#meta posts

Linked Universe has one easier thing going for it: it's a comic, and an online one at that. So I can just pluck a page from the current update and drop it here for us to work on:

(PS. Good practice with this is CITATIONS. Online, that means a link back to where you got the original from! It lets people see what you're talking about and join in.)

So, let's start:

What is the OVERT written or visual information on this page? (Overt means "done or shown openly, not secret or hidden" - so the obvious.)

What that means is, what do we see drawn, and what is written down? - The background is a room with pillars in the dungeon: there's no really notable decoration at this point. - Time, Wind, and Four are walking: there's no urgency to their movement. - They're in their normal clothes: nobody is missing anything, damaged, injured, or holding something new or unusual. - The three are speaking to each other, largely about the past more than the present.

2. What are the INTERACTIONS happening on this page?

Here we start to narrow down the obvious information into specific information: - Time is looking at and touching a pillar: he is expressing specific interest in the environment around them in general, not just a specific flourish or moving part (the pillars are not emphasized anywhere else; they are not interactive or hostile at this moment.) - Four speaks first to ask Time about his interaction with the pillar: he is expressing interest in what the other man is doing and seeking information. - Four keeps asking questions: both "What's wrong?" and "Oh, Mrs Malon not let you?" are from him, to Time. - Wind responds to Time's answers with shock, and also a statement that assumes what Time means: "You ran out of treasure?"

So we have: - Time interacts with the environment - Four is asking questions of Time - Time answers Four's questions - Wind reacts to Time's answers

3. What ACTIONS or EVENTS are conveyed by this information?

So, pulling the first layer of these things together, we have a scene in which: - Time is the one studying the environment the most. He's smiling, and fairly relaxed. - However, his attention to the pillar catches Four's interest and he asks him "What's wrong?" -- they are in a dungeon after all, and unusual attention to something could be important. - Time answers he's reminiscing, thinking about the past, and Four asks if the reason he hasn't continued is his wife, which startles a laugh from Time who clearly never thought of Malon as an obstacle to his behaviour: simply that his life has changed. - Wind is shocked by the implication that adventure can "run out" -- interpreting "There simply isn't much to be had anymore" as "No more treasure?!" based on his own experience among pirates.

So that's all the really obvious, surface level stuff! How do we go deeper?

4. What is IMPLIED by the information before you?

Implications are a bit wiggly. Here, we are leaving explicit language and images and entering into interpretation. Your interpretations will not necessarily match anyone else's, but -- as long as you keep your meaning grounded in the above, obvious details -- you can make an argument for your own meaning.

Let's dig into one piece of the above: eg. Four asks Time if "Mrs. Malon" is why he stopped adventuring.

(Why this piece? Because we cannot analyze everything at once. Focusing on a single interaction allows us to be more precise in our work and to write something that's readable in the space we have here.)

- This is in reaction to Time saying "It has been long since I tread ground like this." which clearly states that Time hasn't been in a dungeon in long enough he feels nostalgic about being in one now. - The specific phrasing and pose Four is taking makes his statement a bit rude, and maybe arguably accusatory: "Oh, Mrs. Malon not let you?" with his hands on his hips and an eye-roll going on. - The behaviour makes it feel to me like Four is being demeaning here: he's assuming a wife would get in the way of her husband's actions and order him around, without a care for whether Time might want to do it or not. - Time responds to this with laughter: he's not offended, but also not agreeing with Four. The address amuses him (because we get it as an aside to his speech bubble) but he just refutes the point by giving a correction: "While it's true my life is much different now, there simply isn't much to be had anymore."

Does this mean that Four doesn't like Malon? That feels unlikely to me. It could be that Four is used to hearing other people talk about their wives like that. It could also mean that he can't imagine Time not wanting to adventure anymore.

How would you try to figure out if any of those positions is more or less likely?

By pulling back from only one page and bringing in more, related information:

5. How does this CONNECT to previous or subsequent information?

This gets much more complicated. The same principles above will have to be applied to each page or section you want to analyze in this way to support your argument. As you do so, you will collect the pieces you need to pull these things in.

We have seen Four interact with Malon in the past! How you read those interactions yourself will tell you what you can infer here. You can also look further into this update and see: where do they go next? Do they keep asking about Time's experience, or do they move on to the others?

A third option is to look at related media that are not part of the initial piece. For Linked Universe, what we have is the games that each of these characters originally come from. For every interaction between Time and Four, or Four and Wind, you can ask: what do these characters, by implication, bring with them from their original games?

This is why many people strongly suggest that readers interact with the games themselves, their wikis via sites like ZeldaDungeon.net, or walk-throughs. Doing this allows you to add more pieces to your work.

And every piece you add gives you more power to answer the question:

Okay, now what do I think of that?

