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godlytemperance · 7 months

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npmd proshot reaction livethread

except i'm not on twitter and also this is probably my third time watching it because i was too busy painting my room to make a proper live reaction post

having the two nerds that die be the first singers we see is such good foreshadowing actually,,, you know from the first moment they start to experience a change in their lives after max kicks the bucket that they're doomed, and the first act shows you that right away. none of the other kids in the first song are injured by max, just richie and ruth.

lauren doesn't have her headgear in High School Is Killing Me, which is a bit confusing, but i think it's so her voice is clearer in the first song

also i love ruth's sweater? i'd totally wear that irl

grace looks utterly deranged in every song because she doesn't drop that fuckin SMILE the whole time i love her so much

i love the "AUGH" chorus after "it's one hell of a normal abnormality"

someone brought this up before i noticed it, but grace is the only one to cover her mouth during any iteration of "i'm so fucking dead", which is so swag actually... it fits the choreo while also showing that she's super averse to cursing (initially)

pete my beloved... stephanie's so correct for falling in love with him

also PETE'S TIE MATCHES HIS SUSPENDERS THAT'S ADORABLE??? plus it very (very) subtly matches steph's flannel i'm gonna explode

anyways mariah looks gorgeous throughout the whole show

the little string instrument *plunk* as steph snaps pete's suspenders

pete's goofy run

steph giving up on asking who pete's running from as soon as she realizes he's dipped

i'm pretty sure that kim's nerd character has a unibrow, or very thick brows that have that appearance? that's actually really cool that they implemented features on characters that would lead to bullying from a societal standpoint.

i'm not ashamed to admit that i thought richie was gonna be a metalhead from the very brief glimpses we had of his outfit before the show dropped... imagine my terror when i heard "anime love pillows"

oh also is richie's hair Like That because of bedhead? a cowlick? hat hair? a shitty haircut? i don't know and it's gonna drive me insane

KYAAAAAAAA

as someone who's been bullied, then Suddenly had one of my bullies admit to having a crush on me, max's crush on grace is completely realistic fr

homec*mming... babygirl you are so repressed

continually stating that all of the main characters are 18+ / seniors is actually very relieving to see, especially for shows set in high school. like yeah, teens can be weird and nsfw, but it feels deeply upsetting when it's not established that they're of legal age. it's still gross, though, but in a "aw shit we Were like that in high school, damn" kinda way

literal monster slaps so fucking hard

is ms. tessburger in a relationship with mr. lauter? she acts like a shitty stepmom to steph (on that note, the theory that steph's biological mom was a former honey queen, and that's why solomon has used the black book before)

if i had a nickel for every time corey doris nearly brought a hammer down on his daughter, mariah rose faith casillas, i'd have two nickels

PETE'S UPDATED OUTFIT I LOVE HIMMMMMM

i love ruth's warm color palette, it's even visible in her wig :00

ruth is so "i read hetalia wattpad lemon too early and that's the only reason i passed social studies"

i didn't catch richie saying "NANI????" on my first run and it felt like a punch to the gut

ruth and richie crawling all over pete to try and hear steph is so hysterical. they are just creatures

wEEeooWEEoOO

richie please... richieeee attack on titan is so badddd

"someone's willing to tolerate your presence for a whole evening",,,, he is so neurodivergent to me

pete you are SO much cooler than you think you are

steph 🤝 emma being head over heels obsessed with the normalest dork in history

"SAY YOUR PRAYERS" "amen :D"

i desperately wanna read the newspaper that mr. chastity is reading

also if the chastity's weren't so adamant on abstinence-only education for grace, they'd be the cutest family ever... like they're actually really healthy and communicate really well with each other

karen chastity freezing up during every freudian slip kills me

grace's fucking FACE when she says "this is sooo wrawng"

MAX'S ABS?????

max is so puppydog when he's talking about jesus. that scene is what made everyone say he was babygirl

grace sweetie you're drooling

local nerdy prude realizes she has a blasphemy kink and promptly goes insane about it

grace and max are toxic yuri actually. if max was a girl grace would've got the black book speed-run world record

max's little scramble back to the stage. little cockroach of a man

SHE DID THE FACE AGAIN AS MAX LEFT

i will never shut up about grace starting her villain arc immediately after dirty girl. she just doesn't SHOW it until after she tastes blood

not waifu material

as much as i love lautski and dirtyprude (i don't know the actual ship name for max and grace), i do think that the entire nerdy prudes squad + max should be in a poly relationship,,,, love their dynamics

"there are two girls in the boy's bathroom" grace. grace is there something you wanna share with the class. grace why didn't you count yourself

the lore drop of the black altars Before we even hear about the black altars... :3

"SEX MAGIC" "😳😏"

"wait but where are the waylons" you may be asking. simple. they put a curse on the house that made sure that nothing dies in it... but they didn't die in the house. they died by the witchwood bc of the hatchetmen. the curse wasn't activated until max died there.

they actually spell potty-pants as PottyPants and PissyPants in the captions

"i have overactive sweat glands" I AM A TRANS RICHIE TRUTHER

she spin

and she spin others too

"PETEY GONNA JUMP ON OUT" 🕺

SPIDERMAN REFERENCE LETS GOOOO

also a kamehameha for good measure

as someone whose entire family says "cool beans", the cool beans section is stuck in my head

lauren's face as she says "excellent" is so cute

ruth's crush on steph getting multiplied by a thousand the MOMENT steph touches her shoulder. god me too

"you kinda look like that homeless guy from downtown" (audience hollers)

i didn't realize that lauren was twerking at joey in the background of the proshot. i know for a fact that he had to practice so hard to keep from giggling

richie trying to hook ruth up with pete... he loves her so much he wants ruth to be happy so bad....... polynerds should be real

i think that if max hadn't fallen from the third floor (which i think is this timeline's event that got messed up, like how the starlight theater got crushed in TGWDLM), he would've loved going to haunted houses with the group... they go to the local haunts every year and one time they get tickets to Halloween Horror Nights and max happy-cries so hard about it that he fucks up his voice

𝕒ᵃ𝕒𝔸𝓐𝓪𝓐𝐚𝐚𝔸ᵃ𝓪𝔸

SKELE'IN count x5

grace stop being horny for two seconds

ruth's little yelp is so cute

also MAX GOING TO PROTECT STEPH... he loves people deep down

the audience going "aw...!" when max says that the prank was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for him

grace literally blue-screens when she realizes she hasn't gotten the upper hand on max. girl is Stunned

GET DOWN FROM THERE YOU DOOF

will doing the goofiest noises of exertion is so funny to me

the gore sfx under the wooden planks is so gnarly actually also the blood from max's mouth, holy fuck

... y'r fuckin useless, rich

ruth being more upset about not being someone's bitch than about Going To Jail In The First Place

i love how doe-eyed grace is as she says "it was an act of god!" she is like a little purse dog to me

"oh no she's snapping again"

i love ruth's slumped pose. she is just 🧍

steph looks like she's gonna throw up when grace mentions cutting up the body

also steph's "WHY????"

THE STAGGERED HARMONY FROM MARIAH I LOVE HERRRRR

pepperonis

hypegirl grace real

pete getting anxious after being called a nerd... boy's traumatized now

they are so flirting in this scene. sarcastically going to a football game. lautski forever

STEPH'S SMILE AFTER SHE CONFIRMS THE DATE SHE'S SO CUTE

ruth and richie actually getting positive attention for once,,,,, they deserve the world,,,, stacy calling richie Mr. Lipschitz is adorably sweet

realizing that the mascot is a reference to ezekiel the nighthawk from Perky's Buds nearly incapacitated me

stacy and brenda are so cute in the background

i love that the football team is so nice to each other when max is gone, to the point where the team rapport is actually genuine instead of forced

FUCK YOU CLIVESDALE GO GET FUCKED YOU'RE FUCKIN LOSERS AND WE'LL KILL YOOOOOU (i checked the live comment section when the show had just dropped, and it was a fucking cacophony of "FUCK CLIVESDALE" the same exact thing happened during the talkback livestream too it was so fucking funny)

i love that they squawk as part of their school chant

stacy's smile dropping was so cunty of her

richie's the best mascot ever (do you think he has a fursuit. i think he has a fursuit. it's tricked out like crazy and it has built in ac. he doesn't talk about it because its a timberwolf and it makes him feel guilty as a hatchetfield nighthawk)

HE FEELS CONFIDENT ENOUGH TO CALL JACOB JACE I'M GONNA SOB

wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube richie, i love the way he makes the suit slap the ground with his wiggles

the audience collectively remembering he's the first body mentioned in the show as soon as he says "i love being alive!"

max's bedazzled ghost costume kills me

but on a serious note, the ghost sfx slays so hard

does max have psychic powers after he dies? he's shown making richie float, forcing the doors to close, and knocking richie prone without touching him in the NPMD song. but all of his kills involve physical contact?

speaking of: the DOOR SLAM holy fuck

they had to give richie a dorky vest over his long sleeve + button-up combo because otherwise he would've had too much transmasc swag. proof: right before he dies he loses the vest

grace having a prophetic nightmare that doesn't get elaborated on... waddahell

unironically grace's shirt is so cute. the coquette girls would love her

max defo would've whooped the chemists' asses. plus if he actually got his redemption arc he would've boosted the team's morale like crazy

grace is never chill ever

all of the nerds having their own nauseous reactions to getting called to the office

i honestly thought they were asking about max in the group interrogation scene the first run through. god i can only imagine how sick the three (not counting grace) of them felt realizing that one of their closest friends was dead

the lauren urge to lie face-down on the nearest surface

grace immediately targeting ruth... homophobic behavior fr /j

i am glad that none of them assume that it's a ghost right away, because that kind of trope is super cliche. let them figure it out slowly!! they don't need to know it's a monster right away! let them think it's a mundane threat!

dan and donna moment

also it took my second run-through of the show to realize that the "hatchetfield kennel" line isn't just a smooth transition into dan's last name. it's referencing the problematic pooch from HSIKM

i actually thought that officer bailey was sam for a bit, then i remembered that charlotte's last name was sweetly, then i realized it's a separate character

LAUREN CHOREO POG + donna is so pretty in this song

karen gendering ziggy correctly is something that can be so personal to me

also JAEEEEEEE MY BELOVED I LOVE ZIGGSSSSSS

barry swift slays

the creeping steps in the second chorus repetition are so cool

CHARLIE???? BRUH??????

bryce's solo was so well-deserved, she has a fucking angelic voice!!! i just know that the audience lost their minds every fucking night

GERALD!!!!! my favorite evil old man

"can i shit or will i drown" references richie dying by swirly and it took too fucking long for me to realize that

fuckin traaaaaanscendent (is this sam? i think it's sam)

the little implied bird

KAH-bob. he sounds like a text-to-speech. accurate for some theater production actors tbh

paaaaahsshin <3

m'BAHBECUU

i love kim's teacher character, she's so cute

the collective "thank you ten" from the actors (and maybe the audience)

knowing that ruth's first canonical debut on stage (canonical in the Workin' Boys short film, at least) involved her forgetting her only line bc of stage fright makes me so sad... she does have a lot of talent, but her anxiety about being watched and judged scares her from the stage. it takes failing once to get over that fear, but even then, it leaves a lasting worry that you'll fail again.

on that note: ruth being so conscious of her appearance and personality that she's terrified of her own future. she's afraid that the best parts of her future will be centered around making other people happy, and never about what makes her happy. she's afraid that she'll get married to someone who doesn't care for her. (or worse, someone who has taboo desires, because who else would take her but those who want to use her as a diversion? the "maury prefers their kids" line after the pool is mentioned makes my skin crawl for ruth.) "well done on the outside, not within" "should i let the coals burn out" "should i let the years cook my body down" she's horrified of the future she feels she's destined for. she has so many dreams, but she feels like she isn't able to - or allowed - to pursue them.

i'm gonna be skipping ruth's death scene because it actually makes me feel sick... half because it's a form of torture that actually makes me feel nauseous (getting split from the crotch upwards) and half because it's happening to a character who's living an experience i've had in the past (feeling unworthy of pursuing something you love)

it's super obvious that shapiro is waiting to catch grace in a lie, which makes her interrogation of grace super funny in hindsight. she KNOWS this perfect christian girl is bullshitting her and blatantly lying about the deaths. i can only imagine how vindicated she felt when grace immediately crumpled under the pressure

DOOO SOMETHING YOU SONUVABIIIIITCH

OH FUCK GRACE GOT A GUN!!! SHIT!!! THIS NEVER GOES GOOD!!! (grace gets a gun in Workin' Boys too it's so fucking insane)

i love that grace's bike is so iconic

the audience losing their fucking minds when paul and emma appear on stage. same fr

"it's short for a perpetrator" paul you are so autistic (affectionate)

