#a good Real Robot protagonist were this not a Super Robot show

[doozie97]

I like to imagine that Isami is actually very competent at handling high stress workplace environments and resolving conflicts in his military role. He just comes off as a coward most of the series because he’s being forced into situations involving alien robots with fantastical powers and zero regard for the value of human life, the rule of law nor the Geneva conventions.

#yuuki bakuhatsu bang bravern #bang brave bang bravern #isami ao #ao isami #a little backstory would have been nice #surprisingly he doesn’t hold a grudge against the guy that had him waterboarded and is remarkably chill with Lulu given her beatings #a good Real Robot protagonist were this not a Super Robot show

[kimbap-r0ll]

Vil x gn!reader x Neige - To Stand on the Stage Til the End (angst)

The only thing that Vil ever wanted in life was to see himself standing on stage, in front of the cameras, the audience, until the very last second. He wanted to be in the spotlight, standing as the audience cheered, as the music swelled into a heroic theme. But he would only watch from behind the shadows, his role in the storyline already over as he watched the protagonist, usually Neige, take his bow. 

Vil wasn’t sure how much harder he could try before he would have to simply give up. There were many moments when he felt it was all too much and perhaps his role as an actor was not fit for him. The neighboring children or the whispering mouths of adults would pester him as if he was an actual villain. It didn’t matter to the audience whether the characters were real or not, it seemed to him. 

But then you showed up.

You were a budding performer too, one that did not shy away from female or male roles. You took each character with love and you showed everyone working on the film or theater project with respect. Many people called you a muse because of how good you were at singing. If anything, however, Vil felt as though he was breathing fresh air when he met you.

“You did really well today,” you approached him one day after the filming. He looked over at you, the two of you were only around 12 in age, but he had already acted more like an adult. He nodded at your compliment. 

“I make sure to perfect my role before every filming you know, perhaps you should do the same,” he sounded cold. He did sound like a villain in a storyline, but to you it didn’t seem so. You simply giggled and sat next to him. 

“I’ll try harder next time,” you reply. You dig through your pockets to look for a piece of candy that you snuck in. Finally, after you thought you had lost it, the small sweet showed up. 

“Here,” you handed it to him. He was surprised, not because he wasn’t expecting sweets but the fact that you weren’t talking to him like he was an antagonist or if he was mean. You reminded him of Jack. 

“You don’t have to, I don’t usually take treats,” he took it nonetheless.

“It helps me calm down before I go onstage, I think it’ll help you too, though I’m sure you don’t have any butterflies in your stomach since you’re basically a pro at this,” you laugh. 

It was refreshing for him to have someone to talk to. You ended up going over to his house more often as the two of you lived in the same area. His father was happy Vil had more friends and your parents were glad you had a friend too. Whenever Vil and you would go out however, you could also hear the murmurs that others spread. 

“They’re going to get influenced by that boy,” a woman spoke in a hushed tone to another.

“He’s too robotic, I heard that he’s just as selfish as the last role he had,” the other responded. 

“Hey, don’t talk about him that way!’ your voice startled the two women. They looked down to see you with a pout. “If anything, I think that he has better chances at getting a date than you two combined!”

Vil would be lying if he said that it was a bit embarrassing with how upfront you were about some things, but he couldn’t help admiring you. He could stand up for himself sure, but he didn’t have the brightness that you had. It was the kind of brightness that he wanted in his life, perhaps like the stage lights with a protagonist. 

You two became closer until one day you two got admission letters from different schools. You had texted him that day, sending him a picture of your acceptance into Royal Sword Academy. You were super excited, especially because you wanted to become better at magic and what better place than here! But Vil turned out to be going to Night Raven College, the rival school of RSA. 

“We might see each other during sporting events then, or we could go hang out at the town area on the island,” you texted back after he told you where he was going. 

“We should, I think that would be nice,” he wrote back. He was always more formal in language than you were. Some may call it opposites attract, and Vil was definitely attracted to you. 

