From Crawl's Aria of Sorrow Review:
I have a feeling I'm going to get a lot of flak for what I'm about to say, but I don't "get" the kind of paintings that are a red and a blue stripe, maybe about two inches wide each and overlapping by about half an inch painted vertically down a four foot by six foot canvas. I guess it's kind of neat, but what's the point? I've seen some paintings that are an optical illusion. The most famous case of this might be the faces-vases, where you can see either a vase in the middle or two identical faces to the left and right. Others I've seen are two boxes made of stripes and if you looked at it one way it looked like the smaller box was actually an indentation of the larger block and if you looked at it another way it looked like the smaller box was in front of the larger box, and a triangle where it could look like it was either jutting out or concaving into the wall. I do kind of like those. The difference may be that the optical illusions have footing in science. I can't think of the word for it, but it's whatever science optical illusions are in.
Going back to video games, in the Aria review Crawl mentioned how fucked up the idea of having a castle in an eclipse is. Or other off the wall plot twists, like in Final Fantasy 7 when they kept flipflopping on if Sephiroth was an Ancient or a space alien or a genetic experiement who was created out of the blue and finally decided on a normal human baby that was injected with Jenova's cells while he was still developing in the womb, and if Cloud was Sephiroth v.2 or not, and what Jenova was (I don't think they even settled on an answer for this one, and halfway through the game they decided to flipflop on the gender, too), etc. An I-Mockery article mentions a Marvel comic book featuring a lean muscled ninja and the mystery of who it really was, and it turns out to be a deaf woman who was wearing a muscle suit. Sure, mysteries are great, but when you're doing it in a way that defies comprehension that you're slipping. Bonus points if the lack of a point is the point ("You're not SUPPOSED to know Jenova was supposed to be beyond some randomass organism that randomly fell to Earth! That's what makes it so mysterious!").
And then there's graphics, both with the modern games trying to imitate the real world except the game don't actually look like the real world, and monster designs. Try to imagine a worm-like creature that's pink and blue and white polkadotted, its head only has a giant mouth, has arms are coming out the sides of its head, fifty legs about as long as a man's index finger lining its body, and a row of eyes along its backbone. It's bizzare, but there's no scientific base to it (in this case, Darwinism or basic biology), and the lack of believability makes it uninteresting.
So, I guess what I'm getting at here is the best kind of art is the kind with some footing in science.
From what science has taught us of the physical nature of eclipses, hiding a castle in one is about as reasonable as reaching the moon by walking far enough north. I realize this is fantasy, but a flavor of reality makes myth easier to swallow.I was thinking about how this could apply to art as a whole.
I have a feeling I'm going to get a lot of flak for what I'm about to say, but I don't "get" the kind of paintings that are a red and a blue stripe, maybe about two inches wide each and overlapping by about half an inch painted vertically down a four foot by six foot canvas. I guess it's kind of neat, but what's the point? I've seen some paintings that are an optical illusion. The most famous case of this might be the faces-vases, where you can see either a vase in the middle or two identical faces to the left and right. Others I've seen are two boxes made of stripes and if you looked at it one way it looked like the smaller box was actually an indentation of the larger block and if you looked at it another way it looked like the smaller box was in front of the larger box, and a triangle where it could look like it was either jutting out or concaving into the wall. I do kind of like those. The difference may be that the optical illusions have footing in science. I can't think of the word for it, but it's whatever science optical illusions are in.
Going back to video games, in the Aria review Crawl mentioned how fucked up the idea of having a castle in an eclipse is. Or other off the wall plot twists, like in Final Fantasy 7 when they kept flipflopping on if Sephiroth was an Ancient or a space alien or a genetic experiement who was created out of the blue and finally decided on a normal human baby that was injected with Jenova's cells while he was still developing in the womb, and if Cloud was Sephiroth v.2 or not, and what Jenova was (I don't think they even settled on an answer for this one, and halfway through the game they decided to flipflop on the gender, too), etc. An I-Mockery article mentions a Marvel comic book featuring a lean muscled ninja and the mystery of who it really was, and it turns out to be a deaf woman who was wearing a muscle suit. Sure, mysteries are great, but when you're doing it in a way that defies comprehension that you're slipping. Bonus points if the lack of a point is the point ("You're not SUPPOSED to know Jenova was supposed to be beyond some randomass organism that randomly fell to Earth! That's what makes it so mysterious!").
And then there's graphics, both with the modern games trying to imitate the real world except the game don't actually look like the real world, and monster designs. Try to imagine a worm-like creature that's pink and blue and white polkadotted, its head only has a giant mouth, has arms are coming out the sides of its head, fifty legs about as long as a man's index finger lining its body, and a row of eyes along its backbone. It's bizzare, but there's no scientific base to it (in this case, Darwinism or basic biology), and the lack of believability makes it uninteresting.
So, I guess what I'm getting at here is the best kind of art is the kind with some footing in science.
