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Next 'Legend of Zelda' game ideas

In Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, the five individual kingdoms of Hyrule were very friendly neighbors.

Raise the stakes by having all of them become enemies, and use the environment to emphasize their division.

The Rito dominate the floating sky islands. The Gorons live in vast caverns below the surface of the earth. The Zora live below the surface of the ocean.

This allows for sky-diving and chasm-diving, as in Tears. It should allow for boat-sailing like in Wind-Waker, as well as allow for ocean-diving.

Link needs to use trans-species transformations like in Majora's Mask, not just so that he can reach the homes of each tribe, but also so that he can speak to any of them without being instantly attacked as an enemy.

Each region/dungeon-boss is a chieftain or other influential figure of the local kingdom who is driving the conflict with the other tribes of Hyrule.

The entire regions might work as 'open air' dungeons, where Link has to complete a series of tasks, quests, and puzzles to infiltrate these hostile kingdoms, reach the heavily-guarded war-hawks, and face them in personal combat.

Yes

Fandom Problem #4482:

I hate it when a movie or series tackles the subject of identity and people immediately say that it's "queer coded". Like having issues with your identity is only an LGBT+ experience and not a human experience that everyone at some point goes through.

Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics #31 by C.C. Beck

was handed a new style guide at work and now we gotta use "person-first" language meaning you can't say "lgbt person" you gotta say "a person who is lgbt" and it's very fun and whimsical for me to imagine a world in which this helps anyone

Maybe myopic could work.

LMAOOOOO

you heard it here ladies, terfs are so powerful that they traveled back to the 19th century and made sure that everyone used queer when referring to homosexuals so they could exclude enbys 300 years later 🥴

An Open Letter to Pretty Much Everyone

The function of moral high ground isn’t a better vantage from which to throw rocks.

For sayo physical apperance  according to the author if i remember correctly shannon boob are fake. padded to complete her disguise. and Lion don’t have boob either so a boobless shannon with kanon black hair is probably the closest.

Really, Sayo?

You’re still wearing that ‘Golden Witch’ dress?

You know, I would prefer to know what you really looked like. I like to write based on canon, not assumptions of it.

Even as a zelink shipper whenever people refer to Link and Zelda as soulmates it makes me laugh, cause yeah you're not wrong they totally are but Ganondorf is also technically their soulmate in that regard? The poly shippers have gotten around that issue but for everyone else he's literally born to third wheel. No wonder he's pissed, not only does he never get to realize his ambitions he's gotta watch that awkward teenage romance over and over for eternity. It's like he keeps scrolling past his NOTP and the block button isn't working. Bottling the princess just pisses off the other one, and the other one has the invincibility of a Nokia cell phone. What's a born hater to do

war and murder are awful. killing another human being is a horrible thing to do. swords and guns are cool as fuck. these two beliefs exist simultaneously in my mind and do not conflict at all

Letter about female characters in comics written by Elaine Lee, female DC writter, in 1994.

Shame that this got worse with time...

stop calling me "my fragile little flower" or "my beautiful delicate pet" im literally going for a glass cannon build. i can one shot most adults

H❄️ICE❄️ENBERG

Art by Dan Schkade

The Joker? Lex Luthor? Green Goblin? Voldemort? Palpatine etc none of these villans is more fanatic, crazy, sociopath and psychopath than Eobard Thawne aka Reverse Flash.

frisk is just a fucking baby. and everyone just monologues at them

White Boy

I don’t care when someone calls me a white boy.

I am pale and male, so calling me a white boy is purely descriptive. Even if someone intends it as an insult, I don’t care.

Go ahead and call me a pasty-ass cracker, I don’t give a fuck. I truly am a pasty-ass cracker, so why should I find that insulting?

None of this inspires an ethnic identity in me. It doesn’t incite me to see my skin color as anything other than a quaint accident of birth, rather than as something that holds any inherent meaning or value.

But someone calling a fictional character like the loathsome Dung Eater a “white boy kinnie” absolutely means to equate him with all white men. Absolutely means that all white men are monsters who must be exterminated.

They can say it’s a joke, but that’s only because they find the idea amusing, not because they consider it ridiculous.

I want a world of peace where pigmentation is a funny accident and a source of practical description, and not some kind of inherent “team colors” in an ethnic conflict.

But there’s no faster way to inspire an ethnic identity in white people than to tell them there are people in the world who hate them for the accident of birth that made them pale of skin.

The Neo-Nazis love when these bigots do that. It makes their recruitment efforts so much easier when you prove them right about white people needing to band together against everyone else.

In the middle of watching this video and wanted to share. While the video is focused on a specific novel, the issues and advice given is general with lots of examples from popular media. It also has a focus on prose and narrative, one of the more difficult parts of writing both in execution and find assistance with.

no language should be mocked other than french

Hitman - How the series Deconstructed and Reconstructed itself

I’ll be honest when I say I’m not someone who grasps ideas quickly. So for a long time I didn’t understand what a deconstruction in fiction meant. Because to me I thought the term just mean making something realistic, and I didn’t understand it because most deconstructive pieces of fiction aren’t realistic. In fact I find a lot of deconstructions to be even less realistic than a straight story. That’s neither here nor there though, my point is I known have a way of understanding in my head what a deconstruction is and I owe it all to Hitman

To understand what a deconstruction is I look for where I found it in works I enjoy and am familiar with, and I think the Hitman series provides a perfect example of a series that deconstructed itself and then undid that deconstruction in a clever way while keeping elements that were good points in the decon, otherwise known as reconstruction. So before I make my case as to why I think Hitman decon-then-reconed itself I will describe my personal definition of a deconstruction. I think a deconstruction isn’t a realistic version of a work or a narrative device but instead is interpreting an element or elements of a work in a more realistic sense in the context of applying it to the fictitious events of a new work. So while what I will describe in this essay will sound bonkers to you, keep in mind the whole work is absurd it’s just small elements that are reinterpreted in a more realistic way while still keeping the amount of unrealism needed in fiction

So to begin with let’s roll back the clock to 2006. Hitman: Blood Money comes out and over time establishes itself as the definitive Hitman experience. The gameplay of the series is the same as ever with a little more polish. You’re dropped into a map, you look for disguises and items to work your way into social spaces to find specific NPCs marked as targets with the intent of killing them and getting out without anyone knowing you are there. You play as Agent 47, a bald, barcoded killer clone working for a politically neutral assassination agency known as the ICA. 47 and his handler Diana in the course of the story get wrapped up in the ICA’s feud with a rival agency called The Franchise, who also employ a killer clone to help install themselves in the White House. The game however was noted by critics at first to not be a big leap from the previous two games in the franchise, scores were good but the series back then peaked with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin’s 87 on metacritic. However, with a six year gap between games and a fanbase that loved replaying it over and over, Blood Money thru fantastic word of mouth became the definitive Hitman game that others had to live up to

The story is told in flashbacks as the leader of the Franchise and main villain Alexander Cayne is telling an embellished narrative to a journalist about how 47 was captured by them and was left running scared the whole time. While your gameplay, if you play well, is deliberately set up to contradict the story Cayne tells. In gameplay you are meant to be untouchable, unnoticed and efficient. If you play well, like I said. 47 is a legendary assassin and stated in-game to be a myth. The Franchise only get 47 by the end because Diana betrays 47, and even then it’s a double-double cross to get 47 in the position to mow down all of the Franchise in the iconic funeral shootout

So now we have established what a typical Hitman set up is we flash forward to 2012 and Hitman: Absolution is released after a the longest gap and biggest change in direction for the franchise. And upon looking at this game and what it’s going for I think Absolution was trying to be a commentary on Hitman’s more absurd gameplay and story elements. Trying to ground them in reality a bit more. Now the game is infamous as the worst Hitman game for its time, and the tone of Absolution is absurd in its own obnoxious, grindhouse inspired way, but I think reading it like this makes it more enjoyable and interesting to study even when the experience of playing or watching it remains the same

The setup of Absolution is 47 is hired to kill Diana by the ICA because she betrayed them. 47 finds out she did this to protect a little girl called Victoria who is like 47 - a clone being trained to be an assassin. So 47 - in what outsiders to the franchise characterize as a rare moment of sympathy for the character (but is incredibly common) - decides to keep the girl safe and go rogue from the ICA. He also ends up butting heads with a businessman called Blake Dexter who wants Victoria for himself and there’s sort of a three way conflict between 47, the ICA and Blake and I’ll be honest I couldn’t tell you what happens in detail because I didn’t pay attention. What makes this story interesting for the purpose of this essay is not the characters or plot itself but the ways it comments on the previous games

Let’s use the already set up Blood Money as an example, specifically the elusiveness and physicality of 47. In Blood Money and the rest of this series 47 is the silent assassin. The elusive Hitman, a myth and legend that only conspiracy theorists believe in. He’s a social chameleon that goes unnoticed in any situation as long as he has the right disguise. He can kill anyone as long as he sneaks up behind them with his trusty piano wire. In Absolution, 47’s identity is found out very early on by Blake Dexter when he tries to sneak up on Blake’s bodyguard Sanchez, a man with gigantism brought on by experiments done in Dexter Industries. 47 fibre wires Sanchez but due to how big and buff Sanchez is he’s able to overpower 47 and incapacitate him. Like I’ve said this scenario in itself is also absurd, Sanchez is basically the Hitman universe equivalent of Bane, but the idea that 47 could fail in killing someone stronger than him with his signature kill method because he didn’t expect them to fight back is realistic. While the scenario when played out in the cutscene makes 47 look like an idiot when he could’ve used a gun or knife from earlier in the level, if you imagine instead the same scenario but Sanchez unbeknownst to 47 knows martial arts or is pretending to sleep to trap 47 in place of having gigantism then you can understand what the devs were going for. In Blood Money, 47 always went after targets with the same kind of build and height. The targets could fight back but only with their guns, you never went up against anyone who had the raw strength or technique to fight against 47 strangling them. 47 also isn’t an incredibly tough person physically, he’s buff but he’s not a hulking bodybuilder and when you get into combat in the games he can’t take much more punishment than another human despite his enhanced genes. His strength is in his intelligence, his anonymity, his speed/dexterity and his skills at social observation. He does have enough raw strength to throw a brick one handed onto someone’s head, but he can still lose in a fistfight with a typical guard if you lose a QTE

The second half of this is the elusiveness. In Absolution 47 is going up against the ICA, some of the only people who lived to know his identity up until now, and Blake Dexter, who now knows 47 is real and is after him. In the events of the game the ICA is able to track 47 down to his motel and send a group of female assassins called the Saints after him, who shoot an RPG rocket at his room, and when 47 tries to rescue Victoria at Hope County jail he is electrocuted in a trap and captured. He is able to escape from both of these scenarios but that’s because the game is stupid. The idea of 47 being caught off guard, however, brings up a good point about how his anonymity is what awards him such success. People bring up two contradictory points about 47’s design being just a bald white guy and also that he stands out from every scenario he’s put in. I don’t get that. Not only is 47’s design an endorsement of multiculturalism, he has five dads of various ethnicities including eastern european, asian and latino with him resembling Lee Hong more than the others, but he’s deliberately designed to be generic yet specific. His design could fit a bland business man type if he wore more casual clothes and softened his scowl, and his barcode has always been sort of like how the TARDIS works in Doctor Who. Nobody notices it. Not saying it isn’t ridiculous, it’s part of the absurdity of this franchise that a six foot man who never smiles wearing a suit with a blood red tie is never noticed but at the same time if he was never caught, called out or seen at the crime by any witnesses or security footage there’s no reason to be suspicious of someone with such an iconic look unless you were a conspiracy theorist. Which gives 47 some plausible deniability. This look becomes a disadvantage however when he’s going up against his employers who know that they’re looking for a bald man in a suit with a barcode tattoo. So early on Absolution 47 has to cut off his barcode as a pre-emptive measure to avoid being more easily uncovered by the ICA. If Absolution is revealed by its writer to have always been intended to be a deconstruction this moment is an excellent metaphor for the game’s entire philosophy. Cut out the defining traits of 47 so he can blend in, with both the crowds of Chicago as he makes his escape and in a real world context the gameplay and tone blend in with its contemporaries of the time

So Absolution deconstructs the idea of 47 being the perfect assassin by pointing out the flaws in his methods. As soon as he loses that anonymity he becomes easy to predict and if he doesn’t get the chance to pick his battles he can be bodied by someone physically superior. In the context of the work if 47 isn’t used to physical challenge and has never had to deal with the consequences of being known it’s realistic for him to be caught out by either ignorance or arrogance in this situation. Arrogance isn’t a trait normally shown explicitly by 47 but he definitely has elements of pride in his characterization since he takes his work so seriously. If Absolution is trying to deconstruct the character it is realistic to show this pride blinding him

Now we get to the way the gameplay of Hitman is deconstructed. Absolution is the Hitman game most informed by its story, so this will be treading ground a bit because these mechanics are implemented because of the events of the story

47 is a master of disguise. He can dress up in almost any other man’s outfit in order to benefit from something like the access a worker can get backstage during a play or the social privileges of a VIP at a luxurious auction house. However, this idea has always been criticized for its absurd, gamey surrealism. Absolution’s deconstructive approach is to imagine what it’d be like to try to sell your disguise to people in real life. Now when you pick up a disguise every person with that same role in the area will be suspicious of you. If you get caught you will lose silent assassin and if you stick around you will get guards on you. Pressing one of the bumpers will make 47 tuck his head down when walking in front of people to stop then from catching you, which depletes a meter called instinct, and 47 can also use certain spots to blend in using disguise specific actions which will also refill a a little bit of the instinct meter. As you can see this is a way more realistic interpretation of how someone like 47 would have to use his abilities to get past people. In Blood Money the right disguise is a free ticket to the target. In Absolution you’re still doing a lot of sneaking and avoiding sightlines it’s just that disguises mean you’re not going to fill the attention meter super quick, which is what happens when trespassing. The only respite you have from the new awareness of guards and employees is when you put on a one of a kind disguise. For example 47 disguised as the only chef in the mansion won’t get noticed by the target’s bodyguards but house cleaners will notice if 47 dons one of their disguises. That particularly quirk does contradict some of the effort put into making the disguise system punishing and realistic but the rest does make sense for what they’re going for

Another aspect of gameplay that is changed is the inventory. In Blood Money, every mission aside from the tutorial and the epilogue had a screen where you could pick out 47’s weapons and items. There was even a screen for customizing specific ICA-made weapons with silencers, scopes and dual wielding. In Absolution, 47 is now on the run from the ICA and the game is split into three parts with each part having one level flow into the next. So you now can’t pick your own weapons to take on missions, instead you usually start empty handed except with your fibre wire and in some levels maybe you get a pistol. Of course 47 doesn’t have time to pick out new weapons when his journey is so seamless, but where the game seems to be commenting on the previous entry is where this was also a plot point in Blood Money near the end. It’s specifically stated that the missions in Mississippi in that game were done to buy time, and that by the Vegas missions the ICA is almost dissolved. Yet the ICA still has resources to smuggle in items for him and 47 still has time to stick around and get sent guns to use in his back-to-back assassinations. Absolution says this is unrealistic and instead has 47 procure most of his equipment within the levels, picking up bricks, knives, syringes and silenced weapons that he finds in the alleyways of Chicago. He even gives away his custom silverballers in exchange for information early in the game, until you get them back you can’t rely on silenced weaponry to kill people