THE REFERENCE HAPPENED WE CAN REST EASY NOW

also this time around we get to see what the paulkins meeting would've been like in another universe and it's just as cute as we expected it would be

*ptuuuh*

........ WWWWHAT

if richie could see them now he'd be calling them tsunderes. am i fucking wrong

did pete just shotgun a hot chocolate. buddy that was fresh out the fuckin pot

pete's color scheme switching from subtly green (to match with steph) to subtly yellow has me running laps in the kitchen rn. tinky would lose his fucking mind

steph openly admitting she likes smart people, implying that she doesn't consider herself smart by comparison... babygirl you are so intelligent i prommy

starkid consistently showing that romantic partners don't have to kiss on stage for them to have chemistry makes me so fucking happy as a person with kiss aversion

why does beanies just have hot water in cups. do they just make instant drinks. iconic of them actually

HOMOPHOBIC GRACE REAL??? /j (but also not)

grace immediately jumping to fleeing the country and holding her friends at gunpoint has me giggling. she's got the world record for jumping to conclusions

also thank god grace knows proper gun etiquette (not holding her finger on the trigger) but also. who taught her that.

the way grace immediately scrambles to hide, and she does it fast enough to make it look like she just teleported behind the chairs in the proshot

yyyAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (how dare they call her Barista in the captions. you put some respect on emma perkins's name)

alternatively: imagine you work up the nerve to give your number to a cute barista and five minutes later she's trying to get a cop to stop holding you in an armlock. what a wild first impression to give to someone who marries you in every fucking timeline

grace is so wet cat coded, angela did an incredible job playing her!!

bringing up the honey queen Mrs. Lauter theory again because how else would the lauters have the black book? i know that linda's family is the one in charge of the festival, but the mayor obviously has some sway in it as well. he probably acts as the warden for the book in most timelines, because if it was in the hands of the church itself, they'd be trying to summon gods every damn day. he keeps the church under control, allowing them one day a year to summon the only god that is the easiest to pacify. he probably proved his worth by convincing his wife to pursue the honey queen title, knowing full well what would happen to her, because he needed to give up something to show he could be trusted. (i also think this is why nibbly singles steph out when they first meet. he's already tasted lauter blood, and he likely recognizes her as the daughter of the man who facilitates his resurrection every year.)

AGAIN: the waylons made sure the spell was cast on the house, but the spell wasn't TRIGGERED until max died there. more proof that the waylons aren't ghosts, but that they were intended to be the ghosts.

returning to the honey queen lauter theory again: imagine how heartbroken steph is after all of her parental figures have died. her mom isn't around by NPMD, and during the show, her stand-in stepmom and her dad both die. she's technically an adult by the time of NPMD, but she's still lost all of her remaining family in one night.

i'm glad that they were able to convince shapiro about max at the last second, but damn, how fucked up is it that you learn that the current suspects of a homicide case are being haunted by a spirit that's been picking them off one by one, only for said spirit to slam your face through your fucking windshield. you survive the incident, somehow, but now you know that hatchetfield is haunted and you nearly became a victim.

i talked about the LiB and their altars at the very beginning of my NPMD fixation so i'm not gonna repeat it here :PP bleh

i am gonna mention that i love the designs of the LiB tho! they're so neon and goofy, they have little props that show who they are, it's so cute nibbly has his lollipop (which happens to look pretty fleshy, like a twirled up intestine), pokey has his mask, blinky has his sunglasses, tinky has his Bastard Box, and wiggly has a plush of himself + a crown that indicates his place in the hierarchy

the hair touch when steph starts to realize that pete is the thing she desires most... chills

also someone mentioned that in the digital ticket, steph fully collapses during "stephanie has got a gun", and i can definitely see that in the proshot too! it isn't seen in full, but her posture definitely slumps something fierce between shots

and what if i cried? huh? what if i burst into tears knowing that pete was resigned to dying to save steph's life? that he openly admits to loving her more than the stars in what he thinks is his final moments? that he thought he wouldn't make it to homecoming, and that steph would live on knowing that she would carry the blood of her true love on her hands?

literally if max hadn't intervened, steph would've lost her soulmate. imagine how horrifying that is for her. she would've lost everyone important to her in one fell swoop. her family. her friends. her love. it would've broken her.

pete reeling up to throw what should've been a devastating right hook to protect steph, only to get knocked aside by max's otherworldly power

and then we get the absolute whiplash of grace fucking a ghost

SPEAKING OF WHICH bro!!! angela put her whole christianussy into that performance. grace knew she had one chance to seduce max into taking what she cherished most and she thought "welp. might as well open up all the repression i've shoved into this box"

"WHAT. THE FUCK. IS HHHAPPENING RIGHT NOW." you're watching the mating ritual of two toxic lesbians

thank god they didn't caption the sex noises because if i knew what grace and max were saying the whole time i'd be in shambles

steph + pete slowly looking over and breaking into a giant grin as grace gets NASTY with it is so funny to me. pete looks genuinely touched by the experience while steph is learning something new about herself

grace smoking her first cigarette immediately after boning down is so goofy to me

you can see the moment where steph and pete realize what grace did, even if it's out of frame in the proshot. steph whips around to look up at pete, while pete seems to stumble back a bit. when their faces are in frame again, they both look quietly concerned for grace, like they're trying to process what she gave up for their sake.

the shot of max looking up at the lights, eyes and makeup perfectly illuminated as he witnesses (what can only be) the true forms of the Lords In Black - creatures which he didn't even know existed, considering their involvement was very distant in max's resurrection... CHEF'S KISS

also the eyes-rolled-back exorcism of max is so fucking incredible actually??? very slay of him

CUTE TEACHER IS BACK!!! i love her she's so girlypop

cawwww caw! <3 <3 <3

THEY GOT TO GO TO HOMECOMING TOGETHER!!!!! <3

their little conspiratorial giggles as they scuttle away from shapiro i fucking LOVE THEM

grace is so evil in the intro to Best Of You i love that for her

BLINK 182 / OWL CITY AHH SONG <3 it's such a bop

not something i saw, but something i heard: the staged version where the lights went out after Best Of You being the "good" end is so cute actually! i love that the actors and tech people like to include alternate endings / stories based off of different actor portrayals and mishaps is such a fun way to provide variety for audiences

(for example: jon has mentioned he played Inevitable in TGWDLM two different ways. he either plays it like paul isn't infected, but is trying to convince emma to fake it with him so they don't get force-infected... or he plays it like paul is truly dead, and he's part of the hivemind. the proshot version of TGWDLM is a case of the latter, where paul truly was infected.)

grace tricking jason into kissing her on the cheek, only to punish him for it... girl you TOLD him to do that? bruh

i do stand for women's wrongs tho she's so slay for this

poor jason has a literal fear boner bc grace goes on her villain arc

the audience collectively going "OHHHHH" as they realize that grace is reprising the NPMD song is so insane

"darkness will spare my soul" GOES SO HARDDDDDD

#nerdy prudes must die #nerdy prudes spoilers #hatchetfield #the wolf speaks

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olderthannetfic · 3 years

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It's really surprising that you're so well versed in older fandoms and yet participate in new popular ones (that cdrama, kpop) is this by design? Im in my twenties and my interest turnover is already way slower than it used to be

You know, that’s a really interesting question. I wouldn’t say it’s by design exactly in that I do tend to just follow what strikes my fancy, and I can’t force myself to want to write fic for just anything. (I find it easier to like reading fic without serious involuntary emotional investment, but writing takes more. Vidding I can do on command most of the time, but I don’t usually bother unless I have a lot of feels or I’m fulfilling someone’s prompt.)

However, me getting into BTS was 100% due to me wanting to understand BTS enough to explain to people who weren’t very interested but wanted to know what was going on in fandom lately. Under normal circumstances, I run the dance party at Escapade, the oldest extant slash con. We borrowed vividcon’s thing of playing fanvids on the wall--all of them set to dance music--as the soundtrack for the dance party. This means I’m creating a 3-hour mixtape of fannishness, which has amazing potential to make people feel in the know about Fandom Today... and equal potential to make them feel alienated if nothing they care about shows up. Only about 100-150 people attend the con, so it really is possible to make a playlist that feels inclusive yet informative--it just takes a huge amount of work.

Every year, I do a lot of research on which fandoms are getting big and look for vids from vidders people won’t have heard of, so there is an element of consciously trying to keep up with things. Generally, I only get into these fandoms myself if I had no idea what they were and then suddenly, oops, they’re my kryptonite, like the buddy cop android plot in Detroit: Become Human, which sucked me in hard for like 6 months on the basis of a vid.

(So if you’re into cross-fandom meta and associated stuff as one of your fannish interests, you tend to have broader knowledge of different fandoms, old and new, than if you’re just looking for the next place you’ll read fic. It’s also easier to love vids for unfamiliar things than fic.)

But though I was only looking for a basic primer on BTS, BTS has 7 members with multiple names and no clear juggernaut pairing, not to mention that AU that runs through the music videos and lots of other context to explain. The barrier to understanding WTF was going on at all was high enough that to know enough to explain, I had to be thoroughly exposed... And once I was over that hurdle, oops, I had a fandom.

In terms of old vs. new, here’s the thing: kpop fandoms in English and c-drama fandoms in English right now feel a lot like anime fandom in English did in the early 00s. I had a Buddy Cops of the 70s phase in the middle, but my current fannishness is actually a return to my older fannishness in many ways.

What do I mean about them being similar?

Yes, I know some wanker will show up to say I think China, Korea, and Japan are indistinguishable, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way that I used to routinely meet Italian and French and German fans, Argentinian and Mexican, Malaysian and Indonesian and Filipino too. English-language fandom of SPN or MCU may have all those fans from all those countries, but it feels very American most of the time. English-language fandom of a non-English-language canon is more overtly about using English as a lingua franca.

It also tends to attract people who as a sideline to their fannishness are getting into language learning and translation, which are my other passion in life after fanworks fandom. (I speak only English and Spanish and a bit of Japanese, but I’ve studied German, French, Russian, Mandarin, Old English, and now Korean.)

Nerds arguing about methods of language learning and which textbooks are good and why is my jam. This is all over the place in English-language fandoms of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean media. Those fandoms also tend to be full of speakers coming from a Germanic or Romance languages background who face similar hurdles in learning these languages. (In other words, if you’re a native Japanese speaker trying to learn Korean, the parts that will be hard for you are different than if you’re an English speaker, but you’re also usually not doing fandom in English.)

There’s also an element of scarcity and difficulty of access and a communal attempt to construct a canon (in the other sense) of stuff from that country that pertains to one’s fannishness. So, for example, a primer explaining the genre of xianxia is highly relevant to being a n00b Untamed fan, but just any old thing about China is not. A c-drama adapted from a danmei webnovel is perhaps part of the new pantheon of Chinese shit we’re all getting into, but just any old drama from decades ago is probably not... unless it’s a genre precursor to something else we care about. Another aspect here is that while Stuff I Can Access As A N00b Who Doesn’t Speak The Language may be relatively scarce, there’s a vast, vast wealth of stuff that exists.

This is what it felt like to be an anime fan in the US in 2000. As translation got more commercial and more crappy series were licensed and dumped onto an already glutted market, the vibe changed. No longer were fans desperately trying to learn enough of the language to translate or spending their time cataloguing what existed or making fanworks about a show they stuck with for a bit: the overall community focus turned to an endless race of consumption to keep up with all of the latest releases. That’s a perfectly valid way of being fannish, but if I wanted that, I’d binge US television 24/7.

Anime fandom got bigger, but what I liked about anime fandom in English died, and I moved on. (Okay, I first moved on to Onmyouji, which is a live action Japanese thing, but still.)

Hardcore weeaboos and now fans of Chinese and Korean stuff don’t stop at language: people get excited about cooking, my other other great passion. Times a thousand if the canon is something like The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, which is full of loving shots of food preparation. People get excited about history! Mandarin and Japanese may share almost nothing in terms of grammar or phonology, but all of East Asia has influence from specific Chinese power centers historically, and there are commonalities to historical architecture and clothing that I love.

I fell out of love with the popular anime art styles as they changed, and I’m not that into animation in general these days. (I still own a shitton of manga in art styles I like, like Okano Reiko’s Onmyouji series.) I’ve become a filmmaker over the last decade, and I’m very excited about beautiful cinematography and editing. With one thing and another, I’m probably not going to get back into anime fandom, but it’s lovely to revisit the cultural aspects I enjoyed about it via live-action media.

BTS surprised me too, to be honest. I really dislike that early 90s R&B ballad style that infests idol music (not just Korean--believe me, I resisted many rounds of “But Johnny’s Entertainment though!” back in the day). While I like some of the dance pop, I just don’t care. But OH NO, BTS turn out to be massive conscious hip hop fanboys, and their music sounds different. I have some tl;dr about my reactions in the meta I wrote about one of my fanvids, which you can find on Dreamwidth here.

But back to your comment about turnover: I know fans from the 70s who’ve had one great fannish love and that’s it and more who were like that but eventually moved on to a second or third. They’re... really fannishly monogamous in a way I find hard to comprehend. It was the norm long ago, but even by the 90s when far more people were getting into fandom, it was seen as a little weird. By now, with exponentially more people in fandom, it’s almost unheard of. I think those fans still exist, even as new people joining, but we don’t notice them. They were always rare, but in the past, only people like that had the stamina to get over the barriers to entry and actually become the people who made zines or were willing to be visibly into fanfic in eras when that was seen as really weird. On top of that, there’s an element of me, us, judging the past by what’s left: only people with an intense and often single passion are visible because other people either drifted away or have seamlessly disappeared into some modern fandom. They don’t say they’re 80 or 60 or 40 instead of 20, so nobody knows.

In general, I’m a small fandoms and rare ships person. My brain will do its best to thwart me by liking whatever has no fic even in a big fic fandom... (Except BTS because there is literally fic for any combination of them, like even more than for the likes of MCU. Wow. Best fandom evar!) So I have an incentive to not get complacent and just stick with one fandom because I would very soon have no ability to be in fandom at all.

My appetite for Consuming All The Things has slowed way down, but it also goes in waves, and a lot of what I’m consuming is what I did back in 2000: journal articles and the limited range of English-language books on the history of m/m sex and romance in East Asia. It’s not so much that I have a million fandoms as that I’m watching a few shows as an expression of my interest in East Asian costume dramas and East Asian history generally.

I do like to sit with one thing and experience it deeply rather than moving on quickly, but the surface expression of this has changed depending on whether I’m more into writing fic or more into doing research or something else.

But yes, I do do a certain amount of trying to stay current, often as a part of research for fandom meta or to help other people know what’s going on. Having a sense of what’s big doesn’t automatically mean getting into all those things, but I think some fans who are older-in-fandom and/or older-in-years stop being open to even hearing what’s new. And if you’ve never heard of it, you’ll never know if you might have liked it.

#fandom meta #fandom history #Anonymous

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thegeminisage · 4 years

Note

thots on what constitutes a Guy Game, or if that's too controversial, thots on the best first person games.

ok wait im doing this in reverse order because EASILY the best first person game is mirror’s edge. u can’t compete with perfection?? i didn’t really like first person games until i played it because i was so used to a third person camera but now i have no issue with them and i actually think that there are a lot of perks to not having to think so hard about camera position the way you do in third person games. i had a really hard time with the camera in the last guardian and that just really made me appreciate mirror’s edge a lot because i NEVER had a hard time with it. it was so fucking intuitive

RE: GUY GAMES

this is a little long sorry i am going to go into video game history, which i wish i could give a college lecture on, but i can’t, because no one cares. nobody is obligated to read this entire thing u can skip the next 3 paragraphs

anyway i think there is a very specific demographic that guy games are reaching out to that are like, firstly, men (duh), secondly, we are American!, we didn’t grow up playing nintendo games and watching anime and so we think all that weeb stuff is for nerds. in the 90s and early 00s video games werent for just Anybody they were for kids and for nerdy people (usually guy people, girls got sooo excluded it’s like v sad). like back in the 90s and early 00s games were released in america months or even years after they were in japan (and if you were in europe or australia, FORGET IT) and the translations were often kind of shoddy and slapped together, so you wound up missing stuff sometimes or getting something hilarious like “all your base are belong to us” (kudos to one of the internet’s very first memes...you memers out there better respect...video games MADE YOU...). anyway the point being japanese made games are not always appealing/accessible to the average american (who sees and anime and goes...why do they look like that thats weird)

so that’s where a console like xbox comes from, it’s american-made, it’s the first of its kind, its gonna compete with nintendo (ostensibly for families/kids) and playstation (ostensibly for more grownup games) and americanize/westernize what is essentially a japanese medium at that point to make it accessible to americans/western men (because video games won’t be For Girls until like, very generously, the mid 2000s, and even now it’s a crapshoot), because it’s a huge untapped audience who aren’t experiencing or enjoying this medium, and if people wanna keep making games, games gotta keep making money, you know how it is w/ capitalism

as a side note i think it’s worth noting that before xbox came into the picture, sega was making its own consoles (genesis etc) that were VERY well-received by american audiences...sonic the hedgehog got like a FUCKTON of american-exclusive media such as shows and even a live action movie that came out as recently as THIS YEAR. but they didn’t have as much casual appeal and also had other difficulties, and so once they went under console-wise the market kind of opened up for something New. something with the american-friendly appeal of sonic, and something with the casual appeal of nintendo games, something with the more grownup appeal of playstation. so boom, you have xbox, you have halo, call of duty, etc. suddenly after almost two decades of japan exclusively cornering the home console market, americans can make games! wild!

(skip to here) and so i think that’s what a guy game is: a game made by american men specifically to appeal TO american men, or, at the very least, to not be a threat or turn-off to that demographic. guy games are exemplify american masculinity, and get their roots from what that meant in the early 00s (bearing in mind that as a rule Classic american masculinity is usually sexist/racist/homophobic lol). they have either male protags or female protags that are there to be eye candy. they’re often violent and lighter on the story content (or with a story specifically geared towards men, like halo, which was a huge rousing success) and feature limited women/romance plot lines. they’ve typically got that instant-reward action hack-em-up/shooting gameplay and not very many puzzles, because they’re by design meant to be easy to get into so as not to scare away the new audience they were trying to court

happily that definition has expanded somewhat and we now have the phenomenon of the little girls from previous guy games (emily kaldwin from dishonored, ellie from tlou) becoming the protags of sequels in their own right. and it’s not like guy games are all bad because i, A Woman, have enjoyed many guy games myself. shooting is satisfying gameplay and sometimes im just not in the Mood for big heavy romance arcs like u find in rpgs. technically mirror’s edge borders on being a guy game but it’s got a TON of well-rounded women in it including a female protag who isn’t just there for sex appeal. games including guy games have more characters of color now (not to point to mirror’s edge twice but LIIIKE it’s one of the best games ever made, so). “””guy games””” made in the 2010s are just more inclusive generally bc american devs figured out women like games and they spend money too, and so gradually the classic “guy game” genre is sort of merging into the more broad thing of just “american games” which is probably a good thing but has also been fascinating to watch in real time. ok lecture over ty everyone for attending

#liz answers asks #ask memes #maulthots

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prorevenge · 6 years

Text

The Lawyer, The Fabulous, and The Geek

A few relatively unimportant details are fuzzed to obscure identity as this ended up a Big Deal.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I had just managed a promotion at work. I was now a manager who managed managers at a hotel of not insignificant renown. This meant I was at that point where despite having a boss above me in the same building, I was the absolute highest person most guests would ever talk to. Unfortunately, that also meant I got to handle the most noxious of people who were so insistent their shit didn't stink that they wouldn't pull their head out of their ass because it smelled too nice in there.

One of our better corporate clients was a law firm I will call Lawyer Factory. On a regular basis we would have a new hire from Lawyer Factory stay with us for one or two months before they could find a suitable apartment in the city. Most of the new hires were slightly elitist but not particularly bad sorts. They would talk to front desk staff on occasion, mostly to brag about their watch collection or new Jaguar, but they would also give front desk staff a few local sportsball team tickets they got from the office.

The target of my revenge was a newly minted lawboy who I will call Dylan as he looked like the kind of guy you would expect to be named Dylan. Lawboy Dylan was very obviously new at the game, as he would come down for breakfast every day around 8:30 in a sweatshirt, jeans, and stocking cap. Part of our deal with Lawyer Factory meant their recruits had breakfast included with the room every day. At first, Dylan was a fairly approachable fellow, shaking hands with the front desk staff and taking time to talk about the most popular sportsball team in town who was a favorite of everyone including yours truly. Dylan and I had also spent a bit of time jawing about a few video games and anime. He was a causal fan, but it happened that his brother in college was a hardcore fan both of an obscure Asian online game and Dragon Ball Z, both of which were my big nerd-out spots. Thanks to him, I met his brother in game and fortune had it that we were both in guilds which went boss hunting together on a regular basis.

Of course, this wouldn't be a story about revenge if Dylan was really a likable guy all the time, now would it?

One day a few weeks into his stay, Dylan hit the lobby early on Monday just before 6 am looking for coffee and breakfast a bit early. According to security footage, this is when things started to break down. He pulled on the restaurant door to no avail as it would be locked for another ten minutes. He pulled again with some frustrated mumbling that couldn't be heard clearly. It is also worth nothing that Dylan's breakfast outfit plus a weekend without shaving left him looking not entirely unlike a transient man hoping to score some free coffee. At this point, my night manager "Marcus" decided to intervene. Marcus is very reliable, very flamboyantly gay, and very black, and he'd scold me for only using one very for each of those. Marcus asks Dylan for ID as proof that he is a guest. Somehow, this must have been the worst insult Dylan has ever heard, as he decides this is time to lash out in the worst way. He started into a profanity laced tirade filled with racial and homophobic slurs along with rolling up his sleeve far enough to show a Confederate battle flag tattoo to display his contempt for Marcus. While security footage didn't show this part, Marcus also testified that Dylan reeked of whiskey and cinnamon as if he had been pounding Fireball since 5 pm the day before. Marcus decided he wasn't going to have any of this, stepped back and let one of our early bird morning staff handle the issue. When she stepped in, Dylan had no problem procuring ID for her as well as an unsolicited phone number. By 8:00, Marcus was in my office venting about how he wanted to "beat Dylan's ass like the bitch he is" and unleashing other bits of choice profanity.

I've got a rule when it comes down to troublesome guests. You can swear at me, you can hurl racial slurs at me, you can say whatever you want, and I'll still make it a point to provide the best customer service possible. Pull that shit with my staff and I'll toss Business McMakebucks out on his ass. Dylan went the latter route and he had to go.

Well, as you might imagine, a lawyer being informed that it was on him to find new accommodations immediately did not go over well. First he attempted to invoke tenant law which was quickly shot down as he had not established 30 days of residency. Second, he implied that his employer would cease operations with us if he were evicted. Considering we had offered them a sweetheart deal far better than our rivals, this was not particularly likely and never came to fruition. When all else failed, he turned to me and begged me to not throw him out. No dice, nobody calls my go-to night guy a N-F- without consequences. I'd like to say I was badass enough for him to bolt in fear of me, but I wasn't and he didn't. However, he was pretty quick to shut up when Officer Smiley came in and requested his cooperation.

First, I call "Katie" at Lawyer Factory HR. Katie is one of the nicest ladies I've had the pleasure of working with. A quick discussion leads her to a decision that Dylan has stepped over a line. Within two weeks, Katie refused to acknowledge anything beyond the fact that Dylan was not employed at Lawyer Factory.

Next, I call the state bar association. They are as tight lipped as expected, although there was a clear air of exasperation from the representative as if this wasn't the first she had heard the name Dylan Lawboy.

Professional revenge is fine and dandy, but insulting my crew and showing off proof of being a treasonous son of a bitch in my hotel asks for more.

Three weeks later, Dylan's brother is pulling tank duty and I'm the King of Healz, bringing the smack down on a goat demon. His brother mentioned how Dylan had moved back home after his employer "lost a client and didn't need him anymore" and his potential apartment was "not worth the trouble" after all. Seems not working as a lawyer means it's pretty hard to make rent in a downtown loft. Bro also mentioned that Mom told Dylan that if he wanted to stay at home, he would "have that terrible graffiti taken off his shoulder immediately."

The aftermath included a lawsuit, a few discussions with company legal, and a healthy dose of Schadenfreude at a complete failure of his claim of defamation. The next hire from Lawyer Factory was a very likable Samoan guy whose idea of flaunting his wealth was buying pizza for the staff and bringing it in while singing "You're Welcome" from Moana. Total goofball and easily my favorite lawyer guest. Last I heard from Bro, Dylan had a large tattoo removal scar and a job as a paralegal.

(source) (story by 432A)

#prorevenge #by 432A #pro revenge stories #revenge stories #pro #revenge #revenge story #last10

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throughtheglassdarkly · 5 years

Text

Roadblocks, part 2

Welcome back. When last you were here, Bella broke all the glass and I used Day as a makeshift hurdle. Onward.

The day after our last adventure, Bella spent pretty much all day meeting and having dinner with her entire extended family. Pam, being such a mom, decided to stay on call in case anything went south. So that meant only three of us were free for the next nonsense that came up. I was at home, whipping up a perfectly nice lemon cake, when trouble called. Or texted, to be more accurate. I got a message from Evain that simply was an address about half an hour away. I washed my hands and texted back, “Need me to bring lube?” He replied, “You wish. Meet you there in 45 minutes. With the others.”

