A funny and sweet story

In order to beat my crippling Pure O O.C.D, (yeah I didn't think my mind could get any worse but yeah, apparently I had a sort of mini-breakdown due to stress and my o.c.d emerged out of this) I've been thinking up another story inspired by a city in FF XII (strange I know...), usually I wouldn't do this and try to fight to keep my intrest in 'Hazards' but if you know what Pure O, O.C.D is and what it's like to have it, then you'd understand (seriously, type it in to google) and I started reading fanfiction, I usually would abstain from fanfiction but I don't mind now if it distracts me and found this quite funny piece here

Me Reviews: The Path

I had heard about the game many years ago when it was still in production and back then I was very intrigued in the premise.

The idea of the game revolves around the Red Riding Hood story, when you first start the game you are greeted by five girls, you as the mother send each one off to visit grandma with some wine and bread. The game starts out with said girl on "the path" with the words of her mother echoing in her mind "don't stray off the path" however the aim of the game is to stray off the path and enter a wood filled with psychologically imagery, if you just follow the path you receive the failure ending.

Each girl's travels through the forest is different, each will come across different items in the forest and depending on the girl can interact with them. These items including a rusty car, a television that plays nothing but static, a well, a treasure chest, a wheelchair and others, they invoke the girl to muse in her own way about the item therefore you learn more about her the more items you find.

As you travel through the forest you will encounter each girl's "wolf", in only one of the girls travels is the wolf an actual wolf, in others they are men or a mist creature or a young girl dressed in red. The wolf represents something traumatic that happened to the girl and after a cut scene with the wolf, the girls are returned to the path, lying there broken in the rain, each girl gets up and enters grandma's house where they are faced with a horrific journey through Grandma's house which reflects the traumatic experience.

I give this game a B+ because it is one of the best i've played but it also falls flat in several places.

First of all, I was a little put off by the fact that the girls were so broken by their experiences, and some of the girls for arbitrary reasons. Although each travel is vague and can be interpreted in different ways, the general consensus for one of the travels of Ginger was that it was about the trauma of menstruation and growing up, umm... I don't know why people have this idea that menstruation is "traumatic" it didn't bother me much, I just was a bit pissed that I would have to do this every month. I watched a cartoon on a site once about a girl going through menstruation who wakes up and starts rocking backwards and forwards in her bed because she's menstruated with the words "you're a woman now" eerily sung over it, I was just like... whaaat? it's not that bad... really!!

The travel I most liked was Carmen, which deals with a traumatic first time, as yes I can imagine how that would be traumatic and her rooms in grandmother's house reflect her confusion and trauma, however the others were a lot more vague in a sense that I couldn't really understand them at all. In Rose's her ending is that she gets in a boat and meets a torso dressed in a cloud, that's it... I felt as through the creators had run out of ideas and just threw this together. Also Scarlet's (which is my favourite but only because her wolf is the most handsome XD) which is where she plays the piano and the curtain closes on her. What's that about? I could only understand it as her becoming a failed musician.

I believed that though this was an amazing game with beautiful enviroments and eerie imagery, it failed on a human level. The gameplay is amazing especially the grandmother houses, which you walk through clicking to move with the shadows of the girls superimposing, but that it didn't really talk about proper traumatic issues.

The idea of the game is, that if you leave the path (i.e. conformity) and do the wrong things, like having sex with an older man, being involved in a drunk-driving crash, and failing as a muscian, then you have lived and experienced (which is mirrored by the forest girl at the end, whose white dress is smeared with the blood of experience) unlike just following all the rules.

However I wish that it had gone further, there are so many traumatic experiences that they could have done but didn't and the ones they did do, weren't really done well, such as Robin's (it was supposed to be about a young girl discovering her own mortality but I didn't get that at all), Scarlet's and Rose's. Carmen's and Ruby's were very good but they weren't the best. Themes they could have done: Death of a parent, unwanted pregnancy (which could also be about a miscarriage), being gay or lesbian or transgendered, loss of faith, sickness or illness, loneliness etc. etc.

All in all, I say play it, it's an experience which you won't regret but don't expect this to be any sort of real psychological look into the mind of a girl (just the fact that most of the wolves are male is one indicator, the girls didn't seem to have any problem with women which I find hard to believe).

Also it does get tedious after a while, since the forest is endless you can go for whole stretches without seeing anything, the girl's can also only run for a short time without getting out of breath. You can follow the white squiggles at the edge of the screen to find items but the squiggles don't dissapear once you've found the items, sometimes leading you back to the same damn bathtub every time!!

My Manga/Manhua/Manwha Keepers

Inspired by this post over at Smart Bitches, I thought i'd share with you the books that mean so much to me. I don't know why they are comics, I'm not an Otaku and fell into manga just by chance. I think it's because I love art and so comics give me just what I adore, beautiful art and beautiful story telling:

1) Tale of the Moon (Japanese)

My favourite, the odd couple of Usagi and Hanzo is my favourite pairing! Love the artists artwork as well. The story is the tale of a young girl Usagi, who falls in love with Hanzo the head of some ninja clan. Though born a ninja herself, she is very bad at it! Usagi is told to marry Hanzo after he is jilted by Princess Sarah but he refuses to marry her due to her inability, how she wins him over is so sweet and endearing :D. It's also one of the funniest comics i've read!

