#The point of an archive is to preserve the original version if it exists

[jeremys-stash]

In fucking tears at the people saying they're making an archive of a donghua bc it's getting nuked by YouTube and then not even putting the raws, just the versions with the English subs burned on it like wtf no.??

Y'all need to fucking STOP doing English-centric shit like that all the time, other languages exist

Like if someone want the episodes to use subs in another language, what do they do? The fucking English sub is unremovable and the Chinese subs are already on the original video. You end up with three languages displayed on you video bc some pal thought that only English-speaking/reading people would need/want it? That non-English-speaking/reading people exist?

#At the end of my fucking life seriously #It's very amenable #Really #But goddamn I'm at my limit with people like that #The point of an archive is to preserve the original version if it exists #And I fucking proposed them to have said original versions #But nooo they downloaded the burned english subs version and then was here like 'oh. Sad that those two episodes got nuked by YT. #It would have been nice to have the subs on it' as if the subs creator didn't fucking made a whole ass repository for their subs #Not only that but goddamn even by reading videos through google drive you can add subs on it #Like the best thing would've been to make a new folder for all the English subs and propose to host subs in other languages so it could be #an actual really useful archive #Uuurgh anyway

[dr-yung]

I LOVE DR. YUNG. Please watch Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon... I wish to ramble about it...

So there's two english dubs. The original airing, and the DVD Bonus alongside the Mystery of Mew movie. The first dub also has a different intro (I prefer the second dub's intro). They're the same song, at different points.

Very notably, in the second dub, there's an error where Ash refers to Mirage Master by his Japanese name, Mr. Mirage. This is not present in the original dub.

As to which one is better... Both have their clunky moments. I love the special dearly, but both English dubs are kind of mid. Where the first lacks, the second provides, and visa versa.

Back to the Mr. Mirage / Mirage Master thing... Dr. Yung is still his name in Japanese, which implies a Jekyll and Hyde origin, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being the titles of the characters in the novella. This inspiration is one I firmly believe is intended, given that Dr. Yung was portrayed as respectable until the reveal. Alongside the fact that I also have great interest in the novella, so I may be biased... Dr. Jekyll is a man who is of dubious morality. People equate Dr. Jekyll to good - but that is wrong. He experimented to create Hyde, a personification of his evil, in an attempt to seperate himself from his darker thoughts and ideas. Hyde is every bit of evil that Jekyll is, but isolated and without restraint. This makes Dr. Yung being inspired from Jekyll more plausible. Pokémon has always been my special interest, and I had a year or so where I obsessed over the novella, so my current Dr. Yung obsession is. Intense.

His hair is #78BDC4, which is EXTREMELY close to the color of Wynaut's official art. This is notable, because Wynaut is the only Pokémon found on Mirage Island - which is the only refrence to Mirage Island I can see in the special. The special itself takes place in Dr. Yung's lab in Kanto - despite being based around Mirage themes and being in the Hoenn era. I personally headcanon that Dr. Yung has once visited Mirage Island, but the island is never mentioned in the special.

Dr. Yung's past in the Pokémon Institute is vague; and that may be because that past only exists in the English Dubs (grain of salt; I'm unsure myself, because I don't know where to watch the entire sub). The past is only touched upon near the end of the special, where Oak mentions Yung was expelled from the Institute, and that his actions are of vengence. The details remain vague; if Oak was his teacher, or the one who expelled him, is never clarified. However, in Japanese, this line is absent; Oak instead concluded that Dr. Yung is Mr. Mirage, due to Mr. Mirage stating all his hard work was complete, which directly implies that he made the Mirage System, which Dr. Yung did.

The fact such a vital story beat could be created for the dub isn't far-fetched, to me. The dubs are of dubious quality, and were in the middle of a huge shift in voice actors, alongside the original being under 4Kids (and we all know how badly 4Kids changed things for no reason). The special itself is unique, in that the dub was aired in the US, before the original Japanese version aired in the east.

This isn't actually mentioned on the Bulbapedia page, but when the special was aired in the US, it occured with a sweepstakes event. If you input a code found in the commercials in a certain site, you could win a 10th anniversary Pikachu plushie, or a copy of Pokémon Trozei. The only known preservation of said airing I know of, is on internet archive.

Speaking of, the special was aired for the 10th anniversary (based on Red/Green's release date of 1996) in April of 2006. This is referenced in the special, with Oak's password being REDGREEN.

Dr. Yung is one of few Pokémon Villains most consider entirely irredeemable. Note that morality =/= enjoyment of the character, and for God's sake I am allowed to enjoy morally dubious characters. If you think me liking a morally dubious character is excusing and weird, please touch grass. He is wrong, and I like him, that can and should coexist.

He's extremely obscure in terms of Pokémon, having very few pieces of fanart to ever be posted online (one being from me, and one being traced). From what I can find, only two English fanfics featuring him exist, both being rewrites of the special on Fanfic.net. He has no tag on Ao3. I am in the trenches. All gifs of him on Tenor are from me (solarcanic), including a few inside jokes. To this day I have only met 4 other Dr. Yung fans, one being here on Tumblr, one being on TikTok, and the other two being my friends whom I dragged here with me.

I am BEGGING people to hear me out. My autism has cursed me by making my interest in him so severe. Please don't let me crazily ramble here alone PLEASE... If I yell loud enough people might hear... And join me.........

#pokemon #stuff ;; infodump #op ;; me #pokemon dr yung #dr yung #dr yung pokemon #mirage master pokemon #pokemon mirage master #mirage master #mastermind of mirage pokemon

[al-hekima-madara-blog]

This repost is just for me to keep an archive. It's an answer from this convo.

I’m not a specialist in genetics so I won’t talk about recessive or dominant genes but in term of sociology and historical perceptive the purity bloodline theme even if it’s not discuss directly in the fiction it’s implicitly the case. let’s not forget Naruto is strongly based on Japanese culture, folklore and religion. Being a fiction doesn’t mean popping up out of the blue. The fiction just put more fantasy and magic for the sake of entertainment on practices already existing in reality. In ancient japan, endogamous marriage were not the norm but permitted specially in aristocratic circle or in rural area wishing to preserve some secret knowledges.

I’m sorry I couldn’t find an english version so here is my very rough translation of the anthropologist Emmanuel Todd about Origin of family system (2011)

1- Marriage between cousins : The japanese descent family is distinguished from the german and the korean one by a slight endogamous tendency. Marriage between cousins is not forbidden in rural traditional Japan. After the second world war, in a society highly industrialised the global percentage of marriage between cousin 1st degree is 7.2%. A number, although not important, can be compared to Europe with a number inferior to 1% at the same period.

2- High aristocracy from Heian Era gravitating around the imperial family did not have any prohibition against consanguinity with the exception of parent/children, and brother/sister. As noticed by McCullough, a man could freely married an aunt, a niece, or a cousin […] It is clearly a classist endogamy according to McCullough, a tiny dominant group pull apart through endogamy from the rest of society. Thus they preserve in the same time bloodline “purety”, power exclusivity both symbolic and material.

There was an other part from the same chapter but a bit too long to translate where the author stress on how in some traditional japanese family, they put emphases on the elder child having a distinctive status, education and privilege than the other siblings.

Hyuga and Uchiha are both view in the Narutoverse as a very prestigious and traditional clan. Huyga even use terms Soke/Bunke which is a concept already existing in japanese culture. So we can associate them with a kind of aristocracy among the shinobi world. Both of them are said to descendant from Alien but even irl a lot of aristocratic family still proclaim a divine ancestry to justify their power over a majority (Ethiopia kings from Salomon, British queen claims to descent from the biblical King David) and in japanese case the imperial family still believe today to descend from Amaterasu. So following this aristocratic logic, keeping the blood “pure” is extremely important to them, they think it’s the source of their power.

I know that for a western/christian point of view, cousin union is seen as disgusting and incestuous (although European aristocracy still do it regardless for the reason explained previously) but it’s not the case in most part of the world, (I’m not defending it I’m just stating facts), and it’s not automatically produce disable children otherwise the Middle East and South Asia who have a long and stable tradition of doing so would have disappeared from Earth long time ago.

My point was just to say I don’t think the bloodline purity is a fandom invention, it’s a natural deduction. Senju are exogamous by choice (they have a tradition of making matrimonial and political alliances hence why Konoha was possible with a Senju driving force) in the opposite Hyuga and Uchiha seems to be strongly endogamous also by choice based on the fact they keep very similar features, a very strong sense of pride, an elitist education, a protective and secretive approach to their culture and a higher proportion of clan members possessing KKG (contrary to Senju where Mokuton is limited solely to Hashirama). Historically marrying your 1st, 2nd or 3rd degree cousin through arranged marriage will maximize the chance to keep some traits (good or bad) in the family. Hinata choosing herself to marry a non-Hyuga is an exception rather than a rule 1) Hinata/Neji/Hiashi relationship where her father is seen to slowly change his mind about his very conservative approach to tradition 2) Naruto is the most powerful Ninja post-war, son of an Hokage, future Hokage himself so they might play lottery with the genetic pool but they gain a great prestige and affluence by association with him.

#bloodline limit #endogamy #kekkei genkai #uchiha #hyuga #Naruto meta #uchiha clan #Hyuga clan

[anotheruserwithnoname]

There are dedicated people who have spent decades searching for lost media - lost films and TV shows that are no longer available due to all known copies disintegrating over time, or being deleted by their owners, or due to archive fires. Some of these people have had marvellous success: many lost episodes of Doctor Who from the 60s and 70s have been recovered. Several first-season episodes of The Avengers too (Steed and David Keel version).

One spectacular example was how a treasure hunt for the original edit of the silent film Metropolis eventually led to the recovery of a near-complete print in an archive in Brasil.

Of course not every search has been a success. There are still several lost Charlie Chaplin silent films, several early Tarzans, and the Doctor Who screen canon remains incomplete (hence the decision to animate some 1960s episodes). There is even a lost Elvis movie (Pied Piper of Cleveland) that people have been searching for for nearly 70 years).

I mention all this because of the irony that the current streaming era, in which everything is supposed to be preserved forever digitally and always available on demand, has led to a new era of lost media. And history is repeating itself: in the 1920s Charlie Chaplin voluntarily destroyed all copies of A Woman of the Sea, a film he'd directed, as a tax write-off.

Sound familiar? This is pretty much what has happened to the Batgirl movie. And I could name others.

We don't know if the Willow series still exists. Or the multi-million-dollar series Marco Polo which was to have been Netflix's answer to Game of Thrones before it proved in spectacular fashion that being on Netflix was no guarantee of survival. For all we know the only copies of Sense8 still in existence may well be those people illegally downloaded.

I'd like to see one of the big unions (writers, actors, directors) demand an audit. Even if a show has been placed on an archive server, never to be exhibited in public for whatever reason, it would be good to know it still exists in some form. I and many other people assume the Willow series has been literally deleted from existence and general consensus is the completed Batgirl film is lost media, meaning all the work that went into them has been wasted. Neither is a show I had an interest in, but imagine if, say, The Serpent - Jenna Coleman's streaming crime drama - was to be deleted. That would be awful for Jenna fans (I'm so glad she wasn't cast in Willow), plus Serpent stands as a testament to British TV production ingenuity considering how they managed to finish it despite COVID restrictions. It deserves to be preserved on that basis alone. (And yes I know it's on DVD in the UK, though not in North America; I'm just using it to prove a point. At least Sandman got a physical release).

