The Adventures of Tulip, Interlude

[rynling]

Tulip is taking a break from Lordran while I go to Toronto.

I was just saying to a friend on Twitter that Dark Souls has become the education about European art history that I always wanted. The architecture is so beautiful that I've been looking up the real-world references, and I've been learning a lot.

I have a fairly solid education in East Asian art history, and I love Japanese architecture so much it's unreal. What's cool about architecture in Japan is that, like... I'm not sure how to put this. So you know how, when you go to like a museum or a botanical garden, and they have a Japanese teahouse or something, they'll have cordons around it so that no one touches it? In Japan, it's the exact opposite. They'll be like, "This is the oldest and largest extant wooden building in the world, and it's built without a single metal nail, and it's still in active use, so come on and put your hands and feet all over it, also would you like to sit down on this thousand-year-old veranda and have some tea." The same thing goes for Japanese ceramics. You'll be casually having tea with someone, and they'll just randomly be like, "Oh yeah, that cup is four hundred years old." And the same goes for more recent architecture, where there will be a beautiful Victorian-style brick building from the Meiji period housing a café where you can get beer and pancakes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that art history is more interesting if it's something you can touch for yourself. And for me, Dark Souls is exactly that sort of experience.

Comments

[lassarina]

It sounds like a sense of "appreciation includes use" in the Japanese art - things aren't meant to sit quietly somewhere, they're meant to be interacted with, even the precious and rare things. Which makes some sense when you think about Japan having smaller living spaces and needing to use those spaces efficiently/not being able to store a lot of things that aren't used. Western art is so often a kind of conspicuous consumption - we can afford to waste time, money, and space on this thing that you can only look at! (and I am not immune to this; I own several items that are looked at rather than used. Which is actually making me consider: for some of those, am I happy enough with them being appreciated not used? I have some genuinely fucking adorable novelty cups with FFXIV characters on them and right now they're on a shelf. Would I be happier using them instead, even with the risk of breaking them? I might. An interesting thought.)

[rynling]

I use fancy teacups all the time. I break them all the time too, but the good news is that the world is filled with fancy teacups. I would absolutely drink out of Final Fantasy teacups every single day, and I would feel like a goddamn wizard doing it. Damn you are lucky to have such treasures.

[lassarina]

These aren't teacups, they're like - lidded tumblers? Like this one, although I certainly did not pay that amount of money for it.