Finally, in Absolution you aren’t killing very many people, and you’re no longer exploring large non-linear areas. This is one of the only parts of the gameplay that is explained behind the scenes as being because of the narrative-driven direction and technical limitations so this isn’t a deliberate deconstruction. There’s a likely chance none of the game is an intentional one, but this next example is entirely unintentional. The deconstruction here can be argued that the Hitman setup of sandbox locations where people do the same loop for hours on end isn’t realistic, so having smaller, more boxed-in areas where you have to react to more active situations instead of learning patterns to manipulate is more of a realistic setup that a Hitman would deal with. Whereas the old style was deliberately absurd to support the fantasy of being a super spy where you’re always welcome as long as you’re in the right costume. I think that, in conclusion, is an excellent summary of Absolution’s approach to critiquing the series thus far. It’s not a realistic depiction of how a Hitman like 47 would operate, and while Absolution isn’t realistic either it does have a point that these elements of the series seem archaic and absurd and reimagines them to add tension and to try to bring the series to modern gamers that don’t buy absurd, fantastical gameplay elements so easily. However, that’s the flaw in deconstructions as a concept. You can tear something down as much as you want but it was built for a reason. Absolution tears down the series’ conventions in favor of a more modern style of game, but never once thinks that the lack of realism was the point. Hitman was made to have these weird, half-simulation half-puzzle mechanics from the get-go because that’s what made it unique and fun. Hitman isn’t Hitman when it’s made to be realistic and less archaic. 47 isn’t 47 if he’s not ridiculously iconic and still treated like a ghost. The gameplay isn’t as fun when you’re a real Hitman trying to escape from the police to your next hit. It’s fun when you’re showing the guards your invitation to a party in St. Petersburg that you took off a drunk guy and then dressing up as a waiter to poison a general with a glass of champagne. Something that IOI realized and course corrected with their next Hitman project

The World of Assassination Trilogy needs no introduction at this point. It saved the franchise by taking it back to its roots, took the series to new heights of critical acclaim and started a boom of new fans that may only know Hitman thru this new trilogy. However, in a fit of irony, the trilogy owes its success to Absolution. The trilogy is built off the Glacier2 engine that debuted in 2012’s Absolution, but the engine was built over a long time just for Absolution’s linear style of gameplay. So when Absolution was a disappointment and IOI knew they had to make a return to the sandbox gameplay of the previous entries, they had spent too much time on the engine to walk it back or make another one. So what they had to do was take the gameplay mechancis of Absolution and twist them around to accommodate a traditional Hitman framework. Luckily, this ended up making the perfect style of gameplay for the series. Innovating it from just have the traditional, maybe even stale Hitman formula but not having any of the flaws of Absolution’s structure. The WoA Trilogy is a reconstruction of the series in both gameplay and even in story in the same sense Absolution is. Even if it isn’t for sure intentional

The first element I will point to as a reconstruction is the disguise system. Blood Money’s philosophy to the disguise system is pure escapism. Put on a disguise and nobody questions it. Absolution said to Blood Money “hey, that’s stupid. A disguise like that wouldn’t fool anyone” and made everyone see thru your disguise. WoA’s philosophy is to tell Absolution while he had a point that it’s more realistic for 47 to have to hide from everyone to make his disguise work, that’s not fun and that’s not Hitman. So WoA reimagines the disguise system with enforcers. In the game when you put on a disguise while you can fool most people, select few NPCs known as enforcers are observant and will see thru your disguise. You can still use blend spots to avoiding being noticed but now you can’t just push your hat down or rub your head. The deconstructive philosophy of making the series more realistic is reconstructed into a puzzle element to fit into the traditional Hitman gameplay

With the Trilogy the series goes back to a traditional loadout screen. The missions are all self contained, until the third act of the story, and 47 is back to being a myth again. There’s no rush for him to complete his tasks and he’s back with the ICA who are at the height of their power. That being said, some elements of the new loadout still take queues from Absolution to make it more believable to modern audiences. For example, smuggle points have descriptions which tell you how the item got smuggled there. In most levels it’s the ICA, with Hitman 3 it falls to Grey’s informants or Olivia. There’s also a progression system to your loadout, where leveling up a location will get you access to new places to start, new items to pick and new places to smuggle them. You even get to pick places where you can start with a disguise already on. These benefits are unlocked via replaying the levels, and while this is classic Hitman absurdity where somehow replaying the same event over and over gives you more and more different benefits the idea with it is that the more useful you are to the ICA the more they can spend to give you new items and aliases and provide more assistance to 47 on his mission. The idea is reimagined in a way that you can buy the ICA with the much power that they have would do this kind of stuff for their best agent, especially since because you can do any level perfectly with the resources you have on a first run thru it proves canonically 47 can do it without resources anyway. He’s not relying on assistance. There’s even instances within the trilogy that prove this, as there are levels that take queues from Absolution and deliberately start you with no loadout. Hokkaido and Miami require a certain level of mastery to be able to bring in a loadout due to a heightened security presence. Dubai and Berlin are set in points of the story where 47 won’t be able to take a loadout with him and he only gets the option to when he unlocks other starting locations. Then the finale of Hitman III outright has no way of taking in external items, making 47 kill an entire train full of hostile Providence agents with no resources beyond what he can find onboard to throw, shoot or wear. Just like Absolution