Vil wasn’t someone who believed in romance or love at first sight, but maybe he fell for you the moment he saw you on that day after the filming. Was he having a protagonist moment? No, he tried his best to keep his emotions away from him, but his heart would always beat faster when he was with you. He noticed how much your smile remained in his mind and how he would replay moments he had with you over and over again in his head. This would only continue to grow as the two of you went to your respective schools. 

There’s one person in this tale however that we need to mention. 

Neige LeBlanche.

You were always assigned a character paired up with the main protagonist, who happened to be Neige. He was similar to you: great smile, beautiful hair, amazing personality. He was everything a protagonist needed to be, and you were his sidekick or romantic partner in almost every show or movie. Vil however, would be the one to try and stop the relationship or end one of your lives. It always went like that. He didn’t mind that much, but maybe the world on a stage was merging with the one in real life. 

“There’s this guy I really like,” you confessed to Vil one day while you two were at a cafe. He stopped drinking his cup of tea and looked at you. He felt his heart rate go up, he hoped he wasn’t blushing. Was it about him? He hoped so, he tried to prepare what he would tell you after you confessed your feelings for him but your next words stopped him. 

“Ah forget it, it’s probably just a passing crush,” you laughed and bit a piece of your sandwich. 

“You know, we’ve been friends for a long time, don’t be shy to tell me if you need help,” he responds. 

“No, it’s totally fine!” you smile at him, then you look at your watch and gasp. “Shoot, I’m going to be late for a club meeting, I’ll see you soon!” 

He waves at you with a smile, watching as you nearly slam yourself into the door and hurl yourself out. He always found your slight clumsiness cute, and now he feels himself blushing.

I should have just told them, perhaps then they would have said something back, perhaps I will next time, he says to himself. 

Just like being on stage, he seemed to always be behind the curtains, a little bit further from you by some kind of a barrier. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to break out of the shadows and join you in the light, but perhaps this was his chance. 

Going to Sam’s shop, he found something that he always knew you liked; sweets. It was the same tiny ones wrapped in pastel wax paper, it was called “Poppins” or so, famous for their burst of flavor. He wanted to gift you with them, perhaps because it reminded him of the first time you two met, but it didn’t seem romantic enough. Should he ask Rook what he should get for you? No, asking Rook would mean the whole school would know, and he didn’t want to hear anyone teasing him about it. Hell if it were to get leaked onto Magicam, it would make it to the headlines and you wouldn’t like it either. Deciding on the simplest item, he bought a small box of Poppins for you. 

Walking back, he was reminded even more about how he had planned to confess to you right before the two of you went away to your respective schools. “What a pity, I could’ve saved myself this headache,” he mumbled to himself, opening the door to his room and placing the box on his desk. He had to ask you when you were available so he could confess to you. He could already imagine you blushing, perhaps you would smile brightly at him like you always did. Smiling once more to himself, he untied his hair and got ready for the night. 

He decided to visit you the next time you two had some free time, but he wished that he stayed back after he went to see you. He didn’t like stepping into RSA that much, but the students didn’t seem to mind that much that he was visiting. It wasn’t uncommon to see some NRC or RSA students visit from time to time to each others’ schools anyways. He saw some younger students, giggling and whispering as he went by. At first, he thought that it was about him and how he was a famous person walking into the school grounds, but he listened a bit closer and found out they were talking about someone else. 

“They actually decided to confess today!” one of them whispered excitedly. 

“I know, I knew they would do it eventually! I mean, they’re like a storybook couple, just like in the movies they’re in!”

Vil felt his legs stop. He looked back at the students, wondering if he should ask whether he heard them correctly or not. He then looked ahead, seeing a courtyard that you were bound to be in. Taking a deep breath, he decided to continue marching. 

He saw you, talking to someone and shifting your weight from one leg to the other. You seemed shy, how cute. He was going to call out for you but then suddenly you looked at the person you were talking to and hugged them. 

You hugged someone in the way that he hoped you would hug him. 