I sent off a message to Yova and Day: “Evain wants us to meet him at the Goblin Market. You in?” Yova texted me back, “Do I have time to change into something appropriate?” “Do you ever?” I asked her. She showed up ten minutes later, dressed to the nines, and we drove over to pick up Day and get to the address. It was a Sunday evening around 7:00, definitely getting dark early at that time of the year. We drove on the thoroughfare for about 20 minutes before pulling off on another highway. When we got there, we had to double check the address about eight times before we realized we were in the right place. It was the saddest looking mall any of us had ever seen. The biggest sign was for the Cash 4 Gold store and the parking lot was almost deserted. The only thing that told us we were in the right place was Evain, who was sitting on the hood of his SUV next to a large unlit Super Kmart sign.

Evain greeted us and gestured for us to walk up to the abandoned-looking Super Kmart. We were skeptical, but the double doors did slide open as we approached. The first thing any of us smelled was an overpowering reeking mixture of cheap incense and burnt rubber. It got worse from there. We didn’t see any electric lights at first, but about ten feet in, things started to brighten up a bit. Inside was what could only be described as the Spirit Halloween of Faerie markets. It had none of the class, ambiance, or deafening power of the goblin market we witnessed in Arcadia and none of the charm of a usual street fair. There were tacky streamers hanging from the metal supports in the ceiling, Christmas lights strewn over the walls, multi-colored lanterns lighting individual pathways between the vendors, and fairy lights on a few of the stalls. It was laid out in the aisles like a department store and awful, just-barely-out-of-sync folk music was playing. The three of us just stood there, staring in disbelief for a few moments.

“I’m pretty sure we can get goblin dysentery just sitting here,” Day said. “I want to find whoever’s playing that music and beat them over the head with a metronome,” Yova said. “I think Bella would be right at home here,” I said.

Evain apologized that it wasn’t the classiest place in the world, but said it was the best they could do. “They don’t announce this place until the last minute, so it’s not like they’ve got a lot of time to set it up and make it look nice,” he said. “But there’s a lot more you can buy here than it looks like. And they take a lot of different stuff in exchange. Cash, memories, toenails.” All three of us turned to look at the same moment. “Wait, toenails?” Yova asked. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Couple of months ago, there was stand selling this amazing hedgebeast jerky. Best stuff I’ve ever eaten. And all they wanted was a month’s worth of my toenails. Don’t know what they used them for.”

“Please tell me you didn’t have that ready to go to exchange,” I said, feeling my gorge start rising. “Oh, no, it was installments. I just had to keep a jar of them and hand them in at the next market,” he said. “Where’d you say this stall was?” Day asked. “DAY,” I said. “What?” he asked. “Day, you don’t save your toenails, do you?” Yova asked. “No. I mean, not really. I haven’t changed my vacuum bag in a while, so-” “Gyaaaaaah,” I said, going through a full body shudder.

Evain warned us that our phones weren’t going to work inside the market due to magical wards, so we planned to meet back at the entrance in an hour and a half. He headed off to find some things of his own and the three of us tried to figure out a good plan of attack and what we were looking for. “So, uh, maybe we could pick up some things for the others? Maybe some treats for Paisley?” Day asked. Yova and I both turned our heads so slowly to look at him I heard creaking. “Day, are you suggesting we get presents for Pam and Bella?” I asked. “…maybe. I dunno,” he said. “I guess since you guys pulled me out of that office I should probably do something nice.” “Awwww, I think his heart grew three sizes today,” Yova said.

Yova, our resident strategist, suggested that we do a lap around the main floor to see if we could figure out where everything was before we started buying anything. “It’s just like an anime convention. You don’t give your money to the first person who catches your eye, you might see the same shirt being sold three different places,” she said. Nerd. We ended up doing what she said and I realized while we were scouting things out that the market was laid out just like a big box store: if you found one thing you were looking for, everything else like it would be in the same area.

Our first stop was in the pet section, which was FUCKING LOUD. All the creatures were damn vocal about not wanting to be in crates and cages. Most of what was on sale was small to medium hedgebeasts, which meant Yova was a lady on a mission. She stopped off near a cluster of tables and shelves and I saw her blinking her eyes behind her Jackie O sunglasses, the big softie. The proprietor, a short, squat goblin, took clear note of her and asked if there was anything in particular she was looking for. She tried to play it cool, but then she saw a terrarium in the back with a bunch of tiny geckos. She moved closer and they all started swarming, trying to look up at her and get her attention.

The proprietor took a puff off his pipe and waddled over, asking her, “God a soft spot for the wee dragons, do ye?” “I’ve always preferred things of a herpetological nature over things with fur and feathers, yes,” she said. “HEY,” I said. “Shush, you,” she snapped. He asked her if he could interest her in one of the little dudes and she gave him a look, asking what the price was. He eyed her up and down, asking what she wanted it for. “Cockroaching, companionship, food?” When she told him she was interested in a pet, he considered this and said, “Well, since you’re looking for something to fill that void, how about a memory, a time when you felt that void?” She extended a hand, saying, “I get to pick the gecko.” He reached up, took her hand and shook it. She told me later that as soon as he did, she felt something ripple in her memory. She could tell there was something gone, but she couldn’t even remember what. Everything around it was just missing.

(Side note: Yova lost the painful memory of the time she came out to her parents and they rejected her. Per her player, “Not the worst memory to lose.”)

That, however, was a concern for another day. She put her hand in the bowl and started feeling around. The geckos were stepping all over each other, pushing each other away. As they were doing so, she noticed one of the less excitable geckos crawl onto her and she pulled him out. He was a scrawny little guy who was much paler than Paisley and he hadn’t fully grown into his wings yet, but as soon as she pulled him out, he wrapped himself entirely around her knuckle like a ring. “Awww, look at the little guy. Whatcha gonna name him?” I asked her. “Gershwin,” she responded without missing a beat. “What?!” Day scoffed. “You had that name completely ready to go, didn’t you?” I asked her. “Yeah,” she said. As we were walking away, I overheard the shopkeep chuckle darkly to the other geckos, “And to think you guys were just going to be feed!” before he tossed one of them to another hedgebeast, which caught it and crunched down hard. I decided it would be best not to mention that to Yova.

We realized that we would probably need to look for weapons and other supplies we could use on our mission to Arcadia, but in asking around it became clear PDQ that there was a total moratorium on weapons and other deadly things. Nevertheless, Yova spotted a stand that got all our attention quickly. It was a stand with a bunch of weird odds and ends: a golden comb, a pair of mudboots, an old IOU paper, a pair of chopsticks, a spool of silver thread. The thing that really got her attention was an old Montreal Expos pennant. I tried to ignore the pennant as best I could because when I was a much smaller, even more awkward Derek, I had to play shortstop on my local Little League team for one brief and tragic summer and as a “reward” for doing that, my dad took me and my brother up to Montreal for an Expos game. I just wanted some goddamn crepes, but no, I had to sit and watch one of the worst professional teams in history get completely trounced by the Orioles. The Orioles, for crying out loud.

Sorry. I have some baggage.

Point being, every time Yova looked at the pennant, she was filled with a swelling of pride. In fact, all the items at the booth did that. The chopsticks filled you with overpowering dread, the thread with a feeling of belonging. The proprietor, a taller Mrs. Pepperpot-type goblin named Nanny Primrose, asked us if she could interest us in anything. Yova casually reached out to touch the thread and Nanny Primrose rapped her knuckles with her cane. “That is not easy to come by, I don’t want it stolen!” she crabbed. “What is it?” Yova asked. “That, my dearie, is the length of a leash that one of the fae used to keep one of their pets on,” Nanny Primrose said. “Ohhh, like Bella,” I said low-key to Yova. “And what does it do?” Yova asked. “Well, if two people love each other very much and don’t mind the thing, you just pull them back to you like a fishing rod,” Nanny Primrose said. I leaned in and murmured, “You know, nine months out of the year, the Autumn Lodge is closed to outsiders…” She didn’t dignify that with a response, but I did see her eyeballing it more closely.

Yova did ultimately end up pointing to the pennant, asking, “And that?” “That, dearie, has seen a great number of battles within the Hedge. You could call it a call to arms, as it were. When things are looking down, sometimes you need just that little bit of oomph to get the guy who’s trying to beat you down. Of course, I have it look like that right now because,” she chuckled unpleasantly, “people don’t like to buy things that are covered in blood.”

Yova asked what the cost was and Nanny Primrose asked for something that had a story. “What do any of you have that has a story?” she asked. Yova and Day looked to me and I reached up, pulling a feather out of my neck and daubing it in some of the ink that was running free. “With this, anyone can write their own story,” I said, handing it over to Nanny Primrose. She looked at it appraisingly and then looked up. “Give me another one and we’ve got a deal,” she said. I pulled another feather out of the opposite side of my neck and handed it over. She tucked the feathers away and passed the pennant to Yova. “Bit of advice: you need heart’s blood to activate it,” she said. “Pardon my ignorance, but heart’s blood?” Yova asked. “Stab yourself with a stick, dearie,” Nanny Primrose said.

With a gecko and a banner secured, we decided to start looking for some things for the others. At least Yova and I did. Day wandered into the stands that were selling food and wild horses couldn’t have helped us drag him away. So Yova and I wandered into the décor section. There were a ton of different stands selling everything from carpets woven out of vines to cups carved out of pieces of rock to still-dripping paintings to glass that bent in ways glass shouldn’t have been able to bend. We ended up near a stall that was selling a collection of geodes that were SO SHINY and while I was drooling, Yova picked up one that looked like bismuth, though circular instead of the usual geometric shapes.

Unlike a lot of the items in the market, the geodes all had clear price tags on them. When Yova flipped the tag over, she saw that there was an image of two mice on it. I was distracted by all the shiny things and didn’t notice when a tortoiseshell cat jumped onto my shoulder and meowed loudly in my ear. Over my wailing, Yova asked it, “Pardon me, are you the purveyor of this establishment?” It meowed again and popped off, rubbing its tail under the “2 mice” price tag. “I’m afraid I don’t have any mice, but what about this?” She pulled out some glittery thread and twisted it back and forth so it would catch the light. The cat stuck its tongue out at her.

“You know, I think I have an idea,” I said. I reached in my messenger bag and pulled out the laser pointer I used to give Paisley some exercise and flicked it on, running it in front of the cat. It started batting at the laser and I flicked the pointer off. It looked up at me. “How about this: I give you a good chase with the red dot in exchange for the geode?” It thought for a moment, then nodded. I flicked the pointer back on and started running the cat through its stall. “You might want to go look for something for Pam. I’m gonna be here a minute,” I told her.

Yova ended up making her way through the rest of the décor section, noting a jewelry stand and a stall with journals that made noise upon opening. Eventually, she found the housewares section and a stall that sold a variety of different kinds of brooms. There was one with a polished oak handle and bristles made of something silky, which she knew Pam was going to love. Surprisingly, there was another changeling running the stall, a woman with blue iridescent scales and dark skin. Yova asked her what the cost was and the changeling gave her a knowing smile, saying, “I’m not complicated. I take cash. $75, I carved the handle myself.” Yova gave her four twenties and told her to keep the change.

Around this time, both Yova and I heard the music come to a blissful stop and an announcement came on over the loudspeakers: “Attention patrons: there is a blue light special on aisle 16!” Yova made her way back over to where I was still letting the cat chase that goddamn laser pointer. “Do you think we should check that out?” she asked. “Uh, yeah. Gimme one second,” I said. I threw the laser light about as far away as I could get and when the cat chased it away, I turned to go. Or at least, I tried to. It was a lot harder to do than I thought; it felt like there was something forcibly keeping me in place. I had to wrench myself away and when I did, I felt guilty. Some part of me knew I was leaving before I was formally dismissed and that part knew I should still be there.

“You should’ve just left the laser,” Yova told me as we made our way over to aisle 16. “Dude, this is Paisley’s favorite. You have no idea how picky she is,” I told her.

When we got to aisle 16, we saw a soapbox that had a blue light radiating out of it. The man standing on top of it was very pale with wavy silver hair pulled back in some updo that was somewhere between a ponytail and man bun. He was wearing a navy blue suit and had milky white eyes. Even before he could speak, I had the distinct feeling of oiliness.

When he spoke, that feeling was confirmed ten times over. He said, “Distinguished guests of the Spindle City Goblin Market, welcome! I have for you today a very interesting item, a very useful item, I’m sure you’ll all be quite interested in placing bids on.” He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a long crocheted rope with little precious gem beads embedded in it. “Behold!” he bellowed as he waved it in front of him. “A skinwalker’s trinket! Yarn woven from the wool of several different powerful hedgebeasts with beads carved from the dream gates of some of the most powerful changelings on the Earth! This is a very effective back alley doorway into the dreams of anyone you want to get into the dreams of! Bidding starts at a minor boon!”

Yova and I got into a huddle quickly and we agreed we were going to at least try to get it. “I think the best thing I can offer is to ensure a promise he has someone make is locked, but I’d have to be there for it to happen,” I told her. “True. But we just need to give him some way to get in touch with us. And worst case scenario, we get outbid,” she said.

We split up and Yova stepped forward to make the bid, holding up her hand and smiling her biggest bullshit smile. “My good sir, I have an offer!” she said. “Oh, do you, do you, do share, my good madam!” he said, matching her bullshit for bullshit. “I have the guarantee of a promise, locked down and guaranteed to happen,” she said. “What sort of promise are you talking about, a sworn pledge, a guarantee to kill someone?” he asked. “A Notarized promise. My friend here has the ability to do so – he is a Notary, a very rare breed, who can make such a thing happen,” she said, swinging her arm in my direction. I felt about eighty pairs of eyes on me and tried to give my friendliest smile, which has on occasion caused people to offer me antacids and made small children start crying.

The vendor looked over us (and me in particular) and grinned. He looked back to the rest of the crowd and said, “Well, we’ve got one going all in right at the start. Can anyone beat a promise from one who knows many of the secrets of the True Fae?” I was relieved that our gambit seemed to work. There were a few tepid bids coming in, but they were pretty puny and clearly not landing. The vendor rocked back on his heels and said, “I hate to say this, but you’re all boring as fuck. This is supposed to be a Goblin Market! Notary boy, come forward!” I stepped forward, clutching my messenger bag. He looked at the rest of the crowd and yelled, “SCRAM!” They all left, grumbling and looking unhappy.

He came forward, putting an arm around both of us (I was surprised to see he was almost as tall as Yova) and he said, “To be quite honest, your bid wasn’t so exciting either, but you have a reputation, so I’ll bite.” “We have a reputation?” Yova asked. “In certain circles,” he said. “What kind of reputation?” I asked. “You have people who are fond of you. They tell stories.” He turned to me and said, “So, how does it work? Are the words actually on your skin or what?” I pulled back some of my feathers to show the skin beneath and where some words had been printed on my flesh. “Ooooh!” he said, leaning close to see what was written. “Hey, watch your business,” I said, pushing the feathers back into place. “This is my business! This is my very business! Yuri, by the way,” he said, extending a hand. We introduced ourselves and hammered out the details of our deal, with him proposing that he come for his favor within the next lunar cycle. I agreed, pulled a feather on my lower arm out and wrote a note for him to take. I felt the Glamour leave my body and enter in the words that flowed onto my wrist under the ink that was bleeding out. At the same time, I felt some pushback from the Glamour he was pushing into the deal as well. It’s definitely a weird feeling. I’ve never gotten a tattoo, but from what I understand it’s kind of similar – it doesn’t exactly hurt, but there’s definitely a pressure there, pushing it down into my skin.

Yuri handed me the Token and I tucked it into my messenger bag right away. “One more thing before you go, and you don’t have to answer this, but it’s something I’m curious about,” I said. “You didn’t happen to have sold something similar to a young lady with tan skin and the legs of a white deer, did you?” He grinned wider and said that he had. “Sweet girl. Owes me a ton of favors now. And she’s very fond of all of you. I told you I’d heard about you.” With that, he waved and disappeared back into the throngs at the market.

“Okay, what next?” Yova asked. “Maybe we should go check on Day and make sure he hasn’t sold his toes for beef jerky?” I asked. “Day is a grown man, if he wants to sell his toes, he can do that,” she said. “Yeah, but we need him to be able to walk and stand in front of us,” I told him. “Besides that, why beef jerky? It’s disgusting,” I said. “I hear it’s very high in protein,” she said. “So is semen! Doesn’t mean you need to choke it down!” I said. She gave me a look of complete disgust and said, “This is exactly why I’m a lesbian.”

We passed by the food vendors and saw Day eagerly talking to the vendor at a stand marked “Organic” “Fruit” (yes, exactly like that, both words in separate quotation marks) and decided we’d swing back and get him later. Yova told me about the journals she saw earlier and they sounded intriguing, so we went back to the book binders. And that was when I realized that every single one of them made the sound of the animal whose hide was used to bind it. “NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE” I said. Yova quickly pulled me over to the other side of the stand. “What about these?” she asked, pointing to another set of journals. I picked one up and the face on it opened up and stared at me. “NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE” I said and she pulled me away.

“Look, Derek, you haven’t gotten anything for yourself, don’t you want anything?” she asked. I shrugged. “I dunno. I’m fine,” I said. And here’s something for those armchair psychologists of you out there: I was a middle child and I got used to getting passed over on stuff, so half of the time I don’t even really think about getting anything for myself. Yova, however, was not going to hear about that and she dragged me over to the cookware section to find something. And it was there that we found the most awesome stone rolling pin with kaleidoscopic handles. It was shiny and practical. I was about to ask how much it was but Yova had already spent the Glamour on it and she practically shoved it at me to put away. Having friends is awesome.

We found Day not long after that, about as big a smile as I’ve ever seen on his face. “You look pleased,” Yova told him. “I found the best freaking burgers I’ve ever had!” he said, pulling one out of its wrapper and shoving it in his face. He swallowed it whole and said, “And all they asked for was a bottle of my tears!” Yova and I looked at each other and she asked, “How many times did you have to punch yourself in the face to fill up a bottle of tears?” “None! They’re really spicy!” he said, chowing down on another one. And then, because I am a bad person, I started trilling, “Mind you, I can’t hardly blame them… these are probably the worst pies in London…” Yova bit down hard on her knuckle to keep from laughing and Day paused mid-chomp and looked at me. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” he asked. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all,” I said.

We were running close to the time where we said we’d meet Evain, so we took our purchases and went back up toward the entrance, where he was standing. He asked what we got and we showed him all of our goodies. He looked around and pulled a small doll out of his canvas bag. It looked eerily like Cassi and he asked hesitantly if we thought she was going to like it. “I think she’ll be very touched,” Yova said. “Yeah, you can say it’s for the first Christmas you missed. Oh! Oh, you know what I just saw this week that’s coming to Blu-Ray? Cinderella! You should get her that!” I said. “Oh, yeah, she’d love that,” he said.

“Did you watch that a lot with her when she was a kid?” Yova asked. Evain gave her a deadpan look and said, “Okay, listen. This is going to sound awful, but when you’re a single parent, sometimes you have to put them in front of the TV for a while to get stuff done. But then they want to watch the same movie six times in a row.” “Yeah, with my little sister it was Mulan,” I said. “Hey, Mulan is a perfectly good movie!” Yova protested. “She just liked the Reflection song,” I said. “She’d watch it, rewind to the start of the Reflection song, play the Reflection song. Rewind to the start of the Reflection song, play the Reflection song.” “Not I’ll Make a Man Out Of You or A Girl Worth Fighting For?” Yova asked. “Nope. Because ‘Mulan was pretty,’” I said. Evain looked around and said, “Uh, fun as this conversation is, maybe we should get going before they realize I stiffed them on the doll.” We quickly made our way for the exit and told him we’d be in touch about our mission in. And then we stopped off at PetSmart on the way home to get crickets for Gershwin.

So that’ll about do for our shopping excursion into the Goblin Market. Until next time, be safe and may you never be around well-meaning idiots who take you to go see journals bound in flesh.

#Changeling: The Lost #changeling #ctl #ic #recap #day got a punchcard where every fifth toe he gives up he gets a free burger

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smokeybrandreviews · 4 years

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Go Woke Go Broke

I am a fan of great stories. I adore brilliant, unique, art. I adore when both are integral to a creation be it film, comic, book, short story, light novel, fan fiction; Whatever. I find the ability to build worlds in almost any capacity, incredible. I’m also an older Millennial; Part of the tweener, X/Y, Oregon Trail generation. Born in the 80s, raised in the 90s, and came of age in the early 00s.We played until the street lights caught us, my first game system was an NES, and all my Saturday morning cartoons were sans Disney, toy commercials. I got an honorable mention once at a science fair and my parents were unimpressed so Participation Trophies were a joke to me and i learned how to deal with bullies by dealing with bullies. I had to worry about gangs shooting up my school, not that lone, weird kid in a trench coat. I’m all about representation but i understand that if you want people to look like you on film, you’d better find a way to make that film in white ass Hollywood. Basically, i have sense whereas most Millennials born after 89, do not. I need to make that distinction because we are about to get into some sh*t.

The merit and value of representation or visibility in mainstream media is dependent on the quality of said portrayal in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m a giant black dude who lives in America so representation for me basically begins and ends with a thug persona. As a black person in general, watching actors who look like me get passed over in roles that are uplifting and enriching to the culture like Hurricane or Ali for very specific, very demeaning, very marginalization, stereotypes, is disgusting. Black people, however excellent they are, never win for anything other than the magical Negro, uplifting slave, or non-threatening service person. Hidden Figures is an amazing tale of the trio of black women who saved NASA during the height of the space race. It was nominated for three Oscars and won none. Mahershala Ali did win an Oscar for best supporting actor portraying Juan, a drug dealer. Another movie he was in won several Oscars as well, Green Book. Ali plays Dr. Don Shirley characterized by the magical negro trope. I can go on and on. Denzel Washington got his second Oscar for Training day playing a corrupt ass cop when he turned in a much better, far more emotional performance, in Hurricane the year before. His first? Glory, where he played a former slave. A few years later? Snubbed for Philadelphia. Washington played, deftly i might add, a lawyer named Joe Milller who had to reconcile his own prejudices bout what it meant to have AIDS. Dude wasn’t even nominated. Tom Hanks won, though. See that pattern?

I don’t like Steven Universe. I don’t think it’s a very good show but because it has a massive fanbase among the LBGTQ community, it’s bullet proof from criticism. Nah, i’m about to go in. I adore Rebecca Sugar and i commend her creativity. My favorite episodes of Adventure Time are often attribute to her in some way, wither s0rt direction story boarding, or song writing. Marceline wouldn’t be Marcy with Sugar and i’ll always love her for that. That said, Steven Universe is melodramatic trash that uses pandering as a crutch. I don’t have a problem with the gays or whatever getting their visibility, but there are ways to do it without coming across as plagiarized drivel. Euphoria immediately comes to mind. Universe wears it’s anime inspirations on it’s sleeve. Sugar is a massive fan of Sailor Moon and you see, just, SO much of that in this show. Entire scenes and plot points are directly lifted from Usagi’s epic adventure but, because of the nostalgia goggles, cats are blinded to the straight-up theft. I’m not. That lack of originality is hindrance to the message. I mean, not really, i guess, because people love this show but it’s hard for me to acknowledge anything genuine about it because i know it is all a fraud. Hell, Land of the Lustrous, a manga by the name of Hoseki no Kuni, bares more than a striking similarity to Universe and came out a full year before Steven first bared his belly gem! Guess what Lustrous is? A manga! Guess who loves anime and manga? Sugar! Guess who has built a career on Sailor Moon images and Fan art? Sugar! Hell, Lustrous does a better job of LBGTQ representation by accident. Seriously, check that sh*t out. It’s an excellent narrative that doesn’t pander to the SJW crowd. It just tells it’s story about gem girls and space monsters. Sh*t is dope.

Where i feel the most sting, however, is in the US comic industry. All of this PC wokeness is in direct contrast to creative storytelling, for the most part. Marvel is hilariously guilty of this sh*t. I was on board when they decided to turn carol Danvers into Captain Marvel, effectively retiring her leotard costume and pretending kike it never happened. Fine. I liked that design but i get how impractical is was. The homage to Mar-Vell in her current duds is cool, too. I was one of the few that waited before running to judgment as Bendis race-bent Spider-Man into Miles Morales and then gender bent Iron Man into Riri Williams. Riri is a sh*t character in her own right but the outrage was more about her gender and race which made the criticism seem neckbeard nerd rage. Even then, i stuck around. Hell, when that Mockingbird run dropped and was literally a feminist manifesto, i let it ride because it was cleverly written and, foe the most part, i am kind of a feminist. More Equalist but there are feminist undertones in there. More recently, however, we got this New Warriors book and this is where i have to draw the line. Snowflake and Safe pace? Token non-binary hero? Marvel used to be at the forefront of this sh*t. They had gay superheroes in the 70s. They got married in the 80s. They addressed AIDS in the 90s and muslim bigotry in the 00s. Marvel was always crazy social conscious. That was one of their story telling staples and they delivered those messages with a light but firm touch.

F*ck, dude, the X-Men are an allegory for black people and the Civil Rights movement! Magneto and Professor X are literally caricatures of Malcom X and Dr. King. mainstream comic, broaching the subject of discrimination, camouflaged in the vibrant arto f superhuman clashes, sold to white kids across America, during the f*cking 60s? Are you serious? That sh*t changes minds. That sh*t starts a conversation. That sh*t is status quo changing! Snowflake and Safespace? F*cking really? This is your social discourse now? Disrespectful parody of a marginalizing slur and already absurd concept derived by weenies? This isn’t even satire, it’s outright disrespect. I think safespaces are detrimental to proper, healthy, discourse or that the notion of those who stand up to offense are snowflakes who “need to get a sense of humor”, but for real? The fact that cats just tacked on the one is non-binary just outright exposes the true intent. This sh*t is pandering, straight up. It’s non representation It’s not progress. It’s disrespectful Woke point grabbing. It’s superficial lip-service being played to those that feel like their label isn’t getting enough media scrutiny. I think all of these new genders or whatever are stupid but i’m an old person. Some kid might identify with being non-binary or whatever and THIS sh8t is what they have to look forward to seeing. You can’t be serious.

Now, the whole reason i’m writing this, the entire reason i was even thing king about this subject, is because of Late Night with Lily Singh. Singh is a comedy Youtuber who has crossed over into the mainstream. I, personally, don’t find her funny, but i understand how important her success is in the world. Singh is, if you haven’t deduced by her name, a Desi woman. She’s a Canadian of Punjabi descent and she’s making moves. Ma is one of the most popular channels on the platform and, indeed, i first came across her through another cat i follow. Even though i personally do not enjoy her content, the breadth of what she has accomplished does not elude me. Singh is a powerhouse and should be recognized as such. However, her actual, on-air, late night talk show is f*cking dog sh*t. Singh is not geared for that. Like, at all. Her jokes are bad, her monologues are delivered with a clumsy anxiousness that belies the energetic skit-maker from her Youtube channel, and she is the worst interviewer on television! Her guests are often visibly bewildered. Watching James Corden interview someone is off-putting, dude does his best impression of graham Norton, but Seeing Singh just assault her guests with mediocrity is textbook cringe. Why the f*ck was she put into this very public position, thrown to the wolves, doomed to fail?

Her show is bad, man, but when you say so, the PC Police come out to beat your sh*t in. Singh is Indian, female, and bisexually; The three biggest spaces on the Marginalized bingo board. Being brown, or queer, or prone to vaginas gets you them woke points whenever you create anything but to have all three at once? Boy, you bulletproof! Saying anything remotely resembling criticism gets you cancelled on the grounds of sexism, homophobia or just plain classic racism, all the while, her show i literal sh*t! Singh, herself, is often racist and sexist throughout her “comedy” skits! I’m not one to subscribe to white people being discriminated against. A a black dude with a firm grasp of history, i personally believe white people should just take it when a minority goes after them because they never have a problem taking from everyone else. Goose/gander, you know what i’m saying? That said, there’s an art, a nuance, to that racial observation. Singh does not deliver her content with that deft touch. She’s built a career on malicious caricatures of the whites and the penises, which would be fine if there was a message in her satire, but there’s not. It’s base and uninspired.

You can build a career on that type of content. Dave Chappelle’s entire career is that type of content and he’s one of the greatest comedians to ever comedy. The difference between his material and Singh’s is that Chappelle says something. Chappelle hits you in the gut and forces you to look within. His sh*t is actually profound. Lily Singh is not. She’s skews closer to that trainwreck, Nicole Arbour, than she does Eddie Murphy. She’s more Amy Schumer than Wanda Sykes and that sh*t is on full display with her terrible, terrible, talk show. I read somewhere that it might be getting cancelled soon and my first thought was, “It’s not cancelled now?” If i am aware that Singh’s content is pedestrian, surely the studio knew it was. I mean, the ratings of her show are abysmal. She even found her way into a race controversy as a female, lesbian, Desi on TV! Then it dawned on me; This wasn’t true representation This was NBC casing Woke points. They never believed in this show, rather, wanted to use Singh as a sounding board. She’s a trophy for a network trying to court that meek, 90s baby, everyone-is-special, “Muh anxiety”, crowd. It didn’t work and Singh’s show is getting shelved, as it should, but it’s f*cked up that this is what representation at the corporate level looks like. This sh*t is tokenism, plain and simple

Representation is great. I want all of us to be seen. People around the world judge our various cultures based on what our entertainment contributes to the cultural zeitgeist of the world. Mot blacks aren’t gang-bangers, rappers, or dug dealers. Most Muslims aren’t terrorists. hell, most Muslims aren’t even of middle eastern descent! Islam is the largest religion in the world. You’re more likely to meat an south Asian with a Koran than an Iranian with a suicide belt. Gays aren’t going to turn you, Women don’t have vagina dentata, and the handicapped are more resilient than you think. Don’t pander. Don’t token. This game of playing for Woke points in the media and arts needs to stop. All of this faux outrage by mostly rich, white, people on behalf of the people their privilege marginalizes, needs to stop. Patting yourself on the back because you’re book has a Sudanese, paraplegic, lesbian, lead is not being progressive, it’s masturbatory at best. Approach your project with a sense of levity, common sense, and, more than anything, respect. Is what you deem “representation” a good look for whatever class you’re trying to champion? Or is it just a means to stroke your ego and push your politics? Are you Brad Pitt or are you Kathleen Kennedy? Is what you want to show us going to do more bad than good?

At the end of the day, create what you ant to create, just be conscious of how you create. Evaluate your message. Make sure it’ something that needs to be said. Something that, when said, can’t be ignored. Make the message profound and the representation enriching. Make that sh*t count because doing so in an effort to appear the Wokest, just trivializes everything you are attempting to do.

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smokeybrand · 4 years

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Go Woke Go Broke

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odinknows · 6 years

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Know Your Meme Goes to New York Comic Con

The west side of 8th Avenue in midtown is a strange place in New York City. On an island where every plot, lot and its sublot has been claimed or filled, Hudson Yards, Manhattan’s soon-to-be latest neighborhood, is an urban ghost town, a surreal snapshot of a newly developed district in Simcity. But this weekend, Hudson Yards was flooded by hundreds of thousands of pop culture fans of all ages: teens, adults, kids chaperoned by their moms and pops, moms and pops chaperoned by their kids. New York Comic Con (NYCC). It’s the biggest nerd convention on the East Coast.

Thursday, 10:00 a.m. Matt, Adam and I met up by Penn Station on 34th Street and 8th Avenue. This was the first NYCC for all of us. Having had a daily commute in the area for a few years, I’ve certainly heard and seen the hubbub NYCC brings to the city every year, but as soon as we joined the first wave of attendees and entered the main venue, we were immediately struck by the sheer volume and size of the gathering.

Jacob K. Javits Center is a massive complex designed much like an international airport. Yet, with thousands of attendees moving in droves at all times, the 1.8 million square feet arena felt like, as Matt put it, a “geek mall” filled to its max capacity. And it’s true. Unlike its west coast counterpart, San Diego Comic-Con, NYCC has always been a for-profit event organized by ReedPOP, with a reported annual revenue of $50 million. At that level of rainmaking, it has grown into such a high-profile industry event that not even Hollywood’s most wanted A-list celebrities can decline to attend, not even George Clooney.

Once we made our way through the security checkpoint, we were greeted by Bandai Namco promoters offering wearable printouts of Luffy’s straw hat and calling on a few volunteers to participate in a lottery game for their mobile game One Piece Thousand Storm.

After a brief moment of complete distraction by fancy pop-up booths, neat gadgets and professional cosplayers all around us, we headed over to our first panel event of the day, Geek Journalism in the 21st Century, hosted by Ryan Britt of Inverse Magazine and joined by writers Caseen Gaines, Emily Asher-Perrin, Jill Pantozzi, Krutika Mallikarjuna and Mike Cecchini. Reflecting the popular consensus that’s been running for years on the Internet, much of the discussion centered around the future of fandom and challenges entertainment critics face as Hollywood’s reboot frenzy persists, a trend that hasn’t sloed down since Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Comics in 2009. While the panelists acknowledged that reboots can bridge the gap between generations, especially for the millennial audience, and serves the industry well with its guaranteed profit, they all seemed to agree that some of these classics have been rebooted at the expense of legacies that the original works left behind.

Thursday, 12:15 a.m. Tara Strong is a celebrity of her own class. As the familiar voice behind Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls, Twilight Sparkle of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and a number of other characters in video games, it is little surprising that she commands one of the most diverse and devoted fan bases. The seating in the conference room had already filled up by the time we arrived. Taking in the spotlight, Strong opened up the panel by talking about her latest voice work in the forthcoming film My Little Pony: The Movie, at times playfully breaking into the voice of Twilight Sparkle, and offered quite a few insights on how to get one’s foot in the door of a career in voice acting. In a way, Tara Strong is the archetype of a celebrity whose fame probably wouldn’t have been the same without the power of internet fandom. For decades, most voice actors lived behind-the-scene of films, TV shows and video games (unless you were already a famous actor), until people on the Internet began putting faces to their names in all corners of fan forums.

Thursday, 3:00 p.m. We assembled on the main exhibition floor, a gigantic open showroom where hundreds of vendors were offering all sorts of geek treasures and merchandises. The density of the crowd was more than any of us could bear for too long, although it was on the show floor where we spotted some of the most impressive cosplays at Comic Con. Aside from an army of Rick Sanchez, there were a number of other usual suspects in attendance: Deadpool, Princess Leia. Sailor Moon. Dv. A. Super Mario Bros.

Cosplay is a magical way for people to socialize. In 1939, Los Angeles sci-fi fan couple Forrest J. Ackerman and Myrtle R. Douglas showed up at The First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in futuristiccostumes, little knowing they had invented the world’s first prototype of a “fan costume,” which would eventually become known as cosplay in the coming decades. At this year’s NYCC, swarms of cosplayers, many of whom are Con-goers, but also event promoters and journalists, roamed the show floor, greeting each others in passing. Who they were didn’t really matter. It was all about what they were.

This isn’t to say that everyone is on equal footing at Comic Con. After all, it was the familiar faces from the big-screen that drew the fans out in hundreds of thousands. Throughout the day, we could hear intermittent bursts of applause from the live stage and autographing booths all around. And just from a glance at the guest list, one could gather which stars came to make an official appearance and which stars came to seize their day.

Friday, 11:00 a.m. Midtown Manhattan felt livelier than ever, with long lines wrapped around every venue on the way to Javits Center and the day’s construction work in full swing. Most workers seemed barely distracted by the seemingly endless stream of Rick Sanchez, Captain Kirks and Power Rangers pouring out of the 7 train subway exit, except for a few who would take occasional snapshots with their phones. I asked one of the men in hard hat if he has ever seen a crowd like this in Hudson Yards before. He said this is the most people he has seen in six months of working in the neighborhood. I asked him which character he has seen the most thus far. “Hello Kittys,” he said. “Lots of Hello Kittys.” Funnily enough, we didn’t catch any glimpse of Hello Kitty cosplays.

In stark contrast to the construction workers, the tension was running high among the New York Police Department officers, as they tried to keep the crowd in motion outside the convention center. Mix a couple hundreds of RPG and FPS cosplayers sporting all sorts of weapon replicas into an estimated crowd of 200,000 people, you’ve got yourself a long day at work.

We started our second day off with our own agendas. Matt attended the Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams panel, which explored the storylines of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle, and how art can combat bigotry through representation and diversity. As Matt put it, imagining the worse case scenario for America was “a real nice cup of coffee at 10:15 in the morning.” Adam went to the Hey Arnold panel event, where the creators and voice cast of the show came together to talk about the upcoming animated feature film Hey Arnold!: Jungle Movie and reminisce about the early years of the show when the voice actors themselves were kids. I headed straight to the Artist Alley, where more than 100 artists and independent vendors have set up shop to showcase their works, ranging from hand-drawn illustrations and comic zines to custom figurines and wearable merchandises.

Just one floor level below the festivities, next to the autographing booths, there was something very different going on. As much of a geek mall NYCC felt like, the vibe in the conference rooms stood out from the rest of the convention as scholarly and inquisitive. For an event of such massive scale, there were quite a few panel discussions that opened the doors to constructive discourses on identity politics and pop culture: The Wonder Women Behind LGBTQ Characters in Comics, Super Asian America, How to Respectfully Draw POC and LGBTQIA Characters, Gender Identity Through Art, the list went on. TL;DR, they were woke AF. And unlike the discussions that all too often devolve into mudslinging on the internet, everyone listened and waited for their turns to speak. With things in order, the discussions made leaps in the short span of an hour, something that we don’t see every day.

Had the late French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard still been alive, he would have taken great pleasure in tearing NYCC apart, just as he had done with the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Disneyland. To be fair, Comic Con is a hypermarket of industrialized pop culture, where the boundaries of fiction and reality blurs with every transaction. Nevertheless, despite its glossy artifice and Disneyland-like deceit, NYCC does ultimately serve its purpose as a public forum where the creators and consumers can critique and workshop the status quo in today’s pop culture. Say what you will about the mall culture in America, but there’s nothing like the good old-fashioned consumerism that brings people together in this country, regardless of age, gender and color.