Even the concept of NPC looping a routine for the entire day is reconstructed in a way. Anyone could be a great agent like 47 if people do the same loop forever. With the WoA Trilogy the levels keep their Groundhog Day set up but are made more complex with scripted mission stories and hidden triggers for NPCs to change pattern. With emphasis on listening in and manipulating these patterns the implication is no longer that 47 is just a great assassin because he’s the only person in the world who doesn’t walk in a circle, like a deconstructive parody might imply, but instead just sees people as these simple animals of routine that he can socially manipulate into doing what he wants. The dialogue even supports this, 47’s deadpan delivery was always played for drama previously or at least was presented without irony, but now it’s portrayed as 47 being so confident and assured of himself that he knows he’s manipulated someone without them knowing. Hence his quips about food being to die for, his conversation to Vanya Shah about how he nudges people to do what he wants after giving a sniper a clear shot at her, or when he pretends to be a blathering idiot with a paper thin alias to Tamara Vidal in order to lure her away from Diana. Absolution deconstructed 47 as a flawed assassin who can be easily taken out if you expect him, the WoA Trilogy reconstructs him as using such predictable methods because other people are simply beneath him and he knows it. Blood Money made him a badass assassin, Absolution made him a bumbling idiot who has to get his groove back and the WoA Trilogy made him a mischievous trickster with a knack for social engineering

The biggest example I can think of in differing philosophies with Absolution and WoA is the mission Apex Predator in the final game/act of the trilogy. The story of the mission is essentially that 47 is ambushed at a nightclub by ten or eleven ICA agents after him and side character Olivia Hall. All the ICA agents are enforcers and you can hear them telling people to be on the look out for a guy in a barcode for them. So it’s like Absolution: we have the ICA on the hunt for 47, a group of people are expecting 47 to come after them and 47’s barcode tattoo is once again singled out as a noticeable trait for the first time since Absolution. Except this time the ICA gets their ass kicked. It’s not even a contest, he kills half of them at least and depending on player choice either lets the survivors tuck tail or dispatches of all of them before they flee. Not even out of necessity, it’s stated in the objective itself that it’s only to send a message to the ICA not to fuck with him. The WoA trilogy asserts that even if 47 had no loadout, no help and is being hunted by people who are competent agents like he is he wouldn’t be caught and incapacitated just because he no longer has the element of surprise

This is not to say Absolution is completely stupid and the WoA just shits over every point it makes in the name of bringing the series’ gameplay back to its signature of fun, simulator silliness. The idea of 47 being fallible and emotional is great and I supported that aspect of Absolution. I just think the game’s attempt to make 47 a more realistic character also made him look stupid and not like a legendary Hitman he’s supposed to be. That’s why I think the WoA Trilogy, for all its storyline faults, actually gave 47 some great emotional beats. For example in Blood Money 47 thinks he is betrayed by Diana when she comes to his hideout and jabs him with a fake death serum to give him to the Franchise. This might be kicking a sacred cow here but I think this betrayal is actually less emotionally effective and makes 47 look more Marty Sue-ish than in WoA because it makes it look like he only gets outsmarted by mere surprise rather than his own mistake. In WoA 47 follows Diana to Mendoza, lets her touch his hand which she has laced with neurotoxin on her glove and then after the mission follows her to the location she specifies because he trusts her that much. Sure in that cutscene he points a gun at her because he starts to suspect her but for a very long time he’s left to stew with his decisions. He could’ve not went after Diana, negotiated a different location or even disobeyed her orders to kill Yates and Vidal but he didn’t because he has always loved and trusted Diana. An aspect of the characters and their relationships I’ve always liked and will laud Absolution for trying to make deeper, paving the way for WoA. The two have always been friends but you would expect them to be absolute besties given they seem to only talk to each other, so a flaw in Blood Money is that 47 doesn’t have a vulnerability in this friendship and he doesn’t make a bad decision on his own to trust her. He doesn’t feel like he had a choice in Blood Money, so he doesn’t feel flawed. In WoA he makes this stupid decision by himself after having ample time to consider it, so the character feels more well rounded. An excellent combination of Absolution’s more fallible 47 with a plot point ripped from the more straight story of Blood Money. A reconstruction

The final note on WoA’s story I want to say is I would say Absolution’s deconstruction of the ICA as a corrupt, flawed organization is almost played completely straight in WoA and isn’t really reconstructed at all. 47’s relationship with the ICA is pretty much portrayed as thankless aside from Diana, not only does training director Soders not like him but after 47 leaves the ICA they are hired by Providence to kill him. The ICA is portrayed as politically neutral and especially in WoA this gets critiqued to hell and back because it lets them get manipulated pretty easily, especially by the Elites. The organization has turned corrupt, been hunted down and unintentionally aided supervillains so many times thru the course of the series. Ort-Meyer used them, Sergei used them, Soders used them. So it’s a long time coming that 47 ends his relationship with them permanently by destroying them completely. Leaking everything they’ve ever done, only erasing mentions of him and Diana so he can remain the anonymous assassin. I would say the only reconstructive element of the narrative is portraying 47 as a figure of good, it’s pretty refreshing if weird that a Hitman who kills only evil people is outright portrayed as a good thing but I like it. I also like that the ICA is destroyed. It’s a status quo change that makes sense but isn’t really a major status quo change. We don’t have much attachment to the ICA but we know it means a lot to 47 and Diana, we can recognize it’s a status quo change and enjoy that things will be different without changing the series forever like what would happen if, for example, 47 retired or Diana died. It also leaves the franchise open for reinterpretation once more. Maybe we’ll get another deconstruction of how this was a bad decision because of unforeseen consequences, a further reconstruction where 47 is even more heroic or just a straight story where we kill people. None of those opportunities are boxed out by that decision

Summing all this up I would say The WoA trilogy takes what Absolution did to deconstruct the franchise and then reconstructed it with elements of gameplay, tone and story from the Hitman games of the past to be more believable, more self aware and more fun. As much as Absolution does wrong I think it should be remembered and praised for how much it influenced WoA for the better. The trilogy is often seen as Blood Money 2 but in both story and gameplay it also aimed to be like Absolution when that game was at its best, in making the series less avaunt guarde and less impenetrable, and then aimed to avoid being that game in every other aspect, the cringe storyline and shuttering of classic Hitman level design as an example of Absolution’s biggest mistakes. We owe it to Absolution more than I ever even thought before. Like it, love it, hate it, indifferent, we have to respect it. We also learned that sometimes deconstructions are flawed and stupid, but they can also bring up good points and can themselves be picked apart. The pieces of a deconstructed deconstruction and a deconstructed straight story can be combined to create a culmination of a franchise. Reconstruction is king

I love memetic communication when it gets to the point of being incomprehensible because can you imagine showing someone this picture

And asking them what Greek god it represents

where is this from

I believe I've seen the argument that Arturia in the Fate Route isn't truly strong because she needed help from Shirou. Which...baffles me.

On the surface, it seems right. Shirou saves Arturia's life twice and helps her grow as a person. ... But that's on the surface. Throughout the route, it is emphasized that Shirou is nigh useless in a fight unless he Projects Caliburn, effectively borrowing Arturia's strength. And even then, he was aided by Arturia in one of his saves (vs. Heracles).

As for her personal development- Yes, he pushes her to make peace with her past and move on. ... But in turn, Arturia gave Shirou a human attachment.

See, remember Archer? How he's the end result of Shirou's life, where he will never know peace because he keeps sacrificing himself with no relatable human connection to understand why or give him an end goal to strive for or meaning to push him on? Arturia gave Shirou that. She gave him a deeply human reason to fight and sacrifice as he will, all with the end goal of meeting her again. Through coming into his life, Arturia saved Shirou from becoming another Archer and let him live at least a meaningful life.

To say that Shirou saved Arturia alone undermines the very idea of the routes' romantic side- That they each save Shirou from a horrible fate.