justlookingfordragon

Just to add another factor to the ongoing discussion: artistic talent isn't uniform and never was. Just because only/mostly "immature" art survived from a certain century of human history, doesn't mean that there literally was no realistic art present at the time. Since you mentioned the statues already...

These are from the same era (around 200 BC), but as you may have guessed, made by different artists =P The statue is called The Dying Gaul by the way.

As for painting examples, I guess the Rothschild Canticles^1 book illustrations represent best what most people nowadays would call medieval art. Not exactly realistic, a little goofy ... perspective? Never heard of it. Proportions? Who cares. And who needs shading anyway?! As long as you can still distinguish a human from a cupcake, it's "eh good enough".

I guess that was also what you meant by "immature" art, because it is the same art style as those goofy weird pictures of knights fighting giant snails and rabbits riding cattle into battle and the like.[^2]

That book is dated to be around 1500–1520 so it would be easy to assume that people at the start of the 15th century didn't have a realistic art style yet. But you know what else was made in that same era?

The Mona Lisa (1503–1506).

One dorky meme-esque style, and one realistic, modest and easy-on-the-eyes style in the same century, probably even the same decade. But they were used by different artists.

Now you might be thinking that those art styles might have been intended for their respective purpose or something along the lines: that the goofy, simple art style was used for nothing but amusing little pictures, and the more realistic style was for "proper" art, because noone in their right mind would spend 100+ hours painting highly detailed nonsense just for sh*ts and giggles, right?

May I introduce you to Joseph Ducreux?[^3]

I guess most of you will have seen that meme by now, but this is a real painting made by a real artist - and it is far from the only one. Ducreux created an entire series of similar self-portraits in ... unusual poses and situations.

... so yes, at least that one guy DID indeed spend dozens if not hundreds of hours (plus material costs) painting amusing nonsense for his own entertainement. He was, in a way, the victorian era equivalent of a shitposter (and I mean that in a good sense!)

Long story short: one can't just claim that "they didn't have X art style in Y century" because the truth is much more facetted than that. It is way more likely that each and every era of human history has had people with insane talent who were able to create art as realistic as possible with whatever tools their lifetime had to offer, and also a bunch of "eh good enough" art or stuff that was deliberately stylized for fun. How we percieve said art today depends mainly on what artworks have survived up until now, and/or how popular the surviving art is. (Everyone and their grandma knows about the Mona Lisa, but how many of y'all knew about the Rothschild Canticles?)

If we don't know about any realistic art from a certain period of time, it doesn't automatically mean that there was no realistic art. It may have been lost, forgotten or it exists but it's just not popular enough to be well-known.

[^2]: https://imgur.com/gallery/medieval-marginalia-dump-bKY5h just some delightfully awkward examples [^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ducreux

Sorry for the late reply, I wasn't online for a few days ... but I see you figured it out ;) I can't speak for other instances, but at least on lemmy.world, the thumbnail is blurred and the post marked as NSFW.

Wikipedia claims they're quite popular.

whoever handed those out is probably a bigot

That explains so much. Their usual mental gymnastics have a similar "order" to them ....

I have no idea, sorry. I just found that picture in an imgur dump.

Thanks! I was sure that I had added the NSFW tag initially and wasn't aware that it wasn't showing.

There is also at least one major translation error that's only present in the English version. In the final boss battle, Zelda says that Ganon has "given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure enraged form", implying that the reincarnation cycle has been broken and there will be no more Ganons after this fight.

In all other languages including the original, it is some variation of "his obsessive refusal to give up on reincarnation turned him into this monstrosity", which implies the exact opposite. No matter how often you kill him, he just won't let go, ever - even if it means to turn into a mindless beast. He WILL try to survive and revive, no matter the cost.

I guess the translator in question got a little confused with the double negative (Ganon fiercely does NOT want to NOT reincarnate = he fiercely wants to reincarnate).

I allowed myself to build a hoverbike… and haven’t looked back

Hear, hear. I love the horses in these games so much that I can't fathom completing a full playthrough without owning at least one, but it is kinda hard to still find them useful and convenient when there is a free pile of Zonai stuff lying around behind every corner and Autobuild exists. Plus all the restrictions ... the desert? Off limits. The Depths? Off limits. The Sky islands? Off limits. The sea? ...you get the idea. The areas where horses are even allowed to be are already rare, and on top of that you have dozens of chasms, blockades, "Monster Forces" blocking roads, uneven terrain, rivers, lakes, tunnels, caves, wells, mountains that are almost impossible to cross without leaving your horse behind. Trying to find a rideable path around all of that becomes annoying pretty fast.

Personally, I think it was a very bad call to remove the Ancient Saddle & Bridle. Most people were already struggling to keep an interest in horses in BotW because even WITH the saddle it was a hassle to get your four-legged buddy back to your side after you had to glide somewhere, but now that TotK is three times as vast and has a LOT more vertical travel - where the teleportation feature would really shine - they nuke the ONLY way to summon your furry means of transport to your side whenever you want? C'mon, guys. Seriously.

Even if they wanted to get rid of all "ancient tech" then why not let Purah build a substitute? Or put a hidden secret Zonai saddle somehwere? Or make it an amiibo drop? DLC content? Let Robbie invent a special Travel Medallion specifically for horses? Or make Malanya reward the player with a magic flute or whatever?! It really isn't hard to come up with an in-game, in-universe, lore-fitting reason for why a horse teleportation feature can exist.

Or just hide a special saddle with mechanical wings behind some late-game quest to make your horse able to glide.

Gesundheit.

If you mirror it tho, it makes even less sense:

Oh...yeah, that does look a lot closer to it. Thanks for pointing it out ^^ I'm going to edit the post.