Round Table Discussion

This conversation was audio-recorded, transcribed and edited for clarity at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on October 5th and 6th, 2017.

First Impressions of NYCC

Adam: We’re all really exhausted, just from the sheer amount of people and fandoms and cosplays and comic book booths and panels. It was pretty crazy.

Brad: Luckily, we got our badges sorted out beforehand.

Matt: It seemed like a real nightmare this morning getting into the place. It’s a lot like Disneyland with the lines and the check-ins and the bags–

Adam: Also, let’s clarify that the Javits Center is like a fancy airport, better than the actual airports in New York City. It was basically like going on a flight through fandom, I guess?

Adam: It’s like the movie The Terminal, but for fandoms.

Matt: It’s like a play land for people who like very specific things. The more specific the thing, the better.

Thoughts on Panel Events

Adam: One thing from Geek Journalism in the 21st Century that was interesting to all of us as “meme journalists” was to hear the perspectives of other people in the pop culture journalism industry, even if we all hears stuff we were a little bit familiar with, in terms of how to break into it.

Matt: I think that’s one of the things you see at a thing like Comic Con. You see all these people that like a very big “work,” whether that’s an anime, movie, or video game, and they really want to be a part of it. I think that that’s true in that a lot of the people here also want to be creators. They want to either be writing about this stuff or create this stuff. A lot of the panels we saw today, like the Tara Strong panel, there were a lot of people there asking her how to break into voice acting. I got to the Tara Strong panel assuming people would be asking her specifically about My Little Pony stuff, Powerpuff Girls stuff. I didn’t expect so many people would be asking her how to break into this thing. There’s a lot of people here looking into that, and that definitely carried over into the Geek Journalism panel.

Brad: There was kind of a workshop layer to it, and that’s as good as Q&As can get.

Adam: Matt, you went to Michael Rooker’s panel. Did you find your experience similar there? Were people asking him about acting or was there more a “people geeking out” vibe to it?

Matt: There was more geeking out, but it was also in a bigger room. Tara Strong Spotlight and Geek Journalism were held in very small, conference-like rooms, but Rooker’s panel was held in the special events section, a giant auditorium. The way that it started was he was on a panel with an author who wrote Guts, Frank Darabont. They were discussing Rooker’s career. As the panel was going, Rooker became more and more restless answering this guy’s questions, and all of a sudden, he was like, “We have 38 minutes left!” then ran offstage and started running through the crowd, being like, “Who has a question? You have a question? What’s your question?” And people would be like, “Uh, what’s your favorite scene in Guardians of the Galaxy?" and he’d be like “Any one that I’m in!” Just stuff like that. It was very much like he was there to let people experience him. He was such a personality, you couldn’t even get a word in. There were maybe one or two questions about how he got his start in acting and he was just like “I had nothing else to do.”

Adam: So he wasn’t trying to be workshop with the audience. He was trying to be a celebrity.

Brad: That is really endearing, especially considering he has been a longtime character actor whose fame suddenly blew up only as of recently.

Matt: He’s like the breakout character of Guardians of the Galaxy, for sure. He is kind of building up a cult-following, like Bruce Campbell. Your parents might not know his name, but you know the face. Fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and fans of The Walking Dead will love him. And he’s a great actor. It’s about time he’s gotten that recognition.

Brad: I think that also reflects as how fandom works on the internet. Even in the context of memes, there has always been a tendency to put the spotlight on people in the backdrop instead of up and center.

Adam: Like the Left Shark.

Brad: Definitely.

Thoughts on Fan Interactions

Matt: I think that the appeal of conventions like this one is that its a celebration of the specificity of these things. Like, everyone loves Star Wars but not everyone loves TC-14 or R5D4, things that have fans but have like, one line in the movies. Still, fans will watch these things so many times that they end up having to focus on different elements to get new appreciation.

Adam: And that spoke to a conversation Brad and I had with Ryan Britt of the Geek Journalism panel about memes, and he immediately jumped to talking about Prequel Memes, which I think are exactly the type of hyper-specific, fandom-driven things you were talking about before. You pick out this one moment of the films and if you keep repeating it, it becomes a joke. I mean, at this point, it’s like almost 60% of the script is a meme.

Matt: Prequel memes in general changed the way I saw the Star Wars prequels. The fans are so attuned to finding one word that’s delivered in the strangest way and it becomes a meme. That’s very similar to the type of specificity you’ll see here. You’ll see things now, like Simpsons shitposting, where it’s like the more obscure thing you can put into a new context, the more successful that meme will be. That’s true for cosplay too. Like, if you can make something super specific and make it super well, your thing and blow it out, that’s where you’ll have the biggest Comic Con success.

Thoughts on Cosplay at NYCC

Adam: By the way, our Rick Sanchez cosplay count is 12.

Matt: But to be fair, you have to have a high IQ to like Rick Sanchez cosplay… [laughter]

Brad: Rick Sanchez has to be the most frequently seen cosplay, right?

Matt: There’s a lot of Deadpools.

Brad: Oh yeah, that’s true. Deadpool has to be the unofficial mascot of cons. There’s that YouTube guy, D Piddy, who goes to like, every single Con.

Matt: I think Deadpool is like the unofficial spokesperson of adult geeks. Like, “This isn’t your granddaddy’s superhero. He swears.” You know, this stuff started out as just being for kids, basically, but there’s a lot of that sort of “adulting” going on in fandoms and superhero movies right now.

Brad: It’s not surprising you see a lot of Deadpool after the movie. I’ve gotten so used to seeing D. Piddy doing wacky antics. I completely forgot that there was a movie after Deadpool had already become a convention staple.

Matt: And we saw that Deadpope, that was pretty awesome.

On NYCC and Consumerism

Adam: Matt, you were talking about a point earlier at lunch about how this place is very much like a Disneyland, and in the same way Disneyland is a land of wonder, it is also like, an orgy of capitalism.

Matt: When I was going through all the aisles and booths, I started realizing that we were basically at the geek mall. All the stuff that you want and care about in pop culture is here at your disposal. The things you knew you wanted, didn’t know you wanted, all here. It exists in the center of this Venn diagram between consumerism and emotional investment. People want to express their enjoyment of these things but outside of here they only have designated areas to express these things, like the movie theater or online. Comic Con gives people a chance to celebrate that, hence the cosplay. But there’s also this element of this engagement being sold to these people. There’s an element of exploitation here. It’s like the people here can become the billboards for these giant corporations like Disney and Marvel.

Adam: And you were saying before how you used to collect things but the realization eventually dawned on you how you were being kind of a pawn in this larger machine.

Matt: Yeah, at a certain point, you realize you’re spending so much money on books you read like one time, and you’re just like, well, what am I doing with this comic book collection? Like, I’m not gonna make money off this in the future. The comic book industry was ravaged by overprinting. The reason comic books aren’t worth any money is because everyone threw them out. There’s so much supply and no demand. Now we’re existing in a space where superheroes and science fiction are the biggest American export. Entertainment is America’s biggest export, and superheroes and Star Wars are the top of that heap. Right now, to participate in these things is really to engage with America’s biggest global machine. It’s a weird thing, because the flip side of that is very pure: people love these things. I’m one of them! I love Star Wars and Star Trek, and people want to go and, as I witnessed today, argue over whether the Millennium Falcon would beat the Starship Enterprise in a fight. This is a conversation people want to have! There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does exist in a weird space.

Adam: Someone brought up in the panel how fandoms crop up around certain things basically on the strength of the characters. On the one hand, the general idea of a Comic Con is to create a place where perhaps social outcasts can geek out about their fandoms and find themselves in pop culture where they might not necessarily see themselves in their daily lives outside of that. There’s something really empowering about that, but at the same time, it is sort of playing into the great industrial machine. You can look at it both ways. It’s sort of cynical and cool at the same time.

Matt: There are some cool aspects. I think a big part about this convention and cosplay in general is feeling like you want to participate in this thing, in the same way, say, a Patriots fan wants to put on a Tom Brady jersey and paint their face. Someone wants to dress like Spider-man to express they like Spider-man. It’s basically the same thing. It’s not like the Patriots are a small Mom-and-Pop business. They’re a huge sports franchise!

Adam: That makes me think that the reason so-called “sports cosplay,” if you will, is more socially accepted, and part of what makes Comic Con so special, is that when you walk around the convention, there’s a really supportive and wholesome vibe, which is really awesome. Maybe because NYCC is so big, it doesn’t leave any room to be cliquey, which may be the case in some smaller Cons. If you have a niche fandom, you may not interact with like-minded people IRL every day. To come to a place like this is an opportunity to engage with some people like you.

Matt: I think what’s really weird about that is that this place is so pure and feels very welcoming to all different types of people, which is so different from the type of fandom that exists on the internet. It’s a total 180!

Brad: I agree that is the most refreshing thing, in comparison to other smaller-scale conventions I’ve attended. Like you said, the size of this place kind of renders cultural elitism almost impossible. There’s something nice about not having to be on, say, the same frequency, but everyone is on the same bandwidth, more or less.

On Inclusiveness at NYCC

Adam: This brings up an interesting point. Matt, you recently wrote a bit on Simpsons shitposting and how the phenomenon exemplifies the way geek fandom is portrayed in pop culture. Do you think the preconceived ideas about NYCC has shaped your expectations of what this event would be?

Matt: I always have a hard time with fandoms because of the toxic online culture of it, and it can really put a sour taste in your mouth. I don’t know why we have to be so mean about a cartoon! But when we came here and started talking to people and engaging with people it was a lot calmer and nicer than I expected. You’re dealing with a lot of personalities with things like this, and granted we went to small panels, but… I had a good time.

Adam: Mark Hamill was here, and there were some big names here that if we wanted to meet them, that would’ve been our entire day. We saw the line for his autograph signing and it looked at least two hours long.

Matt: Mark Hamill is like the perfect model supporting fandom as a base. After Star Wars, Mark Hamill wasn’t a huge movie star. It wasn’t until Batman: The Animated Series that he really started taking off as a voice actor. Through that, he built this fanbase that grew at conventions like this and carried him to where he is now. A lot of people and studios today recognize that you can maintain a good base and evangelize for your thing if you’re good to them. Michael Rooker is taking advantage of that right now by blowing it out and saying “I am the guy fans want to be around,” so people will cast him because they know he’ll promote the film.

Via Knowyourmeme

The post Know Your Meme Goes to New York Comic Con appeared first on Odin Knows.

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vagabondwithflowers-blog · 7 years

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San Diego: Day 1

up hella early, because waking up at 5:30 am Central time messes you up when you move time zones. I looked out the window, I saw gray skies and lots of palm trees. I thought to myself, OH NO we don’t have the ocean view! I went back to bed and slept a bit more because I was so frustrated about not seeing the ocean. Later in the morning, around 7:00 or so John woke up as well. I told him about the lack of ocean, and he looked and told me, “No sweetheart, the ocean is gray because the sky is gray. It’s right there!” He pointed and there it was!! I had never seen something like that before in my whole entire life!! The Pacific Ocean! There it was! I don’t get to travel all that much, so it was so new to me! We talked a bit about what we would do today and John wanted to get some of his family things done that day. So, this day I would get to meet his family when his uncle called him later in the afternoon.

The day begun with showers, that walk-in shower was prettttyyyyy nice, it was hard to be upset about the lack of bath tub. We decided for breakfast we would go to his favorite bagel place he used to frequent when he lived there. We took the scenic route and followed all the beaches. Never in my life have I seen houses so close to the water before. It was so beautiful. I wished that I could live in a place near the beach. Eventually on the way to the bagel place there was construction, so we had to take a detour. I honestly thought we were lost, yet John managed to find the way to Crown Point Coffee. It was a small place with patio seating. I grabbed a menu from the side of the wall and had a look. The menu references were all music references. There was the “Touch Me I’m Sick” “The Elvis” “The Priscilla” John got the Elvis bagel and I got the Priscilla, of course, a couple’s breakfast but unintentionally. I also got a delicious smoothie that was named after something sunshine related. John got a London Fog because he had been craving it ever since the Tokyo Fog at Cafe Martinez. When we paid the guy behind the counter had a nerd conversation about Overwatch with John, and I took a sample of a bee pollen smoothie and tried to speak above them.

