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#Also: non human animals have emotions and complicated responses to them just like we do. Cats for example know very well when you're not
hikari-ni-naritai · 1 year
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Since you have read/ watched all of them, do you have a favorite isekai? Or like a top 5 or however many
well it's a complicated question really, because isekai is a pretty varied genre (despite what one might think), so a lot of them dont compare to each other, and we also have to consider whether we're including reverse-isekai like 'devil is a part timer' and pseudo-isekai (anime that have all the trappings of isekai but the protagonist is not from another world) like 'danmachi 'is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon' and also reincarnation-within-the-same-world-but-its-so-radically-different-its-like-an-isekai anime like 'misfit of demon king academy' and also non-anime isekai like 'the owl house' or 'wizard of oz' (which actually follows a very similar thread as modern isekai) and also isekai-as-a-plot-device-but-it-doesnt-follow-any-isekai-tropes like 'mairimashita iruma-kun' and the answers to all of these questions would likely change my response.
i DO however have a favorite isekai of all time, which is No Game No Life. that's a fairly well-known name though and definitely not for everyone. beyond that, while i cant specifically rank them, i CAN give you a couple that i really like!
so first off if you dont know NGNL, its about a loser neet guy and his loser neet sister who together are undefeated video game addicts, and they get sent to a world where everything is decided by games. despite stating multiple times from the very start that they will never and can never lose, the series does a remarkable job of building up tension that most overpowered protagonist isekais cant hope to match. an excellent story about believing in the potential of humanity but very heavy on the uh. very awkward fanservice. watch at your own risk.
another one i really liked was I'm Quitting Heroing, which was about a guy who defeated the demon lord, only to show up a few weeks later with a professional resume and a powerpoint about the skills and benefits he would bring to the demon lord's army. it holds a special place in my heart for reasons i cant quite articulate, though i'll hazard a guess that it might be because it features themes of learning to embrace immortality.
if you like gratuitous and lovingly animated violence, Reincarnated As A Sword was a beautiful story about a cute catgirl full of rage and murder who gets hold of a big magic sword with a guy in it. very wholesome and also very bloody! shes my daughter basically. season 2 coming!
if you like really pathetic loser guys with everything wrong with them, Eminence in Shadow is. like holy shit dude. his dream in life is to be so so powerful he can kill everything and survive an atomic bomb. but he spends all his time playing the part of Worlds Most Generic NPC. the show commits to everything with all its heart and its so fucking funny.
something more lighthearted that i really love is Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear. it's just a girl in a bear costume living in another world but its very charming. good if you like girl main characters.
I'd also recommend Fabiniku, which if you havent seen around is about two guys who get sent to another world but one becomes a cute girl. its just cute and good. and shes basically trans until shes canonically trans.
one i mentioned in my first paragraph, Misfit of Demon King Academy, is one of my favorites. the demon king sacrifices himself to end the war between demons and humans and reincarnates 2000 years later. one of those extremely overpowered protagonist type shows, but hes got real pizazz about it, yknow? hes a good guy. personally i think its a better show if you headcanon him as aroace but ymmv.
and finally, the most . tentative recommendation on my list. would be Mushoku Tensei. ive talked about this before but its SO difficult to sort out my emotions on this one bc, i cant lie, it is kinda fucking vile! its like some guy in his 30s getting reincarnated as a baby, and he uh, very extremely sexualises the girls he is around as he grows up, and they are . also children. and thats bad and gross and uncomfortable! but like. everything else, the story, the music, the animation, is SO lovingly crafted. like REALLY good. but fuck dude, yknow? you gotta put up with a LOT. but if that doesnt bother you, it's worth watching.
anyway thank you for your curiosity! <3
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mali-umkin · 3 years
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I hate to break it to you but no, improving your mental health shouldn't be the only reason why you want to adopt a pet. Seeing posts listing all the benefits of getting a cat to help with your anxiety/depression without ever mentioning that it's a financial and 20 year-long commitment, that it can be emotionally challenging at times, that you must provide the adequate environment, is quite disturbing - we are talking about another sentient being whose needs should come first, and the 'how useful can an animal be to you' rhetoric, even with the best of intentions, is damaging, for both the animal and potentially yourself.
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pumpkinpaix · 3 years
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mdzs fandom, diaspora, and cultural exchange
Hey everyone. This post contains a statement that’s been posted to my twitter, but was a collaborative effort between several diaspora fans over the last few weeks. Some of the specifics are part of a twitter-localized discourse, but the general sentiments and issues raised are applicable across the board, including here on tumblr.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably seen a few of my posts about this fandom, cultural exchange, and diasporic identity. For example, here, here, and here. This statement more directly criticizes some of the general issues I and others have raised in the past, and also hopefully provides a little more insight into where those issues come from. I would be happy if people took the time to read and reblog this, as the thought that went into it is not trivial, and neither is the subject matter. Thank you.
Introduction
Hello. I'm a member of a Chinese diaspora discord server - I volunteered to try and compile a thread of some thoughts regarding our place and roles in the fandom expressed in some of our recent discussions. This was primarily drafted by me and reviewed/edited by others with the hopes that we can share a cohesive statement on our honest feelings instead of repeatedly sharing multiple, fragmented versions of similar threads in isolation.
This was compiled by one group of diaspora and cannot be taken to represent diaspora as a whole, but we hope that our input can be considered with compassion and understanding of such.
For context, we are referencing two connected instances: the conflict described in these two threads (here and here), and when @/jelenedra tweeted about giving Jewish practices to the Lans. Regarding the latter, we felt that it tread into the territory of cultural erasure, and that it came from a person who had already disrespected diaspora’s work and input.
Context
The Lans have their own religious and cultural practices, rooted both in the cultural history of China and the genre of xianxia. Superimposing a different religious practice onto the Lans amidst other researched, canonical or culturally accurate details felt as if something important of ours was being overwritten for another’s personal satisfaction. Because canon is so intrinsically tied to real cultural, historical, and religious practices, replacing those practices in a canon setting fic feels like erasure. While MDZS is a fantasy novel, the religious practices contained therein are not. This was uncomfortable for many of us, and we wanted to point it out and have it resolved amicably. We were hoping for a discussion or exchange as there are many parallels and points of relation between Chinese and Jewish cultures, but that did not turn out quite as expected.
What happened next felt like a long game of outrage telephone that resulted in a confusion of issues that deflected responsibility, distracted from the origin of the conflict, and swept our concern under the rug.
Specifically, we are concerned about how these two incidents are part of what we feel is a repeated, widespread pattern of the devaluing of Chinese fans’ work and concerns within this fandom. This recent round of discourse is just one of many instances where we have found ourselves in a position of feeling spoken over within a space that is nominally ours. Regardless of what the telephone game was actually about, the way it played out revealed something about how issues are prioritized.
Background
MDZS is one of the first and largest franchises of cmedia that has become popular and easily accessible outside of China. Moreover, it’s a piece of queer Chinese media that is easily accessible to those of us overseas. For many non-Chinese fans, this is the first piece of cmedia they have connected with, and it’s serving as their introduction to a culture previously opaque to them. What perhaps is less obvious is that for many Chinese diaspora fans, this is also the first piece of cmedia THEY have connected with, found community with, seen themselves in.
Many, many of us have a fraught relationship with our heritage, our language—we often suffer from a sense of alienation, both from our families and from our surrounding peers. For our families, our command of the language and culture is often considered superficial, clunky, childish. Often, connecting with our culture is framed as a mandatory academic duty, and such an approach often fosters resentment towards our own heritage. For our non-Chinese peers, our culture is seen as exotic and strange and other, something shiny and interesting to observe, while we, trapped in the middle, find ourselves uprooted and adrift.
MDZS holds an incredibly important place in many diaspora’s hearts. Speaking for myself, this is literally the first time in my life I have felt motivated and excited about my own native tongue. It's the first time I have felt genuine hope that I might one day be able to speak and read it without fear and self-doubt. It is also the first time that so many people have expressed interest in learning from me, in hearing my thoughts and opinions about my culture.
This past year and a half in fandom has been an incredible experience. I know that I am not alone in this. So many diaspora I have spoken to just in the last week have expressed similar sentiments about the place MDZS holds in their lives. It is a precious thing to us, both because we love the story itself, and because it represents a lifeline to a heritage that’s never felt fully ours to grasp.
It’s wonderful to feel like we are able to welcome our friends into our home and show them all these things that have been so formative to our identities, and to be received with such enthusiasm and interest. Introducing this to non-Chinese friends and fans has also been an opportunity to bridge gaps and be humanized in a way that has been especially important in a year where yellow peril fear mongering has been at an all-time high.  
History
However, MDZS’ rise in popularity among non-Chinese audiences has also come with certain difficulties. It is natural to want to take a story you love and make it your own: that’s what transformative fandom is all about. It is also natural that misunderstandings and unintentional missteps might happen when you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the culture and political history of the story in question. This is understandable and forgivable—perfection is impossible, even for ourselves.
We hope for consideration and respect when we give our knowledge freely and when we raise the issue of our own discomfort with certain statements or actions regarding our culture. Please remember that what is an isolated incident to you might be a pattern of growing microaggressions to us. In non-Asian spaces, Asian diaspora are often lumped together under one umbrella. In the west, a lot of Chinese diaspora attach themselves to Korean and Japanese media in order to feel some semblance of connection to a media which approximates our cultures because there are cultural similarities. This is the first time we've collectively found community around something that is actually ours, so the specificities matter.
There is a bitterness about being Asian diaspora and a misery in having to put up a united front about racial issues. Enmity towards one group becomes a danger to all of us, all while our own conflicted histories with one another continue to pass trauma down through the generations. Many of us don’t even watch anime in front of our grandparents because of that lingering cultural antipathy. When the distinctions between our cultures are muddled, it feels once again like that very fraught history is flattened and forgotten.
Without the lived experience of it, it’s hard to understand how pervasive the contradictory web of anti-Asian and, more specifically, anti-Chinese racial aggressions are and how insidious its effects are. The conflation of China the political entity (as perceived and presented by the US and Europe) with its people, culture, and diaspora results in an exhausting litany of criticism levied like a bludgeon, often by people who don’t understand the complicated nature of a situation against those of us who do.
There is often a frankly stunning lack of self-awareness re: cultural biases and blind spots when it comes to discussions of MDZS, particularly moral ones. There are countless righteous claims and hot takes on certain aspects of the story, its author, and the characters that are so clearly rooted in a Euroamerican political and moral framework that does not reflect Chinese cultural realities and experiences. Some of these takes have become so widespread they are essentially accepted as fanon.
This is a pattern of behavior within the fandom. It is not limited to any specific group, nor does it even exclude ourselves—we are, after all, not a monolith, and we should not be placed on pedestals to have our differing opinions weaponized against one another in fandom squabbles. We are not flawless in our own understandings and approaches, and we would appreciate it if others would remember this before using any of us as ultimate authorities to settle a personal score.
It is difficult not to be disheartened when enthusiastic interest crosses the line into entitled demand and when transformative work crosses into erasure, especially when the reactions to our raised concerns have so frequently been dismissive and hostile. The overwhelming cultural and emotional labor we bring to the table is often taken advantage of and then criticized in bad faith. We are bombarded with racist aggressions, micro and macro, and then met with ridicule and annoyance when we push back. Worse, we sometimes face accusations of hostility that force us to apologize, back down, and let the matter go.
When we bring up our issues, it usually seems to come with the expectation that there are other issues that should be addressed before we can address ours. It feels like it’s never really the time to talk about Asian issues.
On the internet and in fandom spaces, Western-coded media, politics and perspectives are assumed to be general knowledge and experience that everyone knows and has. It feels like a double standard that we are expected to know the ins and outs of western politics and to engage on these terms, but most non-Chinese have not even the slightest grasp of the sort of politics that are at play within our communities. We end up feeling used for our specialized knowledge and cultural background and then dismissed when our opinions and problems are inconvenient.
As the culture represented in MDZS is not a culture that most non-Chinese fans are familiar with, we’d like to remind you that you do not get to decide which parts of it are or are not important. While sharing this space with Chinese diaspora who have a close connection to the work and the painful history that goes along with being diaspora, we ask that you be mindful of listening to our concerns.
Cultural erasure is tied to a lot of intense historical and generational trauma for us that maybe isn't immediately evident: the horrors of the Pacific theatre, the far-reaching consequences of colonization, racial tensions both among ourselves and with non-Chinese etc. These are not minor or simple things, and when we talk about our issues within fandom, this is often what underlies them. This is one of the first and only places many of us have been able to find community to discuss our unique issues without feeling as if we’re speaking out of turn.
With the HK protests, COVID, the anti-Chinese platforms of the US election etc., anti-Chinese sentiment has been at the forefront of the global news cycle for some time now, and it is with complete sincerity that we emphasize once again how important MDZS fandom has been as a haven for humanizing and valuing Chinese people through cultural exchange.
Experiencing racial aggression within that space stings, not just because it’s a space we love, but because it feels like we’ve been swimming in rapidly rising racial aggression for over a year at this point.
Feelings
This is a difficult topic to broach at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many of us have a wariness of rocking the boat instilled in us from our upbringings, and it is not uncommon for us to feel like we should be grateful that people want to engage with something of ours at all. When we do decide to speak up, we’ve learned that there is a not insignificant chance that we’ll be turned on and trampled over because what we’ve said is inconvenient or uncomfortable. When it is already so difficult to speak up, we end up second-guessing and gaslighting ourselves into wondering whether there really was a problem at all.
We’d like to be able to share what we know about our culture and have our knowledge and experience be taken seriously and treated with courtesy. This is a beautiful, rich world built with the history of our ancestors, one that we too are trying to connect with. When we find it in ourselves to speak up about it, we would appreciate being met with consideration instead of hostility.
We don't have the luxury of stepping away from our culture when we get tired of it. We don't get to put it down and walk away when it’s difficult. But if you're not Chinese or Chinese diaspora, you get to put this book down—we'd like to kindly request that you put it down gently because of how much it matters to all of us in this fandom, regardless of heritage.
What we are asking for is reflection and thoughtfulness as we continue to engage with this work and with one another, especially with regards to how Chinese issues are positioned. When we raise issues of our own discomfort, please take a moment to reflect before reacting defensively or trying to shut us down for spoiling the fun—don’t deprioritize our concerns, especially in a fandom for a piece of Chinese media. We promise most of us are not trying to start shit for the sake of a fight. Most of the time, all we want is acknowledgement and a genuine attempt at understanding.
Our hope with this statement is to encourage more openness and understanding between diaspora and non-Chinese fans while we navigate this place that we’re sharing. Please remember that for many of us, MDZS is far more intense than a typical fandom experience. Remember that the knowledge we have and research we do is freely and happily given, and that it costs us both materially and emotionally. Please don’t take that for granted. Remember too that sometimes the reason for our discomfort may not be immediately evident to you: what seems culturally neutral and harmless might touch upon specific loaded issues for us. We ask for patience, and we ask for sincerity as we try to communicate with one another.
We are writing this because there’s a collective sense of imposed silence—that every time the newest round of discourse crops up, we often feel as if we’re walking away having created no meaningful change, and nursing new wounds that we’ll never get to address. But without speaking up about it, this is a cycle that will keep repeating.
This is not meant to shame or guilt the fandom into throwing themselves at our feet, either to thank us or beg for forgiveness—far from that. We’re just your friends and your fellow fans. We are happy to have you here, and we’re happy to create and share and play together. We just ask to be respected and heard.
Thank you. Thank you for listening. Several of us will be stepping back from twitter for a while. We’ll see you when we get back. ❤️
* A final addendum: here are two articles with solid practical advice on writing stories regarding a culture other than your own.
Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice
Cultural Appropriation: Some More Practical Advice
The thread on twitter is linked in the source of this post. Thanks everyone.
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eighthdoctor · 3 years
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back on my bullshit again in a new fandom: logical consequences of grimm responding to animal fears
(do they? don’t they? whatever, i don’t think the show has given us a good answer yet)
anyway so the thing: non-human animals feel...a lot of emotions. fear is one of the most fundamental, but anger is also in there. i’d expect to see grimm turn up for two main types of interactions: predation and intra-group conflict.
predation is what it sounds like: predators attacking (and kiling and eating) prey. intra-group conflict is when two or more members of the same social group get into a fight.
one at a time:
predation: the predator’s feelings can be pretty easily dispensed with, because they feel excited and focused and happy. not very grimm feelings at all. prey are much more likely to become a grimm target, as they feel afraid and sometimes angry.
a quick evolution recap for y’all: more animals are born than live to reproduce, but this isn’t random. which animals die young is, over large scales, determined by how well adapted they are to their environment--that is, how good they are at both getting food and not getting turned into food. animals which are better at eating and not getting eaten are more likely to have offspring in the future.
or, as the old joke goes: you don’t need to be faster than the bear. you need to be faster than your friend.
so in real life, a cheetah takes off after an antelope, and the following selection pressures are in play:
1. speed. being physically faster will be beneficial to both animals, so we have an arms race where cheetahs are getting faster and faster, and antelope are getting faster and faster, and some day we may hit a land speed record.
2. reaction time. the cheetah initiates this chase, but the antelope will zigzag, and so the closer the cheetah can stick to the antelope’s path--the faster it can respond to its moves--the more likely it will win. meanwhile, the sooner the antelope can react to the cheetah’s initial lunge, the more likely it will get away entirely.
3. stealth. this one goes entirely to the cheetah, and it’s not well suited for it. other cats get closer to their prey before lunging. cheetahs do get close, but they’re simply not built for the stalk (or temperamentally equipped for it either). but for a cheetah who can get that close, their odds of a kill go up.
4. observation. and this is the antelope’s equivalent. if it can spot the cheetah before the lunge, it’s actually very unlikely the cheetah will make a go for it at all.
for the most part, antelope are already at their observation maximum, and cheetah sacrifice stealth for a better reaction time (it has to do with twitchiness: if you’re very very twitchy, you’ll be fabulous at tag but horrible at hide and seek). mostly they’re being pitted in terms of speed and reaction time.
now add grimm.
i’m making the assumption that about half the time, the grimm will attack the predator, and half the time, they’ll attack the prey. (probably more like 1:1:1:1 where the last two options are “both” and “neither” but let’s not complicate this).
for the antelope, well. the antelope never cared very much about what the cheetah was there for. 
to zoom out from this particular example, prey animals have two major responses to predators: get away (run faster, hide better) or make the predator go away (horns, size, tough skin, poison, spikes...poison spikes...). some of these strategies will be more useful on grimm than others. grimm aren’t going to be intimidated unless the animal genuinely isn’t angry; grimm won’t necessarily be deterred by going down a burrow or changing skin color.
once a predator-prey duo has attracted grimm, the prey animal has two choices (they always do): fight or flight. they can either outrun the grimm (arguably only because the grimm will focus on the slower predator instead) or kill it.
in the case of the cheetah-antelope example, antelope are most likely to just get faster. grimm are just bigger, scarier cheetahs with better endurance to an antelope, so the antelope population will undergo selection for faster, stronger antelope.
cheetah are similar, actually: when it comes to conflicts with other large predators, cheetah rarely take it to a fight. they’ll walk away from their own kills if another predator turns up because they’re not at all built for physical contact. so in remnant, we’re looking at super fast cheetah and antelope.
however, there are other outcomes.
first, predators are much less likely to develop for pursuit over ambush in the first place. an ambush will very quickly resolve into a kill or the predator walking away to try again later. there will be fear, but it’ll be intense and quickly gone. pursuit predators take minutes to hours (to days) to wear down their prey and catch them, which is much more time for grimm to turn up. so wolves, who are quite happy to chase large prey for miles on end, are going to need to adapt to smaller prey who can be caught faster.
second, prey which have always been more inclined to fight than flee are going to face more intense pressure to be lethal. you don’t need to kill the tiger to get it to give up, but you do need to kill the grimm. so animals like elephants can’t just be big. once a mamma elephant gets scared for her calf, she has to be willing and able to kill about it. (in real life they start and often end with display charges. around grimm? probably not so much)
in comparison to real life, where we do have some generalist prey animals, remnant equivalents are going to be much more extreme. bison often run from wolves as a first response but stand their ground once chosen as the victim; in remnant this sort of mass herd panic would attract grimm pretty quickly. it’d be a much better strategy for bison to stand their ground from the get-go and consistently attack back.
as @mylordshesacactus just argued to me, there also won’t be any large herds. it’s very, very easy to start a panic in massed groups. much harder when there’s only 4 or 5 of you. so that’s interspecific conflict. what about conspecific conflict?
well, unlike with predation, you don’t need to fight members of your same species to survive. [citation needed] most fights between animals of the same species are over a resource, such as food, sleeping spaces--or sex.
i’m going to set aside squabbling over food. nobody wants to get killed for a haunch of meat, so predators have worked out ways to share a kill or scare off others without major conflict (or fear).
instead let’s talk sex.
in species where sex leads to conflicts (some species are monogamous, and others do flybys where no one gets too worked up), you’ve got two major strategies: male competition and female choice.
female choice is where males compete for the attention & sexual availability of a female. males don’t directly interact, and may have things arranged so they’re spread out over a small (or large) area. instead females move around until they find the male who suits their interests. this is particularly common in birds, where males compete to grow the flashiest tail or sing the prettiest song. then they pair off, boink, and incubate eggs.
this isn’t particularly full of negative emotions (it’s...hard to figure out what jealousy looks like in order to study it, so mostly what you’ll see is some amount of frustration) so not terribly interesting to grimm.
male competition is full of anger though.
in ungulates (hoofed animals), males butt heads, kick, bite, bang necks together, and otherwise have a huge fuss over who can assemble the largest harem. these conflicts are painful and violent. watch any david attenborough documentary for examples. while long term, these behaviors are motivated by the eventual access to sex, in the short term, they are driven entirely by emotions.
so we’ve got a herd of horses. (say a small herd, accounting for the first half of this.) there’s one dominant stallion, and a handful of satellite bachelors (zero to four depending on number of mature mares). when the mares come into heat, the dominant stallion is going to spend a lot of time a) stressing about the bachelors or b) running them off. meanwhile the bachelors are going to spend a lot of time a) stressing about the stallion and b) trying to fight him off.
(the mares won’t be too fussed by any of this.)
the longer this goes on, the more likely grimm are to show up.
here’s the problem for the males: it’s to everyone’s advantage for male-male competition to not be deadly. even the top male isn’t going to be top forever, and he’d rather not get killed off on his way out, because if he gets killed off, there goes any chance of sneakily reproducing later. so fights are DRAMATIC, they are HIGH OCTANE, and they very rarely escalate to physical contact. when they do, they even more rarely lead to death.
so while at the same time males need to remain non-lethal against other males, they need to escalate to lethal behavior very quickly when grimm show up. this is a tricky balance to hold when you’re worked up.
now, i admit that grimm are less interested in non-human animal emotions than they are in human/faunus emotions, and that some of these encounters are so brief that the grimm won’t arrive before they’re over. but evolution is a gambling game. it’s about many, many small transactions over years, and so it matters greatly whenever anything slightly increases the risk of a certain behavior.
if male-male competition is slightly more risky, then either a) males need to be better at killing grimm, but not to the point where they’re killing other males or b) there needs to be less anger involved.
it’s very very tricky, speaking as an animal trainer, to retain a behavior while neutralizing the emotion behind it. possible! but tricky. even trickier when there’s no trainer involved. it’s not enough for the fights to become less dangerous, because the grimm care about emotions. the conflicts need to be less intense, and that’s hard.
so instead of less intense conflicts, pivot to more readily lethal horses. (ouch) (sidenote: increasing traits in one sex will often lead to similar changes in the other, especially in species where males and females are largely the same. and it’s not like mares aren’t already interested in kicking the living daylights out of anything that displeases them...)
remnant horses, and many other ungulates, would be more prone to fighting over flight, because that’s a necessary trait during mate competition. since it’s very hard to shift strategies mid-go, males who are already fighting (non-lethally) can more easily turn to killing grimm than running away from them.
so what we’re looking at here is a world where social species live in smaller groups, where fights are more readily lethal but also easier to diffuse, and where predators trend towards patient stalks and short, fast kills.
and that’s without getting into the implications for farming and domesticated animals...
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itsclydebitches · 3 years
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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Dark”
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Welcome back, everyone! Can you believe it's been six weeks already? I can't. Something something the uncomfortable passage of time during a pandemic as emphasized by a web-series.
But we're here to talk about RWBY the fictional story, not RWBY the cultural icon. At least, we will in a moment. First, I'd like to acknowledge that shaky line between the two, growing blurrier with every volume. A sort of good news, bad news situation.
The bad news — to get that out of the way — is that we cannot easily separate RWBY from its authors and those authors have, sadly, been drawing a lot of negative attention as of late. This isn't anything new, not at all, but I think the unexpectedly long hiatus gave a lot of fans (myself included) the chance to think about Rooster Teeth's failings without getting distracted by their biggest and brightest production. There's a laundry list of problems here — everything from the behavior of voice actors to the quality of their merch — but as a sort of summary issue, I'd like to highlight the reviews that continue to pop up on websites like Glassdoor, detailing the toxic, sexist, crunch-obsessed environment that RT employees are forced to work in. A lot of these websites requires a login to read more than a page of reviews, but you can check out a Twitter thread about it here. 
Now, I want to be clear: I'm not bringing this up as a way to shame anyone enjoying RWBY. This isn't a simplistic claim of, "The authors are Problematic™ and therefore you can't like the stuff they produce." Nor is this meant to be a catch-all excuse for RWBY's problems. If it were, I'd have dropped these recaps years ago. I'm of the belief that audiences maintain the right to both praise and criticize the work they're given, regardless of the context in which that work was produced. At the end of the day, RT has presented RWBY as a finished product and, more than that, presents it as an excellent product, one worth both our emotional investment and our money (whether in the form of paying for a First account, or encouraging us to buy merch, attend cons, etc.) I'll continue to critique RWBY as needed, but I a) wanted fans to be at least peripherally aware of these issues and b) clarify that my use of "RT" in statements like, "I can't believe RT is screwing up this badly" is meant to be a broad, nebulas acknowledgement that someone in the company is screwing up, either creatively (doesn't have the skill to write a good scene) or morally (hasn't created an environment in which other creators are capable of crafting a good scene). The real, inner workings of such companies are mostly a secret to their audiences and thus it's near impossible for someone like me — random fan writing these for fun as a casual side hobby — to accurately point fingers. Hence, broad "RT." I just wanted to clarify that when I use this it's as a necessary placeholder for whoever is actually responsible, not a damnation of the overworked animator breaking down in a bathroom. Heavy stuff, but I thought it was necessary (or at least worthwhile) to acknowledge this issue as we head into the second half of the volume.
Now for the good news: RWBY has reached 100 episodes! For any who may not know, 100 is a pretty significant number in the TV world because, when talking about prime time programming, it guarantees syndicated reruns. Basically, networks don't want audiences to get burned out with a show — changing the channel when it comes on because ugh, I've seen this already, recently too — and 100 episodes allows for a roughly five month run without any repeats, making it very profitable. RWBY is obviously not a television show and doesn't benefit from any of this (hell, modern television doesn't benefit from this as much as it used to, not in the age of streaming), but the 100 episode threshold is still ingrained in American culture. Beyond just being a nice, rounded number, it is historically a measure of huge success and I can't imagine that RT isn't aware of that. Regardless of what we think of RWBY's current quality, this is one hell of a milestone and should be applauded.
All that being said... RWBY's quality is definitely still lacking lol.
Our 100th episode is titled "Dark" — keeping with the one word titles, then — and I'd like to emphasize that, as a 100th episode, it definitely delivers in terms of plot. There's plenty of action, important character beats, and at least one major reveal, everything we'd expect from a milestone and a Part II premiere. The animation also continues to be noteworthy for its beauty, as I found myself admiring many of the screenshots I took for this recap. There are certainly things to praise. The only problem (one we're all familiar with by now) is that these small successes are situated within a narrative that's otherwise falling apart. It's all good stuff... provided you ignore literally everything else surrounding it.
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But let's dive into some examples. We open on Qrow starting, awoken by the thunder outside. Robyn has been watching him and makes a peppy comment about how none of them will be sleeping tonight, followed by a more serious, "Sounds bad out there." Yeah, it does sound bad, especially when they all know — thanks to Ruby's message back in Volume 7 — that this is due to Salem's arrival. I think a lot of the fandom has forgotten that little detail because people often discuss Qrow as if he is entirely ignorant of what is going on outside his cell. Even if we were to assume that he's forgotten all about the pesky Salem issue (the horror of Clover's death overriding everything else, perhaps) he still knows that Tyrian is running loose in a heat-less city with a creepy storm going on and, from his perspective, the Very Evil Ironwood is still running the show. So it's bad, which begs the question of why Qrow (and Robyn, for that matter) hasn't displayed an ounce of legitimate worry for everyone he knows out there. Thus far, their interactions have centered entirely around Qrow's misplaced blame and Robyn's terrible attempts to lighten the mood, despite the fact that a war is raging right beyond that wall. It's another example of RWBY's inability to manage tone properly, to say nothing of balancing the multiple concerns any one character should be trying to juggle. Just as it rankles that Ruby and Yang don't seem to care about what has happened to their uncle, Qrow likewise doesn't seem to care about what might be happening to his nieces. When did we reach a point where these relationships are so broken that someone can be arrested/chucked into a deadly battle and the others just... ignore that?
So Robyn's otherwise innocuous comment immediately reminds me of how badly the narrative has treated these conflicts and, sadly, things don't improve much from here. We are thankfully spared more of Robyn's jokes when Qrow realizes that what he's hearing can't be thunder. A second later, Cinder blasts through the wall — called it! — and Qrow instinctively transforms. 
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The only downside to this moment is that the whole ceiling falls down on Qrow and the others because APPARENTLY these cells don't have tops on them. Seriously. As far as I can recall we don't see the stone breaking through the forcefield somehow and this looks pretty open to me.
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If it is... you're telling me these crazy powerful fighters who practice landing strategies and leap tall buildings in a single bound —
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— can't just hop over this mildly high electric fence to get out? Qrow can't just fly away?
We're, like, two minutes in, folks.
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We transfer to Nora's perspective as she wakes up, seeing Klein giving her the IV. He tells her not to worry, that "you and your friend are going to be just fine." What friend? Penny? Klein went upstairs prior to Weiss hugging Whitley or Penny crash landing outside. I had thought them bursting through the door with another unconscious friend was the first time he learned what the big bang outside was, but apparently not.
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Penny is, obviously, a mess. While I now understand the choice to make her blood such an eye-catching color when that's crucial to the Hound's hunt, I still think it looks strange visually. Like someone has taken a copy of RWBY and painted over it. It doesn't look like it fits the art style. More than that, it implies some rather complicated things about Penny's humanity, especially in a volume focused around her being a "real girl." Real enough for Maiden powers, but with obviously inhuman blood that isn't even referred to as "bleeding." Penny "leaks" instead.
Toss in the fact that she's literally an android who is made up of tech — recall the running gags about her being heavy, or it hurts to fist-bump her, to say nothing of keeping things like multiple blades inside her body — yet Klein says that her "basic anatomy" is the same and he can "stitch up that wound."
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I'm sorry, what? Whatever Penny looks like on the inside, it's not going to resemble a human woman's anatomy, and Klein might be able to stitch the outer layer of skin she's got, but that won't do anything to fix whatever metal bits have been broken underneath. Penny isn't a human-robot hybrid, she's a robot with an aura. Penny has knives in her back, rockets in her feet, and a super computer behind her eyes. When our clip introduced that Klein would be the one to help Penny, my initial reaction was, "Seriously? He's a butler and a doctor and an engineer?" But RWBY didn't even try to get away with a Super Klein explanation, they just waved away Penny's very obvious, inhuman anatomy. Yeah, I'm sure "stitching up" an android wound is just like giving Nora her IV. I hope the surgical sutures he used are extra strong!
In an effort to not entirely drag this episode, I do appreciate that Whitley is allowed an "ugh" moment about the non-blood covering his shirt without anyone calling him out on it. That felt like the sort of thing the show would usually try to make a character feel guilty about and I'm glad that, for once, he was just allowed to be frustrated without comment.
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Then the power goes out and May calls, which raises questions about what state the CCTS is in and when scrolls are available to our protagonists vs. when they're not. But whatever. She's checking in because she just "saw another bombing run light up the Kingdom" and —
Wait. Bombing? Salem is bombing the city? I know we've seen explosions in the sky, but I'd always just attributed that to evil aesthetic. Why does this dialogue sound like it's from a World War II film and not a fantasy sci-fi show about literal monsters launching a ground attack?
May looks pretty against the sky though. I like her hair color against that purple.
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I'm admittedly grasping at positives here because we finally return to her "You have to choose" ultimatum and — surprise! — May has pulled back completely. Ruby says that once they've helped Penny, "We'll...we'll do something!" which is once again her avoiding making a decision. Ruby still refuses to choose, instead falling back on generic, optimistic pep talks. They'll figure out how to stop Salem later. They'll think about the impact of telling the world later. They'll choose who to help later. Ruby keeps pushing these problems into the future where, she hopes, a perfect, magical solution will have appeared for her to latch onto. When that continues to not happen, others pressuring her to actually do something and stop waiting for perfection — Ironwood, Yang, May — she panics and continues stalling for time. Wait an episode and the narrative supports her in this.
Because initially May was forcing Ruby to decide. Now, May enables her desire to keep putting things off. "Don't beat yourself up, kid. At this point, I don't know how much is left to be done." That's the exact opposite of what May believed last episode, that there was still so much work and good to do for the people of Mantle. This is precisely what the show did with Yang and Ren's scenes too, having people call Ruby out... but then return to a message of, 'Don't worry, you're actually doing just fine' before Ruby is forced to actually change.
None of which even touches on May calling her "kid" in this moment. That continues to be a convenient way of absolving Ruby of any responsibility. When she wants to steal airships or Amity Tower, she's an adult everyone should listen to, the leader of this war. When the story wants to absolve her of previously mentioned flaws, she becomes a kid who shouldn't "beat herself up." I said years ago that RWBY couldn't continue to let the group be both children and adults simultaneously, yet here we are.
So that was a thoroughly disappointing scene. Ruby gets her moment to look sad and defeated, listing "the grimm, the crater, Nora, Penny" as problems she doesn't know how to solve. Note that 'Immortal witch attacking the city I've helped trap here' isn't included in that list. Ruby is still ignoring Salem herself and no one in the group is picking up where May left off, challenging her to do more than wring her hands over things others are already trying to take care of: Ironwood is fighting the grimm, May has gone off to help the crater, Klein is patching up Nora and Penny. Ruby, as one flawed individual, should not be expected to come up with a solution to everything, but she does need to stop acting like she can come up with a solution to everything when it matters most (office scene) and rejecting others' solutions when they ask for her help (Ironwood, May).
If it feels like I'm dragging the flawed, traumatized teenager too much, it's not in an effort to ignore those aspects of her identity. Rather, it's because she's also the licensed huntress who wrested control from a world leader and violently demanded she be put in charge of this battle. Ruby, by her own actions, is now responsible for dealing with these problems, or admitting she was wrong and letting others take the lead, without purposefully derailing their plans. She doesn't get to suddenly go, "I don't know," cry a little, and get sympathetic pats.
But of course that's precisely what happens, courtesy of Weiss.
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During this whole scene I kept wondering why no one was celebrating Nora waking up, especially when Ruby outright mentions her. Have they just not noticed given all the Penny drama? Because Nora absolutely woke up.
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Aaaand went back to sleep, I guess. What was the point of that POV shot? No worries though, she'll wake up again in a minute.
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Willow arrives and announces that they can fix the power (and Penny) using the generator at the edge of the property. I'm convinced RT doesn't actually know what a generator is because the characters are acting like it's some super special device that only richy-rich could possibly have. Whitley says that it's the SDC executives who have their "own power supply" and that it's "extremely unfair." Now, don't get me wrong, a good generator powering large portions of your house can run you 30k+, but you can also get one that plugs into your extension cord and powers your fridge for a couple hundred. There's absolutely a class issue here, just not the one Whitley and Weiss seem to be commenting on. They make a generator sound like the sort of device that only a politician-CEO could possible have and it's weird.
Likely, it sounds weird because it's a choppy way of getting Whitley to bring up the wealth disparity so he can then go, 'That's right! We're crazy rich with a company housing tons of ships! We can use those to evacuate Mantle.' Awkwardness aside, I do like that the Schnee wealth is being used for good purposes, but... evacuate where? To the city currently under attack by a giant whale? In a RWBY that wasn't determined to demonize Ironwood, this would have been a great plot point during the office scene instead, with Weiss offering her services to Ironwood, even if the group decides that a continued evacuation still isn't possible.
Instead, we get it here from Whitley. Do I need to point out the obvious? That Whitley is the MVP of this episode? He's done more good in an HOUR than the group has managed in a year. Give this kid some training and make him a huntsmen instead.
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We're given a (very pretty!) shot of the shattered moon because it wouldn't be RWBY if we weren't continually reminded that gods once wiped out humanity before destroying part of a celestial body... and absolutely no one talks about that lol.
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Blake's coat might not make any sense for her color scheme, but it does make her easy to spot as she and Ruby run across the grounds. Oh my god, they're actually doing something together! It only took eight years. They even get a lovely talk where Blake admits how much she looks up to Ruby, despite her being younger, and once again I'm struck at how much more I would have loved this scene if it had appeared elsewhere in the series. It is, indeed, as sweet and emotional as all the RWBY GIF-ers are claiming... provided you overlook that this is the exact opposite of what Ruby needs to hear right now. She doesn't need to hear that she's more mature and reliable than her elders when she's functioning under a "We don't need adults" mentality. She doesn't need to hear that not knowing what to do is totally fine, not when that led to her turning on Ironwood, despite not knowing how to stop Salem. She doesn't need to hear that "doing something" — doing anything — is a strength, because Ruby keeps avoiding the big problems for smaller ones she's comfortable with, like standing by Penny's bedside instead of deciding between Mantle and Atlas. Blake's speech is heartfelt, but it's a speech that suits a Beacon days Ruby who is having some doubts about her leadership skills, not the girl whose impulsive — and now lack of — actions is having world-wide repercussions. Everyone is babying Ruby to a staggering degree. It's like if we had a med show where the doctor is standing by the bedside of a coding patient, fretting between two treatments. 'Don't worry,' their colleague says, patting their shoulder. 'I've always looked up to you. You'll do something when you're ready' and then they continue to watch the patient, you know, die.
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Also: who does Ruby look up to? Everyone talks about how much they depend on and trust Ruby, but who does Ruby look to for guidance? A number of her problems stem from the fact that she has rejected the advice of everyone who has tried to help her improve: Qrow, Ozpin, Ironwood, even Yang. Ruby is presented as the pinnacle of what to strive for in a leader, rather than a leader who has only been doing this for two years and still has a great deal to learn.
Anyway, they get the generator on and the Hound shows up.
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I am begging RT to just make RWBY a horror story. All their best scenes the last three years have been horror I am bEGGING —
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Anyway, while Ruby waits to be eaten we cut to Willow and Klein, the former of which is reaching for her bottle, pulling back, reaching again, all while her hand shakes. This is good. This is what we should have gotten with Qrow. Which isn't to say that their (or anyone's) addiction should be identical, but rather that this is a far more engaging and complex look at addiction than what our birb got. Willow tells us that she doesn't drink in the dark despite bringing the bottle with her; tries to resist drinking when she's scared and ultimately fails. Qrow just decided to stop drinking after decades of addiction, seemingly for no reason, and that was that. Why is a side character we only met this volume written better than one of the main cast?
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Blake manages to call Weiss about the Hound and she asks if Whitley can handle the airships without her. I mean, I assume so given that Weiss is looking at the bookshelves while Whitley does all the work lol. He makes a teasing comment about how he can if she can handle that grimm and she comments that they still need to work on his "attitude."
No they don't. Weiss stuck a weapon in her kid brother's face. Whitley made a joke. Even if Weiss' comment is likewise meant to be read as teasing, it's clear that we've bypassed any meaningful conversation between them. That hug was supposed to be a Fix Everything moment even though, as I've laid out elsewhere, it didn't even come close.
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We cut back to Ruby getting thrown through a wall into the backyard and the Hound creepily coming after her. She's freaked out by this clearly abnormal grimm and Blake is weirdly... not? "It's just a grimm. Just focus!" Uh, it's obviously not. Have we reached the traumatized, sleep-deprived point where the group is sinking into full-blown denial? I wouldn't be surprised. They've been awake for like... 40+ hours.
Because the Hound knocks Ruby out with a single hit. Just, bam, she's down. "Focusing" is not the solution here.
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Weiss calls to warn the others about the grimm, telling them to stick together. Willow (understandably) starts freaking out and flees the room (classic horror trope!). Klein is left alone when Penny wakes up with red eyes. Oh no!
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Don't worry. You know nothing meaningful happens.
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She shoves Klein before (somehow?) resisting the hack, her Maiden powers going wild in the process. Just when it looks as if Penny might cause some serious damage, Nora wakes up, takes her hand, and says, I kid you not:
"Hey... no one is going to make you do anything you don't want to do... It's just a part of you. Don't forget about the rest."
Okay. I want to re-emphasize that I love hopeful, uplifting, victory-won-through-the-power-of-love stories. Istg I'm not dead inside, it's just that RWBY does this so badly. I mean, what is this? It has similarities to the character shouting, 'No! Resist!' to their mind-controlled ally, but this is not presented as a desperate, last-ditch effort by Nora. She just speaks like this is the most obvious truth in the world. If you don't want to have your mind taken over... just don't! It's that simple. The problem definitely isn't that Watts has changed her coding and has implemented a command she can't override, it's that Penny has forgotten about the "rest" of her personhood.
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And this works. Granted, not for long, but we leave Nora having successfully calmed Penny down and until her eyes unexpectedly go red again scenes later, we're left assuming that this is a permanent solution. That, imo anyway, is taking the Power of Love too far, overriding the basic reality of Penny being hacked. It’s not a personal failing she must overcome, it’s an external attack. I would have rather had Nora react to the scars she saw on her arm, or have a moment with Klein, or get some love from the group. Not a wakes up, falls asleep, wakes up again to save Penny with a Ruby level 'Just ignore reality' pep-talk, then back to sleep again.
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So Penny isn't attacking her allies, or mistakenly hurting her allies with wild Maiden powers. Not that the group doesn't have enough to deal with, but still. Weiss arrives to help with the Hound and attempts a new summon, only to fail when two minor grimm burrow up into her glyphs. I really enjoyed that moment, both for the wing visual and the knowledge that Weiss' glyphs can fail if you break them somehow (which makes sense). Also, I just like that she failed in general? Weiss is, as per usual now, about to demonstrate just how OP she is compared to the rest of the team, so it was nice to see her faltering here.
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The Hound tries to make off with Ruby and Blake does an excellent job of keeping it tethered. Ruby finally wakes, only to realize that the grimm is actually after Penny since it's staring at her power up through the window, no longer trying to escape. Moments like this remind me that there's someone on RT's writing team that knows what they're doing, at least some of the time. The assumption that the Hound is after Ruby as a SEW, the surprise that it's actually Penny, realizing it holds up because Ruby is covered in Penny's blood and Blake is not... that's all nice, tight plotting. More of that please!
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The Hound drops her and Ruby's aura shatters when she hits the ground. I want everyone to remember this moment as an example of how strong the Hound is. The group may be tired, but unlike YJR they've been sitting around in the Schnee manor for a number of hours, regaining strength. We saw the Hound hit Ruby twice — once through the wall and once to knock her out — and then she falls from a not very high distance for a huntress, yet her aura is toast. That's the level of power and skill the Hound possesses. Decimating YJR, knocking Oscar out, same for Ruby, avoiding Blake and Weiss' hits, soon to treat Penny like a ragdoll. Just remember all this for the episode's end.
Blake tells Weiss she'll take care of Ruby, you go help the others. Yay breaking up the duos more! Bad timing though as the new acid-spitting grimm pops out of the ground and Blake is now left alone to face it.
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Weiss re-enters the mansion, knowing the Hound is somewhere nearby, but not where. Suddenly, Willow's voice sounds through her scroll with an, "Above you!" which... doesn't keep Weiss from getting hit lol. But it's the thought that counts! Willow has accessed the cameras she's set up throughout the manor, watching the Hound's movements, and I have to say, that is a WAY better use of her separation from Klein than I thought we were getting. I legit thought they'd have Willow run away in a panic, meet the Hound, die, and then Weiss could be sad about losing her mom.
It does say something about RWBY's writing that this was my knee-jerk theory, as well as my surprise when we got something way better.
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The Hound runs off, uninterested in Weiss, and she asks Willow to keep tabs on it. It heads for Whitley next (also covered in Penny's blood) and very creepily stalks him in the office with a, "I know you're here." Whitley is seconds away from being Hound chow before one of Weiss' boars pin it against the wall. He runs, then runs BACK to finish deploying the airships, before finally escaping assumed death. Goddamn this boy is pulling his weight.
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I assume all these ships are automated then? I hope someone takes a moment to call May. Otherwise it's going to be super weird for the Mantle citizens if a fleet of SDC ships just show up and hover there...
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I don't entirely understand how Weiss saved him though. She's nowhere to be seen when Whitley leaves and he runs a fair distance before he and Willow encounter Weiss again. We know her summons don't have to keep right next to her, but are they capable of rudimentary thought, attacking an enemy — and an enemy only — despite Weiss being a couple corridors down and unable to see the current battlefield? I don't know. In another series I'd theorize that this was a deliberate hint, a way to clue us into the fact that Willow, someone who we currently know almost nothing about, had training in the past and summoned the boar herself. Weiss and Winter certainly didn't get that hereditary skill from Jacques. Hell, we might still get that, Weiss reacting with confusion next episode when Whitley thanks her for the boar, but I doubt it. That scene with Ruby and the Hound aside, the show isn't this good at laying groundwork and then following up on it.
Case in point: Weiss says, "I didn't forget you" to Whitley after he gets away from the Hound, the moment trying to harken back to her promise to Willow. Key word is "trying." Because she absolutely forgot him! Weiss threatened and ignored Whitley until he proved his usefulness. I also shouldn't need to point out that, "Don't forget your brother" does not mean, "Don't let your brother die a horrible death by abnormal grimm." Weiss acts like her saving him is a fulfillment of her promise, rather than just the most basic of human decency. And also, you know, her job.
So that part is frustrating. The entire Schnee dynamic is a mess, from Weiss making a joke of her father's arrest, to Willow (presumably) fixing their relationship by putting a hand on her daughter's shoulder. Okay.
Then Weiss cuts off the Hound by summoning a giant wall of ice. My brain, every time this happens:
YOU COULD HAVE FIXED THE HOLE IN MANTLE'S WALL.
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Moving on, Blake's fight against the acid... thing has some great choreography, including Blake using her semblance which we haven't seen in AGES. 
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I really like the fight itself, just not what Blake is shouting the whole time. "I need you, Ruby! We all need you!" This has really gotten ridiculous. Ruby is presented as everyone's sole savior despite failing time and time again. It's not that I don't think Blake as a character should have faith in her leader, it's that I don't think the writers should be crafting a story where everyone puts their unshakable hopes in an untrained, disloyal, impulsive 17 year old. I mean, Ruby is currently unconscious, yet Blake is acting like if she doesn't wake up — she, as an individual, if Ruby Rose does not re-join this fight — then all is lost. If Ruby doesn't save them, no one can. Which is, of course, absurd on numerous levels. Blake doesn't need the passed out, aura-less Ruby right now, she needs the still very healthy Weiss pulling out multiple summons and an ice wall! Use your scroll and call for backup again.
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But of course, Ruby wakes up and kills the new, terrifying grimm with a single hit. It's a preview of what's to come with the Hound and it's just as ridiculous here as it will be there.
Speaking of the Hound, am I the only one who thought this was... cute?
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I can't possibly be the only one. That head-tilt is exactly what my dogs do and my brain instinctively went, "Aww, puppy!"
Murderous puppy.
The Hound realizes none of the Schnees are who it's looking for and runs off. Penny, meanwhile, has been fully taken over because, well, that's just what's convenient now. She resists long enough keep Amity up, then succumbs, then resists to apologize to Ruby, then succumbs, then resists because Nora asked her to, then succumbs once it's time to knock her out. If RWBY was willing to commit to consequences, Penny would have been taken over and that was that. The characters would need to deal with whatever outcome happens as a result. Instead, the show very carefully avoids any of those pesky consequences by having Penny successfully resisting at key moments, despite no explanation of how she's managing that.
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She shoves Klein again (Klein is having a Bad Time) and starts walking down the main steps. When Whitley wants to know where the hell she's going, Penny mechanically responds that she must "Open the vault, then self-destruct." I suppose the change Watts made was the self-destruct order? Ironwood obviously wants the vault open, though not necessarily Penny's death. Think what you will of his moral compass, she's a damn powerful ally — a research project, perhaps — and a Maiden to boot. At the very least, her death may give the powers to someone even worse.
God, please don't let them have brought Penny back and made her a Maiden just to kill her again.
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The Hound arrives though and, as said, knocks Penny out. We're back to square one with her, then. Note though that this attack is near instantaneous. She grabs its hands one second, is hanging limply the next. Wow, the Hound sure is a terrifying antagonist!
Not for long.
"That's enough," Ruby says and one-shots it with her eyes.
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Now, I want to talk for a moment about the implications of that line. "That's enough." Obviously Ruby is #done with this situation and emotionally unwilling to let the Hound kidnap Penny (congratulations, Nuts and Dolts shippers), but there's a meta reading here as well. Not intentional, but glaring to me nonetheless. Basically, the idea that the Hound has, from a plot perspective, done enough. It has served its singular purpose. It kidnapped Oscar and now it dies. Never-mind how insanely powerful we've established the Hound to be, never-mind how Ruby's eyes also work or don't work according to whether anything of actual import is on the line. From a plot perspective "that's enough" and the Hound can be disposed of instantly. It got Oscar and gave us an episode of filler creepiness. Move along now.
The idea behind Ruby's eyes isn't bad, but the execution absolutely is. RT has undermined a huge portion of the stakes by giving their protagonist an instant kill-shot that always works precisely when she needs it to. Starting with the Apathy, we have yet to get a moment where Ruby's eyes fail to save the day when she really needs them to, no matter how incredible the challenge. The Hound was very intentionally written to be a grimm outside of the group's current power level. It thinks, it talks, they literally can't touch it. This creates the expectation that the group will need to grow stronger — or at least become smarter — in order to surmount this new obstacle, yet Ruby's eyes undermine all of that. The group hasn't grown in years, the show just makes enemies weaker as needed (Ace Ops), or has Ruby pull out her eyes as a trump card. It wouldn't be that bad if we'd at least gotten a good battle out of it, one where the group gets close to defeating the Hound on their own, but needs Ruby's eyes to finish it off. Instead, she literally walks up without any aura, announces to the audience that this antagonist's time is up, and blasts it out a window.
Granted, Ruby's eyes don't completely finish it. The Hound pulls itself to its feet and we see this.
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Yup, that's a guy and yup, those are silver eyes.
I would like to issue a formal apology to the "It's secretly Summer!" theorists in the fandom. I mean, I still think it would be ridiculous (and at this point highly improbable) that Ruby's dead mother has actually been a grimm mutant this whole time, just hanging out in Salem's realm while she waits for the plot to start before attacking the world, and then sends some no-name faunus dude after the group instead of their leader's mother for extra, emotional torture... but you all were definitely right about the “It's a person” part! I... don't know how I feel about this. Admittedly, it seems to be a logical continuation of the other grimm-human hybrids we've seen — namely Cinder and Salem herself — and it finally explains why Salem wants Ruby alive (even though it actually doesn't because WHY did she want more SEWs for Hound grimm when she wasn't even attacking back then? And already has all these other insanely powerful tools??), but at the same time, it feels like it's complicating a story that doesn't need further complications. The group fights monsters and has an immortal enemy. You don't need to add 'Some of those monsters are secretly human' to the mix.
It doesn't hurt that this twist is giving me Attack on Titan vibes, which, ew. A dark time in my fandom life, folks.
The Hound staggers a few steps before Whitley and Willow dump a suit of armor on it. That's all it takes to kill the most dangerous grimm we've ever seen: a single flash of silver eyes and some heavy metal. This also wreaks havoc with the implication that Salem wants SEWs alive because they create such powerful grimm. Obviously not. I mean yeah, normal huntsmen are going to have serious  problems, we’ve seen that this volume, but any other SEWs nearby will take a Hound out instantaneously. For a villain with so many other powerful abilities — immortality, magic, endless normal grimm, her nifty soup — Salem would be much better served just killing SEWs straight out. Clearly, creating Hounds isn't worth the effort.
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The Hound leaves some bones behind and Ruby collapses to her knees, overcome with the knowledge that this was once a person. Again, uncomfortable Attack on Titan parallels.
We finish our premiere with Cinder clearing away rubble to reveal Watts. Honestly, I like that we ended on this because her rescue is hilarious. She just slings him over her shoulders like a sack of potatoes and blasts off with her magic fire feet. Fantastic.
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Note though that with this scene we've seen almost everything from the clip and the trailer. What's to come in the rest of Volume 8? No idea. Outside of Winter leading the charge with the bomb, we got it all here.
Time to update the bingo board!
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I'm crossing off "Introducing new grimm that are quickly abandoned." Between the Hound and acid-dude both falling to a single blast/cut from Ruby, we've more than earned this square.
It doesn't look as if we'll get another Watts-Jacques team-up now that he's left, but you never know.
Maria's got me worried. I feel like her Yoda fight against Neo is the one thing she'll be allowed to do this volume, but given that we didn't see anyone except Ruby's group this episode, we don't yet know whether the story is now ignoring her and Pietro, or if they'll re-appear in another episode like YJR.  
Qrow is free. Will he get a drink before trying to murder Ironwood? Perhaps.
Still no bingo :(
All in all, the episode was by no means horrible. I think there were lots of horrible parts, but also some legitimately well executed moments, fun action, and scenes that I can easily imagine as squee worthy if you lean back and squint. Everything is comparative and in the growing collection of bad RWBY episodes, this one isn't securing a top slot. Which doesn't mean I think it's good, just... not as bad as it could have been and primarily only bad due to long-running problems, not things this specific episode has done. That's my bar then, so low it has officially entered the underworld.
Still, RWBY is back and a part of me is eager to see where this volume takes us, for better or for worse.
Until next week! 💜
[Ko-Fi]
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audikatia · 2 years
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if you receive this message you have to tell me some of the best books you read this year!! thank you <3
Hello! I love this! I read a couple really great books this year haha
Not including rereads of some of my favorites, the best books I read this year were (in the order that I read them):
Cloud Atlas by Daniel Mitchell - Beautiful, beautiful piece of fiction that spans over centuries and generations and is just absolutely gorgeous
Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo - late to the party with this, but a fantastical YA duology of heists and complicated love and emotional baggage
Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater - the latest installment in my favorite universe, but also just a really fantastic piece of action writing on its own, tbh
Borne by Jeff Vandermeer - post-apocalyptic future scifi that was hopeful and fantastic and introspective and beautiful
The Burning Girls by C. J. Tudor - a religious thriller murder mystery... there were dead crows in a church, what else could I want?
Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo - Repressed gay/bisexual men deal with ghosts in the south while not dealing with their grief in a healthy way or doing their graduate work either. Beautiful writing and also they talked a lot about the importance of air conditioning. Also, street racing. LORD. I LOVED THIS. I AM FOAMING AT THE MOUTH ABOUT THIS.
Fuzz by Mary Roach - Non-fiction book about animals breaking the law and humans who try to hold animals responsible for breaking the law. Spoiler alert: the dingo did eat the baby. Mary Roach could write about literally anything and I would love it.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - History of the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic. Keefe is one of the best investigative journalists I have ever read; it's so comprehensive and fascinating.
The Girl in the Haystack by Bryon MacWilliams - Biography of a woman who escaped the Nazis during WWII by hiding in haystacks with her dog. She kept quiet about her survival story for years until Trump's time in office when the similarities to his politics were too similar to Hitler's rise and she felt she could no longer stay quiet. She relayed her story to the author, who I had the pleasure of speaking with a few months ago.
Honorable Mentionings to:
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (Horse racing on a November beach, except the horses want to eat you and also people are falling in love and losing their house. Very atmospheric)
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (People are mysteriously disappearing/dying and there ghosts and people are falling in love. Are we sensing a theme about what I like to read about?)
Einstein's Dream's by Alan P. Lightman (what if time was different and we all wanted our minds fucked with? This was like beautiful poetry and science all at once)
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff (the most comprehensive book about the Salem Witch Trials I have ever read ever, omg. And I have read a few, haha)
Rabid by Bill Wasik (honestly, the most fun I have ever had reading a book about rabies)
The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele (really fascinating bit of history about the "dark" ages, which is a time in history I don't really know much about. Resonated amazingly with everything going on today, which was awesome, and was excellent research for Transubstantiation haha)
The Anatomy of Evil by Dr. Michael H. Stone (the science of how serial killers are so fucked up, I love it)
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docholligay · 3 years
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A Silent Voice--Koe no Kitachi
This movie has come up a couple times for Eight Days and various other things I’ve done, which was basically all I knew about it, until it was sponsored as a one-off by @iscahwynn. The first time I watched the movie, I felt a lot of ways about it at once. It was certainly one of the most interesting “anime movies” that had ever been recommended to me, and had a capacity and quality of humanity that I really didn’t expect going into it. 
As always, non-spoilery review leads, spoilers under the cut. 
A Silent Voice, (Which is called The Shape of Voice on my subs) if you read the blurb, is about a boy trying to make restitution for a deaf girl he bullied horrendously in elementary school. That’s a fair assessment, but I also don’t think it’s a complete one. The movie is really about the nature of alienation and friendship, and how a lot of lonely people have at least some culpability for that loneliness. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say I liked it. I had some issues with it that I’ll go into in the longer spoiler review, but being as its on Netflix right now, if you have any interest in seeing it, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all. 
I”m not going to go through a play by play of the film itself, I figure if you’re reading this you’re familiar with the general narrative of the film and I’m not super interested in padding this out for the mere word count.  
Also, the main character’s names are really similar: Shoko and Shoyo, so I’m going to call Shoyo by his patronymic, Ishida, for clarity. 
You feel, or at least this viewer felt, nothing but sadness and frustration for poor Shoko, who did nothing but have the audacity to show up at school. One thing I think this movie does an excellent job with is showing how resentment creeps in over the most minor of accommodations. We see at first, the kids be taken in by the novelty of writing in Shoko’s notebook in order to accommodate her and talk to her. Then we see it turn annoying, when she wants to be brought into conversations on a regular basis, and they don’t want to do that. It turns to hatred and resentment, as it gets easier and easier to simply ignore her or make fun of her. When a teacher comes in to teach them some sign language at ten minutes a day, for all but one student, this is too much effort for them to make. 
It escalates with Ishida himself repeatedly yanking her hearing aids out of her ears and throwing them out of the window, into the trash, etc, at one point ripping them out with such force that her ear bleeds. His punishment for this cruelty is essentially that his mother has to pay back, or choose to pay back, all the money lost for the hearing aids to Shoko’s mother, but on a more personal level, his classmates, actually faced with consequences, turn on him and implicate him as the sole actor in all of the cruelty aimed toward Shoko. 
And I’m fine with him reaping the whirlwind, let’s not mistake that, but I do have one compelling question: 
There are 106 schools for the D/deaf in Japan, and you couldn’t put your child into one of them? I have no idea if Japan has any equivalent of the ADA whatsoever, and the internet seems to suggest that the rights and education of D/deaf people in Japan is pretty woeful, but this really annoyed the shit out of me. I mean, I’m supposed to feel for Shoko, so I suppose that didn’t detract from what the movie wanted to do in that right, but man did it make me irritated with every single adult involved. 
I think some of the most interesting things that come out of the movie are the ways in which it deals with depersonalization and isolation. 
After we see Ishida’s fall from grace, if you will, when in middle school, people are (rightly) told that he’s a bully. People don’t want to be around him, and while, again, I do not feel particularly sorry for him, there’s definitely something deeply human and deeply disturbing about the way they make him the pariah of it all, even though they were mostly all involved in treating Shoko cruelly, or at the very least, at a distance. It’s easier to believe that it was Ishida’s sin specifically, and that they bear no responsibility for their part in the cruelty toward her. 
When this happens, by the time we meet up with him, we see that he sees the world of people with the letter X across their faces, as a sign that he no longer thinks of them as people, more like objects or happenings that are best to be avoided. He goes so far as to say that he never looks anyone in the face anymore. Its a very visually powerful way of showing how Ishida, when he is hurt, walls himself off in the world, while, even when we see Shoko later, there’s no indication that she has done such (Though admittedly, the vast majority of the movie is through the eyes of Ishida) 
It isn’t until Ishida defends Nagatsuka, a fat kid with curly hair, from getting his bike stolen by giving his up as an option instead, that he begins to see people in any different way. And it isn’t even in the moment that he does something, but when Nagatsuka returns his bike, found in a rice field, that the x falls away from his face and he begins to see someone as a fully realized human. A cynical viewer, who might be me, would see this as an acknowledgement that Ishida’s problem is not seeing people outside of their relationship to and treatment of him. That it is only with returned kindness that he can see Nagatsuka as human, defending him only because he recalls the shame of having been so cruel to Shoko. 
Which I actually don’t have a problem with! I think it would go fairly far to show that he’s learned something from the Shoko situation, for him to expect no inkling of humanity but still be so desirous to remove that shame that he acts anyway. I just don’t know if that’s the intention of the narrative, even having seen it several times now. 
“Friendship lies somewhere beyond things like words and logic” is one of the best lines from the movie, and I think it does a fairly good job of doing that as it calls up a large group from the past. It’s complicated, because I actually thought the group aspect was very interesting, particularly the incident on the bridge where Ishida, every fairly, tells each of them how they failed, what their personal sin is, and he isn’t wrong! The first time I watched it, I found myself screaming at it, the reckoning of this responsibility finally shared. 
But the downside of all of these characters is that the focus on Shoko and Ishida, as well as any real development of feelings and forgiveness between them, feels very rushed. We get to the end of the story, with Ishida having saved Shoko’s life and hurting himself in the process. SO much emotional and character development gets laid down in a five minute scene, and while the scene itself does lend a lot of strength to the characters for that, I found myself more frustrated that we couldn’t have seen this sooner, and come out over time. Unfortunately the time with the ancillary characters feels a bit wasted, given what ends up being sacrificed for it. 
Some parts of the movie are tricky for me to fully allow myself to fall into, at best. It’s particularly difficult for me to see Ishida as a huge victim given the exceptional level of his cruelty to Shoko, and if he really only pays until he’s in high school, while that may play as “forever” to a younger audience, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for his plight. This isn’t following him to his damn job. Maybe I’m a jackass, and that’s why I can’t go with it in the way the film seems to want me to, or maybe it’s that I was also horrifically bullied to the point of tears as a child, and I do not feel any particular sadness for the ways in which some of my own bullies were socially punished in high school. I don’t want him to kill himself, I want him to be better, and honestly the movie could have really really worked for me if we just saw the developing of his friendship with Nagatsuka and his turning into a better, softer person. This kind of goes into what I was talking about earlier--in a two hour movie, there just isn’t the time for all the side characters as well as the full development of the mains. We would have been better off just having Ishida, Shoko, and Nagatsuka. I fell you could have told a quite complete story with that. I think if those three characters had been more carefully written, I could have ADORED this movie, instead of the middle place I end up with in it. 
But instead we come to the question of Shoko. I kinda suck my teeth at Shoko’s treatment in the film. Her open hearted kindness was heart-breaking as a child, the way she just wanted to be friends and she still had that belief that it could all work if she just did as adults told her and was NICE, and it’s extremely effective.  But when we get to the high school Shoko and we’re still meant to see her as being this very mild, very apologetic, very sad person with no friends...it stops being a tragedy of the character individually and starts being a way of writing a disabled character as someone for our protagonist to act upon. Shoko is never really given her own moment of anger for herself, her own rich life outside of Ishida and the friends he brings to her. We don’t see her thoughts except as they relate to Ishida. We’re meant to believe she has no one outside of her sister when Ishida decides to reconnect with her, a tragedy of convenience that allows Ishida’s “work” to be valuable to more than just him. Even her own sorrow and suicide attempt seem to have so much more to do with the further of Ishida’s character than the oppressive social forces that have conspired against Shoko. 
And we ALMOST get there. The end conversation between the two of them, where he says he understood her in ways that were convenient for him, and that because of that he failed to see her own pain and isolation, is amazing. Great, and I wish it would have come sooner and that we could have had some real payoff from that conversation that showed their relationship deepening in a way that served both Shoko and Ishida. But it comes at the tail end, and the “solution” we get all has to do with Ishida and his embracing of humanity, which I want, but not at the expense of Shoko’s character, who I liked very much and longed for a richer treatment of. 
The romantic element between them is frustrating. Not only because he was her very very overt bully, I might even go so far as to say abuser, but because it feels so tiresome when the movie clearly has bigger fish to fry, and in many ways, does fry them!  It doesn’t help that it is like quite a few things, painfully rushed, and when she falls for him, it’s left to the viewer to supply your own reasons that don’t quite make sense. It adds a layer to the story that I personally felt it did not need, even as cute as I find Shoko’s little flappy legs on the bed when she has her head buried in a pillow after trying to confess to Ishida, but he can’t understand what she’s saying. 
Basically, I think this movie watches better once. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say about anything, but the first time I saw this, I didn’t notice so keenly some of the things that niggled at me later. I think it’s pretty fucking enjoyable, in the one shot, to be honest! I think it’s an ambitious movie that is, at its best, trying to say something about the nature of bullying and that it not only harms the bullied but the bully themselves. And in some ways, I think it has absolutely brilliant moments with that, and reflections on the nature of friendship and what it takes.  But I think some of that ambition falls through, and feels a bit flat, when taken on the whole. 
Have you seen it? What did you think? 
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ronnytherandom · 3 years
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I forgot to watch content all week so i wrote about games ive been playing
9/2/2021: The Truman Show
You should fear your fears but embrace them and use them to guide you into the unknown, to explore and experience what life has to offer. Fear stands between you and the fullest experience of life so you must pass through it to better yourself. Heed not the walls built about you and the chains made to hold you. Though the architects insist it will preserve your life, containment is anathema to life. Do not take in faith the benevolence of powers that be; instead trust those who would support and liberate you, guide you through fear and into life.
As best I can lay it out, I think this is the philosophy of the Truman show but there is so much more to read into it also. There is critique of systems of commodification and celebrity (i.e. capitalism) reducing human beings to a consumable good as well as encouragement to find and pursue your goals despite adversity and even sensibility which is also tied to the illusion of economic responsibility. You can’t put a camera inside a human head, you can never “know” them without being an active and intrinsic part of their life, but also there is need for reciprocation. If one half exists with ulterior motive then the entire relationship is rotten; sincere humanity is what creates real connections. Without such your world is fake. A world built around one person is a world where no one can truly live. All these actors have given up basically their entire lives for the sake of watching Truman have his life built around him by outside forces, have allowed themselves to be commodified and dehumanised for the good of one man, Christoph. The man at the top has delusions of grandeur and thinks only of his own bottom line, he cares not for his subjects but simply wants them to do as he tells them because it benefits him to commodify their lives and interactions. Even then he cannot stand to lose control and in seeking to demonstrate Truman’s “realness” he structures his life so thoroughly that eventually there’s no reality left, only a script and adverts. But the people watching still empathise with Truman because everyone in the working class understands what it is to be trapped because real life is our own Truman show and one day we must all pass through fear, step out of the dome and create a real life for ourselves outside of the system of commodification which consumes everyone’s life and removes all realness and sincerity and emotional catharsis from it.
I unreservedly love this film.
14/2/2021: Assorted Game Reviews
Horizon Zero Dawn (Unfinished due to technical issues, 45 hours inc. parts of Frozen Wilds): This game is really cool and really fun. I think it is defined by its incredible setting which somehow creates a fresh feeling post-apocalyptic environment. Said environment creates intriguing alt-future lore and some very interesting environments to explore. I love the machine designs (especially tallnecks!) and was very sad to hear one of their contributing artists passed away recently but I’m glad their work lives on in this visually stunning game. I’m a sucker for Ubisoft-style open world games simply because it tickles a certain kind of itch and somehow this non-Ubisoft game has outdone Ubisoft on their own formula, which is hilarious, but also good for me as running around this world exploring and clearing map markers is engaging fun. Not least because of the combat. I have a minor criticism here that the combat feels slightly awkward on mouse and keyboard, the arrows never seem to go where I’m aiming, but aside from that the experience of fighting is a grand one. Enemies never lose their threat and I love the weak spot system the game employs which makes every tool useful in niche circumstance and rewards curiosity. It specifically manages this in a way that I feel the Witcher series could learn from if it ever returns; by making head on assault less viable and encouraging tactical hunting. I do feel this system makes hunting robots so fun that by contrast hunting humans becomes a chore however, though I noted this improves in the dlc with the addition of humans with elemental weaknesses limited in number as they are. I cannot speak for the story in entirety but what I encountered was pretty good, though I feel as if it was only just really getting going at the point where I could not continue. I find Aloy to be a compelling and well portrayed protagonist and though I can guess about her origin and the ultimate end of the alt-future apocalypse I still want to see how it plays out on screen, so will return to this as soon as I’ve fixed it.
Rimworld (122 hours. Familiar with but do not own Royalty Expansion):
Rimworld is one of those super special games that I don’t think I have a single problem with. Fair warning it can be brutal and is heavily dependent on RNG but this allows it to create truly unique and interesting scenarios on a constant basis. In the wider perspective it could be described as formulaic, with regular cycles of managing the settlement between raids and random events, but the devils in the details. Colonist traits, health and skills dictate how you play and sometimes you’ll be forced to adapt as some colonists simply refuse to perform some tasks. The depth of health particularly amuses me, in that each little part of someone’s body is modelled in a way. If you’re in a firefight you may take a single bullet which grazes your finger and you’re fine. Alternately it could pierce your human leather cowboy hat, your skull and kill you instantly and the game will tell you exactly what happened. The risk/reward element is addictive enough, and that’s without accounting for just how cool it is to see your colony slowly expand. Establishing more and more options for crafting is fun and shows off the full range of different items in the game which is fucking extensive. Between clothing, weapons, armour, sculpture and drugs to name only a few you have the opportunity to create many varied production lines either for your colonists or to trade for money and there is a lot of fun to be had here as well as it is quite satisfying to see psychoid you have grown personally become the cocaine your colonists snort to help them stay awake on limited sleep. From an archaeologist’s perspective it is especially cool to look back over your base and see the hints of how and why structures were built and remember the history of your limitations and development through structure. I think the lore of the universe is really cool too, a very 40k-esque kind of place except with far less order, somehow. But the universe does an excellent job of feeling alive and moving constantly on both a planetary and interstellar level. You can fully believe that while you build wooden shacks to shield yourself from terrifyingly low temperatures there are simultaneously rich pieces of shit living it up on the glitterworld that’s one system over. The music does an excellent job of creating the wild west frontier atmosphere the game cultivates to great effect. Ultimately, for just being a grid with a series of different numbers attached, this game does a fantastic job of creating a compelling, brutal and very real colony management experience. I dont think I can properly put into words the grandness and scope of this one. I didnt even mention the modding scene, which is expansive and tailors to basically any need you could have. The Rim is a terrifying place but theres so much fun to be had.
Factorio (86 hours, mostly 1.1): Having completed a game of Factorio I can tell you reliably that this is one of the best games ever made, thoroughly addictive and fun. If you like numbers, logistics, TRAINS, its gonna be your thing. Not to mention its probably the only documented case of a game with no bugs (so far as official forums are concerned). Strictly speaking this games combat is not the most engrossing thing but good lord do you feel it when you acquire a flamethrower. The way each aspect of the game (production, research, logistics, combat, upgrades for everything therein) feeds into the next is a really well constructed balancing act such that you must experience the full game in order to complete it and I always appreciate this kind of design. I think its one of the best tenets of factory game design especially as its something present in Satisfactory too. Beyond all of this generalised good the game is also excellent in its intricacies, the architecture necessary to build a maximum efficiency base, the level of planning and organisation that can be employed is mind-blowing. Not to mention the mod community, factorion is already an extensive experience and some mad bastards have seen fit to complicate it further, hats off to them. This really is a great moment in gaming.
 Destiny 2 (198 hours, all expansions, played some post Forsaken release, mostly Season of Arrivals onwards, spent roughly £20 on microtransactions):
This is a very interesting and enjoyable experience, but I must say it can be a bit controversial at times. What its does particularly well is moment to moment gameplay and design in all aspects. The game is stunning; between environments, cosmetics, shaders ships and ghosts there’s a vast range of incredible things to see, all rooted in the “pseudo-magi-science” aesthetic it’s got going on. The class design is excellent and you really do feel like you embody this rampaging madman / agile gunman / space wizard archetype, whichever you choose to play. The abilities, especially supers, are very satisfying. Everything has heft and power behind it which can be felt in all aspects of design; sound and animation is top notch. Movement is cool, you can feel how fast you move both on foot and in vehicles and the navigation has a little fun subtlety depending on your class jump, even if you can bounce unpredictably occasionally. But for the love of god why is the wall kick in there? It has only ever served to push me from a ledge into a bottomless pit. You're looking to remove antiquated content? Start there. Some guns are not so good to shoot but there’s such a great range of guns that are fun its like complaining about one drop in an ocean; and enemies are fun to shoot at, each faction distinct in meaningful ways and presenting an effective challenge. Speaking of oceans, that’s one way to describe the lore. I haven’t dived too deep but it keeps going down forever and everything I’ve read is intriguing. As a former Elder Scrolls lore nut this is something I could definitely sink my teeth into, though its much more of a pulpy sci-fi vibe than a pure nonsense vibe. I do think the game has a bit of a loot problem, primarily in regards to the conflict between high stats and looking good. This should never be a conflict, and yes you can apply ornaments to any purple gear but that’s not enough when I spend the entire time grinding power levels and thus must change armour and weapons on a constant basis to progress. This game needs a true transmog system and if not that, rethink how gear power level works. Perhaps rather than earning new instances of gear you always possess a version of it and the loot you acquire in missions just upgrades your instance to your current overall power level? This would serve to do away with the current upgrade system which I think is a needless additional grind. Perhaps it could be retained in using enhancement cores to empower gear as present but necessitating a whole upgrade module to keep your favourite weapon on hand is kind of painful honestly. There is also at present the issue of sunsetting gear, mildly controversial to say the least. If it’s necessary to streamline the game and make it function moving forward so be it but surely loot pools should be adjusted so you can actually get useful loot from older locations? And why sunset personal instances of gear which can be acquired at the regular power level anyway? I had to throw away my favourite bow and hunt down a new version of the exact same weapon for… what reason? I do think destination navigation leaves a little to be desired also. I get that having a physical hub world is meaningful but Destiny does not have a very extroverted community; I can count the times someone noticed me in the tower on one hand. And its not even like there’s fun activities to be found in the same sense as say Deep Rock Galactic, which really does take advantage of its hub. Perhaps for players who simply want to go about their business all of the vendors could be set into a menu system where just clicking an icon takes you to their menu from anywhere in the system rather than, per se, having to go through an entire loading screen (Which takes you to orbit and back) to reach a location which serves simply as the front for four menus. These are established player problems. As a dedicated PvE player I can say that this game is immensely fun in combat and growing in power does feel really good. It’s something I recommend getting into, there’s just some very large creases that need ironing which the Bungie should really take the time to address rather than pushing out new in game content every three months.
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millennialdemon · 3 years
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Coming off of true trainwrecks the likes of Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven, I actually came out of Dark Cat with a sense of respect and gratitude for its competence. 
For the uninitiated, Dark Cat is a notoriously bad OVA from 1991 that you will see listed in many Worst Anime Ever countdowns. It follows 2 brothers, “dark cats” Hyoi and Rui, who investigate supernatural happenings and purify evil with their somewhat undefined powers of shapeshifting and increased strength/agility. The majority of the story in the OVA is about a school girl named Aimi, who is pining after her childhood friend Koizumi, who since the rejection and sudden death of his crush, has been suffering a depressive episode and ignoring her. Hyoi and Rui sense dark forces are manifesting at the school, and they keep an eye on Aimi while fighting off the increasingly brazen appearances of demonic enemies.
A monstrous ex-dark cat named Jukokubo is revealed to be manipulating Aimi with his dark powers, and Hyoi and Rui fight him, but not before Aimi succumbs to the evil magic -- as well as her own violent jealousy and overprotectiveness of Koizumi -- and transforms into a horrific tentacle monster that kills seemingly everyone in the school.
In the end, Koizumi realizes that Aimi was in love with him the entire time, and doesn’t fight her when she engulfs him completely. Apparently this act of selfless love was enough to purify them both, and although they do indeed die, their souls are “light” and able to ascend. This throws a wrench in Jukokubo’s plan to prove that humans are The Worst, so he turns tail and leaves his boss fight against Hyoi, threatening to return again. In the epilogue, Hyoi and Rui reflect on the mission and wax poetic about the nature of humanity while crossing a busy street.
… Ehm… happy ending, yes?
Now then: there are actually quite a few things I enjoyed about Dark Cat, and they are all very simple things that I had come to miss after days of watching other entries from the Bottom of the Barrel.
It had a narrative, and was -- mostly -- comprehensible in its storytelling, as rushed as it may have been. There was an undeniable presence of an art director, something I’m not convinced was present in a few of the other similarly rated titles I have seen. Some of the shots were noticeably well composed and even clever, and required an artistic vision and some decent effort to create. The animation wasn’t awful, the designs ranged from serviceable to genuinely charming (I like the subtlety of Hyoi and Rui’s cat-like features!), and I liked that the characters actually emoted. It wasn’t as generic as I expected and took some risks, even if they didn’t pay off and left it with a reputation of being “too grotesque to be enjoyable”.
I can understand the common criticisms of the gore and body horror being poorly animated, but I won’t decry it for existing and “being ugly”... of course it’s ugly, it’s body horror reminiscent of The Thing from The Thing. (Now would be a good time to warn people not to look this OVA up, unless they are sure they are okay with body horror and gore of this calibre. Tentacles with teeth and spines rip out of people’s skin from the inside and deform their hosts, it is quite awful! I would also include a warning for trypophobia -- there are shots where the mutations form clusters of holes on the skin.) The body horror in Dark Cat being disgusting and making my skin crawl isn’t a fault -- I think it’s the intended purpose. Though I will concede that:
The phallic imagery of the horrific flesh mutations, particularly that of the teacher who attacked Rui, was… bizarre, considering that otherwise the OVA isn’t particularly dark in tone or otherwise sexually graphic.
Perhaps having grotesque body horror is completely unexpected in a story about two bishounen teens (?) who can turn into cats and fight ghosts. 
Yes, Dark Cat, the OVA put on Worst Anime Ever lists for being a grotesque spectacle, is just as commonly placed on those lists for being a dumb anime about guys that can transform into house cats and who fight supernatural entities with not so amazing powers. This is a gripe I’ve seen in a few popular reviews, but there was no point during my watching experience that I thought, “Man, these teens are pansies, they don’t even turn into big scary lions or anything! What’s the point, it’s practically a power-down! cinemasins ding” because I don’t go into anime expecting every single male character I see to be Big & Strong & Cool, because I uh… don’t have brain worms I guess? I don’t know what to say about this criticism really, other than people who watch a lot of shounen have very strange hang ups about super powers. 
Otherwise, it seems the biggest reason Dark Cat is lauded as One of the Worst -- perhaps even ahead of the silly concept and nauseating gore -- is actually because of the abysmal english dub. It’s my honour to say that I didn’t watch the dub, so it doesn’t factor in at all into my impressions! 
So in the end, perhaps my only true gripes with Dark Cat are:
Despite having no particular issue with body horror and gore existing, the extent of destruction and graphic death gave the OVA a bit of a snuff film vibe.
The conclusion to the story was quite bad. 
It could be surmised by the brief plot outline I wrote earlier that Dark Cat isn’t a very complicated story. Demons and ghosts exist and wreak havoc on emotionally vulnerable humans, and supernatural soldiers try to mediate between the realms by purifying tortured ghosts and saving those dragged into darkness by evil entities. These beats are common in the supernatural genre of anime, but Dark Cat’s handling of its tragic morality tale left me more confused than anything.
Koizumi didn’t do anything wrong -- he shouldn’t have had to die for the sin of not reciprocating Aimi’s feelings, nor for developing depression after the rejection and death of his classmate and crush. Aimi… did things wrong, but was nevertheless the most compelling character in the OVA. Throughout Aimi was kind, patient, and forgiving when it came to being treated badly by Koizumi. In the finale however, it is revealed that Aimi was the one responsible for Koizumi’s crush’s death, assumedly having murdered her out of jealousy or out of revenge on Koizumi’s behalf for hurting his feelings. Prior to this, the first students to be killed by the tentacle monsters just happened to be the ones that had bullied Koizumi in class earlier that day -- implying that Aimi was getting revenge on them, as well.
It was with these revelations that I started to wonder: Why not just let the flesh monster manifest as a direct result of Aimi’s negative feelings? Aimi confessed to murdering Koizumi’s crush before the events of the OVA -- would she have done so if she wasn’t being influenced by the malignant force set on her by Jukokubo? I feel that her arc would have been much more interesting without the introduction of a non-compelling and badly designed villain like Jukokubo, because then we would know it was all her. Even if she was influenced by forces exacerbating her pre-existing jealousy and rage, that is a more satisfying option than having a big dumb green cat of a villain to trace everything back to so neatly. 
And really, what did Jukokubo do in the story beyond take the spotlight, and the blame, from Aimi? He had some previous relation to Hyoi and Rui, but it’s not developed at all, and his ideological rivalry with Hyoi was trivial. Hyoi could have come to the same conclusions about holding out hope for humanity without Jukokubo there to insist he be a guest to debate on his political podcast.  
The lack of accountability regarding Aimi is a part of why the resolution to her conflict with Koizumi feels so wrong -- he succumbs to her feelings because he realizes the evil was born from her suffering, and he feels that he has to sacrifice himself to make up for unknowingly hurting her so much that she turned into a monster from hell. In the end she is absolved via being purified and getting to die with her spirit entwined with Koizumi’s, and he apologizes for having not recognized how he was hurting her. 
Aimi kills his crush, kills his bullies, and ends up -- inadvertently, at least -- killing almost all of their classmates, because she was tilted about her childhood friend not realizing she had romantic feelings for him. And when Koizumi learns all of this, he apologizes and dies with her, and this is proof of humanity’s goodness? The dark clouds part and the rain stops and Aimi and Koizumi ascend in a heavenly ray of light, because he decided, while she was devouring him, that he was wrong to ignore his murderous best friend’s love for him?
I guess it’s fine -- it was probably mostly Jukokubo’s fault anyway, and everyone was just an unfortunate victim of his meddling… 😒
Other than the bad writing, the string of deaths that happen in the finale when the monster lets loose in the school are quite uncomfortable to behold. Deformed student bodies are splayed and strewn around classrooms, and the bullies are rendered into unrecognizable mounds of pulsating flesh in their homes. The violence of a fight against a monster like this, I can handle, but the graphic images of helpless death were difficult to stomach. And in this OVA, there is no miraculous reversal of the demon’s damage once it is purified -- there is no implication whatsoever that everyone who died isn’t still just as dead as Aimi and Koizumi in the end. 
The main thing I was actually worried about when I watched Dark Cat was that there would be sexual assault, thanks to reviewers griping it for “generic hentai tentacles”. I am relieved to say that there is none, at least not insofar as deserving a comparison to actual porn. There is sexual content scattered throughout the horror scenes: The occasionally phallic appearance of the tentacles, shots of the tentacles coming down from under skirts, and there is one shot of nudity when Aimi’s shirt is ripped open as she transforms, though I would say it’s too horrific and ugly to be sexualized or otherwise considered “fanservice”.
What is the point of the hits of sex imagery in Dark Cat? I have no idea. This isn’t Alien, it isn’t about the horror of sexual assault or the violence of creation -- though the main horror of the scene where Rui is ambushed by the teacher seems to be that she uses magic to seduce him, only to reveal a very phallic tentacle from her mouth that she means to kill (or infect…?) him with, which can have multiple, potentially offensive readings… it is a one off, however -- and there doesn’t seem to be any moral posturing about it as is often seen in slashers. I couldn’t parse any sort of consistent STI allegory regarding the plague of tentacles upon the student body, despite how many summaries I have read that describe the tentacles as that, a “plague”. 
… I realize I am probably the only person on earth to give any aspect of Dark Cat’s production this much thought. To sum up: It seems to just exist for the shock value. Considering the extent of disgusting imagery already present a la The Gore and Deformation of Human Bodies, I don’t think this OVA benefitted from featuring some explicit looking tendrils, beyond cementing its abhorrent reputation.
Is this all to say that I think Dark Cat is a good OVA? No, of course not. It’s tone deaf, and tasteless, and has awkward pacing and bad writing. But compared to the utterly soulless and artistically devoid works the likes of Skelter Heaven and Mars of Destruction, I would say the fact I was able to write this much about Dark Cat is testament to that fact that it at the very least, contains content -- and some of that content was like, decent! Skelter+Heaven was such a mess it was all I could do to understand the sequence of events, and Mars of Destruction was so bland I literally have no posts about it on the blog despite watching it more than once. Psychic Wars was a snoozefest I barely finished that similarly has no mention on the blog, and Hanoka’s production gimmick couldn’t save it from being a totally forgettable romance story. 
Therefore, Dark Cat is the best worst title I have seen thus far, by virtue of being executed with an average amount of competency for an OVA from the early 90s, and for having a balance of good and bad elements that gave me something to hold onto and mull over after viewing. 
3/10.
Oh, and I loved the bad 80s insert songs.  
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terramythos · 3 years
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TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 30 of 26
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Title: The Cloud Roads (2011) (The Books of the Raksura #1)
Author: Martha Wells
Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction (ish), Adventure, LGBT Protagonist, Third-Person
Rating: 8/10
Date Began: 10/20/2020
Date Finished: 10/28/2020
Moon has spent most of his life as an outsider, wandering from place to place. An orphan with little clue to his origins or past, he has the ability to transform into a large, winged creature. Due to an unfortunate visual similarity to the Fell, a destructive race of marauding shapeshifters, he has to keep his identity hidden. When his current home discovers his secret, the residents assume the worst, poison him, and leave him to die.
By luck, Moon is rescued by a huge shapeshifter named Stone. According to Stone, they're both members of a species known as the Raksura, and a nearby group is in the midst of a dire crisis. Desperate to know more about his past, Moon agrees to help. He follows Stone to Indigo Cloud, a dwindling court of Raksura under threat from the Fell. While the Raksura initially distrust Moon, and Moon has difficulty adjusting to their way of life, they soon discover they need each other to survive. Moon must come to terms with his place among his newfound people and help them overcome an insidious and overwhelming enemy.  
He spoke the thought that had become increasingly obvious all day long, with every interaction he had had. “I don’t belong here.” Maybe if he had been younger, there would have been a chance, but not now. 
Stone made a derisive noise. “You’re afraid you don’t belong here. There’s a difference.” 
Moon seethed inwardly but held his temper, knowing it would give Stone a victory if he lost it. “I’ve been walking into new places all my life. I know when I don’t belong.” 
Stone sounded wry. “You’ve been here half a day, and for most of that you were asleep.” 
Moon said sourly, “I like to make quick decisions.” 
Minor spoilers and content warning(s) under the cut.
Content warnings for the book: Lots of graphic violence, action, and death. Non-graphic sexual content. Mind control/manipulation is a whole thing. R*pe is plot relevant and mentioned several times, but not depicted.  
I read Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series earlier this year and enjoyed the hell out of it (reviews here and here). Featuring fantastic writing and the most well-written perspective character I’ve ever read, I cannot recommend that series enough. So I was interested in reading other stuff by Wells, and ultimately settled on this series. Murderbot is a tough act to follow, and The Cloud Roads is MUCH different in tone/genre, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to more. 
To me, the worldbuilding is the strongest aspect of The Cloud Roads. The Three Worlds is an interesting and creative setting. Humans are completely absent-- instead, there are dozens of different sapient humanoid races. While there are some cultural analogues to our world, everything feels distinctly alien and science fiction-y. I find it interesting that there don't seem to be countries or empires as such, though I get the sense it’s intentional. The Raksura, a main focus of the novel, are based on insect colonies like bees or ants, but with social complexity more like a wolf pack. 
Moon is a good choice of protagonist for this novel due to his general ignorance of the world around him, so we get a firsthand view of someone learning about it. Furthermore, I think Wells does a great job in heavy worldbuilding without it feeling overbearing. When information is doled out, it's always because it's relevant to the situation at hand, so the learning progression feels very natural. By the end I got the sense of a vast and complex world that we'd barely scratched the surface of-- which is a good thing.  
The Raksuran culture is fascinating. Personally I find insect colonies super interesting so I love to see a fantasy race borrow some elements of that. Without going into a whole essay, the matriarchal Raksura have a biological caste system and a ruling queen responsible for a lot of the reproduction. They're separated into two main groups-- winged and not. Within those two categories are various social roles one performs for the colony. All Raksura are able to shapeshift between a smaller almost-human form and a larger, more animalistic one. Despite the insectoid inspiration, the Raksura seem to be a hybrid of mammals and reptiles. They’re... sort of dragons? Gargoyles? Dinosaurs? There’s no perfect analogy. One thing I particularly admire about the writing is how Wells manages to make the Raksura human enough to be relatable, but with pronounced animal-like behavior to make the distinction obvious. Maybe I’m a bit of a furry, too. Sue me. 
I also enjoyed reading a story where the main characters can fly. I haven't read many books like that; I just think it's neat! It adds an extra element to travel sequences, or even how the characters view and observe the world around them. Journeys in fantasy can be boring to read, but this element keeps it interesting. 
The Cloud Roads’ plot isn’t mindblowing, but I think it serves the purpose of the novel well. It’s a pretty standard stock story-- orphan/loner must set out to reclaim his heritage and a new place in society. I think this plot works here because the worldbuilding is so complex, it would be difficult to also balance a complicated story. What keeps it interesting is that Moon struggles to adapt to Raksuran society; it’s his whole character arc. He is inherently mistrustful of the others and in many cases the feeling is mutual. The Raksura initially see Moon as a means to an end; something he is acutely aware of, and Moon keeps himself deliberately detached. The emotional thrust of the story lies in certain characters genuinely wanting him to stay on his own merits, and Moon realizing he actually wants to as well. 
One thing I hope to see more of in future installments is good ol’ character development. Moon is well-realized in this novel; he’s emotionally repressed, but starts to get over it and find a place to belong over the course of the story. We also gradually learn about his past, which adds more depth and context to his behavior. But I want more from the supporting cast. Jade, Chime, Pearl, and Stone get some development but I found myself wanting to know more about them outside of the main plot and their direct relationship to Moon. All the books are written and published by now so I guess I'll see for myself. One pattern I do like with the side characters is how several are set up to be obvious antagonists, but turn out to not be so bad, or are otherwise open to changing their ways. I like how Moon’s limited perspective influences perceptions of certain characters. Also: loving Moon's Peak Bisexual Energy. I tagged him as an LGBT Protagonist since he's clearly bisexual, though it isn't a big focus in the story. Casual rep is still nice to see. 
My main challenge is the Fell, which are basically an Always Chaotic Evil race of shapeshifters similar to the Raksura, and serve as the novel’s antagonists. I personally don’t find them that compelling. They sort of remind me of Reapers from the Mass Effect series, but thus far lacking the grand ulterior motive. They just come off as pure evil without much nuance. I also have to wonder how the species has survived this far if their main method of survival is targeting entire cities and eating the inhabitants (and each other?). I’m not sure where that whole thing is going. Maybe insight in future novels will help me on this. 
I’ll be honest, while I personally enjoyed The Cloud Roads, it is pretty unusual and I don’t think it’s for everyone. If anything, I recommend reading The Murderbot Diaries before this series, but both are well-written and creative. I’m planning to read book 2, The Serpent Sea, after this one, so look forward to that! 
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mediaeval-muse · 4 years
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Book Review
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A Touch of Stone and Snow. By Milla Vane. New York: Jove, 2020.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Genre: fantasy romance
Part of a Series? Yes, A Gathering of Dragons #2
Summary: Danger lurks in the western realms. The Destroyer’s imminent return has sent the realms into turmoil as desperate citizens seek refuge—but there’s no safety to be found when demons and wraiths crawl out from the shadows. Even Koth, a northern island kingdom left untouched by the Destroyer a generation past, is besieged by terrors spawned from corrupt magics.
When Lizzan leads the Kothan army against these terrors, only to see her soldiers massacred and to emerge as the only survivor, she is called a coward and a deserter. Shunned from her home, Lizzan now wanders in solitude as a mercenary for hire, until she encounters a group of warriors seeking new alliances with the northern kingdoms—a group that includes Aerax, the bastard prince of Koth, and the man who sent her into exile. Though they were childhood friends, Aerax cannot allow himself to be close to the only woman who might thwart his treacherous plan to save their island realm. But when a goddess's demand binds them together, Lizzan and Aerax must find a way to overcome their painful pasts. Or there will be no future for the western realms.
***Full review under the cut.***
Trigger Warnings: sexual content, violence, blood, references to rape
Overview: I learned of this book while I was browsing Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I’m usually hesitant to pick up dark fantasy novels, but the site gave this one a positive review, so I took a chance on it. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by some aspects of this book: the worldbuilding was way more involved than I thought it would be, and the author made her world dark and violent without relying on brutalizing women. However, I didn’t rate this book higher because I did feel overwhelmed by all the information I had to keep track of. Moreover, I felt that there was a lot of information, but very little actual plot, so I had a hard time being invested in the story. Maybe that’s because I started with the second book in this series, rather than the first (but then again, it’s romance, which usually doesn’t require you to read a series in order). I will be writing this review as someone who didn’t read book one, so perhaps my evaluations would have been different if I had started with A Heart of Blood and Ashes, but it is what it is.
Writing: Vane’s prose is somewhat odd. On the one hand, I thought it did a good job evoking the grim setting. On the other hand, Vane uses some archaic constructions, which tended to sound formal and frequently pulled me out of the story. Not only would characters generally avoid contractions, end their phrases with a verb (like Yoda’s speech), and use constructions like “I know not” or “I thank you,” but the narration/omniscient narrator would use the same linguistic patterns to describe events and character emotions. This got especially awkward during more intimate scenes, when the formal quality of the prose didn’t seem to jive with the passionate romance.
Vane also has the tendency to throw a lot of worldbuilding at the reader without much scaffolding. Names of characters and places are mentioned that don’t have much relevance to the events at hand, so I often felt like a lot of things were being dumped onto me in order to give the impression that Vane had put a lot of work into creating her world (which I don’t doubt she did - it just wasn’t communicated in a way I found helpful). There were also awkwardly placed chapters where characters would communicate lore or backstory through lengthy conversations, rather than through something more engaging, like a flashback. It made for a lot of infodumping, which I didn’t find to be a particularly enjoyable reading experience.
Plot: I don’t know how to describe the plot of this book other than too much and not enough happens at the same time. In terms of all the non-romantic threads, there is a lot at stake: the book begins with the need for a number of kingdoms needing to make alliances - a figure called the Destroyer is rumored to be returning to the area, which threatens the lives of everyone in these kingdoms. While negotiations take place, representatives from the kingdom of Koth plead for aid - a few years ago, their army battled some bandits led by a sorcerer called Goranik (who has significant history with the princess/heir apparent of one of the kingdoms negotiating the alliance). This battle resulted in the total slaughter of most of the Kothian troops, save for one survivor (Lizzan - our heroine). The Kothans point out that last time the Destroyer was in the area, he never conquered Koth, and it is suspected this is because Koth is protected by divine magic. So, it is argued that Koth could be a refuge for people fleeing the Destroyer, but they need aid to fend off the remaining bandits, who have stayed in the area surrounding the kingdom. Lizzan reveals that her troops were killed because the bandits were accompanied by wraiths, and she alone was spared because of a mysterious magical amulet, which could be the key to protecting everyone from the Destroyer. Aerax, our hero, supports an alliance, but also does not believe that Koth is protected by divine magic (to say the least). As a result, he is contemplating a full scale evacuation of Koth, and toys with the idea of letting the entire kingdom sink into the lake that surrounds it - for secret reasons (you’ll have to read to find out). Lizzan - who has been exiled because the Kothans don’t believe she encountered wraiths at all, but was a coward and hid in battle - takes a divine quest in order to restore honor to her family’s name, and this quest involves being close to Aerax, with whom she has a complicated history. They were once childhood friends, and later lovers, but haven’t seen each other since Lizzan was exiled. There are a lot of bitter feelings between them, as Aerax didn’t speak up for her at Lizzan’s trial, nor did he follow her into exile. Moreover, Aerax is now the heir apparent to Koth, and is duty-bound to return, but Lizzan can’t, because of her exile.
It’s a lot.
I’m not against a complex fantasy plot, but where this book went wrong for me was the lack of events that actually built on one another. Most of the book is spent travelling and talking - people talk at the alliance negotiation, they talk on the road and unload a bunch of lore and worldbuilding, they talk about their pasts and how they got where they are. In terms of things that actually happen, the plot is rather sparse. The only events that held my attention were when the party arrives at a monastery that’s filled with spooky things, and the ending. Other than that, there wasn’t really a sense of suspense. We also never really got scenes of characters investigating magical knowledge or engaging in political intrigue, things that show them piecing together the puzzle to defeat the big bad in a way that was compelling, so those storylines felt less like a part of a narrative and more like an infodump.
I personally would have liked to see the story be a bit more limited in scope. I think the Destroyer stuff detracted from the narrative; just focusing on the plot that concerns the wraiths and the gods would have been sufficient. Most of what happens in this book could have been the same - Aerax is named heir and goes in search of help because bandits are surrounding his kingdom. He finds Lizzan, and so on and so on.
Characters: Lizzan, our heroine, is an exiled mercenary with survivor’s guilt. I took an instant liking to her because she fits an archetype that we usually only see in male characters: she’s a gruff loner who drinks heavily, bouncing from job to job to make enough money to drink some more. Unlike some male counterparts, Lizzan isn’t a jerk - though she could be rough, Lizzan always seemed to care about the people around her, and part of what I liked most was that she decided to be a warrior in order to protect people, not because she wanted honor or rejected more “feminine” roles.
Aerax, our hero, likewise surprised me in that he’s got plenty of angst himself, but never takes it out on other people. He does that thing where he’ll only answer people with a grunt, but he never seemed prone to nonsensical violence and often acted selflessly. I appreciated that he never crossed any boundaries that Lizzan set, nor did he act possessive. The main thing I found strange about him, however, was the sense that he was holding something back. The story would constantly say things like how he was putting up a calm facade to hide how dangerous he really was, or that he had to restrain himself during intimate scenes. I was therefore constantly questioning whether Aerax possessed some kind of magical power that made him threatening, or if this was just a way to make him seem more masculine and thrilling.
Aerax has an animal companion named Caeb. Caeb is a saber-toothed snow lion, who mainly acts like a huge housecat who can understand human speech. Caeb was responsible for some of the sweeter moments in this book, as he would occasionally butt up against Lizzan and purr or push Lizzan and Aerax together.
Supporting characters were numerous, and in general, I think they were varied and interesting. My favorite was Sari, a young warrior who wants to prove herself. She’s pretty adorable in the process. However, I also think that because of the complex plot, there wasn’t room for them to shine.
Other:
Worldbuilding: Despite not having a pleasant experience with infodumping, I do think Vane’s worldbuilding is intriguing. I liked that the world was filled with jungles and animals that seemed to be out of the prehistoric period, rather than being set in the fake European Middle Ages. I also really liked the mythological stories that characters told about their gods, which reminded me of a lot of folklore, and that women were present in every sector of society (in other words, they weren’t confined to the household or the church/temple). Vane also didn’t rely on misogynistic violence to make her world seem “gritty,” so that was also a big plus.
I mostly wish that Vane had reigned in her worldbuilding a bit more. Despite being an interesting world, Vane had the tendency to overdo it by giving the reader info that wasn’t relevant. I also got the feeling that the rules of the world weren’t well-established. By that I mean that once I thought I’d gotten a handle on what the world was like, Vane would introduce another bit of lore that would throw me for a loop (for example: surprise! there are dragons!).
Romance: I’m usually all about a story about rekindling a relationship, but I don’t quite think this romance resonated with me. On the surface, I do think the stakes were sufficiently high: Aerax had to return to Koth, but Lizzan couldn’t accompany him due to their exile. I also thought the childhood friends to lovers background, as well as the sense of betrayal resulting from Aerax’s failure to speak up for Lizzan and follow her into exile, built some sufficient angst.
However, I also think that Aerax and Lizzan got intimate a little too quickly, and tended to participate in sexual activities at fairly inappropriate moments. Although they were lovers before Lizzan’s exile, Lizzan makes a good point that the two of them barely know each other anymore. I’m not shaming anyone for having sex with a stranger (that’s a personal decision, and I’m not here to judge), but I do think the process of re-falling in love before becoming intimate could have been a nice arc.
I did, however, like the angle that Vane took about the two of them challenging each other emotionally - as people. Lizzan insists that she doesn’t want other people to make decisions for her, yet Aerax points out that Lizzan has a tendency to make decisions for other people, even though it comes from the genuine desire to protect others. For example, Lizzan is angry that Aerax withheld information from her to protect her, yet Lizzan herself does the same thing to others. I liked that Vane handled this without suggesting that Lizzan was a hypocrite, and that her relationship with Aerax set her on a path to self-improvement.
Overall, my first foray into the fantasy romance genre was up and down. While I liked the ideas that Vane featured in her book, I wish the narrative had been tighter and the language more updated.
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jq37 · 4 years
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The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 2
Boggy the Froggy!
Welcome back, ya’ll! We jump back in with our Bad Kids (or 4/6 of them anyway) the very next day. Fabian sends Gilear out on a coffee run on the threat of bodily harm. His mom–who, if you remember is low-key a total badass–tells Fabian that if Gilear doesn’t come back from the quest alive, she’s going to duel him to the death on top of the house. Yikes. At Chez Thistlespring, Gorgug’s parents give him another very detailed sex talk and then remind him that he lives in a world where magic is very real so any and all dreams he remembers should be treated as omens. 
At the haunted house, Adaine wakes up having had portentous dreams like everyone else which is doubly concerning I have to imagine considering (1) she is the eleven oracle and (2) as a full elf she’s supposed to trance, not sleep and dream. Luckily for her nerves, she cast Find Familiar the night before and summoned an emotional support familiar which she gave the amazing name Bogariel Frogariel aka: Boggy the Froggy. 
Meanwhile (and I needed to switch paragraphs because Kristen is doing the D&D equivalent of playing Twister while everyone else is playing Checkers as she is wont to do) Kristen is talking to Tracker about changing Yes? again because she is filled with doubt about her god of doubt but the one thing she clearly doesn’t have doubt about is her relationship with Tracker because it’s been less than a year and she already sees wedding bells in their future. Wild. She also invites Tracker on the quest, rectifying what I thought was a wild oversight last week. 
Everyone meets up and they realize Fig and Riz are missing. They (specifically Fabian) can’t get Riz on the phone (which has never happened before) and all of Fig’s stuff is missing. They head over to Riz’s office to see if they can find him but, before that, Tracker cancels the church of Yes? because, sure. 
There are signs of a struggle at Riz’s office, but no blood. They find a picture of Riz’s super-spy dad (Pok) with his arm around someone who appears invisible to them (though the spot is circled in red). They also find claw marks going up to a mirror. Adaine stops Gorgug from touching the mirror which would have driven him insane and had him attack the group. She sees a twisted version of Riz in the mirror which no one else can see until she describes it (suspicious). Then, she dispels magic and the Riz appears in the room…and attacks them (roll for initiative baybee)!
Fabian is flipped the F out. Kristen decides to chill out and drink Riz’s coffee–much to the incredulousness of everyone else (she’s on those chill existential dread vibes). Adaine and Gorgug are stricken by fear but they’re able to snap out of it quickly. Once they’re sure it’s not Riz (the doppelganger is going full creepy horror movie monster with the head twisting and biting and junk), they start going full throttle but Kristen gets a clutch roll and lands a banishment on Nightmare Riz (who was invisible at the time). Also, Adaine finds a gun but no one is down with her packing heat without proper firearms training so she reluctantly puts it back. They confer with Sandra-Lynn and they find out Fig has, for some reason, gone to Bastion City (the capital) and Gorthalax is missing. Also, because Emily is Emily whether she’s present or not, they find out that Fig has decided to multiclass and she is now a bard/warlock with her demon dad as her patron. Those might be connected because, as her patron, Gorthalax can now find Fig at all times.  
Sklonda, in the meantime, has been investigating a robbery at the mall. They end up there too because Gilear (who is back from his coffee run) said he saw Fig’s bus in the area. They tell Ragh to meet them there and then head over (Gorgug in the old family car which he buys from them for 30 gold (the cost of a pony)–the amount Adaine suggests after the Thistlesprings reject his insane offer of 1000 gold). Also, Kristen leaves her brothers some gold secretly which is sad and also I think not the best way to handle that, but the intention is good. The robbery was of a gem–non-magical I believe–called the Devil’s Heart. [Edit: And apparently Fig’s doing.] Fabian shows up, tries to be helpful, and then eats glass. Normal stuff. 
The group tries to figure out what’s going on with Fig by calling the hotel she’s at and basically doing a straight improv comedy routine, each passing the phone around with a bad story until Adaine just hangs the phone up. Then, they find out from Sklonda that Pok’s partner is a tabaxi (cat person) named Kalina and she is in the empty space in the photo. Sklonda and Sandra-Lynn can see it even though the Bad Kids can’t. 
With that information gathered, the group leaves Elmville for the first time on the way to the Hotel Cavalier in Bastion City and, hopefully, Fig. 
Detention
Fabian for Intern Abuse
Poor Gilear. Fabian solicits increasingly complicated coffee orders from his friends to make Gilear’s job harder and tries to get them to threaten Gilear on their behalf. Even Sandra-Lynn was like, bro. Lay off the guy. Bad form, sir. (Hilarious, but bad). 
Honor Roll
Adaine for Rocking Her Portent Rolls
Adaine had a 19 and a 4 for her portent rolls this session and she used them very judiciously. The first was her 19 which she gave to Gorgug who was about to fail his saving throw and touch the mirror which would have led to him attacking everyone (she has a vision of his beheading her in a rage–sidenote love that Brennan makes her portent rolls actual visions instead of just having the mechanical effect of changing the roll happen). The second was a 4 which she gave to Brennan who was rolling for concentration on Nightmare Riz’s fear spell. What a power move to stare your DM in the face and say, “You roll a 4.” Amazing. Portent rolls are so good you guys. Also, bonus points for coming up with the name Bogariel Frogariel. 
Random Thoughts
Fabian’s response to his mom’s ultimatum that she will fight him if Gilear doesn’t return alive? “Damn, guess I have to fight my mom.”
“MAGIC IS REAL AND SO IS MY FROG.”
Brennan describes Boggy as just the most archetypal looking, round, squishy frog and I want a plush of his yesterday. Or a stress ball! It would go with his whole emotional support thing in game. I love that Siobhan picked not the potentially “useful” or “cool” animal. She went full Marie Kondo and was like, “What’s gonna spark some joy?” Boggy also can give her the help action, which is great!
The episode was great even 2 cast members down, but they were missed. On more than one occasion, I was like, “This is more quiet than usual. I wonder why–ah Emily.” We better get her reaction to Boggy as soon as she’s back.  
Kristen brings up the concept of patenting a god which is wild. We also get an answer to the question I had last week about Tracker’s cleric status–she still is a cleric of the moon goddess. The moon goddess is just chill with her followers not being exclusive. 
Fabian sans Riz is a hilarious mess. For anyone who likes them together as friends and/or romantically there was a lot of Content. Fabian being like, “Idk about Fig but something is def wrong with the Ball because he always answers on the first ring when I call  him.” Him canonically forgetting that he has a name other than The Ball (that’s the name in his phone, obv). And, the coup de grace, him investigating RIz’s office, but only for signs of his name. Him trying to Investigate like Riz, rolling a nat 1, and literally eating glass (“I thought I could taste fingerprints!”). 
“Coffee’s ordered, is the Ball dead?”
Adaine as everyone is clowning on Fabian for possibly making out with the Hangman: The Hangman is much more human than my bitch sister. 
Nightmare Riz, who they still think is actual Riz at this point, pops out of the mirror and Fabian and Adaine’s reactions respectively are, “You can’t do these things!” and, “It’s like 60% of our grade.”
The idea of Gorgug going from a terrified scream into a barbarian rage scream is very funny. Where are the animatics people?
Oh, speaking of people, Fantasy High was trending on tumblr the morning after this stream. Nice job, guys! 
The talk that Gorgug’s parents give him about all dreams being significant is something I always say in movies/books/shows like this. You have protagonists who *know* they live in a magic world and they have weird dreams and it’s not until 2/3rds of the way into the story that they’re like, “Wait. My dreams…mean something?” Bitch, what?
Gorgug’s initial coffee order is Hot Chocolate with a shot of decaf.
Everyone is very chill with Tracker coming onto the quest. Adaine just has one rule: No sex in the tent while they’re also in the tent. Kristen asks like she’s offended Adaine would feel the need to say that but like…come on. 
At first, I thought the invisibility in the photo was similar to the non-Adaine bad kids not being able to see Nightmare Riz until she described him but they still couldn’t see the woman in the photo after Sklonda described her so not sure what was going on with the mirror. 
I went back to the episode where Riz finds the photo of his dad (First Kisses and Last Words at around 1 hour, 27 mins in) and in that photo it’s of his dad and his mom. So either (1) it’s a different photo, (2) Brennan forgot/retconned something, or (3) something seriously screwy is going on. I will also note two observations here. Sklonda mentioned that Kalina doesn’t drink but was holding up her hand in a toast like she was drinking in the photo. That seems too specific a detail to not mean anything. And the second thing is, last ep, we did learn about a servant of the Nightmare King called the Shadow Cat and Kalina (if that is her real name) is a tabaxi so that’s something to think about. 
With all the complicated coffee orders flying around, Adaine just changes hers to a black coffee to try and make Gilear’s life a little easier (her original order was a Peppermint Mocha–sans the threat of violence to Gilear Fabian was offering). I do really love that Adaine seems genuinely concerned about the guy. SOMEONE should be. And it’s consistent with her characterization of just being generally well mannered and empathetic. 
Kristen getting the banishment on Nightmare Riz is something she did after Ally asked for it and Brennan was like, “lol, sure on a 19 or 20.” Boom. Rolled a 19. Just like in the prom fight. So the lesson here folks is don’t give your players a conditional yes and then expect the dice to bail you out. 
Kristen’s existential crisis is so crazy to me because she’s having, like, a prototypical Crisis of Faith™ (and pretty realistically) except, unlike in real life, she has certain knowledge about the existence of gods, life after death, and the means to communicate with those deities in the present day like…I feel like you’re crisis-ing wrong, girl. She’s crisis-ing like she just deconverted from Christianity when I feel like what actually happened is closer to, like, quitting a sorority or realizing you hate your major or changing political parties.  
the nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents homestuck helioism again
Ragh had a dream matching up with Gorgug’s (but he didn’t realize it was Gorgug in his dream) which means something and I’m sure we’ll figure out what soon enough. 
The Fabian eating glass scene is another one where you truly need to see it to understand how great it is. Lou is equally game to have Fabian be the coolest person who ever lived or a huge baby and Fabian running away crying because he has glass shards in his tongue is incredible. Hilariously, he runs into Ragh in the food court who has also eaten glass in the past (“Glass is literally invisible.”) and they bro bond over it so hard (“That’s my boy!”) that Tracker and Kristen are like…are they a thing?
The other crazy scene is the gang passing around the phone trying to convince the hotel receptionist to give them info about Fig. Kristen comes up with the name Teddy Guyger (and Zac and I at the same time are like, “Did you get the name Teddy because you have a teddy bear in your inventory rn?”). Fabian tries to drop his dad’s name. Their first move for some reason isn’t to give the phone to Gorgug who is also a part of the band. Adaine just hangs up the phone like Peppa Pig. Exquisite comic timing. 
“I cast bane on Gilear.”
I love the running joke of Adaine having visions throughout the day of her friends in the process of doing dumb BS.
Nightmare Riz going after Fabian’s good eye was big gross. Thanks Brennan, I hate it.  
I wonder if what’s going on with Fig is completely different than what’s going on with Riz. Just because they’re gone for the same reason irl, doesn’t mean they’re gone for the same reason in game. Nightmare Fig could be a fun fight though.
As someone whose fave thing in D&D is not combat, I thought the fight in this episode was great. Interesting concept, good chance for in-character reactions, not too long . 
Ragh upon meeting Tracker: Check it out: I’m gay. (Tracker: Tight.)
Fabian, who has known Cathilda his entire life: Do maids dream?
In this ep, Kristen and Adaine rolled 2 nat 20s each (Kristen rolled one for initiative also but it was lowered by her modifier), and Gorgug and Fabian each rolled 1. Fabian also rolled a nat 1 (which, again, led to him Eating Glass).  
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chiseler · 4 years
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When Nature Was Golden
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Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.
EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.
BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.
THE EASTERN MOLE or common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.
You saw them in the basement of your third-grade best friend, or in your school library. If you were lucky, you had one or two at home—your older sister read them first, years ago; maybe they’d even belonged to one of your parents. Paperback books just a bit smaller than pulp fiction novels, though equally thick, their illustrated pages of a glossier, higher quality. The typeface was Futura, that design marvel of yore, also seen in the old Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Insects, Seashores, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians—which did you have? The Golden Guides gave us our natural world in all its glory, and managed to do it in a singular style, dry yet affectionate, concisely informative and never, ever dumbed-down. They were written for children, but each, too, is a cracking read for any adult eager to learn. Or to remember.
Naturalist Herbert S. Zim, who founded this series of guides and wrote many of them, was born in New York in 1909. Raised there and in Southern California, he finished his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D at Columbia University. He was then a science teacher for twenty-five years—at Ethical Culture schools in New York City, and later at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One wonders where on earth he found the time to crank out so many books. Each was a loving collaboration with other educators, not solely Zim’s effort. But the synthesis of these people, the meticulous research required to bring together all the info, was his responsibility, from 1949 until the early 1970s. Zim, in 1969, was also the editor of an 18-volume set of encyclopedias named Our Wonderful World.
Of the 84 Golden Guides, Zim wrote or co-wrote 24. Is it confirmation bias that makes me believe those are the best of the bunch? The simple style is charming, with phrases like Rock Ground Squirrels, found in the Southwest, are our largest terrestrial squirrels. What grace: with a hint of pride to be from the United States, he said that the squirrels are ours. (I also appreciate that he uses the word “unique” correctly, without qualifiers. The Barn Owl is unique, not “totally” or “somewhat” unique.) The occasional anachronism amuses. Once in awhile Zim tells us which kind of turtle or ground squirrel makes a good pet, if captured.
You have been seeing birds as far back as you can remember and you will continue seeing them wherever you may be. It’s a real pleasure to see them. You can see more birds and more kinds of birds by learning how to look. This book will help you. It is not written for the expert, but for people who want to see birds just for the joy of it.
First become familiar with the mammals pictured and described. Look through the Key to Mammals on the next pages so that you can recognize the major mammal groups. Try to see the mammal well enough to decide, for example, whether it is a rodent or a shrew.
Familiarity with fishes gained by thumbing through pages at odd moments may enable you to make rough identifications at sight. Use this book as an “arm-chair” guide, but also take it into the field with you, for that is where it can be used best. On fishing trips take it along in a plastic bag.
Originally named the Golden Nature Guides, the series name was shortened to “Golden Guides” when they began branching out into other topics—for example, Guns, Sports Cars, and Casino Games. But these adult subjects did not make it into most family rooms, and the more popular guides about flora and fauna, insects, weather, stars, and the like are the ones most frequently found today. The illustrations by James Gordon Irving and others are remarkably detailed, the beauty of pure accuracy from a time when nature photography was rare.
A particularly enchanting feature of the Guides is the family tree, usually a two-page spread of swooping, color-gradated branches, each limb ending in a small picture of an animal in its biological order, labeled something like “Cutlass Fishes” or “Scorpion-Flies.” No less an artist than Matt Groening would eventually parody this format for his Life In Hell comic, describing the evolution of record-store clerks from sullen teens.
Herbert Zim, in his long career as an educator, was the one who brought lab instruction into science courses at the elementary-school level. Anyone who looked through a microscope before they reached ninth grade might have him to thank. And one attribute of Golden Guides is the way they expect one to get involved, not just in the field, but with “amateur activities” like building a birdhouse or preserving animal tracks in plaster. Through such deep engagement, the reader is encouraged not just to appreciate nature, but to discover new things about it, making new contributions to science.
He demanded no less of himself. Going through what biographical information there is on Zim, which is all very straightforward, one notices the list of scientific associations he belonged to, numbering more than twenty. They included the Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Everglades Natural History Association, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Truly, this was a vigorous and busy man.
Like so many cultural products of their time, the Golden Guides can look antithetical to today’s progressive values. Just ask the Yuman Indian woman who sits weaving cotton, bare-breasted, in one of the pictures in a guide to the American Southwest. In little vignettes we see depicted dozens of trappers, fishermen, tourists, birdwatchers—all white, mostly male. Under the entry for “Other Suckers,” Zim claims “some are so easily caught that every boy knows them.” If the Guides were written just for boys, this is a great shame, though their ubiquity meant that many girls of all different backgrounds would find them. The scientific language is devoid of prejudice, by its nature, and is there for any young person dedicated enough to study it. It prizes the natural world above all. One passage recently took me by surprise for its passion, on a page about the fishing industry: If you are interested in fishes, conservation—the wise use of all our natural resources—is your problem too.
Maybe it’s our current predicament that makes one particularly fond of the outside world, and of non-humans. Back in March, I started watching a live online feed from The Aquarium of the Pacific each night, comforted by the variety of fish, sharks, and rays that swam peacefully by. Curious about a small fish with long, showy gold fins, I consulted Fishes to identify it, and Irving didn’t disappoint. Meanwhile, Herbert Zim informed me that the species, named Lookdown, belong to the mackerel-like family of “jacks” and are fine eating.
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In 1934, Zim married the Russian-born Sonia (Sonnie) Bleeker, who had studied anthropology at Columbia. The couple had two sons. Bleeker, too, worked in the book world—as an editor at Simon and Schuster, then as a full-time children’s book author. They eventually moved to Florida. Just like the descriptions in the guides, these biographical facts fall well short of being dull. They force me to imagine how energetic, how full life must have been in the Zim household as the kids grew up; and how many subtropical species kept Herbert company in his later years. After Bleeker’s death, he married Grace K. Showe in 1978. He died at Plantation Key in 1994, of complications from Alzheimer’s.
LIVE OAK has become a symbol of the South. The low, spreading tree, often covered with Spanish moss, marks old plantations and roadside plantings. The elliptical, blunt-tipped, leathery leaves are evergreen—that is, they remain green and on the tree throughout the year. The acorns are small but edible; wood is used for furniture. Two other southeastern Oaks (Laurel and Willow) have leaves of somewhat similar shape, but they are thinner and more pointed than Live Oak. Several western Oaks are evergreen. Botanists apply the unqualified name Live Oak only to this species. Height 40 to 60 ft. Beech family
In a Manhattan backyard in the middle of June, a couple of mourning doves fly between the trees. I’m aware that the gentle woop-woop-woop sound they make is not their voices but their wingbeats. The dogwood’s cream-yellow blooms have begun to fade, as is proper at this time. Above me a juvenile blue jay, still fluffy, shrieks out his typical noisy cry. I’m intrigued to see a red speck moving among the hairs on my arm—it’s a clover mite, an insect I haven’t noticed in decades. As recently as 1982, I was a four-year-old marveling at the rolling movement of clover mites on a windowsill—smaller than pin heads, bright candy-apple red. Somewhere along the line they stopped showing up, at least with the frequency they did back then. Now, seeing even one evinces a swell of emotion. (Incidentally, the same is true of another brightly-colored beauty, the red eft, which used to be so numerous in summer that we had to tiptoe on New York State gravel roads to avoid stepping on them.)
We learn more from Zim’s texts than he bargained for. His Golden Guides speak of a midcentury United States where all these animals and plants were still commonly seen. Just based upon my memories from the past 20 or 30 years, there seem to be fewer animals everywhere; in the 1950s, then, was the Earth just teeming with them, in every corner of every suburban lawn? Having learned that the biomass of insects, in particular, has started to fall fast, I yearn for the spectacle of clover mites and hastily do a search for them. Yes, the internet reassures me: we in New York City still have lots of the red bugs, enough to warrant a FAQ page from a pest-control company. They’re harmless to humans, pets, houses, and furniture. They munch grass and reproduce parthenogenically, which means every individual can lay viable eggs, without mating.
Of course, the sites telling me this haven’t worded their data quite as eloquently as Herbert Zim would have. Still, I thank him for the spark of curiosity that got me there at all. He taught me not just how to identify a clover mite, but how to care about her.
by Amanda Nazario
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alewyren · 4 years
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tumblr is dead but I’m gonna post my thoughts on Inuyasha here too for archiving purposes. cw for (non-detailed) discussion of sexual assault and suicide wrt kikyo
OKAY. SO. MY THOUGHTS ON INUYASHA. warning for some INCREDIBLY hot takes.
it. sure was a journey. I am not sure if I liked the series overall or not. It had some legit good/touching moments, but it dragged SO LONG and there were a lot of things I thought could've been handled better. But it was fun liveblogging it for sure. And I got NarKik out of it, which snapped me out of my year-long creative dry spell, so it was at least a net positive time investment LMFAO.
I liked... mmmmost of the characters? sango, sesshoumaru, kagura, kanna, naraku, kohaku, K I K Y O, and even kagome were all Good. On the flipside, Inuyasha himself is FUCKING TERRIBLE and he sucks and I hate him. Emotional immaturity ain't cute, he gets everything handed to him on a silver platter, rarely apologizes for being a selfish prick, and the other characters are WAY too forgiving of his bullshit. I got tired of the tsundere het romance cliches between him and Kagome pretty fast, as well as how often he was jealous of her. Like, Kagome's insecurities over Kikyo I can legit understand (despite being #1 Kikyo Fucker). But whenever she's so much as civil with Kouga and Inuyasha's all HANDS OFF MY WOMAN I'm like... dude shut up you two-timing hypocrite. If You Like It Then You Should’ve Put A Ring On It. Credit where credit is due tho, they did chill out over time and some of their moments together towards the end of the series were legit sweet. I'm pretty meh on Inukag overall, and iffy on the resolution of her moving to his era permanently, but that last panel of him greeting her as she came out of the well gave me a Feel.
(Actually, on that note, it... would have been legit kind of hella if the series had ended with Inuyasha himself permanently moving to the modern era? Aside from their friends he had far fewer attachments in his world than she did hers, and there's so much more potential with him having to adapt to the modern era, lol. ALTERNATIVELY, kikyo lives and she switches places with kagome and makes a new life for herself in the modern era. thus letting her truly live as a normal girl. But I'll Get To Kikyo Later. smh)
The premise of the series is actually pretty strong, though of course you can poke holes in it. To my knowledge it was the first isekai anime that really took off, and the driving plot of collecting the Shikon fragments is excellent monster of the week material (though I'm not really a monster of the week fan myself). Also, youkai are awesome. Focusing the series on real-world mythology makes my Shin Megami Tensei heart very excited.
I know the series runs on emotion rather than logic, but I REALLY have some questions here. The fact that the well is explicitly stated to take Kagome back in time rather than to another world makes no sense at all. First of all, where are all the youkai in the present day? Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru are at least a couple hundred years old, right? What happened to them in that 500 year timespan? Surely some creature or another from the series would have naturally survived that long. So what happened? Was there a mass-youkai extinction somewhere along the line? Shouldn't this be cause for concern? Also, do Kagome's time-traveling actions create a stable time loop or a branching timeline? If Naraku won in the past, how would that affect the present? The two eras are just completely isolated from each other and I really don't get it. That kind of stuff. Yeah yeah I know MST3K mantra and all but MAN this bothers me.
Which brings me to Exhibit A of stuff I think should have gone differently: Kagome should have stayed the protagonist, and the modern era should have gotten more focus. Not as in her day-to-day school shenanigans, but stuff touching on the questions listed above. There's just a lot of untapped potential regarding How This Shit Works, rather than confining the story pretty much entirely to the Sengoku Jidai With Youkai. Also there could be plenty of shenanigans with characters OTHER than Kagome and Inuyasha hanging out in the present. LIKE KIKYO. okay yeah my kikyo bias is showing but it would be the perfect opportunity to 1. hide her from naraku (unless he found a way into the present, but that just ties into my previous point), 2. develop her friendship with Kagome. Which would have done both of them wonders. BUT I'LL GET TO KIKYO LATER. (I'm dying imagining Kagome introducing Kikyo to her schoolmates as her cousin and taking her shopping though..... teaching her how to ordinary human... like..... HHH.)
Anyway, Kagome as the protagonist. She was very much the protagonist at the start of the series--she took a more active role in a lot of the monster of the week conflicts, and just had a lot more focus and screentime in general. Then Inuyasha got his sword upgrades and her role in conflicts became reduced to sensing Shikon fragments and occasional use of arrows. It took until the last hundred chapters for her to get ANY sort of substantial power-up, and it felt... unearned? I had been looking forward to her developing her miko powers alongside Inuyasha's youkai powers, and getting bow upgrades to match his Tessaiga upgrades, but it just... didn't happen. Her miko powers having been sealed all along felt like an ass pull, and I wasn't really a fan of the test of character she had to go through in order to get the fancy bow upgrade being solely focused on overcoming her feelings of jealousy towards Kikyo... again... like it's valid for her to feel that way but we've been here already! Surely there's more to her character than this! I think it would've been awesome if she actually got some fights of her own too, and maybe Kaede and eventually Kikyo mentoring her growth as a miko? But as far as canon went, it just felt like she got shallower and less interesting over time as Inuyasha slowly took over the protagonist role and that was a damn shame. Let Kagome be the plucky isekai protagonist she was always meant to be! This, of course, ties in with my assertion that the modern era should have gotten more focus too.
okay, so. it's time. kikyo. Kikyo. I fucking LOVE kikyo, absolutely my fave chara, I was not expecting to love Kikyo this much lmao. All that ship war propaganda was a big fat lie. She has an ASTONISHINGLY mature narrative about the effect of tragedy and trauma on people and relationships, but it was SO under-utilized and shafted in favor of the Love Triangle and Inuyasha's Manpain and I'm FUCKING UPSET. Kikyo was (or at least had the makings to be) the best character in Inuyasha but she was not done justice at all, in this essay I
Like, sit down and think about it. Here we have a woman who lost her parents at a young age, taking on the responsibilities of her household, and training to be a miko on top of it--which in the world of Inuyasha is a very emotionally demanding position that requires her to basically devote her entire life to her duties, ESPECIALLY once she's entrusted with the Shikon Jewel. All while being required to live a life of asceticism and suppressing worldly desires. In short, she basically never had a chance to actually, like. Live. Keep in mind that she was a child/teenager throughout all this (she was 17/18 when she died). That's a LOT of pressure on someone that young.
At this point, she's understandably lonely and depressed, and then along comes Inuyasha. She falls in love with him, gets a taste of a life that would truly make her happy, and has it ripped away. Like, there's some really fucking dark subtext to the whole Onigumo plot. She shows kindness to a random stranger, who proceeds to make a deal with the devil to LITERALLY RAPE HER, and her life is ruined as a result. No, Kikyo wasn't literally raped in canon, because even though Onigumo wanted to rape her Naraku's intentions towards her were... more complicated if still incredibly fucked up, but good lord the subtext is THERE. And as a result of the ensuing incident, believing Inuyasha betrayed her, she straight up KILLS HERSELF. Yes, it was partly to protect the Shikon Jewel, but she did not want to come back to life. Let that sink in. Kikyo was driven to suicide by an incident incited by a man who took advantage of her kindness in order to rape her. (nostalgia critic voice) FAMILY PICTURE!
I'm not gonna pretend Kikyo was the only victim here, though. Inuyasha has pretty clear PTSD from the event too, even after learning Kikyo is innocent. But through his relationship with Kagome, he begins to heal and move on. Then Kikyo gets brought back as a clay zombie, fucks up his whole grieving process, kickstarts the love triangle, you know the story. Kikyo's perspective is actually really interesting to dig into though. She didn't want to be brought back. She's PISSED. Even when the dust settles and she learns that Inuyasha is innocent, the anger and trauma have changed her. She's got a good ol' dose of PTSD herself. She's colder, harsher, engages in risky/self-destructive behavior, and distances herself from her loved ones. Like, think about it. Was there any logical reason she had to separate from Inuyasha and his group to fight Naraku on her own? To keep them in the dark about why she surrendered the Shikon Jewel to Naraku? No. That's a character flaw on HER part. And all this puts real strain on her relationship with Inuyasha. They still love each other, but their mutual trauma has completely changed their dynamic. Their love is based on their past relationship rather than their present chemistry. They don't make each other happy anymore. Neither of them are at fault for that. That's REAL AS FUCK. That's what trauma DOES to people and relationships.
So, yes, I'm a hardcore Kikyo stan who supports InuKag over InuKik. We exist. InuKik does not work as a relationship in the present because they've both changed due to trauma and that's the GODDAMN POINT. It's not a story about true love, it's a story about moving on from first love. The problem is that Kikyo's character is largely confined to her role as a love rival to Kagome. Inuyasha's side of the InuKik narrative, of letting go of the past and healing, is resolved. Kikyo's is not. And boy, I was ABSOLUTELY FUCKING LIVID that the love triangle was resolved through Kikyo's death rather than Inuyasha just... fucking, PICKING KAGOME OVER KIKYO BEFOREHAND RATHER THAN HER NEEDING TO DIE. She can still die after that! I swear, I'm not just salty because my fave died. At least 70% of my favorite charas are dead. I literally don't care anymore. I'm mad that she was killed off in a way that reduced her to being Inuyasha's Woman rather than getting a chance to heal and grow apart from him, as he did from her. And this in turn cheapens the narrative around why InuKik doesn't work as a present relationship to begin with, because he never actually picks present love over past love! He just keeps committing emotional infidelity until Kikyo gets killed off to wrap things up in a neat little bow with no character growth on his part! This shit is why I hate Inuyasha (the character).
Kagome's kindness towards Kikyo also plays a part in why she softens up by the end, yes, but that kindness is entirely depicted as "I want to save her because she's important to Inuyasha and I love Inuyasha." Kagome's character growth in these moments hinges on her picking love over jealousy, NOT through actually bonding with Kikyo. On top of that, Kikyo saving Kohaku over defeating Naraku struck me as out of character (have to show she's not a bad person after all? which she isn't, but still). It definitely made her death feel even more pointless. How come Kohaku gets to live and not her!!! Seriously, the fact that Kohaku gets to live and Kikyo doesn't REALLY rubs me the wrong way. She barely even knew Kohaku! He was willing to die to defeat Naraku! NOT killing Kohaku to defeat Naraku almost cost MORE lives! It could've been a poignant resolution to her character arc, but there wasn't enough buildup for it to be a convincing decision for her to make.
And oh my god, there's SO much wasted potential here. Kikyo's resentment towards Kagome is super understandable, and it's never really explored. Kagome replaced her. Kagome is filling the role she should have filled. What's even left for her except her hatred of Naraku? She asserts that Inuyasha cannot forget her (her being lowkey possessive of him is *chef kiss* my wife is a bitch and I like her so much), and he doesn't, but she still straight up tries to kill Kagome lmao. Like I said they do reconcile, but it's kinda half-assed. Kikyo's feelings are never explored in-depth. She's never truly given a chance to heal and realize that she does have a place in the world beyond her decaying relationship with Inuyasha and hatred for Naraku. That her scarred, flawed existence is still just as fucking valid as Kohaku or Rin or Jaken being able to live after being brought back from the dead. Like lemme stress again that the girl experienced INTENSE trauma and COMMITTED SUICIDE. The notion that she's the only one who needs to die in order to restore the natural order, that her death is beautiful and tragic but necessary, is..... gross, tbh. :U
Like, she can still die, lmao. IMO it'd be legitimately more interesting if she lived, if she had an opportunity to carve a place for herself outside of Kagome like Kagome did Kikyo, but it IS possible for her to die without it making ME want to die. Just resolve the love triangle shit first, flesh out some of her relationships outside of Inuyasha himself (ESPECIALLY Kagome), show her healing and softening, and then she can die protecting everyone or some shit. That would've been fine. But No. She just gets killed off for the service of Inuyasha's character, so he can hook up with Kagome guilt-free, with NONE of this addressed. Because it's more palatable for a woman to be dead than broken up with, I guess? I Hate It Here, You Guys.
her (near) last words being "I've finally become an ordinary woman" rubbed me the wrong way too... it like, tried to wrap her character arc up in a neat little bow while ALSO entirely confining its resolution to being Inuyasha's Woman and discarding the narrative of trauma driving them apart. I love the narrative of the girl forced to be inhuman who just wants to be normal. This just felt like... a really cheap way to go about doing that, at the disservice of her character being about OLD love, for a forced (and false) sense of closure. Didn't like it. God fucking damn, typing it all out just made me even MORE pissed off.
tl;dr: kikyo had the makings of an amazing trauma survivor narrative but it got shafted. she deserved everything. thank you for coming to my TED talk.
SIGH. okay. there are other characters I wanna touch on too. Uhhh I actually thought Naraku was pretty cool, though he became way less interesting after Mt Hakurei (for the most part--he was cool again during the direct lead-up to Kikyo's death as well as the final battle). His identity crisis was pretty neat, as was the way he specifically targeted other people's emotions and relationships as a way to compensate for his own utter lack of a sense of self. Not to mention the cold, detached way he regards his own emotions ("my pp stands up whenever i look at kikyo, wish it wouldn't do that :/") and how this leads him to succumb to the influence of the Shikon Jewel, in contrast to Inuyasha and Kagome breaking the cycle. His lack of motivation is actually kind of the point, and I think it's neat as hell! Things got boring once The Baby entered the picture, and I got the sense Rumiko wasn't really sure what to do with Naraku for a while. His style of villainy got a lot more distant and "just as keikaku," when it was the way he got up in everyone's business and pushed their buttons for his own shallow amusement that made me like him in the first place. His fragments aside from Kagura and eventually Kanna were way less interesting, and I think it would've been neat to go more into his role as basically being an abusive dad, but it's fine. The Baby was a fucking boring and atrocious villain though, jfc. The /idea/ of Naraku's own heart rebelling against him was cool enough, but it means jack shit when The Baby is just a bland-ass villain who doesn't remotely represent the character traits that make up Naraku's "heart" in the first place, even aside from Kikyo.
Speaking of which, his fixation on Kikyo is a LOT of fun. Their interactions (which he was apparently secretly into), how he rejected his own humanity and destroyed both himself and the object of his desires, etc. Which is another reason he got less fun after Mt. Hakurei tbh. I fucking hate the way Kikyo's death was handled overall but I liked that he had to reclaim his human heart in order to overwhelm and kill her. That was neat. Something something toxic desire destroying both yourself and the person it's directed at. Then at the very end he realized that his entire existence was completely pointless and empty and his complicated feelings towards Kikyo were the only thing that ever made him actually, like, give a shit. Pour one out for this absolute dumbass. He's a relatable villain because I too would go to absolutely insane lengths to get over a girl I never even dated.
Uhh who else. Sango and Miroku. Sango was my favorite character in the main party. She's the most level-headed of the bunch, has a super cute design, and her story with Kohaku was responsible for a lot of the emotional moments in the series that really landed for me. Her friendship with Kagome was actually super cute and heartfelt. That scene early on where she broke down crying in Kagome's lap because she was scared of being alone again HURT. Also, Kirara is fucking precious. Miroku I've got mixed feelings about, since on the one hand he's a legitimately interesting character and some of his scenes with Sango did hit fairly hard, but DEAR GOD I hate the quirky pervert trope with a burning passion. If it were played seriously, I'd stan him to hell and back a la Adachi. But it isn't, so it's not. I've got mixed feelings about MirSan too. Their resolution was really sweet, but I was kinda like "wha" when Kagome said Sango had a thing for Miroku in the first place. Like, sure okay, but I think more time should've been spent showing her falling for him in the first place lol. Also the butt-grabbing joke got old fast. And when he proposed to her and basically refused to stop flirting with other women I facepalmed so hard. Can't have character growth when you have unfunny running gags! To his credit, he did chill out for the most part, but still kept making jokes about flirting/scoring that clearly made Sango unhappy and I'm like. Why. Then the bit with Hirai-Kotsu needing to be fixed. I liked their mutual resolve to protect each other, but I thought Sango's comment about how she couldn't live without him was..... a bit much. Like what about Kohaku??? But anyway I'm just glad Sango got a happy ending even if I'm still super *SQUINTS* at Miroku.
Sesshoumaru was pretty neat, I get why he's popular, though wasn't really My Type. Sure he's cool, but his /personality/ was a bit lacking and I think we should have gotten some more insight into his relationship with his father for how much focus his quest for the Best Sword got. His development was pretty good, but I've kind of got an issue with how Rin was more of a plot device than a character. Like, okay, one of the reasons I decided to start reading Inuyasha was because the announcement of Yashahime sparked a wave of Sessh/Rin discourse and I wanted to form my own take on it. And, yeah okay I don't like Sessh/Rin either and I say this as a certified Nasty, lmao. Less because it's problematic (though I find it kind of offputting myself, even aged-up) and more because it's bland. Rin has no character whatsoever outside of being a vehicle for his development and I'm REALLY not a fan of girls being objects for male charas' development. Still, I'm not gonna boycott Yashahime if Sessh/Rin is canon or anything. I prefer him with Kagura or even Kikyo but they're dead, so. If Rin has to be his cum dumpster to make this happen, then that's how it's gotta be.
Thats about it I think. I'd put it a rung or two above Naruto in terms of overall quality, but BOY am I still mad abt Kikyo. 6/10 probably wouldn't recommend, but it WAS fun.
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yesvac · 4 years
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Podcasting Dungeons & Dragons: How “The Adventure Zone” is Reviving Oral Storytelling
Topic: Podcasts, oral storytelling, “The Adventure Zone”
Date: 14 October 2019
Read time: 10 minutes
When I was young and visited my grandma’s house, I always asked her to read me Go, Dog. Go! by Dr. Seuss before I went to sleep. This was a reasonable request when I was little, but when I began to grow older, regularly reading chapter books on my own, I would still ask my grandma to read me Go Dog. Go! at the end of the night. It was something about how she sat at the side of my bed, squishing me up against the wall, and said those words that had been repeated many times before. And I am not alone in my fond memories of repeated oral story. People love repeated stories, ones told over and over: myths, narratives, family tales. We love these stories not only for their themes and the multitudes of love they contain, but because oral storytelling is a deeply human instinct: in 1998, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin described that “oral tradition… becomes story as it is retold, resung.” So where do podcasts of the modern age factor in? Podcasts are a medium of oral storytelling, and I plan to explore that idea through exploring the podcast “The Adventure Zone.” “The Adventure Zone’s” specific medium of storytelling and its enjoyed popularity teaches lessons about methods and mediums of story, and how they impact storytelling.
To understand how a podcast can do that, it’s important to know what “The Adventure Zone” is. “The Adventure Zone” is a series of publicized recordings (or, a podcast) created and recorded by the McElroy brothers (Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy), podcast-artists and comedians, with their dad. In it, they participate in and play a Dungeons & Dragons campaign they call “Balance.” “The Adventure Zone: Balance” has 69 episodes, and seven story arcs, amounting to over 75 hours. During the podcasts, the players not only play Dungeons & Dragons and fight monsters, but also develop each of their characters, and Griffin, the Dungeon Master of the game (for those who aren’t intimately familiar with D&D: he crafts the story and moderates the game), creates a web of story and plot throughout the 75-hour runtime of the campaign. There’s no way to tell how many people listen to “The Adventure Zone Podcast,” because there are dozens of podcast-streaming websites and no publicly posted number of listeners or listens; however, in the past few years, the show has enjoyed a boost of popularity and a geniune “following” of listeners. But why? What compels people spend dozens of hours listening to four men play Dungeons & Dragons? 
As I mentioned previously, podcasts are one of the newest and most explosive forms of oral storytelling. While not many of the younger generation watch news on the television (or watch television at all), almost all of them listen to public radio or podcasts through an app. As Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses in his piece “How to See the World,” the newly created “global network” has allowed us to “create, send and view images of all kinds, from photographs to video, comics, art, and animation.” Podcasting is an aspect of this new global network and may be counted as an image shared through it. Most people own technology that gives them access to podcasts through the internet, and consuming their shared images is easier now than ever. 
Through the medium of podcast, there is a certain shared experience akin to the shared experience of intimate oral storytelling. It harkens back to the days of shared story through oral connections, over a fire with friends or a family story not recorded in a written format but passed along through generations. As Juliette de Maeyer recognizes in her article “Podcasting Is the New Talk-Radio,” podcasts “bring you to places you’ve never been… give you the impression of sharing an animated kitchen-table banter... with a couple of friends. In that regard, podcasts are a “sensational” medium.” In “The Adventure Zone,” during long monologues by Griffin, the Dungeon Master, there’s often background music that recalls the musical theme used before in the campaign or arc, while Griffin narrates a story with meaningful themes of death, family, love, loss and loneliness. Certainly, “The Adventure Zone” is a sensational medium when it uses repeated music to elicit an emotional response. Additionally, this concept relates to Thomas Turino’s idea of artistic connections in his piece “Why Art Matters,” when he claimed that “the connections expressed through art flow from and create a deeper sense and a different type of understanding.” By using the repeated artistic expression of music in the podcast, the creators tap into a deeper level of understanding of the listeners. Many podcast creators do. 
What comes from this emotional response and formed connection is an imagined community by the podcast-listeners. In “How to See the World,” Mirzoeff discusses Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities: that all communities are imagined, because people in it have not truly formed a connection with all of the other members. Anderson describes imagined communities of nations, which often result in patriotism, or imagined communities of readers of newspapers, who feel connections with the readers of the same newspaper. In that case, listeners to podcasts are certainly members of an imagined community, both with the podcast artists (those who record podcasts), in the case that they feel an intimate connection through the oral tradition of storytelling, and with the other fans, in “fandom.” Two fans of the same podcast who have never met can form bonds across boundaries of nation and language because they have an imagined community of being two people who both really, really like this podcast.
But let us rewind a bit, and understand more about the oral medium of storytelling. I want to talk about the oral medium in general and why it’s so persuasive now in 2019. It’s clear that the younger generation of people are less interested in big media the way previous generations have been -- big media meaning CNN, ABC, Fox News and CBS. Even big news outlets like The Atlantic and Washington Post and The NY Times enjoy less recognition and popularity from Millenials and Gen-Z readers. Most people in this age group do not watch the news but instead listen to NPR on their favorite podcasting platform, or any other podcast and talk-radio medium recordings. There is good reason for this. As a Maeyer describes “big news” in 2019, it’s often clouded with “hateful trolls, hysterical fake news outlets, a news agenda led by Russian hackers, and a never-ending spiral of conspiracy theories.” The oft-repeated mantra of “fake news” has led to the younger generation’s rejection of big news outlets with a lack of trust, and it could also explain the younger generation’s attraction to podcasting and oral storytelling as a way to strip the spread of information down to individual voices and intimately shared connections. 
If I allowed myself a paragraph to nerd out about “The Adventure Zone” in my article about “The Adventure Zone,” it’d go a bit like this: That’s not to discredit the importance of the creativity and outstanding qualities of “The Adventure Zone.” For my argument, it’s just one example of a podcast, when there are thousands of podcasts in the world, that connects to its listeners through the format of oral storytelling. But this podcast is the real deal for an example of how revolutionary podcasting can be as a contributer to storytelling. What other form of storytelling requires its consumers to listen and pay attention for almost 100 hours -- and they do it, quite willingly? And it’s not a bore -- “The Adventure Zone” podcast is carefully organized into seven different arcs, all with unique characters, different settings, connected through a complicated non-chronological plot. It’s an intricately woven story with fully developed and realized characters and relationships between them: romantic relationships, friendships, fully-developed and realistic portrayals of family. And one of the reasons why I think its portrayal of these relationships is so popular is because it is created by a family. This podcast is created by three brothers and a dad.  They know what sibling relationships look like. They know what familial loss looks like. And the result of it is something that is so rarely created: a collaboration between a family. And, when it comes down to it, it’s also just a really funny podcast. 
Justin: Uh, I’m, I’m playing, uh, a wizard.
Griffin: ‘Kay.
Justin: His name is spelled “T-A-A-K-O”.
Travis: So like “tay… tay-ko?”
Griffin: So like “tayko…”
Justin: “Tahk”… Well, I mean, the… It’s two “a”s so…
Griffin: Is your wizard named… Are you naming your goddamn wizard “Taco”?
Methods of communication and mediums of storytelling (or, more simply, the ways to tell a story) develop along with the rapidly changing world around us. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Podcasts are widely available to any person with an internet connection and a device to listen on. Creating friends and sharing connections with people who also love the same media is a beautiful thing, regardless of how empty the promise of an imagined community is. Also, one of the reasons I study humanities is because of its focus on humans and their stories. And from what I’ve seen, the shift from bigger, more corrupt and corporate-influenced outlets and big news to individual voices has simply resulted in more intimate storytelling, and a focus on stories from people.
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itsclydebitches · 3 years
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Was planning on making this my own post, but I thought you would be more suited to discussing this sort of topic. Something I've noticed when it comes to the more prominent/important/strong female characters (Nora, Pyrrha, Penny, Robyn, Emerald, Sienna) is that RT often has the tendency of giving them masculine allusions (Thor, Achilles, Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Aladdin, Shere Khan) as if they are unable to stand on their own as characters unless they have that connection to a male character. 1/3
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It is worth discussing! Yeah, I hesitate to call it a pattern just because, as you say, Team RWBY themselves are an exception to the rule  — and as the title characters of the story, they’re a pretty big exception. We also have good women allusions turned into good women characters (Glynda with The Good Witch, May with Maid Marian) and bad women allusions turned into good women characters (Winter with The Snow Queen — I don’t think she was ever meant to enter full antagonist territory, but that’s another post). So it’s not just a matter of saying, “RWBY models their strong women after male inspirations and turns all female inspirations into male characters.” It’s not that simple. But the fact that it’s not simple doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to unpack because I definitely understand the feeling you’re pointing to, anon. Team RWBY feels like it has the most thought put into it in terms of changing up these allusions, specifically when it comes to subversion: the little girl in a red hood who previously needed a hunter’s protection has become the hunter herself, Belle overcomes both her Gaston and the now evil Beast, Snow White extracts herself from her own abusive situation (with a little help from the Dwarves still), and Goldilocks is no longer lost and in need of basic necessities, but can rather punch her way out of any establishment  — like, say, a club. The execution of these themes aside (how Adam was handled, turning Jacques’ arrest into a joke, etc.), there’s a commonality here that works. Or at least, it works for me. Yet when we expand the allusions past our title team, things get... very messy. That’s when we start to hit on these concerns. 
I’d say the problem stems primarily from that lack of thought, not the act itself of turning women characters into men or vice versa. Meaning, as I’ve said in the past, RWBY’s use of allusions is terribly unreliable nowadays, and that’s not just in terms of plot expectations like, “Why did Penny have to become a flesh girl because Pinocchio, but Ironwood didn’t stay good because Tin Man?” It also includes these questions of why these changes were made and what sort of messages they send. As you lay out, why are so many of our heavy hitters  — the most talented huntress, the lightning-immune smasher, the Maiden android, etc.  — based on men? Why are many of the effeminate and “weaker” men  — Jaune the untrained, Ren the emotional councilor, Oscar the kid who wants to talk it all out  — based on women? Again, I don’t intend to sling any hard accusations, but rather to point out what’s likely a subtle, unconscious bias. To provide another example, I’ve seen talk recently about how RT (again, unconsciously) depicts the faunus, where all the good characters have culturally established “good” animal features and all the bad character have culturally established “bad” features. It’s cat ears, rabbit ears, sheep ears, monkey tails, dog tails, and beautifully changing skin color vs. scorpion tails, spiderwebs, bull horns, tiger ears, bat wings, and crocodile scales. Is it a perfect 1:1 divide? No, Ghira has panther claws and Fennec has fox ears, but there’s enough there for us to go, “RT tends to give the good guys cute features and/or features we associate with safe animals, whereas the bad guys tend to get ugly features and/or features we associate with dangerous animals.” I feel the same way here, that there’s a bit of a trend at play, with the caveat that there are more complications simply by virtue of these allusions being, well, complicated. But there’s enough there to make us stop and think, “What were RT’s intentions with this? If they just chose something based on the rule of cool, what might those inclinations tell us about gender norms in America?” Meaning, when someone goes, “Idk, we just thought it would be cool to change this up” there’s a lifetime of media consumption driving that choice. It’s not actually random, but based on whatever has been normalized  — unless you actively counteract that by thinking through what you want the change to do. 
Unconscious biases are always at work. When we analyze something like this it’s often not a matter of saying, “The author is [insert accusatory term here]” but rather just, “The author is falling into expectations, patterns, and normalized decisions based on the culture they’ve grown up in.” Which includes things like thinking, “Well, if this character is based on a male god, she must be crazy strong. If this character is based on a woman fighter, he’s probably more emotional.” Such biases may be driving a lot of decisions because, as said in the past, I really don’t think RT is putting much thought into these allusions, if any at this point. For me, Penny was proof of that  — the inability to see how following her allusion utterly destroyed her character growth  — but even if we don’t agree about Penny, what about Salem? Far from just using her name, this volume gave us a blatant reference to the events of Salem Trails in the 1690s. Namely, the burning of the witch. 
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Except references like this can’t just look cool. This isn’t a video game Easter egg with no real connection to the story, it’s a cinematography/plot choice that carries meaning. So what is that meaning? Well, the thing about the women on trail at Salem is that they were innocent. This is what that reference says: “Hey, remember that real life event where women who weren’t witches were horrifically killed because others thought they were evil? None were actually burned, but culturally we tend to think they were. So that’s the image in our collective mind: innocent women on fire.” Except... Salem is actually a witch. Salem is evil. Salem is guilty. Or at least, the questions surrounding the extent of her guilt  — How much responsibility does she hold in comparison to the Gods? How much agency does she still have after the grimm pool?  — has not been acknowledged by the text. Yang just yelled at Salem for killing her mom and Oscar is about to blow her up. This is not a “Question Salem’s humanity” scene, it’s a “Kill the witch” scene... yet it uses an allusion that is contrary to what the moment is trying to achieve. So what are we supposed to take away from this? Do we adhere to the subtext and believe that Salem is innocent somehow, ignoring what the actual text says, or do we uphold the text and in doing so undermine the reliability of every other allusion in the show? If we can’t trust Salem’s, why would we trust, say, Penny’s? 
RWBY’s allusions are all over the place and yes, I think that lack of consideration extends to who they randomly decided to genderbend. There’s no acknowledgment of  — let alone engagement with  — how many of these characters and historical figures were trying to pass themselves off as another gender, nor does RWBY acknowledge how the need to do so feeds into our current and historic assumptions about gender as a whole. Why does the man dress as a woman? To keep himself safe and seen as a non-threat. Why does the woman dress as a man? To gain access to places previously barred from her and to gain the respect she otherwise wouldn’t be afforded. And, of course, in 2021 there’s the expectation that media will include trans characters, GNC characters, non-binary characters, cis characters uninterested in practicing traditional femininity/masculinity, etc. None of which RWBY tackles outside of May, a woman who references a systematic transphobia we otherwise never see in the show. May, as a minor character, is great and I am in all honesty thrilled that she exists in the RWBY canon. However, the rest of the show is built on an anime conception of gender  — combat skirts and bare midriffs in the snow  — while nevertheless engaging with the very complicated question of how you re-imagine canonically/historically gendered people. As a “girl power” show, RWBY has opened itself up to questions like, “Okay, it’s great that you made these four fairy tale girls kickass, but can we talk about making Joan of Arc into a bumbling guy whose presence as a blonde, blue-eyed, sword-wielding man taking up lots of important screen time has generated accusations about this being a male-centered show?” It’s not a “RWBY is horrible for doing this!” issue, but a “RWBY is deliberately playing with gender and marketing itself as a progressive show, so... let’s figure out what these individual choices are actually implying and whether or not we consider that progressive.” 
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