I hope this helps you do so in the future! Check back on this post, as I may add a few more examples of me pulling apart different pages or updates as a means of helping y'all see what's going on when we analyze things!

Example Analysis Posts: - Likelike Comic - Recalled AU: Stable Greetings pt 1

in the scene on the balcony she speaks, multiple times, about her devotion to oersted, saying that she is his. that she... belongs to him, really. because what else can she be? and i think says this to convince herself just as much as she's convincing oersted. shes trying to force herself to fall in love with him. because maybe if she can fall in love, and if someone can love her for the person she is, then she won't feel trapped in her role anymore.

oersted... well, we don't get much insight to his thoughts about this (or much of anything) before everything goes to shit. but he seems pretty happy with this situation. it probably feels like he's earned this. like hes won. and-- once again getting into the metatextual analysis of the middle ages chapter-- oersted is used to play around with our idea of the "player character". his obsession with winning comes from us, the player, because... well, what else is the player supposed to do other than win the game?

oersted is also very much obsessed with alethea, or rather, the idea of alethea in his mind. during the middle ages chapter he believes that if he can just save alethea then everything will be alright: he'll no longer be branded a traitor, and he'll have fulfilled his role as the hero. saving alethea is the "win condition" here. it's what oersted is made to do.

i think it's also very notable that alethea is the one who's shown the most outward affection towards oersted. although it was forced, it still had an incredible impact on him. look at the way he responds to kindness from the protags in the ending: he's desperate for it, clings to it like a lifeline! because he's the player character; he's supposed to be loved, supposed to be believed in. therefore, playing his role in this story is supposed to benefit him, if he can just win.

but then alethea kills herself. she does so for different reasons in canon, but imagine this for me: she's been waiting, waiting, waiting for oersted to come save her. but during this time she can't help but wonder... what does oersted see when he looks at her? does he see her? or does he just see a prize, a finished game, the symbol of a good ending?

and then someone finally comes to save her and... it's streibough. its here that her forced perception of her and oersted's relationship falls apart. streibough isn't the prince, isn't the hero, isn't obligated to save her... but he saved her anyway. so, maybe streibough is truly devoted to her. and maybe oersted's actions were just for his own merit.

unfortunately for her, the truth isn't that pretty. finally, oersted makes it to the archons roost and confronts streibough. alethea is just out of view for this confrontation, but certainly within earshot, and when she hears everything that streibough says, she realizes that... oh. this is just another contest. once again, shes just a prize in a game between these two men. its all she can be in this story. she cannot escape it. she cannot be a person so long as this role hangs over her head.

therefore, the only thing she can do to be a real person is to take her own life, and remove her status as a prize.

it's a very sad ending for alethea. she lives a short life unable to escape her archetypical box-- not because she never tries to escape, but because the male cast keeps pushing her back into that role. i don't believe oersted and streibough actively mean to do this, but that's not relevant. the end result is the same.

after oersted becomes odio, his already distorted perception of alethea becomes nigh unrecognizable. even after he forgets his and his friends names, alethea remains a fixation in his mind. she, in his mind, has become a saint and an arbiter of justice (see: saint alethea (attack) in the purity of odio fight, and the line "for justice, she demands it..." when fighting oersted in the bad ending). he idolizes her, worships her, but by doing so, he dehumanizes her. he's turned her into a symbol: the exact thing alethea did not want to be. what is this feeling, oersted? is this what love is?

and of course, alethea's horrified by this! when reading alethea's mind in the dominion of hate, she begs for the protagonists to "end this horror".

and in a literal sense, she's talking about oersted's reign as odio, but metatextually... perhaps she's realized, that the only way to escape a story's role is to escape the story itself. and the only way to end the story is to save oersted.

that's pretty much the extent of my thoughts! i think the dynamic between oersted and alethea is a fascinating one, since it's built solely on societal and archetypical expectations, but crashes and burns because of that expectation.

like i said at the beginning, i don't think this is the intended reading. frankly, i think this game is way too misogynistic to intentionally explore alethea to this degree. perhaps you could joke that live a live is so misogynistic that it made this interpretation possible by complete accident, but that's neither here nor there.

to be clear, me calling oersted and streibough's actions misogynistic isn't me demonizing them or calling them irredeemable. rather, i think that it's an interesting character flaw to explore, especially since live a live is a story about stories. it's a great way to explore how this bias affects how we treat female fictional characters. additionally, i believe that the character flaws of the middle ages cast are especially important, as it's through everyone's refusal to acknowledge the flaws within themselves and the people around them that everything goes horribly wrong in the first place. i have more thoughts on this specifically but i think ill save them for another post.

quick shoutout to my friend henry (@/thepeacockshallstrut) who co-authored this reading. thank you for being insane about jrpgs with me bestie

anyway. in conclusion: