{"id":48,"date":"2012-07-18T22:59:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T22:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terry-torres.com\/plays\/2012\/07\/18\/paula-a-woman-far-away\/"},"modified":"2023-09-07T15:44:42","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T15:44:42","slug":"paula-a-woman-far-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/2012\/07\/18\/paula-a-woman-far-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Paula, a woman far away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZfrIcZYcvN4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i129.photobucket.com\/albums\/p214\/kefkajr\/Paula20-20Walk20SW.gif\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i129.photobucket.com\/albums\/p214\/kefkajr\/Paula_Polestar_Clay.png\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i129.photobucket.com\/albums\/p214\/kefkajr\/Paula20-20Falling.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Paula is The Girl in every sense. She&#8217;s feminine and well-loved like a young Miyazaki heroine, she wears pink like Princess Peach, she wears a bow in her hair like Ms. Pac Man, and she uses a <b>frying pan<\/b> as her weapon of choice.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to think the frying pan was an ironic choice &#8211; like, they knew how funny it would be. I&#8217;m also confident that Paula&#8217;s use of a frying pan would lead to Princess Peach being able to use a frying pan (among other things) in Super Mario RPG, and then again in Super Smash Bros. Melee.<\/p>\n<p>Paula was raised by loving parents who also run the preschool in <a href=\"http:\/\/terryplays.blogspot.com\/2012\/07\/trolling-in-twoson.html\">Twoson<\/a> &#8211; how community-oriented they are! Paula seems to lend a hand at the school as well, which goes to show how she grew to be so kind and likeable.<\/p>\n<p>Like Ness, we discover that Paula also has psychic powers, her specialty being telepathy. When you first rest at a hotel after completing <a href=\"http:\/\/terryplays.blogspot.com\/2012\/07\/dungeon-anatomy-giant-step-in-right.html\">Giant Step<\/a>, Paula will contact you and request your aid.<\/p>\n<p>Despite her talent and resourcefulness, her parents actually seem pretty dopey! After Paula&#8217;s kidnapped, her father doesn&#8217;t realize she&#8217;s missing until you ask to see her at their home. He panics and runs around town looking for her <b>[P P P Paula! Where are you? It&#8217;s time for a yummy piece of pie!]<\/b> and presumably never tells his wife, who does not mention Paula&#8217;s absence.<\/p>\n<p>In a lot of ways she&#8217;s a stereotypical girl in an RPG, but I think this is done with purpose. She does get kidnapped, and she is heavily suggested to act as a love interest for Ness, and she IS the most magically (psychically) talented member of the group. So she&#8217;s girly. But, in the 90s, I feel like if a fictional girl wasn&#8217;t wearing pink with bows in her hair, she could have been Boomer from the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:BKkidsclubgang.png\">Burger King Kids Club<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s also the most versatile attacker. All of Ness&#8217; iconic attacks in Smash Bros. &#8211; Fire, Thunder, Freeze, Magnet &#8211; were actually borrowed from Paula. She gets more Psychic Points than Ness, and can even use PSI Magnet to leech PP from enemies &#8211; an explicit encouragement to use her special skills as often as possible. Her sheer offensive potential, I believe, does a lot do balance out her girliness. Hey, she doesn&#8217;t even learn restorative skills.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also something about Paula I never took seriously before. To spoil something: before you recruit your remaining party members, you take control of them for very brief but very illuminating moments.<\/p>\n<p>You <i>never<\/i> take control of Paula. I can&#8217;t think of a more eloquent way to illustrate how an adolescent male like Ness has no idea what goes on in the mind of a girl his age. When I first played this game, I <i>was<\/i> an adolescent male like Ness, and I never even thought to <i>want<\/i> to play as Paula.<\/p>\n<p>Another interesting thing about Paula is revealed in looking back at the Japanese version of the game. <a href=\"http:\/\/terryplays.blogspot.com\/2012\/07\/your-name-please.html\">When naming your party at the beginning<\/a>, you can choose &#8220;Don&#8217;t Care&#8221; to have the game cycle through a set of pre-made names.<\/p>\n<p>In Japanese, these names are, of course, different, but some of them are very special. If you were to name everyone with the 4th set of names,<\/p>\n<p>Ness would be <b>John<\/b><br \/>Paula would be <b>Yoko<\/b><br \/>Jeff would be <b>Paul<\/b><br \/>Poo would be <b>George<\/b><br \/>and the dog would be <b>Ringo<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>Yoko: a lady among men, a non-Beatle among Beatles. The ultimate &#8220;other&#8221; is paralleled with Paula.<\/p>\n<p>Right from the get-go, Earthbound has so much to say about men and women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paula is The Girl in every sense. She&#8217;s feminine and well-loved like a young Miyazaki heroine, she wears pink like Princess Peach, she wears a bow in her hair like Ms. Pac Man, and she uses a frying pan as her weapon of choice. I&#8217;d like to think the frying pan was an ironic choice&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/2012\/07\/18\/paula-a-woman-far-away\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Paula, a woman far away<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}