#lost media #streaming

[aaroncutler]

Toshio Matsumoto in Recife

November 10: The link above leads to a listing of the complete line-up of this year's edition of the Brazilian festival Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, which began on November 6th and will conclude on November 12th. The selection includes a program of eight short films directed by the great Japanese experimental artist Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017), which Mariana Shellard and I organized following the festival's invitation and which will screen on Sunday, November 12th, at 2 P.M. in the Sala Derby of the Cinema da Fundação Joaquim Nabuco.

Matsumoto is known best today internationally for his stellar debut feature, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), and to some extent for his perturbing and equally remarkable second feature, Demons (1971), but the rigorous and tireless Tokyo-based theorist and teacher of experimental film practice also completed over 80 short and medium-length works of film, video, and expanded cinema that investigate a variety of artistic approaches in thoughtful and beautiful ways. The films that will screen in Recife, which were all originally concluded in 16mm, will be presented in high-resolution digital copies provided by the Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive, a nonprofit entity devoted to preserving the work of Matsumoto and of a few other Japanese film and video artists.

A version of the program "The Transformed Japan of Toshio Matsumoto" first screened in July of 2022 at the Cinemateca Capitólio, in Porto Alegre, within the context of the series organized by Mutual Films "Film as an Object in Space: A Look at Film Archives". For the Recife screening, a new general sequence for the program has been proposed to follow rhythmic and thematic lines, and the hardcore structuralist and materialist work Ecstasis (which is closely linked with Funeral Parade of Roses) has been substituted with the more ethereal, sutra-inspired piece Everything Visible is Empty. Matsumoto has many more films that are worth seeing in a projection context than could fit into one program (and the PJMIA's website offers an admirable cataloguing of these works). The hope exists for this program to serve as an entry point.

[thephantombelow]

(the following post I originally posted as a long rant on discord. this is that but with slight edits to formatting since I think I made a few okay points worth archiving in a format that wasn't in a discord with less than 100 people in it). long post about megaman, x dive, it's offline version, and the reality of the franchise as a whole. doomer post sorry. go play 30XX and Gravity Circuit though and like any platformer Inti Creates (Gunvolt / Copen series and the Blaster Master Zero trilogy are pretty good!)

oh hey, mega man x dive's online version is dead. neat.

what an odd game that was. mega man as a gacha game was always an inherently flawed concept, and its gameplay sure showed that. some of the most stale levels in any mega man game. some of the most uninteresting fights, with all of them being recreations of older fights outside the honestly pretty cool final boss. crossover events that were neat but apparently not neat enough to get archived properly, a story that killed any pacing that the levels had when they were going, and again, holy shit those levels were bad

i am not sure whether or not I can confidently say it is the worst mega man game as that probably still is X6 but it sure was the most boring one. the offline version that for some reason is 30 dollars only further helps showcase how terrible the balancing was with how hilariously easy it is even on the challenge mode. it was the purest form of every disease the gacha game genre has at points. every single issue that every bad gacha game had x dive had. and also there is nfts or whatever I still don't know if those are official or not (though judging by them appearing at some cons it sure is a maybe)

like, we were pretty hopeful after 11 then nothing but the legacy collections came out and also looking back 11 was just okay but that is a topic for another day and also when I actually sit down and replay it, and still more legacy collections, and we keep buying them all as hey it is cool to have every mega man game in a series of bundles relatively cheaply on pc and console (besides starforce and legends at this point)

but like, lmao. what now.

the only new mega man game (since 2017, not including collections and odd ball things like the Mega Man X crossover in Minecraft Bedrock) was x dive and now that is dead, and the offline version kinda sucks even though I am glad it exists in the first place. (something something preservation is good and this is mostly the best way it could have gone out, and I hope more gacha games do the same in the future)

it kinda feels like we have looped back to the state the franchise was in back in like early 2010s (just with extra copium and better fangames)

people are like; guys the battle network legacy collection sold well that means there is going to be a battle network 7 right guys right right. and like yeah, I guess. it did, right. but man mega man will always be the 5th or 6th best selling franchise for capcom

capcom publishes devil may cry. capcom makes/publishes street fighter. capcom makes/publishes resident evil. capcom makes/publishes monster hunter.

battle network is the only good selling sub-franchise within megaman (best overall series for megaman), outside of, and this is true, mega man 2 (yeah). even still, it is not resident evil, monster hunter, or even ace attorney though it has been a while since I have seen the numbers there

so tl;dr of this doomer posting is that mega man as a franchise is like kinda dead and outside of potential extra legacy collection for spinoff games (&bass + wonderswan sequel, soccer, rockboard, battle and chase, etc), starforce collection, and legends collection (lmao collection for 3 games?) like that's it huh

the last actual proper mega man game was 11, which was back in 2018. besides that we have just gotten the collections and x dive, and that latter is now dead. it's pretty joever

#long post #megaman #mega man #rockman #rock man #capcom #megaman x dive #rockman x dive #megaman x dive offline #if you are depressed about the franchse as I am go play the many good fangames out there though #the magmml series is really good somewhat #and again anything inti creates mostly #god please someone else play through the blaster master zero trilogy it is really good #the bmz trilogy feels like inti creates making a new mega man game when it is at its best. also they made peak fiction with the last game #too bad the last game sold like shit though so god please please buy the entire trilogy it is SO GOOD and goes on sale often #fair warning though the port on steam has some issues picking up your controller at times so idk get it on the ps5 if you have that bc #it has voice acting there #also play 30XX #and please play gravity circuit it is pretty good

[smoothgeometry]

Premise (accessible ver.)

[PLEASE NOTE THAT THE BELOW CONTAINS A RATHER LONG WINDED EXPLANATION OF THE SANDBOX AND HISTORY OF WRITING WITHIN IT. THE TRUNCATED VERSION CAN BE FOUND ON THE PINNED POST ON THIS BLOG'S MAIN PAGE.]

Background

The story of this setting is simple, but I wanted to include it anyways, since the goal of this blog is to preserve the knowledge and journey.

Originally, around the 2010s, I found a fantasy RP forum containing a very loose version of this sandbox setting on a Proboards site--back when those were popular. I made many friends and wrote on that site for quite a few years, and during that time I pushed for a bit more development on details concerning cultures and locations. There was a lot of wish fulfillment NSFW content on that website, given that people enjoyed shipping their characters with others', but over time there was quite a bit of lore painted by the background details of various location and event details. While I understood that there was a desire to leave things vague enough that anyone could play nearly any sort of fantasy character in this setting (outside of attempting to "godmod" or railroad others), I felt that we could have tiny pockets of groups, neighborhoods, people and cultures with defined information if we were careful.

The website's name at the time was Era of Manipulation, and was later changed to "Libertine Age". Not many people liked or enjoyed that name, and eventually it was changed back. Have a look at one of the website logos (made by me long long ago):

Without turning this into an epic, the conclusion is that Proboards unexpectedly changed its ToS to explicitly prohibit written NSFW content, which led to us seeking out a new RP home to try and retain membership and activity, as well as our character and background information, which was very important to those of us who grew attached. That's pretty typical. We did end up finding a new home for our stuff, and even managed to move many of our characters and old threads--but by then the spark was gone for many people, and the move didn't take root. A few of us remained in contact, but the idea of a new routine on a new website and having to socialize in a large place was overwhelming and difficult to adjust to.

There were still many of us who wanted to continue writing the lives and dramas of our characters, and the result of this desire was a large Google Docs archive. We would simply format our docs in a similar way to old school forums and go back and forth. As time went on, and our lives changed and we grew, and our group became even smaller, we would plan and plot out events via DMs, and flesh out very important events to chronicle them in full prose; there are quite a few DM'd conversations archived as well.

So, there's a lot that's lost due to moving place to place online, quite a lot archived thanks to Google Docs, and still a tiny group of people who are passionate about characters they have in this setting, even though there isn't as much time to write the way we did when we were young and horny college students. We're just horny adults now, haha. So I wanted to preserve my piece of things in a corner where I can look back on it and remember the major turning points.

Sandbox details

[THIS INFO IS DIRECTLY COPIED FROM PREVIOUS ARCHIVES, WITH FEW EDITS FOR READABILITY.]

GENERAL SUMMARY

This is a sandbox set in a divergent future where unseen realms (known as "Realms beyond the Veil") by some catastrophic accident collide with our own. Though the contact was not for long, the result of this event was the outpouring of various magical energies, creatures, and perhaps more mysterious forces out of those planes to be stranded in our own. This has prompted hidden, assimilated beings native to our plane to come forward to combat otherworldly threats and try to wrangle the chaos into peace. Humanity was forced to acknowledge the existence of magic and other ethereal powers as fact, in a context outside of rumor and imaginative mythologies. In an attempt to subjugate foreign powers wreaking havoc on Human societies, slavery was re-established as a system of penance for destructive or dangerous non-Humans from other worlds. With magic saturating the earth, technology rocketed forward in an attempt to maintain mankind's authority on their planet and its new citizens and functions.

Our setting exists in this world a little more than a century after the above event. Humans and non-Humans have adjusted to one another. While the slave market is still primarily comprised of otherworldly creatures, there are just as many non-Humans in a position of power. Greed permeates all races/sentient species, and despite stating that their "goal" was to ensure that the Human race remain "pure", money and valuables can buy nearly everything. Technology has developed more quickly with the introduction of magic, and society is an echo of what it used to be - both similar and different. Things have settled down from the danger and chaos of The Event, and the caste system while loosely defined, is now firmly in place.

As this is a sandbox there is no overall story premise, simply characters interacting in a City on the Eastern coast of the United States, though many other locations are featured!

OUR EARTH, JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT

The year was 2014. The world-at-large for planet Earth was considered to be quite small: Humans held dominion over the land and those who showcased abilities or talents were shunned, called freaks, ostracized and forced into hidden communities. Lore concerning magic and super-human abilities were relegated to the status of exaggerated legends, children's fancies or lies told by the mad.

This was, allegedly, not always the case. There were Others, of course, creatures and beings and at times, small populations operating in their own circles, passing information about other realms and otherworldly feats from generation to generation from times forgotten when the Earth and its inhabitants were once different. For these people, touched by magic, their abilities were both curse-and-blessing: their abilities were great, but could not often be used or displayed. Glamours were all too common, assimilation necessary to ensure survival. No group revealed in totality to Humans persisted for long, with few exceptions.

It was in fact rumored that the Earth had been protected by the magic of a God; some grandiloquent spell cast eons before, preventing anything other than Humans to flourish. This was a wide and far-reaching belief, as it was well known that Non-Humans didn't reproduce or thrive in similar numbers. Be it through ill-fated luck or deliberate intent, open settlements of the supernatural were overrun or became isolated. And so those peoples remained silent; practitioners and stewards alike over nature and the magic were reduced to sneaking from the shadows to complete their works. Remaining hidden became engraved into various cultures as they hid in plain sight. It seemed that even the very powers that watched over them kept their deepest secrets hidden from a world that would not accept them without much bloodshed and strife, as it remained this way for millennia.

The Earth was primitive without its Otherworldly connections, and Humans suffered in spite of their large numbers. The planet could not replenish resources quickly enough, could not rid itself of disease and illness effectively. Soothing energy only pooled in specific places; the reach of magic was limited and restricted in effectiveness.

That was the status quo - being unaware of their full potential, and of the planes around them, Humans existed blissfully ignorant.

THE GREAT REVEAL

As for how the disaster occurred: A lone Human psychic, her name never recorded, allegedly foresaw the possibility of the Event. She came from a mixed bloodline, with very particular affinities. It was not a matter of power or purity of pedigree - her magic was linked to probability; magic attuned to states of reality was rare occurrence, and stealing it for personal gain was likely motivation (though no one has been able to prove it). It is thought that she was used as a conduit by other scholars of magic, made into an anchor to trigger the uncertain into certainty. Whatever their goal, the task proved too much for them to handle.

