PuzzlePantsu

A Georgian Mourning Ring with Pearls, ca. 1800s

Ring size 5.

Tested 10k yellow gold ring with a cushion shape mounting with a seed pearl border surrounding a lock of hair under glass. Underside engraved “Henrietta to Mary Anne”.

Garnet is so important okay I need to rant about it for a second cuz okay most “magical girls” or “super heroines” or what-have-you characters are almost always thin, light skinned, slender, “cute”, uber feminine, extremely sexualized, or even mean and cold.

Garnet gives little black girls, who have never had good representation reflecting themselves, a chance to see a hero that looks like them! it helps them to see themselves in powerful roles, in leadership roles, and in strong roles and helping others and being a hero.

She is dark skinned, tall, has large thighs, big hair, isn’t at all sexualized, strong in her own right and her heart is so warm under all that stoic she wears in her attitude.

I tried to like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I really did. If you actively enjoy these games, that is awesome. It’s just not for me. By all accounts, I should’ve liked it. I enjoy fantasy games, especially those that have—dare I say it—a darker twist. I like being challenged, and I like solving puzzles within games. That’s the fun of it for me.

That was the problem, though—these games (Dark Souls and Bloodborne, specifically) were not fun for me. In order to enjoy these games, in my experience, there are certain privileges that are necessary: time, money, and the dedication to the self-image as a gamer. The entirety of gaming as hobby, lifestyle, or whatever, requires these privileges. But in all my experiences as a gamer, these have not manifested so strongly as in the aforementioned games.

First, I’ll talk about the privilege of time.

You are thrown into the middle of the action of the story without any concrete idea about what is going on in the larger picture. It is easy to pick up the controls and hack away at enemies, but it was unclear to me as the player why any of what I was doing mattered in the larger narrative. Part of this apathy stemmed from the rate at which my character died. I know that this is a huge part of the game, and I know that “You Will Die” is the very edgy tagline of the Dark Souls series. It was more how the character dies rather than the frequency. The absolute loss of all the progress I made over the course of one or two hours would be completely undone by one lucky scythe to the face of my character.

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All because you couldn’t handle it and it’s hard to justify spending so much at being awful when you’re a broke college kid, so you spiraled into navel-gazing and realized how much of a first-world problem extreme-difficulty video games are?

ABSOLUTELY