Cooling off in Kryta

North of Beetletun, there is a field that is well watered by a giant overhead irrigation tower with two spouts like the world's largest double-barreled genii lamp.

On a hot day, in my little attic room, I have to keep the AC a bit low for financial and power draw issues, so it can get stuffy -- so Horione and I go to that field for a bit and stand in the pulsing rain.  The sound is too regular for precipitation.  Soft and angular at the same time, the foley - the sound art - manages to bring the scene to life in a way that lightens the load on my poor AC unit.

Outside my window is the ticky tacky of urban housing, early 1990s two and three family units near Boston MA USA.  In Horione's near distance, the rural Beetleshire landscape fades into hills shattered by war with the centaurs, marred by trenches and fortifications.

But all around me, farmers grunt and "whup!" as they hoe the clumps of golden crops in the circular field, and a few cows helpfully graze on the grass weeds in the field.  Four children play near the aquaduct shed, and a couple pigs snuffle in the shade of the shed's porch.  One of the children suddenly says, "Follow me!  I'll take you there!" and the children are off like a shot and gone.

Someday I'll follow them.

This is what Guild Wars 2 is to me.  Sure, I play the game (I am working on my ascended armor, I have HoT thanks to a birthday present, I will get my 4000 chest this week despite taking a year or so off for illness), but unlike some critics, I see this landscape as partaking in the tradition of Van Gogh, Kurasawa, and Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki -- in art, in social commentary, in whimsy and magic, in awe (and sometime reverence) of what humans do in the face of evil, greed and violence.  There is truth and beauty in the game.

That it is also a business makes it different from VanGogh, but gives it something in common with Kurasawa and Miyasaki.  There are worlds where art doesn't require the suffering of the artist, at least financially, as seems to be the vogue in the West.  Perhaps that is where the Japan/Seattle partnership Arenanet operates under gives it strength.

As a person nearly shut in with health issues, I love being part of what has truly bloomed into a living world, with living stories -- not only for the players, but for the people who live their lives around them.

The L Word, from Pre-Raphaelites to Marjory

Overheard, two small children in Lion's Arch in a public square:
Girl: Let's play investigators!  I wanna be Kasmeer.
Boy: Okay. I'll be Marjory.
Girl: (giggle) If you're Marjory, you gotta let me give you a kiss[!]
Boy: (yelp) [runs]
Girl: (giggle) Come back! [pursues, gleefully]

I was reading an old thread on the forums asking if anyone else thought the characterizations of Marjory and Kasmeer were a little weak.  Personally, I find Marjory annoying as hell, and their relationship a bit forced.  I'm bi, and much in favor of the portrayal of GLBT relationships in games.

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (detail)
c. 1864, Simeon Solomon, shared from doomed-lovers.tumbler.com

Realistically, many relationships involve people of weak character (even RL "heroes" can be remarkably unremarkable, weak characters, or just "thinly written."  I maintain more people would engage in heroics if they thought ordinary types and not Norn-like legends did fantastic things for society!).  And if I had a dollar for every couple of whatever orientation I've known in my too-many decades that were annoying as crap, I wouldn't need to apply for SSDI, I'd be set for life.

But this is entertainment, so we expect better writing.  Romances under battlefield conditions, in my experience, are usually a little more...mature and complicated.  Rich in depth, surface and in private.  Maybe magic changes things?

But it is charming, perhaps an indication of things to come, to see kids finding no difference in gender roles in romance and role playing here and elsewhere in Tyria.  To me, it seems healthy.  Many places, even in European history, gender and sexual preference were not taboos nor binary switches nor just...problems.  Procreation and relationships were often separate issues, procreation put on par with ownership and business relationships, romance and such being somewhat separate.  It's a more complicated history and one very few study.

It is, in fact, the medieval code of chivalry and courtly love first formalizes some aspects of romance transcending the ownership aspects of upper crust European manners, starting a fashion for love matches and courtships.

The revival of an interest in this period in the 1800s led to the sort of medieval-flavored fantasies of figures such as Tolkien's favorite boyhood author, William Morris, (who in one of his works had a crew of Norn-like super Germanic horse tribesman living in a forest called Mirkwood!)  The 1800s sentimentalized version of medieval romance gives us the thees and thous that annoy so many modern MMO players in the roleplay community -- really over 150 years of odd warped historical fantasy tradition...

So today we pay for this warped fantasy romance tradition by seeing emo and fluffy romances among those devoted to the combat of evil (gay, straight, or undefined in some MMOs).  I blame the pre-Raphaelites, probably the original steam-rejecting steampunks.

Amazing how it all stirs, like the foam into a latte, in cycles from history into the art of today.

Even to the point of giving us equally thin and/or emo romances...