They could not control her magic.

If there was a Shield preventing contact with other Realms, it must have shattered or been banished; others still believe a mass of portals might have been manifested instead. The common consensus, however, is that for a brief moment, all of the planes became *merged*. Regardless of what is attributed to be occurrence, the Earth and its inhabitants came into contact with planes layered both above and below, flooded with myriad magical energies, as well as countless creatures both similar and grossly different from those in hiding.

A suddenly over-saturated Earth erupted in chaos. Though many historians emphasize the havoc wreaked by violent, mindless, or ignorant creatures that disrupted every day life, there were other changes, too. Magic changed its topography, changed the flora and fauna, changed any living being it came across, brought new life from other places we have never known with strange properties and effects. Many Humans fell ill, adjusting to new energy swimming through their veins; a handful were transformed almost overnight into living beings thought only figments of imagination.

Initially, there were attempts made to try to replicate the phenomenon to return the visitors and reverse the process. These proved unsuccessful, and these plans were soon abandoned. there were more pressing matters that required attention; with new animals and creatures came problems and dangers that needed to be handled. Many died in attacks or invasions. Some new inhabitants hid on islands and landmasses not yet mapped. Others could disguise themselves undetectably. Areas of the world became unstable and unsafe in a matter of days. It's these times that granted the reveal the alternate nickname of "The Calamity".

IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

Emerging from their hiding places were those of magical origin born on earth, before the tearing of the Veil. There was little time to debate the validity of these offers for help, and Humans took the hands (or paws, or claws, or talons) of those granting assistance. The leagues of "monsters" now a part of the world were cataloged as best as possible. They worked with Humans to maintain control, to heal injured, sick and ailing. They also helped to capture anything new and unfamiliar for study, parlay (when possible) and when necessary, neutralization. Several diplomats rose to sort things out, to exchange customs and impart information, but few agreement came without a price. Lives of many kinds were lost across conflicts.

The advent of new magics complicated things, despite fast advancements in tech; paper and metallic currency meant virtually nothing when some odd creature could replicate it easily.

But slowly and carefully, many were taught how to function with and allowed to integrate into various communities.

Social conventions struggled to adapt to accommodate new needs and features. Regardless of what was thought of Man, Creature or Beast, order needed to be established for the good or survival. Civilization, or some version of it, managed to cling to the changing planet.

The Great Reveal was not only unexpected, some would argue, but necessary. Others call it Justice or Retribution. A few, Destiny. There are those who argue that the planet would have died without the Event to revive it, that Humans were wasting it away.

And many people were not prepared to share a world with anyone else.

Humans were still considered inheritors of planet Earth by virtue, but it was a different world. They fell into old habits. Humans were better, by their own status, and always had been - how else could they adapt well to this sort of calamity? Those once deemed insane, eccentric, were now in demand - their information helped keep the new inhabitants at bay, kept them from sullying Human culture.

Humans were pure.

By force of law those who had been changed, and what creatures that could be subdued were denied their basic rights. Those who could not be were ignored until the proper tech to take them into custody was designed. They were second-class beings who were - at first - assigned legal guardians to take care of them. From that arrangement swiftly grew a caste system that turned the changed into a commodity. They became slaves, their guardians masters who held most if not all rights over their charges.

Despite the planet being theirs, however, Humans were quickly outnumbered. With the aid of magic, some creatures were indistinguishable, and others simply appeared Human on the surface. And that was not the only resistance: many of them had accumulated massive fortunes over time, and in their own home worlds. They put together a strong lobby that allowed them to influence legislation and public opinion, avoided becoming slaves and managed to become Masters themselves. Those Humans who held power and station were quick to turn on their brethren in exchange for more.

For a few decades chaos had reigned, but slowly things settled down.

Now the year is 2122 2037, and the caste system is firmly in place almost all over the world. Technology has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last century, but some conventions could still be recognizable to someone from before the change. Everyone who is someone is a Master, lording over a class of slaves - and the changed never had a chance to become 'someone'. Stuck in the middle are the Citizens, those who are neither; these are the people who still fill the majority of jobs, go through their lives working 9 to 5, many of them uneasy in a world where some flaunt owning others who so covet even their meager positions.

#premise #background details #meta info #primer info #accessible version

[jackgraysonfox]

Alright so I did a little more searching and look looking things over and… I’m at a loss honestly. The picture shows the Tindeck 320kbps version available on archive.org on top vs a straight YouTube rip of the song on the bottom (the 320kbps on the bottom one is fake, I checked and the waveform is indistinguishable from the 128kbps version you would regularly get). However, I can tell you this, that the mixing in the PMV YouTube version of Sunshine and Celery Stalks is different than the PPS2011 album and also now apparently the Tindeck version. I am.. I’m searching for a high quality version of the PMV YouTube version. If you listen directly after the melody part of the bridge (around 2:46ish), you’ll hear that the vocal line is different between the PPS2011/Tindeck and PMV versions. The mixing is also a little different. He says in this original upload of BBBFF Regret is Forever: https://youtu.be/wtAfyiNa7D4?t=313 that the album versions are remastered. I have been looking everywhere to find the old versions of stuff, but maybe they just dont exist. I also know that he had a link to his Dropbox account on his YouTube account way back when (http://db.tt/7yYum8B which leads to https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2qxaxz3brzonro) and I wonder if the original tracks with the original mixes might have been there. I just don’t know at this point though. Do you think you could upload your Tindeck versions to Mega or Mediafire or something like that though since archive.org is missing a song? And do you happen to know if there are even Dropbox versions of the songs? Thanks a bunch, and sorry for talking your ear off

[Response to submitted post]

Hi, and sorry again for taking nearly two years to respond. This is some interesting analysis but I’m not very knowledgeable about these different versions. (I wasn’t even aware of anything to do with Dropbox.)

My first inclination was to check community archive projects (some of which I’m preserving here) like the MLP Music Archive and the Pony Music Archive. At least for “Sunshine and Celery Stalks,” the MLP Music Archive has the same version as the one in the Internet Archive (different metadata but the audio matches), and the Pony Music Archive has the version from PPS 2011, so nothing new here unfortunately.

I don’t think I have the original files I downloaded from Tindeck, but the MLP Music Archive does have a copy of “The Astronomical Astronomer’s Almanac to All Things Astronomy,” although the file is different. I’m hoping that it’s the same audio and just different metadata as for “Sunshine and Celery Stalks.”

Sorry I couldn’t be more help. I’m hoping someone else may be able to provide more information.

#uraliltwerp #brony music #pony music #PinkiePieSwear #Pony Music Spelunking

[prismatic-bell]

as youre very both old school fandom and also someone who works to preserve old fandom content, what do you think is the best way to print off and preserve fanfics? I've been wanting to start to move my many many many archived pdfs into actual physical copies but ive been way too intimidated to really look deep into it so I was wondering if you had a preference

Okay, so.

My preference is "yes." Yes, I want you to archive them. Yes, I want you to save them. I've worked to preserve 1960s teen pulp mags, for fuck's sake, it can't get much worse than that, and I'm grateful to have them.

With that said, pick any or all of the following options to make your physical printouts last longer: --select acid-free paper --bind by sewing, not stapling --store in archival sleeves, like the ones you use for old comic books And now, pick any or all of the following options to make my life easier as a historian (or, you know, the lives of the historians who come after me): --include the title --include the author's name --include the fandom name --include which version of the canon, if relevant (e.g. the OG Transformers show vs the Michael Bay movies) --include the date, or at least year, of publication --include the summary --include the site of origin, including the URL All of these things are called provenance and help not only to identify a specific work, but to place it within its cultural context. As an amusing example: I recently got into James Bond, and decided to go through every fic in the main pairing tag, in chronological order. There came a point where suddenly, out of nowhere, there were like two solid pages of nothing but A/B/O, which I previously had not seen at all. I had a suspicion, so I looked it up, and sure enough--those two pages appeared within just a couple of weeks of the corresponding Supernatural episode. Having publication dates let me determine that. If I were a historian trying to piece together a long-ago puzzle instead of going "lol I live on the hellsite, I bet I know exactly where this came from," that would be a huge datapoint. I could probably find a similar sudden explosion in other fandoms, as well--and if we're going far enough in the future, if Supernatural were to just vanish off the face of the planet along with its entire fandom, historians could still trace that it existed and even determine some of its events based on when certain tropes begin to appear in other fandoms. And further, the fact that its tropes and major events appear in so many other fandoms would allow those historians to say "this must have been a very, very popular story." (This isn't just me making shit up to sound important, by the way. This is literally how we have records of a lot of things throughout antiquity and even into the Renaissance. The more copies there are of something, or the more references that are made to a thing in other things, the more likely it is for at least part of it to survive. This is literally how we know about Shakespeare's two lost plays--he was a popular enough playwright that quartos of his plays were advertised for sale.) Whew! Now let's get into stuff you could do that would make me, as a historian, scream with delight if I were to open your folder full of labeled, acid-free fanfiction fifty years from now: --write a little something about why you picked this particular fic to preserve in hard copy when doing so is bulky and time-consuming compared to the easy instant storage of the internet, yes, even if your reason is "I'm trying not to use my phone in bed because the screen keeps me awake but this story is soothing to reread" --write a little something about who you are, even if it's just "my name is X, my age is Y, I live in Z, I printed this out in 2022" And last but not least: Marginalia. Marginalia. Marginalia, my beloved. That's when you write your thoughts in the columns on the sides, underline stuff, circle it, and so on. Having marginalia means I actually get a window into your thoughts as you read--your perspective, stuff that stuck out to you, places the story made you feel some kind of serious emotion. And yes, this goes for everything. Villain A kills Hero B and you write "YOU MOTHERFUCKER" in the margin, that tells Future Historian Me that you really loved Hero B, you were invested in seeing her succeed, and that this scene really resonated with you. One of my most treasured possessions in the fandom museum is a copy of the novelization of the Help! movie the Beatles did. This particular copy is very worn--unsurprising, it was a cheap paperback even when it was printed--but also, its original owner apparently took it to the movie theatre and

wrote notes in the margins indicating all the things happening onscreen that weren't in the book. What does this tell me? WELL. Let's go ahead and take a look: 1) the written ink doesn't look any newer than the book, so I'm guessing a little when I say this was the original owner and in the theatre, but I have an actual datapoint I'm basing that on 2) based on handwriting and the main demographic of the Beatles audience at the time, this was a young woman, probably a teenager. 3) she went to see the movie more than once (some notes are in pencil, some in ink, but the handwriting is all the same) 4) she was dedicated to making sure every moment of the movie was preserved. This was an era before home video players, so once the movie left theatres, she had no guarantee of seeing it again. 5) while the book is worn, it's not beaten all to shit. It was read a lot, but there's no evidence it was mistreated, so it was probably a prized or at least respected possession.

What can I extrapolate from this, with the understanding that I mean "what theories can I reasonably form but not prove"? Well. She was probably a pretty big fan, since she went to see the movie at least twice and also bought the book. Maybe she wanted to keep the story after the movie was gone. Maybe she was looking for answers for some teen mag contest like "find these things in the Help! movie and win a chance to meet the Beatles." Maybe she had a friend who wasn't allowed to go to the movie. You know what the most tantalizing possibility is to me, although I'll never be able to prove it and actual ethics as a historian mean I can only present it as one among many possibilities? Maybe she did it as a source reference for writing fanfiction. We don't know. We can't know, because I have no idea who the original owner was or if she's even still alive and no way to trace her. But that? In terms of fandom history, that is a fucking gold mine. Pure 24-karat all through. From a strictly historical view, that's worth more than the animation cel I've got in there, and I paid over a hundred bucks for that thing.

