I Feel Both Of You Totally, Freya, Fratley, The Fall Of Burmecia And Cleyra Has A Direct-line To My Heart

I feel both of you totally, Freya, Fratley, the fall of Burmecia and Cleyra has a direct-line to my heart like absolutely nothing else and none of them get the screen time or acknowledgement in game to put my feelings to rest 🙏

I'm not done talking about Freya, actually.

Because ending the game with her reunited and back together with her long-lost lover makes sense, in a way: it's her goal, she's been searching for him, she's been longing for him since his disappearance. In a traditional story arc, she would indeed find Fratley again, stay with him in spite of the obstacles (such as, you know, amnesia), and consider herself content and happy.

But the thing is, the game doesn't really... give us an arc there. We see Fratley in Cleyra, he reveals he has no memory, he runs off once again - and then nothing, until the epilogue. Poor Freya gets nothing in terms of her own story arc and character development; it feels like all her pages in this book were torn out and we never got to read them. We were just handed the epilogue and assured it fit the rest of the story, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It isn't even necessarily that I don't think Freya should have gotten Fratley back. It definitely isn't that I believe his amnesia could or should have been magically cured somehow.

But goddamn do I feel like he should have re-entered the story at some point between Cleyra and the epilogue, even if only briefly - something to make that epilogue make sense, instead of feeling like a cheap nod to what Freya once said she wanted. Is it still what she wants? She never says so. She seldom ever mentions Fratley again after he nopes his way out of the story, and then only obliquely. He's not even the man she loves anymore; that man doesn't exist anymore, and she never gets the chance to properly mourn him. She just winds up in a relationship with the man who currently wears his face, hoping to find love there.

Freya Crescent deserved better.

It's been rattling around my head recently that Discworld is almost anti-whimsy, and I mean that in a good way.

Whimsy, as I define it, is when something magical is put in just to wow the reader. A magic thing that doesn't really effect the story, but its fantastical. Pots cleaning themselves? Moving paintings? A fantastical creature used as set dressing? A spell that does something cool but we'll never hear about it again? What do they mean? Why are they there? Doesn't matter, we're moving on.

But Discworld always applies Logic to these things.

e.g. The old idea of all dwarfs having beards? Ha ha, even the women have beards. How silly.

But that means all dwarfs are men. But there are female dwarfs, right? Are they happy being men? What if you gave one the chance not to be a man? Oh, sure, they'd still have the beard, the helmet, the axe, those are cultural, but what if a dwarf wanted to be a woman? How would other dwarfs react? Would there be biting insults? Snide remarks? Jealousy from other female dwarfs trapped in their society? What if the Low King were a woman? What then?

Pratchett always had this tenacity to follow a whimsical idea until it was ground down in its own grim reality. It's like those old conversations about what would really happen if Superman caught you falling from a high building. You'd smash on his arms because you're still hitting something indestructible at terminal velocity. But the comics would never show that.

Pratchett shows that.

Introduces a werewolf? She has a constant identity crisis and feels like a dog sometimes, between human and wolf, and she's discriminated against in places for being undead. A conman running a bank? Forces everyone to realise how useless gold really is in a scathing indictment of economics. Death becomes Santa? But WHY DOES THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL NEED TO DIE? WHY THE UNFAIRNESS IN THE WORLD? WHY?

What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the Reaper Man?

It's what sets these stories apart from so many others. Magic is never the solution, reality is usually the solution. And little is introduced without Pratchett delving the idea to its depths, sooner or later.

So so wish there was more Yuke stuff around, I know this is a old post but v much appreciate seein it 💜

Thinkin’ about Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and remembered how much I absolutely adore Yukes. Like aside from the weird arbitrary gendered clothing most of them have, the idea of an intangible magical entity that puppets the physical form of an armored faceless stripey bird furry with giant hands is 200% my aesthetic. So I drew myself as one.

Got to do this for real today

I just played the ending sequence of my game FriendShapes with all music in it I just did and wow, watching the credits with the music n seeing it basically capped off aside from one or two fixes is really somethin - still needs a few tweaks but it's really basically done, after almost 4 years - crazy

Woaaah FriendShapes is done, after 4 years of work and struggle - literally all that's left is any fixes indicated by testers 🙏