(no subject)

We live in a time and place when there are so many works of art being made every day that we can't keep track of them all, even "just" the ones that their makers share with the public. And this is a good thing. Every bit of art that gets made makes the world a better place, even if some of it is really only good for the artist.

...But it makes me sad realizing just how much art- great art!- gets made, these days, for stuff that's basically disposable.

Brilliant performances on TV shows that will only last another season because they're getting killed by executives; beautiful art and fluid animation made for cartoons that are basically toy commercials; art and music made for video games that are put out every two years like clockwork....

If the greatest piece of music ever made was written for the Transformers soundtrack, how many people would notice?

(no subject)

There's some... interesting interplay in Nintendo's N64-era RPGs between the player and character.

Specifically, it's assumed the 'player' is a child, and thus in order to make the protagonist relatable and sympathetic to the player, the protagonist is either a child forced into an adult role or an adult with very childlike qualities. So you get a mustachioed Italian plumber running around doing errands for pocket change with total innocence on how... sketchy some of those errands are, or a character who constantly switches from being an ordinary child to being a child in an adult's body, or an older child cursed into looking like a Deku Scrub (who is coded as a very young child, complete with barely veiled hostility from certain adults)....

It creates this weird tension between what the player understands, what the assumed player understands, and what the character understands. It's really fascinating - especially with stuff like Majora's Mask, which has the Coraline Effect like whoa.