So yeah! That was a lot of words to say "just do it." But there's your answer!

#you ask nina answers #the fandom museum

[homo-sex-shoe-whale]

Online shipping, the fetishisation of gay men, and the romanticisation of queer trauma

An essay by me!

Word count: 2.8k

A link to the Google Doc version of this essay.

A big thank you to my friends Nathan @themeerkatnate, Mav @not-mavv , and Duke @dukedark-ness for reading this essay and giving me their thoughts as mlms on the topic. Make sure to check out their blogs and give them a follow!

So I was on a lovely website by the name of Twitter.com yesterday, just scrolling through while having my afternoon cup of coffee, when I saw that viral post of a girl reading a Larry fanfic through a classroom projector. I'm sure most of you have seen it. It's gone viral on Instagram, TikTok, and likely Tumblr too, and if you haven't come across it I'm positive you will soon.

Now, after getting through my initial reaction to that post which was, holy fuck, that's so embarrassing, I had a second reaction of... wait, this ship is still around?

And after I had some thoughts on the incredible permanence of some online ships and the weird obsolescence of others, I did get to thinking of how lots of these popular ships seem to stem from the same types of perceived relationship dynamics and homophobic stereotypes.

These online fandoms often seem to have an obsession with objects of queer trauma, such as having to hide a relationship, lying about sexuality for self-preservation, and even social rejection. So, after some opinions from my followers and the great archive that is the internet, I've decided to discuss some of the most popular examples of online shipping and the particular nuances they came with.

NOTE: Out of respect for all these people, I won't be sharing viral images or videos of them in perceived romantic proximity (or even kissing, as is applicable for some examples), but I will be describing certain moments I deem to be relevant. So even if you're unfamiliar with them, you won't be confused as to what I'm talking about.

NOTE 2: Although not all people within these fandoms were/are toxic, this essay is focused on the overall toxicity of the fandoms, and how they are toxic more so as a "hive" than as a group of individuals. When I refer to a fandom I don't mean every person involved in the fandom, but rather the collective impact of the group.

 1. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson 

This is arguably the most popular example of online shipping. The absolute permanence of this ship, and how its fandom never seems to fully die off even beyond the lifespan of One Direction as it once stood, is downright impressive.  

I'm going to be the first to admit I was never in the loop with this fandom. My childhood best friend was actually a massive Larry shipper and asked me to beta read one of her fics, but that was before I even knew who tf Harry and Louis were! Not because I avoided the fandom or even because I rejected the online shipping, but just by coincidence, I delved into the world of pop punk music right when One Direction began gaining its popularity. I bought my first ever album, Riot by Paramore, in 2011- only a year after One Direction made their X-Factor debut. So, this fandom just bypassed me by a sort of weird coincidence.

But I don't need to be in the loop with this fandom to know the astronomical obsession with these two men, no, these two BOYS, was extremely toxic. In 2010, when One Direction made their debut, Harry Styles was only 16 years old. And Louis Tomlinson wasn't much older at 19! This made the two of them incredibly young when this unprecedented wave of shipping hit the internet, and although that must be traumatising for anyone, I cannot even fathom how overwhelming it must've been for two boys that young.  

I'm 18, almost 19 now, and I cannot begin to imagine how scary it was for the two of them to have their every interaction nitpicked within an inch of its life by thousands upon thousands of people online. I do not know this myself, but from numerous recounts by some of my followers, this massively impacted Harry's and Louis' nondescript relationship in real life, seemingly driving the two previously close friends apart. 

Now, before we move on, there's something we need to talk about. And that is the obsession with the dominance/submission dynamic within the world of gay shipping. 

With almost every popular mlm (an acronym meaning man-loving-man) ship based on real people, it seems that fandoms have a particular fascination with power imbalances in these relationships. You don't even need to look at the insane amount of fanfictions based on BDSM to figure this out. In almost all of the examples I'll be citing today, there is an age gap within the perceived relationship and a person the fandom has seemingly decided to be the top/dominant figure. 

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are 3 years apart in age. Although it isn't all that relevant now, an age gap of 3 years when you're in your late teens is a lot more significant. In 2012, for example, when this shipping really started gaining traction, Harry Styles was 18 and Louis Tomlinson was 21. That power imbalance, albeit not that significant, is enough for a fandom to latch on to. We'll see this a lot more in the coming example with Dan and Phil.

 2. Dan Howell and Phil Lester

It's impossible to have a discussion about internet shipping without talking about Dan and Phil.

 Dan Howell and Phil Lester, although being popular YouTubers individually, are arguably one of the internet's most iconic duos. The two creators published their first videos together in 2009, and while their relationship was already a motive of speculation back then, the peak of the "Phan" shipping definitely came in the 2013-2016 era of Tumblr.

Now, I'm going to admit… I was actually on Tumblr when that happened. 

The 2013-2016 period perfectly aligns with my middle school days (I started middle school in 2013 and high school in 2016), and I was not only on Tumblr back then, but I was on Wattpad too! Again, this wasn't a fandom I had much contact with as I had a huge anime phase in middle school and I was on Tumblr posting mainly photography and Soul Eater content more than anything. 

But I did watch some of Dan and Phil's videos! And the occasional "Phan" content did not completely evade me as one of my closest friends in middle school had a fanchat for them. I wasn't involved in the fandom myself but they were actually one of the few English-speaking YouTubers I watched once in a blue moon (back then I watched mainly Brazilian YouTubers). One thing I did in fact notice over the years, around 2014ish perhaps, was that the two of them seemed to grow increasingly "awkward" around each other, in a way that many folks on the internet thought was reminiscent to Markiplier/Jacksepticeye, two YouTubers who also dealt with extraordinary amounts of shipping.

I'm not the only one who thinks this. The change in Dan and Phil's relationship, at least to the outside world, was clear to almost anyone who watched their videos for a while. I cannot blame them at all. The shipping was nuts. Between the countless fan videos, speculative comments, and insurmountable number of fanfics, there's no way the two of them didn't feel the weight of the shipping. The term "demon phannie" made its way into internet vernacular and there it stayed for years. Even Shane Dawson, who was one of the largest creators on the platform at the time, made several videos speculating on the nature of Dan and Phil's relationship and their sexual orientations. 

There was even porn made in which actors with similar appearances to the creators were made to have sex on camera. 

Now, this is actually a rare example where the two people involved in the ship actually came out as gay once the shipping seemed to die down. I'm incredibly happy Dan and Phil both reached a point where they were comfortable being publicly out, but I hate to say I'm shocked this day ever came. If I'd gone through what the two of them did, I don't know if I'd ever trust the internet. 

And again, this ship's fandom definitely had an obsession with the power dynamics they thought existed between the people within the ship. Dan Howell is 4 years younger than Phil Lester, and was only 18 in 2009, when they started making videos together. From my personal understanding, the shipping was often quite focused on this dominant/submissive dynamic especially in discussions from their early relationship. And this is in no way exclusive to Dan and Phil.

This general fascination with the older man/younger man dynamic, in my opinion, plays into the homophobic stereotype that gay men are predators. The idea that gay men usually seek younger men, and somehow "convince" them to engage in homosexual relationships, is popular homophobic rhetoric. The popularisation, exaggeration, and fetishisation of these power imbalances, in age and/or in relationship dynamics, is directly harmful to the mlm community. 

Not only that, but the romanticisation of a "hidden/forbidden relationship" is also detrimental not only to gay men and the mlm community, but to queer people as a whole. Queer people face huge trauma having to hide their relationships; queer attraction is already a societal taboo. And acting like this is good, or even desirable, is harmful to queer people as a whole, regardless of whether or not it's actually applicable to the people being shipped. It normalises this trauma not only to cisgender, heterosexual people, but to impressionable queer youth who grow to believe this type of trauma is to be expected. 

3. Frank Iero and Gerard Way

This is another example where the perceived power imbalances between the two subjects of the shipping were directly exploited online. Now, this ship did precede the others mentioned above. If we're looking at this topic chronologically, this particular ship did come first in the shipping timeline. It's closer to the origin of the shipping extended universe, if you will.

In case you aren't familiar with them, Frank Iero and Gerard Way are both members of the American emo band My Chemical Romance. This ship is the first one here of which I don't recall the full popularity. It really peaked in popularity around the late 2000s, circa 2008. And I don't remember this moment online as in 2008, I was only 6 years old and believe it or not, I wasn't really all that concerned with rumoured homoeroticism as a first grader. 

However, the popularity of this ship did carry over into the 2013-2015 Tumblr shipping boom. The emo fandom (or "bandom" as it was called) involving not only My Chemical Romance but other similar bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and Pierce the Veil, found its hub on Tumblr. 

During this time, I did in fact listen to this style of music, but was focused a lot more on the anime side of Tumblr as mentioned earlier. Of course, I wasn't 13 years old like, "hey, this type of content might be harmful and can inadvertently perpetuate homophobic stereotypes," I just happened to care more about my silly little anime and ended up not getting involved. 

This ship does involve a discussion that the others don't, however. With Frank Iero and Gerard Way, there is quite often a certain sentiment of, "Oh, they brought this upon themselves!" as the two band members very famously kissed during a show in 2007. In my opinion, though, this doesn't really justify all the obsessive shipping. If you look at Green Day, a band often grouped in with MCR as another famous pop punk group, the members don't follow too different of a trajectory. Billie Joe Armstrong has, on numerous occasions, kissed both of his fellow band members onstage- particularly Tré Cool, the drummer. And Billie Joe Armstrong is openly bisexual, which none of the members of MCR seem to be but some, or even all of Billie's bandmates, are too. 

You'd think Green Day would face a lot more shipping as the more persistent onstage homoeroticism and Billie Joe's openness about his sexuality would warrant more "substantiated" speculation. However, Green Day faces nowhere near as much shipping as My Chemical Romance. Why is this? I actually don't know. It might've been because Green Day has been around for over a decade longer and generally has an older fandom, but I really am not that sure. 

 It could also be because of the lower lack of potential for forced relationship dynamics. The members of Green Day are all less than a year apart in age and are even similar in height. However, Frank Iero is 4 years younger than Gerard Way, who is not only the frontman of My Chemical Romance, but also considered to be the group's intellectual and creative "leader". Even beyond that, Gerard Way is quite visibly taller, and the perceived power difference between the two of them definitely did not elude their fans. 

This difference could even be partly due to the lack of a "mystery" with Green Day. There's not as much to speculate as, well… the members of Green Day are already open about their sexual orientations. It might be that shipping in the Green Day fandom has less of a forbidden appeal for most people. 

Of course, I won't just keep repeating myself, but my previous points about forced relationship dynamics still stand.

4. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch

Better known for their roles in BBC Sherlock as Sherlock and Watson, Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch unfortunately had their roles follow them well into real life. This is the example I know least about, so have these thoughts from a follower by the name of @indubitably-a-goblin, who had the following to say:

"the main issues i had with it were:

a) they were both married at the time, freeman to amanda abbington and cumberbatch to sophie hunter (in which both had children)

b) the main reasoning for it was their chemistry in the many projects they've done together. which is, shockingly, their Whole Job. They're actors! That's what they're supposed to do! if they weren't good at interacting then they wouldn't be good actors! i don't know how people can't understand this.

c) they're real people. we don't know them. we aren't friends with them. we aren't their family members. we have zero right to be pushing this onto them and ruining their friendship by doing so. (this one relates to most of the ships you've mentioned though)

d) healthy friendships between two men are ignored so plainly in most medias and in fandom. its obvious that these two men have a relationship, but that doesn't mean it's a romantic one.

e) its fine to ship their characters, but actors shouldn't be treated as less-than-human or some sort of prop. they're doing a job, and once they are off-screen, they aren't here for your entertainment."

