself in an alternate fantasy world, you know, the usual stuff. At first he acts like he's in a videogame/anime and tries to find out what his superpower must be and where the beautiful girl that must have summoned him may be, he quickly gets himself in trouble. However it turns out he does have a power which (as Firefight would agree) really sucks despite its advantages. Whenever he gets killed he mentally time travels back to a previous checkpoint. He has no power over where and when he returns to, he experiences the full agony of his death, everyone forgets everything about him as he keeps meeting people for the first time over and over again and he is literally unable to tell anyone what he can do. His inherent goofiness is played off against an increasingly brutal world and the story pulls no punches as to his mental state as he works through his ordeals. He's died some hideously brutal deaths and seen his friends go through the same (eg his first few deaths are because of a character known as The Bowel Hunter). One of the best Anime's I've seen in ages, real nail-biting stuff at times (some comedy too).

The best two I read are Girl Genius and Namesake. Girl Genius (updates every mon, wed, fri) is set in a madcap alternate Europe where mad scientists (Sparks) run the world (badly). The story begins when a clumsy inept student called Agatha Clay is mugged by some soldiers and has her locket stolen, what she does not know (at first) is that she is the lost heir to the Heterodyne family of Sparks, the most terrifying of all Sparks, and that her locket was designed to dampen her brain down to keep her hidden and safe. The authors coined the term Gaslamp fantasy to describe a world part steampunk and part supernatural. There are monsters, robots (clanks), undead, minions, monstrous robot undead minions and just about anything else you might expect to find in a world where Mad Scientists can truly warp the laws of physics. Namesake (updates tue, thur, sat) is based on the idea that the titular Namesakes get pulled into other worlds when they are young adults/children, have an adventure and return to find their Writer who tells their story, in this way stories keep spreading and strengthening magic/reality in all worlds. They are called Namesakes because children of particular names will always be pulled into the same world – a Dorothy will always go to Oz, a Wendy to Neverland, an Alice to Wonderland etc. Any child of the appropriate name could have their world turned upside down in this way. The story starts when a girl called Emma goes to pick up her sister, Elaine, from the library and ends up being pulled through a portal. Emma ends up in Oz and Elaine is picked up by an organization called Calliope comprised of former namesakes and Writers who are very confused that an Emma has disappeared when there is no record of Emma being a Namesake name and so they don’t know where she has gone. Emma is confused herself as everyone keeps referring to her as ‘The Dorothy’ (as well as the fact that she is in Oz and a purple witch immediately tries to turn her into a handbag). It has great humour too (eg when one character learns about magical, reality warping Writers he asks ” Is Terry Pratchett one of you guys too?”) Both are excellent full-page comics, I'll also recommend - Freefall, Fey Winds and Gaia.

Well I just bought the kindle version but almost immediately returned it for a refund. I was only around a quarter of the way in when I realised the formatting was a complete failure. I imagine it works well enough on kindle fire (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong there) but on kindle for PC or paperwhite/regular it does not work. The problem is double pages, the formatting shrinks down large landscape images to fit into a portrait size, rendering pictures blurry and writing illegibly pixelated. I suspected beforehand that this may be a problem with my regular kindle so I downloaded kindle for PC before even trying to read this book, unfortunately the PC version is just as bad, there is no zoom option at all. I used the computer's magnify function but that just gave me a larger blurry, illegible image. Double pages are supposed to be where the best art is, not the worst. I don't really want this book in hardback so I guess I'll just have to wait for paperback instead. Feel free to rant with me on this subject (restrict fire to amazon though, it's not Brandon's fault).

Erased is easily the best anime I've watched this season (probably the best I've seen in the last year or two). Some of those cliffhangers are heartrending. I really hope the quality runs through to the end, I'd hate it if it suddenly went X-MenLastStand/Spider-Man3 on me.

Ok so I've never played Halo but I've watched enough Red vs Blue to realise that with the output level that Brandon has managed to reach in the last few months he is clearly starting to enter the Rampancy stage. His output level will continue to grow increasingly haywire in size and imagination at a faster and faster rate until he self destructs, long before actually completing the Stormlight Archive. We can only hope that he somehow manages to break through into the theoretical, stable 'Meta' stage. Our (slim) hopes are with you Brandon.

1. Marasi or MeLaan left the cube for Irich to find because they figured he would immediately put it somewhere safe, that somewhere being wherever they were keeping ReLuur's spike. Basically they did not know where to look so they tricked him into going wherever the important stuff is kept so that they could follow him and pinch it all (getting the cube back in the process). 2/3/4. A Kelsier did it. It is implied that after the world was remade Kelsier managed to get a body back somehow and with a better understanding of the metallic arts he went south to save the people there, then finally made the Bands of Mourning and let everyone believe that they were the Lord Ruler's Bracers. 5. Who on Earth (or Scadrial) can ever guess what Kelsier is up to? Though Hoid obviously just wanted Wax to know that Kel is still about The Bandits threw Irich and themselves off the train as part of their escape (they threw him because he is too feeble to make the jump himself). Can't remember what they landed in or on though.

I'm a big fan of RWBY, I have both volumes and their soundtracks. A quick look on my Ipod tells me that Red Like Roses part II and I Burn are in my top 25 most played tracks (previously it was the trailer versions of both). I also really like Caffeine and Die from vol 2. Really enjoying volume 3 (on crunchyroll) the latest episode (6) was really different to any of the previous ones in that it actually explained a lot more about the over arcing plot and world building. Before this one it was all very teen heroes going to school genericness (but with awesome choreography and weaponry) but this one episode made the world more unique. It is better to look at the first three volumes as one series (as they were imagined) and having reached the middle of the third we are entering what would be the Sanderson Avalanche. One thing I am addicted to is TV tropes and whenever I read or watch anything new I always look them up there to see what I missed. Lots of useful extras to be found there (I altered the RWBY character page during vol 1 to have the weapons treated like characters). The wizard of OZ allusions for the characters mentioned above are on the nose (and not spoilers as they have been discussed since the start). Most of the characters in the show are allusions to stories in our world, often grouped into similar themes. The most obvious being Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang as Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Beauty & the Beast and Goldilocks (fairy tales). Team JNPR has an interesting theme that is far less obvious - they are each gender flips of ancient heroes who disguised themselves by cross-dressing. Jaun Arc is obviously Joan of Arc Nora is based on Thor (disguised himself as the goddess Freya) Pyrrha is based on Achilles (pretended to be a woman named Pyrrha to avoid the trojan war) Lie Ren is based on Mulan. Other random ones: Cinder Fall = Cinderella, Cardin Winchester = the Cardinal of Winchester (oversaw the trial and execution of Joan of Arc), Penny = Pinochio, Roman Torchwick = Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Velvet Scarletina = the Velveteen Rabbit (ps Team CFVY are all named after cakes). Another thing you can get from TVtropes (or the RWBY wiki) are the names of the weapons, in the series only Ruby's scythe has been named (Crescent Rose, a High Velocity Sniper-Scythe) but most do have interesting names and descriptions. Weiss - Myrtenaster, Multi Action Dust Rapier. Blake - Gambol Shroud, Variant Ballistic Chain Scythe. Yang - Ember Celica, Dual-Ranged Shot Gauntlets. Jaun - Crocea Mors. (Yellow Death, supposedly the weapon of Julius Caesar). Nora - Magnhild. (translates from Norse as Mighty battle). Pyrrha - Milo and Akouo (Speak [the sword] and Listen [the shield]) Ren - Stormflower. Sun - Ruyi Bang and Jingu Bang (the weapons of the original Sun Wukong) Adam - Wilt (the sword) and Blush (the sheath) The geek world lost quite a few big names this year (Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Lee, Sir Pterry) but Monty Oum's was the saddest for me as he was only just starting his career and his best was certainly still to come. Volume 3 is still excellent but I can't help but wonder how it would be different if Monty were still with us.