2) The Queen's Knight (Korean)
Oh I love this comic!!! It's the tale of Yuna, who while visiting a fairytale castle in Germany (the Swan castle) falls down a cliff and ends up in a fantasy world named Phantasma. Phantasma is a world of perpetual winter until the a "Queen" is chosen, the love of the Queen then brings spring to Phantasma. However the person who picks the Queen is the dark Knight Rieno whom all the Queen's fall in love with, because of his cold heart however he always rejects them, once she loses her love, winter once again comes to Phantasma and the Queen is dragged into the forest to die. Yuna attempts to break this circle but finds herself drawn to Rieno, will she also fail?. (Tokyopop stopped licensing this series :(, so I guess i'll never know)

3) Operation Liberate Men (Korean)

Another great comic. Suha is a girl who looks like a boy, one day she meets a strange man who kidnaps her and brings her to a world where the gender roles have been reversed and women rule over men. Thinking she is a boy he begs her to help them achieve gender equality in their world because of the type of world she comes from. This mysterious stranger turns out to be Ganesha, the concubine of the Queen, what follows is an amazing piece of work about how the world would be like is the genders were flipped. (Unfortunately also, the writer stopped writing this series due to illness but she may resume it)

4) Bara no Tameni (Japanese)

I read this online as it hasn't yet been licensed and is out of print in japan. The main character (I forget her name) is a young woman who is rather fat and ugly, when the comic starts she's just been dumped by her boyfriend who used her to appear kind. Her grandmother who looked after her since she was a child, dies and she is forced to find out what happened to her birth mother. Turns out her birth mother is a famous actress, who already has three other children from her various marriages living with her, one a famous actor whom the main character has loved since she was a young girl! This is a book that should have been a sitcom, it's just about how the main character deals with living in a house of insane selfish people and when it turns out that she may not been the daughter of the woman after all, weird incestous UST between Sumire (the guy she adores) and the very girly looking Aoi (who also may be in love with Sumire!) Haha!
(I also never found out what happened in this one, she gets married but... to who??)

So there you go my favourites!

Child Ballads

(no, not Children's ballads, the guy who composed them, his last name was child)

A list of some of my favourites:

The Outlandish Knight (Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight)

The Cruel Sister

Twa Corbies

Tam Lin

Sir Patrick Spence

Matty Groves

King Henry

I wish I could have seen them live! I may still... but it's not the same :(. Ah why wasn't I born in the folk hey-day!

I love this ballad! This is up there with my favourites, the eerie violin and the haunting chanting. I love the story of this, a hideous female ghost demands that the King do whatever she commands, including killing all his animals and lying down to sleep with her. The opening stanza:

Let never a man a wooing/ that lacketh these things three/ a store of gold/ An open heart/ and full of charity

So true :P. This is how all relationships should be haha, the man doing everything the woman wants!

Haha I kid, Chivalry is it's own reward.

Sex!!

Yes, it's what i'm going to talk about today.

I've never written a sex scene before, Sei and Cerys from my second unfinished novel, almost got there but Sei backed off because of his feelings for Heloise. However when thinking up 'Hazards' I knew instinctively that I was ready... ready to write a sex scene! However there were problems with this... mainly the fact that I myself am inexperienced, am I ashamed, no, why should I, as a Christian I only believe with sex with love (as for marriage... I'm unsure, I would have to think about that when I got a boyfriend) as for others, why judge?

Angelique and Rana are the two who I chose to do the dirty deed! In fact it was one of the reasons I wanted to write Hazards and I also wanted to write a sex scene that was filled with love and not lust (don't worry it won't be cheesy) and I did my research, I would like to thank Erotica romance :P

For Angelique it's not her first time (she is a concubine after all) but her first time was traumatic, I was reading this article and found this very interesting:

Call it the age of coyness, at least ideally. John Polidori, the first to mingle vampires and noblemen, wrote that his vampire, Lord Ruthven, in the story “The Vampyre: A Tale,” seduced women so that they were “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation.” In fact, so sullied were they, that they became wantons who cared nothing for their reputations or those of their families.

This is what St. Grieve percieved happened to Angelique and why he lusts after her, after losing her virginity and her power, she is forced to become Guy's concubine, she goes from the pinncile of "percieved" virtue (the sort of artemis type) to the sultry and disgraced concubine who turns away no one.

However for Angelique it is different, as a virgin and with the sacred spear that Reynadine gave her for preserving her virginity, it gave her power over men, she believed herself untouched. When she is seduced and then betrayed by her lover, she falls into seeking sexual gratification to soothe her pain and ends up being betrayed so much by her lovers that she ends up a broken bird and rejects Rana's pure if naive love.

In the end she is neither virtous, nor disgraced. She just loves and is loved and has sex because she loves. ^^

Neoromance

Phew...

Anyway, I am not someone who is constrained by their intrests to what is available in my country, as you can see from my posts about Angel Myth. If there's something that I love but it's in another language that won't stop me, I have books that I bought in German even though I don't know German and books in Chinese (which cost me a lot to ship from Taiwan XD) even though I don't know Chinese. I know google Translate like the back of my hand, and used it before they even had a lot of languages to use!

I love otome games from Japan and even though they don't sell them here, I manage to get a little dose from these two places: Neoromance and NeoRomance Love, oh and Harvest moon of course :D.

I usually refrain from playing Otome in a contemporary setting, but that creeps me out a little, why play when I can just go out in real life and do it? But I set that aside when a found a very good english Otome that someone had made called Re:Alistair. It follows the story of a young girl who plays online games, when after defeating a difficult boss her loot is stolen by a rude player, intent on getting back her prize, she tells him that she can figure out who he is in real life in less than a month as by a fluke of loss of internet connection she realises they go to the same school. It's up to you then to figure it out while finding love on the way :D.

This game was really well orchestrated, not to mention, the graphics and the mystery which pulls you in. I went for Travis by the way :P.