I believe she did a great job of summing it up on her own, and for the sake of avoiding redundancy, I'll leave it at that!

5. Corpse Husband and Sykkuno- an emerging yet subtle example

I am absolutely positive you remember how popular the game Among Us was a couple of months ago. And with the popularity of this game, some of its most prominent content creators became the targets of online shipping- as is the case with YouTubers and streamers Corpse Husband and Sykkuno. 

Although the shipping involving these two creators is nowhere near as strong as it was/is with the examples above, I do think there is once again a reemergence of a common theme here. Whilst Sykkuno is known for his happy-go-lucky, almost "innocent" persona, Corpse Husband is the antithesis of this, known for his much darker and moodier personality. 

Do I even have to mention what the common theme seems to be?

Again, although the popularity of shipping - at least with real people - seems to have died down a bit since the Tumblr shipping boom of the early to mid 2010s, I do believe this example is worth mentioning. Even though the creators are still close, they have in fact expressed discomfort regarding the shipping, and I can only hope the internet as a whole lets their friendship blossom and exist naturally without obsessive speculation. 

My final thoughts

As explored in the essay:

The romanticisation of objects of queer trauma as a part of online shipping normalises queer trauma to both cishet and queer youth. 

Online shipping, especially at a high intensity, can end up negatively impacting the very relationships they pine over. 

The relationship dynamics often forced on mlm ships perpetuate homophobic stereotypes about non-heterosexual men. 

If anyone else has thoughts on this matter, do share! This essay is moreso an opinionated observational piece and isn't meant to be taken as fact but rather just as my thoughts on the matter. I hope it was useful as a reflective piece regardless!

Date of posting: June 16th 2021

#lgbt #lgbtq #gay #mlm #I cannot believe I said the phrase 'shipping extended universe'

[canmom]

Animation Night 48 - Independent Web Animators... 2!

It's hard to believe we're approaching the big 50... and in a few weeks I'll have managed a full year of Animation Nights every Thursday.

This week, I'm returning to one of my earliest themes: the independent web animation scenes we first visited in Animation Night #10. Last time, we went on a bit of a historical survey of the classics: the Newgrounds flash scene of Xiao Xiao and Bitey, the charm of SamBakZa's There She Is!, the wonderful body horror fractals of Cyriak, and the most recent stylish generation of indie animators on youtube like Felix Colgrave and Vewn. Check that post for the full list!

Well what's happened since then? Many of these animators have dropped new videos, and I've been introduced to a few more. So I have some pretty sick stuff to show... we'll get to that in a minute!

At the same time, the sword of Damocles has fallen: Flash player is now officially killed off - with lossy, high bandwidth raster video apparently considered preferable to building a secure, backwards-compatible swf player, as far as the powers that be are concerned! Sure, the actual software, now called Adobe Animate, still exists (competing with others like Toonboom as general purpose vector animation software), but while before just about anyone could get their hands on a pirated copy of Flash, the present version is locked into Adobe's subscription ecosystem...

(for more, see Nathalie Lawhead's v good writeup on the death of the Flash website)

Is this going to prove “good” or “bad” for web animation? Who the fuck even knows lol. It's definitely a very different scene these days: Flash has given way to genuinely free tools like Blender Grease Pencil, Krita and OpenToonz, and for those who can afford them, pro tools like TVPaint and ToonBoom. These tend to enable much more sophisticated animation workflows, but you also face a steep learning curve.

The economics has also changed a lot: nowadays people can devote themselves to it full time if they can attract some kind of Patreon audience. The way that shakes out is that a lot of today's web animators are doing much more “technically impressive” stuff than anyone could do in Flash back then, both technically and often narratively (NG's 5MB limit was a pretty harsh creative restriction)...

But something was still lost, I feel? Precisely because the technical standard was not especially high, the old Flash scene was a kind of supportive ecosystem where people could experiment without (much) judgement. Money was not involved, which meant that essentially everyone there was in it for fun - and that's a barrier for entry, admittedly. Still, that world meant someone like Felix Colgrave could get started with shorts like the one above, and find an appreciative audience, long before the days of ‘Double King’. Today, it feels like the pressure is heavier: everything has to be oriented towards self-promotion on the wheel of Content, to build that same Patreon or Youtube audience.

Of course, there's no point wishing for a more innocent internet... or pretending that, without nostalgia goggles, the majority of stuff on NG back then wasn't kinda shit lmao.

Luckily, there are efforts to preserve the old Flash videos! The Internet Archive has a clever WebAssembly-based flash player alternative, and an impressive (if hard to navigate) collection of Flash videos. Another substantial archive is maintained, using the original Flash Player in a special sandboxed browser, as BlueMaxima's “Flashpoint”. Meanwhile, Newgrounds have batch converted their entire database to raster video, and still seems to have a healthy community producing original animation for their weirdly gamified rating system - some of it, like Gooseworx below, is indeed really good. This won't save the stuff that's not part of these big archives, the swfs on obscure self-hosted websites, but it's not all gone!

Anyway, that's my little soapbox over! There are many ways things are much better for indie animators who can't afford to go to animation school. For one, there's so many more good, free resources now than ever before - to name a few who've helped me, check out *deep breath* [Toniko Pantoja] [Striving For Animation] [Dong Chang] [Studio Bulldog] [Howard Wimshurst] [Aaron Blaise] [Ian Hubert]... and there's an abundance of less centralised ways for people to get a start like Multi Animator Projects and animation memes. Not to mention the influence of the sakuga fandom giving people lofty inspiration... it's still an exciting time!

And who knows, maybe one day the Grease Pencil user community will be as vibrant as the old Flash one.

So who are we watching today then? Let's reel em off!

the returning stars...

the ppl we saw last time have not stopped animating...

Felix Colgrave, the extremely talented Australian behind Double King, dropped a new video called Throat Notes full of his usual surreal, psychedelic imagery! This one's about bugs.

Gooseworx is the person who got me to look back at Newgrounds, by making some really perfectly timed videos with a great sense of weird comedy and squishy, bouncy movement. Her Little Runmo we saw last time, but now she's dropped a much longer sequel to Elain the Bounty Hunter in Elain Gets Adopted! Can our triangle girl get out of being a human(...ish?) pet?

Jonni Phillips is hard at work on her feature-length film Barber Westchester (which may stretch the definition of 'indie' since she's now leading an outsourced animation team lol), but for now we can watch all of her wonderfully disconcerting lead-in series Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners! She has a really distinctive style, leaning way into extreme exaggeration and the 'boiling' lines effect (where every drawing is drawn twice and rapidly alternates between frames). Totally slept on her last time, I want to give her a proper showing this time around!

Vewn (Victoria Vincent) made a little short about a monkey since last we saw her - but I also want to show a few more of her previous stuff we didn't cover last time! She remains one of my favourite web animators, with a brilliant ability to ratchet up a sense of alienation and tension and an amazing way of using distorted perspective.

the newcomers...

and meanwhile I got familiar with some more animators...

Worthikids is one of the people who’s really flying with the possibilities of Blender grease pencil to combine 2D and 3D animation - and he's just a plain good character animator, especially for expressions, with a great sense of humour. We’ll check out his Bigtop Burger series about a travelling food truck run by clowns, and his recent short Wire in which a different group of clowns battle vampires. Clowns seem to be a thing for him.

Joel Guerra also recently made big waves with his ENA series, with a wonderful aesthetic taking after early CGI and clipart as a context for surrealism. Most of these videos feature ENA wandering around talking to various characters while we soak in the ~vibes~...

Howard Wimshurst is the host of a discord server for indie animators I've taken to hanging out in, but of course he caught my eye in the first place for tremendously impressive full-figure animation, along with really strong storyboarding and textured brushwork like Encounter.

Toniko Pantoja meanwhile is a CalArts grad whose educational videos are some of the most useful out there (if sometimes a little meandering!) He mostly works in the mainstream industry but occasionally releases very cool original projects like this!

Studio Bulldog are a tiny four-person indie anime studio, who appeared on the scene recently with some cute short films and very informative videos on the anime production process in English.

DawnOfNSSD, aka @bionicie on here, is out pioneering the genre of Bionicle stop motion erotic/fight animation. Their work is fascinating, and does some very clever little technical things (most stop motion animators have little interest in martial arts, sadly, since there's clearly a lot of potential!) - and honestly like, the absolute vision of it! Titty bionicles!

Shingo Tamagawa is an skillful key animator with credits ranging from Gundam Thunderbolt to 3-Gatsu no Lion, but he made an enormous splash in animation circles last year with his beautifully coloured short film Puparia. This film exhibited a level of drawing precision that would be hard to match for big studios with entire cleanup departments, and incredibly beautiful, moody atmosphere shaped by precise, manga-like drawings and a richly saturated colour palette. No wonder it made waves!

The old school...

We covered most of the main hits last time, but we gotta include at least some NG stuff right? Last time we covered the main ones - Bitey of Brackenwood, Animator vs Animation, Xiao Xiao, There She Is! - but we haven't quite covered all the good stuff yet...

Madness Combat by Krinkels is technically not in the 'stick figure fight' subgenre, since the guys are like little raymans or something, but really who cares about the difference hehe. It's a sprawling series on one very straightforward premise: a little guy kills a lot of other little guys, then probably dies. Well, these things became wildly popular because Krinkels had a decent sense of fight choreography and timing out the fights to the beat, which made his stuff stand out among all the stick videos. It's all about rhythm! I'm not gonna show too much of this because they are basically 10+ years of the same video getting gradually more elaborate, but we gotta give it a nod!

Nathalie Lawhead is best known as a game developer, but early on she was part of the Flash scene, with projects like the Rotfront Sovietoblaster music video and Alien Invasion. It's so wonderfully energetic and such a perfect encapsulation of its era that I gotta show some.

The Older School

Now, this playlist might not go very far. I haven't timed it out, I'm running late as it is. If it turns out these are so short we're done in a couple hours, I have a plan B: we'll check out some of MTV's Liquid Television block, which (alongside other similar festival-type presentations like Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation) is where you'd take your work before there was a Newgrounds: a collection of original, boundary-pushing short films. For me, it's most notable for incubating Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, which started this whole thing! You might say that Animation Night owes its existence to Liquid Television. Unfortunately, it remains available only in VHSrip form, but hey, that just adds to the flavour.

Animation Night 48 will start very soon indeed, like more or less right now at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see you there for an Animation Night the way we used to do it! There's so much different stuff I'm sure I'll find something you're into :D

#animation night

[duhragonball]

What version of the Saiyan Tuffle War do you prefer: the Tufflew subjugated the Saiyans or the Saiyans just straight up obliterated the Tuffles

Between the two options, I think I prefer the first one, simply because all the Tuffle characters we've seen have been diabolical villains, and it sort of undermines them as bad guys if the Tuffles were innocent victims in the war. But that's just a personal preference.

I'm not suggesting that the Saiyans were all sweetness and light either. But it seems a little naive to have an advanced civilization just welcome a bunch of Saiyans onto their planet with no ulterior motives.

I say this because most of what we know about the Tuffles is based on Baby's appearances in Dragon Ball GT. Supposedly, Baby was created by the last survivors of the Tuffles, and they "infused" him with the genes of their king, whatever that means. Baby only had two objectives: to take revenge on the Saiyans, and to to convert or destroy all non-Tuffle life forms. And that's... pretty fucked up when you stop and think about it. Baby was such an over-the-top villain in GT that it was easy to just go along with whatever crazy shenanigans he was up to. But he was programmed by the Tuffles, and presumably the Tuffle King was totally on board with this. If he had lived to see Baby Vegeta ruling over the restored Tuffle Planet with the entire population of Earth infected with his nasty mind control eggs, the King would probably be pleased.