I guess that is the person they wanted to go out with? Wonder who it is, he thought. He wasn’t the type to snoop in on others’ business, but it was you he was in front of. He had to know, who was this person that you were enamored with, and who was it that he wasn’t able to take the role of?

“You know, I wanted to ask you out for a while too, I just didn’t have the confidence haha,” Vil recognized that voice. He would recognize it anywhere. 

“Neige,” he muttered to himself. The box in his hands felt heavier than before. Without a word to you, he left. 

You ended up texting him that night, telling him that you finally asked out the person and you were now going on a date. 

“That’s wonderful to hear, I hope it goes well,” Vil wrote back to you while you were sending long messages of how excited you were. 

He put his phone down and let himself fall onto his bed. It was just a school crush, why was he so shattered by it? Was it his emotions, the ones he had for many years, all crashing down at once?

Vil remembered how you two would talk for hours on favorite scenes, acting them out and playing different roles. He remembered how you would sneak Poppins in every once in a while to give him, sort of like a tradition between the two of you after every filming. You were the one that made him feel he had hope to get to the end of the story, standing in front of the audience as a hero. You were the one that gave him that bit of light that others blocked. He wanted to be the protagonist, standing with their lover, standing with you. 

But in the end, he was once again pushed into the shadows, having to watch you and the hero together.

#twst #twisted wonderland #twst imagines #twst scenarios #twst x reader #twst vil #twst vil schoenheit #twst vil x reader #twst neige #twst neige leblanche #twst neige x reader #gn!reader #twst pomefiore #pomefiore x reader #twst rsa #angst

[fantasyinvader]

So now that G-Witch is over (and I finally ordered a HG Aerial), is it a step up from Gundam IBO? I feel like G-Witch is the better show, but IBO is the more important one. I’ve been saying this since the first season, so much of G-Witch felt like it was done in response to IBO. IBO, on the other hand, felt like it was taking the hypocrisies of the Gundam franchise to their absolute limit.

The franchise wants to say “war is hell,” but also wants to market model kits of cool robots. We occasionally get bits on how war can mess kids up, but at the same time the franchise uses the war as a means to mature it’s protagonists. It usually wants to use a grey vs grey war setting, but at the same time the narrative wants us to support one side over the other. The enemy must be stopped, but it’s meant to be grey because the other side are just guys fighting for what they believe in and some of their commanders aren’t complete shitheads (though the upper echelons are another story). So while the “bad guys” are defeated, the good guys will talk about the need for “understanding” despite them having unstoppable killing machines. Violence is okay when the good guys do it, especially if they don’t kill the enemy pilots. It’s okay for the good guys to use illegal weapons, even if we condemn the enemy for using the same weapons. Worldbuilding fluff is often left out of the show, told in side-materials, despite how it could help us better understand the conflict (though that gets in the way of the narrative). And the whole not repeating the past thing is a joke considering we either base events on real wars or reuse the Universal Century timeline.

I mean, you can look at something like SEED and see how these things can be problematic. Old interviews with Fukuda have him saying things like he wanted to make it like super robot shows of the 70’s, the mold Gundam tried to break out of, or how things were done simply because they were cool. That got to a point where SEED was being deconstructed in crossover games and 00 was made with the intent, according to it’s director, to examine what happens when you fight to end fighting, something that was a major part of SEED’s morality later on (though Fukuda himself has dismissed this, saying that Kira fights during Destiny for a world where there will be conflict because that’s needed for people to grow and the Destiny plan would have eliminated conflict). Yet people believe SEED is emblematic of Gundam, and that 00 deconstructed the entire franchise in it’s first half.

IBO intentionally cranked the hypocrisy up to 11, made it’s main characters the villains in the eyes of history and punished them for their crimes while saying more people needed to question them (the creators backed this up0. It’s lost on a lot of people, but damn, that takes some balls. You really can’t go back to Gundam as normal afterwards, you need to be conscious of what messages you are sending out.

IBO sounded the alarm on what Gundam had become, G-Witch fought for the franchise’s soul. That's the way I see it.