After breakfast, we went to the Walgreens, where I had purchased some eye drops earlier in the morning for eye allergy relief, for someplace to park. We walked all the way to the pier. I remember being a little nervous at first because of the creaky wooden boards. But there were little small houses? huts? apartments? cabins? that people were temporarily living in on this pier. We went out a bit further and the ocean was so beautiful. It was bright and blue. The waves were big and even at 10AM in the middle of the week there were surfers riding the waves. I got a picture of Tofu-Chan on the pier. I also caught a Pokémon on Pokémon Go in the middle of the ocean. I took pictures of the big endless ocean because I have never seen that side of the world before. I was as happy as could be to share that experience with John. I was happy until he pointed out the fact that the waves were making the pier shake a bit. Then I got a little dizzy and had to throw away my smoothie leftovers. We stayed on the pier and watched the surfers and the birds in the ocean. We left the pier and walked above the shore, as neither of us had on good sand shoes. We picked a bench and sat for a little while breathing in the air that smelled lightly of honeysuckle. We decided our next adventure for the day was to make our way to Kearny Mesa to go to Book Off and see all the Japanese shops in the area. I was so excited.

Just driving in San Diego was fun for me, I got to see so many things I have never seen before and John would point out where he lived and what happened at one place or if he would take walks down a certain road. It was so adorable. Eventually we got to the store and in we went to Book Off. I was so excited! There was an entire section of books that were completely in Japanese and I wanted so badly to be able read them all. I picked up a set of the second volume of Genki as well as The Lion King and a potty book, all in Japanese. I almost got a few cookbooks… Almost, if I could read them I would have done it. At the checkout, I told the cashier that I came all the way from Texas to buy study material because I’m learning Japanese. She told me that I must visit her home country, and I promised her I would. John’s sister Lisa met up with us at the store because we were all meeting for lunch before visiting their grandmother. After the bookstore, we went to Mitsuwa, the Japanese grocery store that was next door. It was big, about the size of a non-Plus HEB. I made my way to the snacks and there I found, Saku Saku Pandas!!! I have been searching for over a year for these guys. I bought all but two of the bags… I also found a hello kitty rice mold, some tea, and kawaii snacks that I had to have. John was so excited about the curry place in the store, but when we asked the cook he told us that beef broth was used to cook the curry. I was so sad because I knew he was looking forward to eating at that place. We went to another place in the same center and the curry was not even all that good. It was so bland I could barely even finish it. I had dessert also and even that was not that good. I was so sad, but that was okay because I knew it would be a great day anyway! After lunch we went across the lunch traffic to another store that had a Sanrio sign up front. Once inside, I felt so mislead as there were no Sanrio things in sight. There were cute things like figures and stuff, at first I didn’t see much that interested me. While John went outside to talk to his uncle on the phone, I saw the Sanrio section at last and some other cute things! There were tiny fat charm animals. I got a few for some friends. I was so distracted by the cute things, that I got lost from John and his sister! At first, I didn’t worry but then I did that anxious nervous thing and started to wonder around aimlessly until I eventually saw them. John spoke to his uncle and after purchasing my small gifts for everyone, off we were to his grandmother’s house.

I decided to get a Saku Saku Panda but it was chocolate soup already! That was okay though, it still tasted good at least. Up the hills we went to John’s grandmother’s house. We went up and up and up on the hill. His grandmother’s house was very beautiful. The rug was perfectly white and it looked like a very homey place. John told me that he had so many memories in that house, like sitting on a certain chair or laying on the floor. We sat and talked to his uncle for a while, that’s where I learned where John gets his sarcasm from! They all talked about Dunkin Donuts and why there’s no IKEA in San Antonio. Eventually his grandma woke up and we got to go in the room and sit with her. But the funny thing is, as soon as we walk into the room there is a real graphic sex scene happening on the TV. She was watching The Tudors, about King Henry VIII. So, we all sat there watching this crazy show with his Grandma. I was introduced and she asked me how I was liking California, I told her I loved it and I didn’t want to go back home to Texas! I showed her Tofu-Chan and about how John took him all the way to Japan and back and now he was in California! After a while of watching the show his grandma said something sassy about their sex lives, I chuckled but no one else said anything! She looked at me and smiled but continued to watch TV. Eventually, John’s sister said goodbye but we stayed a little while longer and I sat closer to him on the sofa where he was sitting next to her. I noticed on the bookshelf was a book of the art from Spirited Away and I thought it was super cool! Eventually, we also left and on our way, out we didn’t see his uncle so we stepped out and saw he was talking to his sister. They all had this word fight teasing him about shoes and buying me things but I didn’t understand what was going on, it was almost like there were words in between the lines, but I just couldn’t read them… John took the scenic route down the hill and he took me to see Mt. Soledad. He said it was the most beautiful view in all of San Diego, and boy he wasn’t kidding. You could see miles and miles away all around us. It was gorgeous. There was the big cross on top of the hill. I felt I could barely lift my head high enough to see it all. There were quite a few other people standing up there. And I felt like the happiest girl alive up on top of the world with the man I love most. We noticed two big tour busses come and drop some people off and we decided to head down, again taking the nice scenic route.

Back to our hotel we went, to put our things away and decide on dinner. He wanted to watch the sunset that night, I don’t remember what the dilemma was. I remember he wanted to watch the sunset on the beach but I’m not sure if we just weren’t prepared to do that, that night or if there was a conflict with dinner. We ended up deciding on having dinner at the top floor of the hotel where there was a view that looked over the ocean. And we got to see that! We went all the way up the top floor and we had ourselves some real nice food at a restaurant with an open kitchen. I had an orange arugula salad and a margherita flatbread. It was all so delicious. Then we both had dessert and I had one drink that I took all night to finish. But we got to see the sunset completely over the ocean and it was so beautiful. John pointed out that we were the youngest couple in the whole restaurant, and aside from families with kids, we WERE the youngest ones in the restaurant. I had never had such an experience! The food was so delicious. My salad was perfect with arugula, parmesan, oranges and a balsamic vinaigrette. It was amazing. The only thing that could have made it any better would have been blood oranges. The crust on the flatbread was so buttery and the cheese was perfect. For desert, I had a “Deconstructed Pavlova” All I saw was the custard and berries. I remember thinking “WHERE IS THE PAVLOVA?!” But when I bit into it… my god there it was. It was soooooo goooooood. By the time dinner was over, the sun had finally set. We saw the guy downstairs light the torches in the driveway at the bottom of the hotel, we saw the sun set. And down we went back to our room. We laid down for the rest of the night watching Chopped on The Food Network. Don’t ask me how I can stuff my face and then watch food on TV. That’s another story to tell.

#San Diego #california #la jolla #beach #matsuwa #japanese #fun #vacation #travel #personal

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webbygraphic001 · 7 years

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How to Sell Games on the Web

The first step to getting famous as a video game studio is to make a great game. The second step is to sell the darned thing to a whole lot of people. That is, of course, easier said than done. It’s not enough to throw the game on Steam Greenlight and hope for the best. You have to get people excited. You need hype.

There’s a lot that goes into marketing a game, but this is WDD, so we’re going to focus on one thing: video game websites. Specifically, we’re going to focus on sites that market games to new players. We’ll go over the current game site design trends, general tips for making your own, and some UX concerns that may arise.

I won’t be addressing community sites or forums, video game blogs, gamer social networks or ranking sites, clan websites, or any of the other kinds of game-related sites, because I just don’t have the space. All of those probably deserve their own articles.

The trends

Once upon a time, most video game sites, and indeed most sites, looked a little bit like this:

That’s the site for Planeshift, an ongoing open source MMO project. Okay, I feel a little bad about picking on an OSS project, but theirs was the only site I could think of that still looks like that. And still uses tables for layout.

Their site reflects the product, really: it’s old school. You have to type to talk to NPCs.

Throughout the early 00s, a lot of game sites stayed like this, while others experimented with various trends, most of which incorporated elements of the game’s own UI or branding as part of the website’s UI. There were also, of course, plenty of Flash-based sites meant to reflect the dynamic experience of playing video games as much as possible. (Many of these experiments served their purpose, and have rightly died off. Thus, I have no screen shots.)

In the past few years, sites for marketing video games have started to fall into one really predictable pattern, with most of them adopting the full-screen-section-based-landing-page style.

We need a shorter name for that.

This style is used consistently across companies large and small, it’s used for games from different countries, and it’s used for basically every game genre. It is characterized by the full-screen focus, lots of huge images, some video, and occasionally parallax effects.

Here’s a small sampling of what I mean:

And here are a couple of examples with parallax:

Even with this same-feeling style of design, you can differentiate your site by working elements of the game’s UI and branding into your site’s UI. Have a look at Dungeons & Dragons Online’s website:

Now is this trend a good or bad thing? As usual, I am of the opinion that if it works, if it’s selling your product well, then it’s working as intended. As a customer (read: as a huge nerd), I don’t need the site to be super original, I need it to tell me what I want to know about the game.

Not everyone does things the same way, though. Some sites throw you straight into the community. Here, Guild Wars 2 is banking on its brand recognition. If you don’t know what it is, you’re probably not that interested. This is a bold strategy, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.

Some other game sites have kept to the old “Gaming Clan” look. Remember when every Photoshop-owning gamer used to make their own “clan website template”? Please tell me I’m not the only one who noticed this trend. Heck, some people are still doing it.

How to sell your game: show off the experience

Okay, so you’ve settled on a landing-page-style template for your site, and you want to sell your game. How do we do that? Well, games are all about the experience. You have to sell the experience that your game provides to the people who will like it best. This is the one big thing. If you take nothing else away from the article, this is what you need to know.

People who play video games tend to play them quite a bit. Over time, they develop a taste for the kinds of experiences that they enjoy the most. (Warning: Sweeping generalizations to follow…) People who play racing games love the illusion of speed, and the challenge of out-performing a smart opponent, whether AI or human. People who play multi-player shooters love that competitive challenge, but they might prefer a slower, more tactical pace, or they might want a run-and-gun game.

People who play single player and co-op shooters want some challenge, but they mostly want to mow down hordes of virtual enemies, whether alone or with their friends. People who play strategy games want to out-think their opponents on what might as well a much more complicated chess board.

You have to sell the experience that your game provides to the people who will like it best

People who play RPGs might be looking for an action game with a good story, or a world where they can decide what happens to the fate of civilizations, a dating simulator, or some combination of all three (cough Mass Effect cough). People who play horror games want to be scared and challenged at the same time.

Then there are the settings: urban, rural, sci-fi, wild west, and the list goes on for a really long time. People want to know these things. Heck, before I pick up an MMO, I want to know if I can have more than one hotbar.

The point is that you can’t just say, “Our game is totally fun!”, put in a couple of screenshots, and leave it at that. You need to show them, in detail, exactly what kind of experience they’ll be getting. Gamers have been buying games based on hope for a while now, and many of them have been burned before.

The smart game developers give as much information about the game as they can without giving out, say, story spoilers. The more accurately the marketing materials resemble the final product, the better. Every year there are scandals about how games were completely misrepresented before they came out, and that hurts sales.

You might be trying to surprise your players, but more often than not, developers who hide all the details are just hiding a bad or unfinished game. Buying anything is always a bit of a gamble, but right now, finding a truly good game that actually meets the marketing department’s claims feels a bit like winning the lottery. This should not be so.

What to showcase

Start with the gameplay. This is the experience. This is also one of the few times when I’ll say that video is almost necessary on a website. Still images don’t convey enough information about how it feels to play a game.

Heck, even video tends to fall very short, but until we can play demos right on your site, it’s the best we’ve got. Don’t tell them how great the game is. Let them feel it for themselves, as much as possible.

The 2016 release of Doom did this very well. Go to the website for Doom (Fair warning: it’s Doom. There’s virtual gore.), and you’ll see that most of the pages are light on text, heavy on background video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, short videos at 30-60 FPS are like one heck of a novel.

Next, you’ll want to include a clear and immediately available price, or price table. Be very clear about what your buyers get for what price. Some companies try to deliberately make this confusing, and it backfires, all the time.

Get people talking about your game. Be sure to include links to any forums, Facebook pages, or Twitter accounts where people can talk with you about your game, whether it’s out yet or not. People talking to their friends is where a lot of hype comes from

If your game is lore and story-heavy, it can help to include a beginner’s introduction to the story and setting. Just don’t fall into the trap of trying to make the lore into your marketing material. Jumping feet first into a whole new world is a big deal, and if you start throwing too many fantasy names at players who haven’t even bought the game yet, that could backfire. Put some basic lore on the site, but not on the home page.

UX concerns

Selling a game is a bit rough, because in order to properly showcase a game’s experience, you need a fair bit of visual material to get the point across. On the other hand, people with bad Internet play video games too. Just make sure to optimize your video and images as much as possible. Use responsive images, and have the video available in multiple qualities.

And though you might be tempted to animate your UI a lot, like in the days of Flash, I’d keep that to a bare minimum. The sheer amount of visual media will already be hard on some people’s connections. Extraneous UI animation just adds to that burden.

Conclusion

The sites that sell me on a game are the sites that tell me what I need to know, not what they think I want to hear. This is true of all websites in general, but remember that gamers are often far picker than average consumers.

And right now, some simple clarity and honesty is all you need to set yourself apart from, and morally above some AAA game developers. This is not a great state of affairs, but you could make it work for you, by being better than them.

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