And yeah, the Tuffles would want revenge against the Saiyans, but what did Earth ever do to them? Or any of the other planets Baby menaced? You can make the argument that Baby was a doomsday weapon that went beyond the intentions of his creators, but I think he did exactly what the Tuffles wanted him to do.

And that begs the question: If Baby's reign of terror was the last gasp of the dying Tuffle species, then what sort of weird stuff were they up to before? I'll put some thoughts on this under the cut.

First off, I think it's kind of weird how there's not a clear picture of what a Tuffle is exactly. I went looking on the DB Wiki for some pictures and found this Tuffle design by Akira Toriyama.

That design prevailed in DBZ Episode 20, and also in Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans, when King Kai explains how the Tuffles welcomed the Saiyans to settle on their planet when they crashed there in a wrecked spaceship. The implication from Plan is that the Saiyans didn't just show up one day. They were refugees who needed help, and the Tuffles invited them with open arms.

But it's weird how the Tuffles in DBZ #20 are depicted as being much smaller than the Saiyans, but in Plan they're basically to scale with each other. Maybe that's a continuity glitch, and no big deal, but then you have Dr. Lychee, who looks like this:

He starts out as a regular-looking guy, and then he becomes this blue creature who looks a lot like a prototype for Baby. The blue form is supposed to be nothing more than one of the phantoms created by Hatchiyack in the OAV, like the phantom incarnations of Frieza, Turles, Cooler, and Slug. But those phantoms looked the same as the originals. Why does Lychee look so different? Is this a form that Tuffles can naturally assume?

Which brings me to Baby and his "Tuffle Parasites". By the end of his run in GT, Baby basically identified as a Tuffle, rather than a creation of the Tuffles. When he started infecting Earthlings with his eggs, he called them Tuffles too.

Then you've got Kamin and Oren from Super Dragon Ball Heroes. Apparently they're considered "Neo Machine Mutants", which are Tuffles modified become like Baby, for lack of a better explanation. I'm not sure if this was established in the DBGT days or not, but I guess the current lore is that Baby, Oren, and Kamin were natural Tuffles who were augmented into the form we see here.

I guess what I'm driving at here is that the Tuffles seem to have a very broad definition of what a Tuffle is. For them, it seems to be more about a way of thinking and feeling than any particular appearance or body plan. A machine can be a Tuffle. An Earthling infested with a parasite can be a Tuffle. So maybe those miniature humanoids in DBZ #20 were just one more variety of Tuffle.

I get a real transhumanist vibe from the Tuffles, particularly from the notion of archiving their King's DNA into Baby, and the way Dr. Lychee continued to exist as a "Ghost Warrior" after his natural death. Oh, and the Tuffles of Universe 6 augmented Kamin and Oren. That wasn't for revenge, by the way, they just wanted to see if they could do it, and apparently Kamin and Oren were outraged enough by this that they turned on their creators. Throughout the Dragon Ball franchise, the Tuffles are known for their advanced scientific knowledge, and also for making all these freaky creatures.

And maybe they weren't all evil. I wouldn't go that far. But I get the feeling that their leaders welcomed the Saiyans to their world because they saw a potential resource that they could exploit. Maybe they just wanted the Saiyans to pacify the uninhabited parts of their planet, or maybe they though the Saiyans could help them against other enemies. But maybe they saw the Saiyans as potential test subjects for their experiments. Just a thought.

I don't think the Tuffles necessarily subjugated the Saiyans, but it might have been more of a case of rising tensions. They lived in separate parts of the planet, with the Tuffles in the cities and the Saiyans in the wilderness, but the Saiyans grew more numerous, and the Tuffles probably saw that as a threat, and the Saiyans probably started to wonder why they needed the Tuffles at all. A lot of things might have instigated the war, but it wouldn't surprise me if the flashpoint involved Tuffles experimenting on Saiyan prisoners. If something like that came to light, then it would become a matter of survival. The Saiyans would have to wipe out the Tuffles to avoid being "Tuffleized" or worse. And the Tuffles would have to crush the Saiyans in battle to maintain control of the planet. There could be no return to the status quo; it would have to be total war until one side was completely defeated.

Once the war began, it must have taken a long time for the Saiyans to win. King Kai said that the lunar cycle on Planet Plant was eight years, and that each full moon allowed the Saiyans to gain ground in the war. So this implies that it took several full moons to end the war, so the conflict might have lasted decades, or maybe even a century. There might have been a few armistices or truces during that time, as each side would want to try to regroup and get as much momentum as possible before the next full moon. At least, that's how I'm picturing it.

One causus belli that sticks out in my mind is that the Tuffles were apparently a spacefaring people, but the Saiyans couldn't do much in space until they made contact with the Arcosians, and then King Cold's organization. So maybe the Tuffles were purposely keeping the Saiyans confined to Planet Plant, either to prevent them from escaping, or to isolate them from other civilizations. The Saiyans would take this poorly, I'm sure. So that might have a lot to do with it.

To be sure, the Saiyans of this era were real rat bastards, no doubt. I'm sure a lot of Tuffles of the time would make the argument that they were trying to contain the Saiyans as a matter of self-preservation, or even for the good of the greater universe. But I also suspect that the Tuffles aren't just friendly-looking anime folks. Creatures like Baby, Hatchiyack, Kamin, and Oren give us a peek into their more inhuman qualities, qualities that the Saiyans probably knew firsthand. It's possible that King Vegeta thought he was the one doing the universe a favor when he wiped the Tuffles out.

Something else to consider, in Episode of Bardock, we meet the Plantians, who were apparently the original inhabitants of Planet Plant. At some point, they were gone, and the Tuffles were living there instead, and then the Saiyans showed up and wiped out the Tuffles. So what happened to the Plantians? Did they just migrate to another world, leaving Plant empty for the Tuffles to move in? Or did the Tuffles do something to them? Food for thought.

#dragon ball #tuffles #i really ought to write some sort of fanfic about the saiyan-tuffle war #if only to crystallize my thought about it #i thought about using a tuffle villain in luffa but it seemed a little too obvious #like there was a whole war between saiyans and tuffles and that's where that conflict belongs #luffa's not part of that era so it shouldn't be part of her story #it'd make a good nanowrimo project if i ever finish the luffa thing #which... probably won't be for a while

[hystericalfeminist]

BUILD ME A CANON

Earlier this week, Delhi University's Oversight Committee removed works by writers Bama, Mahasweta Devi and Sukirtharani from the university's syllabus for undergraduate students of English. Bama and Sukirtharani are Tamil Dalit writers whose work looks at the experiences of the marginalised. Mahasweta Devi, a Bengali writer, was well-known for her Left-leaning politics and for being an advocate for tribal communities and their rights. She passed away in 2016.

I'd suggest one moment's silence for the Oversight Committee committing an oversight, except this is not an oversight. An oversight is an unintentional mistake, but this seems very intentional. As the DU clarified in a statement later, "the syllabus of the course has been passed through a democratic process with the involvement of all the relevant stakeholders and necessary deliberations at appropriate forums” (emphases mine). The university claims the English syllabus is suitably diverse and inclusive (suitably being the key word here) and it's interesting that as part of its defence of the Oversight Committee's decision, DU has pointed out the process of coming to that decision was "democratic". What it doesn't acknowledge is that if the committee is full of people who belong to dominant groups and doesn't have members who represent the minorities and the marginalised, then the committee's "democratic process" is critically flawed.

The DU statement came after the Academic Council submitted a dissent note, protesting the Oversight Committee's decision. The Academic Council described the Oversight Committee's functioning as vandalism and alleged it has been harassing liberal arts departments. "It is important to note that the Oversight Committee does not have any member from the Dalit or the Tribal community who can possibly bring in some sensitivity to the issue," said the Academic Council in its note.

There was some noise on social media about the decision to drop works by these three writers. Most of the discussion that I saw was about Mahasweta Devi's dropped short story, Draupadi. (Apparently the Oversight Committee chair complained the short story doesn't show the military in a good light. From what I remember, it's the police. They carry out wrongful arrests and brutally gangrape a tribal woman.) There's been far less discussion of Bama and Sukirtharani's works on English Twitter, who have mostly been referred to as the "two Dalit writers", like an addendum to Mahasweta, which is infuriating in itself. I know that this is probably because not enough people read translations. Particularly translations of literature from Indian languages.

There is also little talk about what has replaced the dropped works. One of the authors who has been included is apparently Pandita Ramabai, identified as an upper caste writer (Brahmin, if I'm not mistaken). I've no idea if her writing continues to feel relevant and/ or engaging, but it is all sorts of bizarre to "replace" a 20th century author with someone who died in 1922. Also, if she was included because she was Brahmin, I hope they have fun reading her book The High Caste Hindu Woman which is, I'm told, deeply critical of how sexist Hinduism. Whether or not Pandita Ramabai voiced any opinions of casteism in Hinduism, I don't know.

Even though translations don't get read as much, the fact is, the writings of Bama, Mahasweta Devi and Sukirtharani have been translated to English and other languages. They're part of different university's syllabi and for better or for worse, DU is not such an influential player in academia. If DU's decision to drop these writers convinces some Indian universities to do the same, we can only hope that other universities (in India and abroad) will start thinking about including them in their syllabi (if the writers aren't in them already). In a not-so-distant future, it's very likely that there will be universities abroad that will have a more diverse, inclusive and representative portrait of Indian culture in their syllabi while institutions like DU remain mired in a casteist, Hindutva bog. At that point, who should decide what will make the canon for Indian literature? The Indians or the foreigners?

It's the second time this week that we've heard conversations about erasure in the Indian cultural scene. Earlier this week, social media was on fire after the Indian edition of the Rolling Stone carried a cover story about the record label and music platform Majja, featuring two artists best known for their collaborations with Dalit rapper and lyricist Arivu. Rumour has it that the Rolling Stone cover was bought by Majja, presumably to promote upcoming albums by those two artists. However, since Dhee and Shan Vincent de Paul are currently riding a popularity wave because of their work with Arivu, many readers — beginning with director Pa Ranjith — expected the cover story would be as much about Arivu as Dhee and Shan Vincent de Paul. People also pointed out that Arivu had effectively been removed from a (disastrous) remix of "Enjoy Enjaami" (the original song is amazing).

Shan Vincent de Paul, one of the artists featured on the Rolling Stone cover, issued a statement on social media saying he had the utmost respect for Arivu and had no intention of erasing him. He clarified that the story was part of his efforts to promote his new album Made in Jaffna, which he's releasing with Majja. "I have no control over how the Press chooses their messaging or what narratives they push," de Paul wrote, which would be an excellent point if the cover wasn't bought. He may not have control over the narrative, but he's hardly an irrelevant cog in the wheel. Instead of attempting to exonerate himself, de Paul could have acknowledged that the story doesn't give as much space to Arivu as it should. I am, of course, presuming he's read the story.

If the rumour about the cover being bought is true then Rolling Stone and Majja are complicit in deciding a narrative that sidelines Arivu, either intentionally or carelessly. More than half of Rolling Stone's cover story is about "Enjoy Enjaami" and there is just one quote from Arivu. This sidelining may not be deliberate — the way DU's Oversight Committee's decision was — and it could be an example of the kind of unthinking oversight that the privileged commit all the time when it comes to acknowledging the contribution of the marginalised. Either way, the impression conveyed by the two organisations is that Arivu is not the person they want to promote. Countering the decision of the establishment — it doesn't get more establishment than Rolling Stone and Majja. One of Majja's founders is legendary music director AR Rahman — is the reaction on social media. The songs being freely available on multiple platforms and the (relatively) free access to the artwork and arguments by Dalit creators and critics on social media makes it difficult to invisibilise Arivu.

A translation of Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi is available online as are some of Sukirtharani's poems. DU has dropped Bama's novel Sangati. I'm not sure if there's an extract that's available online. It is not lost on me that it's easier to listen to a song than it is to read a novel, or a short story, or a poem. It is also not lost on me that the fact you can bob to an infectious beat makes it easier to not register the deep-rooted casteism referenced in the lyric, "Enna kora, enna kora, yein chella peraandikku enna kora? (In what way is my darling grandson any less?)" There are no such distractions when you read, for example, Sukirtharani's My Room Needs No Calendar: "As they write on me/ with their penises,/ I will my body to stop/ slithering away."

Sukirtharani and Bama minced no words when they were asked to respond to their works being dropped from the DU syllabus. "I was not surprised at all. Dalit voices such as myself and Bama’s are speaking for all oppressed women, not just Dalit women," said Sukirtharani. "I don’t see this necessary as an exclusion of just Dalit writers as we have seen how progressive writers whose works speak against caste, Hindutva, fundamentalism have also been removed in the recent past. These things will happen in our society, but we cannot be ignored." She said she wasn't going to ask for an explanation, but believed DU owed her an explanation. At the very least, they should have intimated her about the works being dropped. "When they want to project an image of India wherein there are no caste and religious inequalities, our works point out that caste and religious inequalities exist in our society. So, it is obvious that they want such works removed from the syllabus," she said.

Bama said, "For more than 2,000 years, we have been segregated, our histories have not been written. This government is trying to strangulate our voices, but we will shout. The youth of this nation have understood [what is happening]. Rather than being upset, we are angry. The anger will reflect in our works in future.”

I find myself wondering if the business of building a canon was always so complicated and rife with uncertainties. Will the books, music and art propped up by commerce and politics be the ones that make up our mainstream cultural identity? Could we build a better literary canon for Indian literature if more excerpts and poems were available online for free, if more works were translated? Would we care more if the literature was easier to access or would we still dismiss it because they're translations, because the works are by Dalit women? Can the conversations that we hold in the informal spaces of the internet be loud enough to make the canon more inclusive, to make the mainstream expand its narrow definitions? What is more likely to make it into an archive and survive into posterity — the Rolling Stone Cover image or the many "fixed it" versions that people created online? Is it possible that both can and will be preserved? Does dropping the works of writers like Bama and Sukirtharani and Mahasweta Devi make them invisible? Will the dissent make a few more people buy Bama's novel? Will it make some curious enough to look up Sukirtharani's poems?

The words, the tech, the platforms, the imagery — are all these still the master's tools? How long must one wield them before they can claim the tools to be theirs? Will they always be the master's tools and not "our" tools? Is the master the one who cares for the tools and uses them better? Is the master the one with the loudest voice and the deepest pockets, the one who can bribe the boys and hire the deadliest mercenaries? Who decides when the tools have been reclaimed?

#Building a canon #Indian academia #Life in a progressively undemocratic country #Arivu #Bama #Sukirtharani #Mahasweta Devi #Indian literature #Culture and identity #Rolling Stone #Music #Enjoy Enjaami

[cmacaulays]

i recently read a post here that i can’t find even after an hour of searching, but the gist of it was how the whole trend of quoting lines from texts has led to more and more poems trying to include ‘quotable lines’ that somehow capture an entire thought without having to be contextualized. tumblr is one of the main places where you can see this happen and i’ve honestly contributed to it myself by posting quotes, but it’s quite fun to think about why this has happened and how it ties into social media culture generally and into academia afterward.

there’s a paragraph in ‘in memory of memory’ by maria stepanova where she talks about how history is fragmented due to digital archives in which everything is hoarded, collected, accessible:

“The past is now ‘pasts’: a co-existing layering of versions, often with only one or two points of contact. Hard facet soften to modeling clay and can be mounded into a shape. The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place goes hand-in-hand andrej incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events. units of information can be lined up in any formation, any order, like in a children’s game, and the direction of play will utterly change their significance. My linguist friends, Americans, Germans, Russians, all tell me that their students are brilliant at finding subtexts and hidden meanings, but can’t, or don’t want to, talk about the text as a whole entity. I suggested asking the students to retell a poem, line by line, describing only what was going on. But I was told that this wasn’t possible, they simply weren’t able. The banal debt to the obvious, along with the need to tell a story, has been thrown overboard, lost in the detail, broken into a thousand bite-sized quotes.”

the inability to let things die and fade from memory directly feeds into the obsession that social media has with preserving moments, places, people, and objects. we collect the highlights, the low points, use tags as markers so we’ll be able to find them better, but since posting a whole entire book online takes far too long and would probably cause copyright issues, we settle on quotes - but then picking a quote requires quotable lines - and we read into other people’s quotes to apply them to ourselves and our individual situations. people learn how to read into the small fragments and expand them into larger thoughts or web-weavings, but rarely take time to go back to the original text and read through all of it hence the desire to have easily quotable lines in texts and the concern that comes in academia because you’re no longer engaging with the whole the author presents, just with a fragment that you think applies to a particular other fragment yet ignores everything between them.

#just thoughts #i’m rambling tbh but this book is interesting and i’m invested and trying to make sense of all my thoughts #lmk if u think differently honestly i rly want to discuss this #this is why i can’t stand the whole tumblr academia trend of reblogging a few quotes by siken and oliver and secret history #and then not reading any criticism or any full collection or book #jrnl

[carinyms]

We're three days from the Loki finale and I’m back to spout more meta and theories about episodes 5 & 6! It’s a long one (again.)

I really enjoyed episode five. People have complained that they felt it didn't do much to move the show forward, but one of the things I've loved most about this show is the time it takes to sit with the characters and learn about their backstory, their feelings. (I'm always a little bugged when critics say that an episode hasn't done enough to move the plot forward, because without adequate character development, why should I care about the plot?) I thought the pacing of it was really well balanced.

….and I have never been so nervous for a finale in my entire life. There’s a lot of reasons.

The first is just the fact that I’ve been waiting for this show for a whole year, and the anticipation and excitement of it literally helped get me through the pandemic--so when those final end credits roll I’m going to be a whole mess no matter what happens. (I really hope the rumors floating around about season two are accurate) I also just feel like it’s somewhat inevitable that this is our final farewell to Tom’s Loki, and like—I’ll never be ready, but especially right now, amidst all the rampant controversy around this show, I’m just not ready to deal with that. I have a *small* modicum of hope that this won't be the case, but it feels unlikely. Anyway, guess I’ll die.

I really want this show to stick the landing, so to say. I loved the last episode, but a lot of the response has been that it felt like a lull in the plot. I want this show to end in a satisfying bang so it can get the credit it deserves.

Also I’m a whole hypocrite eating my words from last week—I’m fully on-board with Loki/Sylvie now (not that I was ever really against it)--I’m not sure why I’m surprised. They’re so adorable and wholesome, and I’m in love with seeing Loki in love. It’s so precious. (Just as a PSA, if you’re not into them that’s chill, and you’re allowed to dislike a ship without trying to justify your opinion by labeling shippers as morally problematic. Selfcest isn’t a real thing, therefore there isn’t a moral high ground to stand on here. Okay? Okay.) Wherever it ultimately leads, their relationship is still a really sweet exploration of them both growing and learning how to love themselves and trust others. Also, them cuddling under a tablecloth is the cutest shit I’ve ever seen with my two eyes.

MY THEORIES:

I love Sylvie so much, SO MUCH — and she is 100% going to stab Loki in the back by the end of the next episode. I don’t think the betrayal is going to stick, and by the end they’ll both be on the same page again, but the conversations on trust have been way too one-sided for my comfort. If nothing else she's going to seriously consider it. Here’s one way I can see that going. Spoiler alert: it hurts.

Sylvie betrays Loki at one point—and we see Loki’s growth and arc come full circle as, even after being betrayed by the person he hinged his entire development around, he still believes in doing the right thing, in saving her regardless. It ends in a heart-wrenching self-sacrifice of some kind, and his actions serve as the catalyst for her full development as well. We keep seeing different versions of Loki die for their ‘glorious purpose’, just like how Classic Loki shouts the phrase as he was consumed by Aloith (RIP King, I love you).

Loki has already called Sylvie his glorious purpose (or inferred it). There’s been backlash around him saying that, but the way I see it, it’s less “I’m obsessed with this girl she’s my purpose now” and more “I believe that she’s the best version of us and I’m going to make it my purpose to help her succeed and be what the rest of us aren’t”. That’s why seeing all the other variant Loki’s at their worst in the Loki clubhouse (? what do I call this lol) only fuels him more to find her. I think about what Mobius told him: “You exist to cause pain and suffering and death, all so others can achieve the best versions of themselves”. I don’t think Loki truly believes he can be the best version of Loki — I think he saw Sylvie and thought, "it's her". He’s decided he’s going to help her achieve the best version of herself, but he'll do it giving her love and trust and devotion, rather than through betrayal, pain and suffering. He’s re-writing his pre-determined role, in his own small way. I’m so proud of him.

So who’s behind it all and what’s truly going on here? (This isn’t really one theory, more like a string of possibilities and I don’t really know how they’d fit together.)

I still think it’s another version of Loki. And if it is, I can’t help but appreciate the connections between his position dictating the end of time in the show in relation to Loki’s role in the Norse myths, where he’s the catalyst for the destruction of all things. It feels relevant, considering the whole idea that ‘the end of time hasn’t been written yet’ has come up twice now. That would be a fascinating tie-in to the mythology. (Also—Alioth looks like a giant dog. And Fenrir’s role in Ragnarok was devouring the world—I realize this is a reach but am I the only person seeing this connection?) The thing I really can’t predict is the motivation. What would cause a Loki to want to prevent Loki’s from changing? Was there something that happened in the sacred timeline this Loki is trying to preserve? (I also like the idea of us maybe seeing another version of Sylvie behind it all, but I’m just going to leave that rabbit hole alone. )

But here’s the theory I can’t stop thinking about. There’s a theory floating around tik tok (by user twelvepercentcredit) saying the ‘castle’ we see beyond Alioth looks like a place called the House of Ideas, something that appeared in a (discontinued?) Loki comic. Here’s the wiki page on it. Just looking at the imagery of this compared to the location we’re seeing in the trailers, it’s too similar to be a coincidence. The huge bookshelves, the towering ceilings.

Here’s a description from the wiki:

“The House of Ideas is also home to a library which archives the exploits of every hero who has ever existed in the form of books, written unconsciously by the collective minds of their believers. This collection is curated by Now and Then, two of the children of Eternity. Now and Then routinely seek out heroes to bring into the House of Ideas to bargain with them and give their collections more pages, therefore more time for adventures and exploits. “

And later on the page on how Loki ties in:

“Heeding the desire in Loki's heart to do more with his life, Now and Then approached Loki and brought him to the House of Ideas,[5] where they struck up with him the deal to give more pages to his collection of exploits, rewriting the Books of Loki with a hero's stories in exchange for an eventual hero's death.”

Are they gonna play with the exact happenings of this? I don't know, but it sounds pretty cool!

It would be gutsy to go this route with the show given how meta it is, but I love the idea of it. Would they put characters that embody the abstract ideas of “Eternity” “Now & Then” into the show in the last episode? I’m not sure. Something I could see as a possibility though is an alternate version of Loki having overthrown whoever was previously guarding the timeline, and Loki and Sylvie will have to take them down in turn, thus ‘releasing’ the multiverse to its default, chaotic state.

What if our Loki’s ultimate destiny, ultimate Glorious Purpose, is to release the timelines--restoring all the variants back to their original timelines--and remain in this place for eternity, guarding the timeline and ensuring the multiverse is allowed to exist in its natural state? It seems a pretty fitting role for the God of Chaos. It would also explain why whoever’s behind the TVA would be so desperate to eliminate all variant Loki, if that was his ultimate destiny.

It would be an effective way to remove Hiddleston’s Loki from the movie-verse without killing him, AND place both Sylvie and any other Loki variants back in the the main timeline for use in future films—which we know has to happen somehow, because Young Avengers is definitely happening, and Kid Loki has got to get out of the void somehow.

And yea, this outcome would hurt like a bitch. Because even though that would truly be a lovely glorious purpose for our Loki, he’d be alone. And the whole point of this show is that he doesn’t have to be alone! It would be a very poetic sacrifice for him to take on the burden of watching over the timelines alone for all eternity so that his other variants could be the best versions of themselves, but I really just want him to be happy. I will be crying my eyes out if this happens. I’ll be proud but I won’t be okay.

And this all is probably speculative nonsense and could go off in an entirely different direction. Who knows. All in all, I just really want to see Loki fully believe in himself and his ability, to truly absorb what he said about being stronger than he realizes, and to take control of his destiny.

WHAT I WANT (NEED) FROM EPISODE 6:

Let Hunter B-15 and Mobius team up to burn the place to the ground. She was nerfed in the time-keeper fight, I want to see B-15 kick some ass.

I kind of want Ravonna to escape and be a character that carries over into the films for her tie-ins with Kang? I want to see more of her.

Give Loki a new badass costume. I’m begging. If he’s gonna go down, he deserves to go down in something other than khakis.

And then I want to see him and Sylvie fighting side by side in matching outfits.

I want a Mobius-level hug between them. Or a kiss. Or both. But I want the hug more. And you know what? I want her to initiate the hug or kiss or whatever it is because I want Loki to experience receiving love and affection from others as much as giving it. He deserves it ok??

I expect Mobius on a jet ski in the post credits and if I don’t get it I riot

@marvel these are my demands.

As always, if you've made it this far I'd love to hear your thoughts!

#these just keep getting longer and longer #next week you can expect a full novel #loki #loki show #loki series #loki meta #loki show meta #loki series meta #loki theories #loki show theories #loki show positive #loki spoilers #loki series spoilers

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Would love to hear about your beefs with Lucas because I have beefs with Lucas

(Sorry it took me three thousand years to answer this, anon.)

They mainly fall under a few headings, with the third being the most serious and the thing that I am genuinely irl furious about at least biannually (and feeling unable to adequately sum up The Problem with it after yelling about it so often is a huge part of why this post has been in my drafts for such a long time):

1. His self-mythologising and the subsequent uncritical repetition of his bullshit in the fandom. Obvious lies like that he had some master plan for 10 films when it’s clear he did not have anything like a plot outline at any point. We all know the thing was written at the seat of various people’s pants, it’s blatantly self-evident that’s the case. There’s also plenty of public record about how the OT was written. Even dumber, more obvious lies, like that Anakin was ‘always the protagonist’ and the entire 6 films were his story from the beginning. This is preposterous and every time someone brings it up (usually with palpable smugness) as fanboys ‘not understanding star wars’ because they don't get that ‘the OT is not Luke's story’... Yeah, I just... I cannot.

Vader wasn’t Anakin Skywalker until ESB, it’s a retcon. It’s a brilliant retcon and it works perfectly, it elevated SW into something timeless and special it otherwise would not have been, but you can tell it wasn’t the original plan and there’s proof it wasn’t the original plan. Let’s not pretend. And Luke is the protagonist. No amount of waffling about such esoteric flights of theory as ‘ring structure’ is going to get away from the rigidly orthodox narrative and the indisputable fact that it is Luke’s hero’s journey. Vader’s redemption isn’t about his character development (he has almost none) and has no basis in any kind of convincing psychological reality for his character, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s part of Luke’s arc, because Vader is entirely a foil in Luke’s story. It’s a coming-of-age myth about confronting and growing beyond the father.

All attempts to de-centre Luke in RotJ just break the OT’s narrative logic. It’s a character-driven story and the character driving is Luke. Trying to read it as Anakin’s victory, the moral culmination of his choices rather than Luke’s and putting all the agency into Anakin’s hands just destroys the trilogy’s coherence and ignores most of its content in favour of appropriating a handful of scenes into an arc existing only in the prequels. The dilemma of RotJ is how Luke will define ethical adulthood after learning and growing through two previous films worth of challenge, education, failure, and triumph; it’s his choice to love his father and throw down his sword which answers the question the entire story has been asking. Vader’s redemption and the restoration of the galaxy are the consequences of that choice which tell us what kind of world we’re in, but the major dramatic conflict was resolved by Luke’s decision not the response to it.

And, just all over, the idea of Lucas as an infallible auteur is inaccurate and annoying to me. Obviously he’s a tremendous creative force and we wouldn’t have sw without him, but he didn’t create it alone or out of whole cloth. The OT was a very collaborative effort and that’s why it’s what it is and the prequels are what they are. Speaking of which.

2. The hubris of the prequels in general and all the damage their many terrible, protected-from-editors choices do to the symbolic fabric of the sw universe. Midicholrians, Yoda fighting with a lightsabre, Obi-wan as Anakin's surrogate father instead of his peer, incoherent and unmotivated character arcs, the laundry list of serious and meaningful continuity errors, the bad storytelling, the bad direction, the bad characterisation, the shallowness of the parallels which undermine the OT’s imagery, the very clumsy and contradictory way the A/P romance was handled, the weird attitude to romance in general, it goeth on. I don’t want to re-litigate the entire PT here and I’m not going to, but they are both bad as films and bad as prequels. The main idea of them, to add Anakin’s pov and create an actual arc for him as well as to flesh out the themes of compassion and redemption, was totally appropriate. The concept works as a narrative unit, there are lots of powerful thematic elements they introduce, they have a lot of cool building blocks, it’s only in execution and detail that they do a bunch of irreparable harm.

But the constant refrain that only ageing fanboys don’t like them and they only don’t like them because of their themes or because they humanise Anakin... can we not. The shoddy film making in the prequels is an objective fact. If you want to overlook the bad parts for the good or prioritise ideas over technique, that’s fine, but don’t sit here and tell me they’re masterworks of cinema there can be no valid reason to criticise. I was the exact right age for them when I saw them, I am fully on board with the fairy tale nature of sw, I am fully on board with humanising Anakin- the prequels just have a lot of very big problems with a) their scripts and b) their direction, especially of dialogue scenes. If Lucas had acknowledged his limitations like he did back in the day instead of believing his own press, he could have again had the help he obviously needed instead of embarrassing himself.

3. Killing and suppressing the original original trilogy. I consider the fact that the actual original films are not currently available in any form, have never been available in an archival format, and have not been presented in acceptable quality since the VHS release a very troubling case study in the problems of corporate-owned art. LF seizing prints of the films whenever they are shown, destroying the in-camera negatives to make the special editions with no plans to restore them, and doing all in the company’s considerable power to suppress the original versions is something I consider an act of cultural vandalism. The OT defined a whole generation of Hollywood. It had a global impact on popular entertainment. ANH is considered so historically significant it was one of the first films added to the US Library of Congress (Lucas refused to provide even them with a print of the theatrical release, so they made their own viewable scan from the 70s copyright submission).

The fact that the films which made that impact cannot be legally accessed by the public is offensive to me. The fact that Lucas has seen fit to dub over or composite out entire performances (deleting certain actors from the films), to dramatically alter the composition of shots chosen by the original directors, to radically change the entire stylistic tone by completely reinventing the films’ colour timing in attempt to make them match the plasticy palate of the prequels, to shoot new scenes for movies he DID NOT DIRECT, add entire sequences or re-edit existing sequences to the point of being unrecognisable etc. etc. is NOT OKAY WITH ME when he insists that his versions be the ONLY ones available.

I’m okay with the Special Editions existing, though I think they’re mostly... not good... but I’m not okay with them replacing the original films. And all people can say is ‘well, they’re his movies’.

Lucas may have clear legal ownership in the capitalistic sense, but in no way does he have clear artistic ownership. Forget the fans, I’m not one of those people who argue the fans are owed something: A film is always a collaborative exercise and almost never can it be said that the end product is the ultimate responsibility and possession of one person. Even the auteur directors aren't the sole creative vision, even a triple threat like Orson Welles still had cinematographers and production designers, etc. Hundreds of artists work on films. Neither a writer nor a director (nor one person who is both) is The Artist behind a film the way a novelist is The Artist behind a novel. And Lucas did NOT write the screenplays for or direct ESB or RotJ. So in what sense does he have a moral right to alter those films from what the people primarily involved in making them deemed the final product? In what sense would he have the right to make a years-later revision the ONLY version even if he WERE the director?

Then you get into the issue of the immeasurable cultural impact those films had in their original form and the imperative to preserve something that is defining to the history of film and the state of the zeitgeist. I don't think there is any ‘fan entitlement’ involved in saying the originals belonged to the world after being part of its consciousness for decades and it is doing violence to the artistic record to try to erase the films which actually occupied that space. It's exactly like trying to replace every copy of It's a Wonderful Life with a colourised version (well, it's worse but still), and that was something Lucas himself railed against. It’s like if Michaelangelo were miraculously resuscitated and he decided to repaint the Sistine Ceiling to add a gunfight and change his style to something contemporary.

I get genuinely very upset at the cold reality that generations of people are watching sw for the first time and it’s the fucking SE-except-worse they’re seeing. And as fewer people keep physical media and the US corporate oligarchy continues to perform censorship and rewrite history on its streaming services unchecked by any kind of public welfare concerns, you’ll see more and more ‘real Mandela effect’ type shit where the cultural record has suddenly ‘always’ been in line with whatever they want it to be just now. And US media continues to infect us all with its insidious ubiquity. I think misrepresenting and censoring the past is an objectively bad thing and we can’t learn from things we pretend never happened, but apparently not many people are worried about handing the keys to our collective experience to Disney and Amazon.

4. The ‘Jedi don’t marry’ thing and how he wanted this to continue with Luke post-RotJ, so it’s obviously not meant to be part of what was wrong with the order in the prequels. I find this... incoherent on a storytelling level. The moral of the anidala story then indeed becomes just plain ‘romantic love is bad and will make you crazy’, rather than the charitable reading of the prequels which I ascribe to, which is that the problem isn’t Anakin’s love for Padmé, it’s that he ceased to love her and began to covet her. And I can’t help but feel this attitude is maybe an expression of GL’s issues with women following his divorce. I don’t remember if there’s evidence to contradict that take, since it’s been some time since I read about this but yeah. ANH absolutely does sow seeds for possible Luke/Leia development and GL was still married while working on that film. Subsequently he was dead set against Luke ever having a relationship and decided Jedi could not marry. Coincidence?

There’s a lot of blinking red ‘issues with women’ warning signs all over Lucas’s work, but the prequels are really... egregious.

#sw #salt #more unhinged rambling #anyway dowload the despecialised editions #unsubscribe from Disney+ #be free #usually we'd be having a big family thing for Boxing Day but you know #so God bless us all at home separately #I hope everyone had as happy a Christmas as possible in keeping with the situation #I should see if I can drag my brother outside to build a snowman