Still would rather rewatch Witch though, because it doesn't drag like IBO did and the animation is way better.

[thevulpinehero1]

GWatch -- Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Ep 1

Since Armoured Core came out and everyone's in a mecha mood, I figured I would talk about an entirely different mecha series instead. The plan is to watch one episode a day, talk about it, and include one (or more) screenshots to facilitate enhanced rambling. I want to start with the original series since I've watched it before, see if I can get through it all, and then maybe move onto some other Gundams if I have the spirit.

Beware! Spoilers for a 40 year old anime inbound, as well as possible misreporting since I probably am not going to fact check too well. Gundam nerds may feel free to correct me and dispense wisdom where appropriate. Also, I'm just going to go with whatever name spelling is on the subtitles I have at the time. Sorry, not sorry.

The first thing I have to talk about is the theme song, which honestly gives me emotions. Nowadays, we all have this image of Gundam as basically the show that invented the real robot subgenre, but you would absolutely never get that impression from the theme song or OP. Honestly, go find it and listen to it -- it's actually amazing how widely it misses the tone of the series, with lyrics like "Bring to bear the rage of justice!" and "If you are still burning with furious rage, you must fight the towering foe!" It sounds much, much more like a Super Robot theme song for like Daitarn 3 or Raideen or something, than something you would see associated with a classic "war is hell" series like Gundam.

And this was probably completely intentional. I remember hearing that even as far back as its initial run, the series had to fight the sponsors/toymakers in order to carve out its own identity, and part of that was projecting a surface level impression of a more palatable Super Robot style show. (Some things never change, I guess...)

To me, it adds a lot to the charm, because the singer is obviously going in and doing their best, singing an ode to a giant metal hero of justice who doesn't really exist outside of the fertile imagination of an advertising/toy exec who has been thoroughly mislead. I love that. I just want to go and tell them, hey, I appreciate you, you are singing your heart out on this theme song for an entirely different and imaginary series than the one they've actually made, and you're killing it. You are fighting the good fight, and you may be one of the reasons the series even got off the ground in the first place because you were part of this obfuscation.

This is Amuro Ray. His shadow looms large over every Gundam protagonist that will follow him; many of them either use him as a blueprint for their personality, or are meant as a study in contrast to it. He kills a lot of people. He eats a lot of sandwiches. There are long and intricate scenes of Amuro eating sandwiches, and they are among my favourite scenes in the whole series, and, in fact, any Gundam show I've ever watched. I'm not kidding.

I picked this screenshot not just because it shows a stone-cold, unrepentant sandwich-murderer in his natural habitat, but because it also showcases another thing I love about the show: the goofy animation. This was not a show with a huge budget. There is something weird or goofy happening in every episode, almost every scene, and the first episode -- traditionally one of the best funded in most series -- is no exception. Amuro eats like a turtle. Hayato's hand is an amorphous, misshapen blob. I think it honestly adds to the charm; the series is scuffed, and probably knows it's scuffed, but it's doing its best to tell a story in spite of that.

For now, Amuro is not the pilot of legend. He sits around the house doing science in his underwear, his neighbours don't like him enough to tell him about an actual military evacuation that he's supposed to be undertaking, and without the aid of his childhood friend Fraw Bow (who he mostly summarily ignores), he wouldn't bother to evacuate at all and would likely die at home. He's a scrunkly kind of dude. Maybe even a scrunklemeister. Your boy probably smells like a scratch and sniff card if you rubbed off all the panels and tried snorting them all at once.

The show is surprisingly quick at characterising him, too. Within a minute or two, we know all the above, plus that he seems to have a certain amount of tension with his father, who his neighbours blame for bringing the military to their peaceful colony. His father, Tem Ray, loves him at least enough to put a picture of him on his desk, and makes vaguely prophetic statements about how kids as young as Amuro are already joining the war as guerrilla fighters. Foreshadowing hit different in the eighties.

One scene I didn't actually remember, but really should have in retrospect, is the part where Amuro confronts his father ("Do you care more about Mobile Suits than humans?" is the absolute first thing Amuro says to him), and the death of Fraw Bow's mother and grandfather, both of which expose a more sensitive core to the scrunklebeast within. It's very convenient/poetic (delete as appropriate) that Fraw Bow was herself very nearly caught in the explosion that killed the crowd her family was in, and only survived because she separated from them in order to check on Amuro.

I was also kinda surprised to relearn that Amuro doesn't really 'fall in' to the cockpit; he very deliberately gets in, having happened to read the manual earlier, in an effort to either protect the remaining civilians or take revenge for the ones who've just fallen (the context doesn't really make it clear which one, but he rushes to the cockpit soon after Fraw Bow sees her family die and is making her escape).

One thing that's really interesting in the metacontext of the series is that although Amuro ends up being one of the best pilots (he's a legend in mecha anime for a reason), he kinda starts out as one of the worst. Many Gundam protags are either experienced, have some level of training, or have other reasons why they're hot shit right out of the box; Amuro really does not know what he's doing, and is carried entirely by the fact that the Gundam itself is dizzyingly durable for the time period. It also comes with a learning computer (which I bet sounded very advanced in the time the anime was made, but kinda brings certain chatbots to mind in the present day) to ease the piloting burden while he learns how to use the dang thing. Not only that, but he goes up against a lot of mobbers who aren't that much better than he is and can't do much against his much better machine.

(A really interesting experiment is to contrast Kira from SeeD, which follows a lot of the original Gundam's major story beats quite closely for the first part of the series and is almost a spiritual remake in some parts. Kira almost has the opposite end of the equation going on -- a very good pilot from day one, he has the misfortune of having five other named dudes who are close to his level and have machines that are arguably better than his in a vacuum, and he fights them pretty regularly.)

Anyway, through more luck than skill, Amuro manages to get through his first Mobile Suit battle in Side 7, but Bright is already looking to utilise him as labour, and Char is advancing on the colony. That's the first episode, more tomorrow. (I don't intend these to be exhaustive or talk about every little, but I wanted to go a bit more in depth for the first ep, and I don't want to restrict myself from veering off on tangents because those are fun.)

#mobile suit gundam #gundam '79 #anime blogging #idk #felt like a fun thing to do #there's a whole other conversation about Gundam's meta eternal recurrence #and whether it's a play on war never changing #or just laziness for reusing the same plot all the time #probably a bit of both #it's very FromSoft come to think of it #there's your armoured core 6 segue right there #screenshots #Gwatch

[wordsandrobots]

What if 'Gundam SEED' was told from Flay's point of view? How would they approach it? Would it have been better?

For a long time, watching Gundam SEED, I would have said Flay was the most interesting character so I understand the appeal. 'X manipulates Y to exact revenge for Z while simultaneously being what Y needs in the moment and using this to avoid dealing with their own grief, fear and bigotry' is definitely a meaty premise.

However, this is also very clearly not the story SEED was interested in telling.

SEED is fundamentally about Kira and Athrun, and when I say 'fundamentally', I mean the show commits to the day being saved by two blokes in magic space robots who successfully blow up various bits of evil technology and/or bad guys because they're just that special. And to my mind, it's with this notion of 'special' that SEED's underlying flaw lies.

See, the Coordinators are definitively special. Textually, they can do things other humans cannot. We are told (and shown) that people are scared of them as a result. Yet this and Kira's struggles to be defined beyond his genes are obviously poor analogies for any real-world prejudice. It's 'being bullied for being smarter than everyone' logic, rather than how oppression or ethnic conflict actually work.

Basically, it's the X-Men. Hated and feared for being the brilliant ones, why oh why can't we just be treated as people.

Now, I like the X-Men. Always have. It's just, once you commit to inherent genetic 'specialness' of any kind, you back into a corner from which it is extremely hard to extricate yourself. Despite its token protests about Coordinators still needing to train, SEED presents a world where some people are just better. It embraces the idea of functional eugenics. There's nothing here of the nuance allowed by 'new-types' being analogous to new ways of thinking that emerge naturally from a changing world and are subverted or maximised by people who want to control the future. Nor does SEED turn around, as Gundam X did, and saying, nah, you're all random quirks of nature and/or incredibly lucky.

Eugenics is the explanation for why Kira is special. Someone literally bred a super-protagonist. That is a thing that is possible in this world.

So is Flay therefore right to fear the Coordinators?

Even as it presents her hatred and anger towards them as a flaw, SEED allows the possibility that the answer is 'yes'. Because it is reasonable to be wary of those who hold power over you, and the Coordinators come with power built in. Which is an exact inversion of the ways prejudice ascribes particular malevolence to groups who are, in fact, more vulnerable than people holding the prejudice.

I think a story centred on Flay over Kira would automatically be more interesting. If that's the criteria for 'better' then I must answer your question in the affirmative, straight up. The thing is, given all of the above, I can't in good conscience say it would address the stuff I don't like about what SEED is saying. As much as there are stories I love whose politics and worldview are quite at odds with my personal beliefs (currently delighted by Dracula, adore The Man Who Was Thursday, etc), I draw the line at centering lazy misconceptions about bigotry and oppression. And you would need to centre those things if you spent more time with Flay because, within the confines of what is presented in SEED as it stands, they form a significant part of her character.

If you were to take out the whole concept of the Coordinators and simply make Kira a talented member of some group responsible for killing Flay's dad, then tell the story of how she uses him as her instrument of vengeance before growing as a person and confronting the fact Kira is a person too? Sounds like a fantastic set-up with which you could do some very entertaining, very messed-up stuff.

That, however, essentially brings us back to my one big idea for improving SEED which is this: rip it up and start again.

#gundam seed #character development #world construction #words in answer

[rjalker]

The movie is clearly trying to show that racial (or in this case, speciesial? special?) profiling is wrong and that it has serious negative consequences not just for individuals but for society at large. However, as Devin Faraci points out in his review, the portrayal of minorities as "predators" seems to undermine the entire message of the movie. It implies that this minority is inherently dangerous; to quote Faraci:

"Predators eat prey. This is their relationship, and we in the audience understand it as such. Yes, the bunny should be pulling her kids away from the tiger. The tiger is demonstrably, historically dangerous. He has evolved to be dangerous to her."

Archived link.

Yeah this is where Martha Wells, a cis white woman, fails every time she tries to portray oppressed people in her writing. The Raksura are literally apex predators who literally evolve shapeshifting abilities so they could sneak into other species' cities, gain their trust, and then eat them all. They are so absurdly overpowered the protagonists, who are Raksura, have literally never lost a fight on screen, even against the other Actual Evil Race of Shapeshifters Who Eat People that are supposedly super scary and dangerous. No, despite all the characters constantly telling us these other ones are super scary and terrifying and dangerous, Martha Wells just can't bring herself to let the protagonist lose a single fight against them.

Or anyone else for that matter. The Raksura are physically superior to their natural prey - - other people - - in every way. They're faster. They have natural weapons in the form of teeth, claws, wings, and pure physical strength. You can't outrun them, you can't hide from them, there's no defence against them for 99.99% of the people in this world.

But the Raksura, we are old, are oppressed by everyone else, because everyone else is rightfully wary of them and thinks they're going to eat them. You know, the way they literally evolved to do?

And then in her newest series The Murderbot Diaries, the androids (she decided to call them constructs to confuse everyone for no reason) are enslaved, and obviously this is a bad thing....but not even the fucking protagonist, who is one of these enslaved androids, thinks the other androids should be freed because they're all so inherently dangerous and violent and scary and used as weapons by Capitalism to oppress people.

These androids have guns built into their arms and the ability to kill as many people as they want and the protagonist, Murderbot is constantly spying on literally everyone around it by hacking into security cameras and trailing people with drones and there's literally nothing anyone would be able to do to get it to stop doing this. If it wanted to it could, very easily, within less than a minute send a space station crashing out of orbit and into a planet if it felt like it. And there would be nothing anyone could do to stop it.

But then we're still supposed to think that it's not fair for humans who have been directly and traumatically oppressed by these androids to be afraid of them and to think they're dangerous. The protagonist itself literally doesn't even think other androids should be freed because it thinks they'd all go on a rampage and start killing everyone.

Martha Wells has not written about a single oppressed people in any of her stories where the oppressed people were not literally posing a real life threatening danger to the people doing the oppressing.

Because Martha Wells does not understand how oppression works, or why it exists. Just the same way as she doesn't understand that gender is a social construct, or how it works.

If your oppressed people are oppressed "for a good reason" and it's not just literally propaganda to justify oppressing them, then you're just racist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Real oppressed people are not oppressed because they're super powered robots who can kill hundreds of people in a few minutes, or because they're literal shapeshifting apex predators who evolved to kill and eat people, or because they're fucking antivaxxers who've literally wiped several cities off the post-apocalyptic map by refusing to get vaccinated.

Stop fucking writing about fantasy oppression if you don't actually know how real oppression works in the first place.

#fantasy oppression written by white people #fantasy oppression #Martha Wells #The Murderbot Diaries #The Books of the Raksura #Defiance #which was that shitty fucking show that literally tried to compare antivaxxers to indiginous people.

[h50europe]

Why the myth about Steve's PTSD doesn't add up and other inconsistencies

In the last few episodes of H50, PL tried to sell us a mentally broken Steve suffering from PTSD. Only the whole thing came a bit too late. The clip you see is from season 4 and ended up - no, not in the series - but somewhere on the floor of PL's editing room. And why? after Kurtzman and Orci departed, along with their writers, PL took the helm and started turning Steve into a super-soldier. He stylized him into something that wasn't meant to be. Instead of developing the characters, PL began to incorporate more and more hair-raising action sequences into the series and then let Steve fight on the front lines. There was no mention of Steve's mental state, and a lot was explained by PL with: it just happened "offscreen." Yeah, sure. PL can't create a decent character. He can only produce stereotypes and one-dimensional beings. Like Adam. What potential would that character have had had he been turned into Five-0's antagonist? But no. So his role remained diffuse and monotonous. Sometimes even tragicomical.

Back to Steve. When SEAL Team started on CBS, PL also lapsed into SEAL mania. If someone who writes fanfiction were to produce as much garbage as this man did, he would be chased away from every writers' platform in disgrace. PL's Super SEAL also had to rescue his team members from a blazing inferno. Not man by man, no, he flew a helicopter right into the danger zone and lifted a whole cabin out of the burning jungle. If lunacy had a name, it would be PL. While the action became more and more exaggerated and unrealistic, the same happened to the protagonists. After the departure of Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, PL completely lost his mind. And please, don't blame the writers for the nonsense that was thrown at you. A series stands and falls with the showrunner. He dictates what he wants and passes it on to his staff.

And so, lovable Steve became a soulless robot who only showed feelings here and there. Danny diminished more and more into a sidekick. McDanno became a ship that drifted anchorless through a stormy sea and threatened to capsize again and again. From season 8, it became a reboot of the reboot. PL tried an ensemble show and failed more than miserably. Often the actors just stood around bored. At least that was the impression. The only highlight was episode 8.10. A feast for all McDanno fans. But even here, the outcome of "who shot Danny" was more than insubstantial.

Wait, there was something about SEALs... Oh, yes. Junior appeared on the scene and became Steve's lapdog. I really wondered when there was going to be an episode where he would fetch sticks for Steve. Luckily we had Eddie for that. And because he thought he was so clever, PL invented the episode speed dating. How many subplots can you squeeze into one episode at the same time? In some episodes, you couldn't even take a look at the bag of potato chips without losing the thread.

The case of the week became the yawn of the week. There were so many loose ends that PL then came up with something called retconning. That's what you do when you're no longer satisfied with what was once established in the series years ago, or it no longer fits. But PL went one step further and did the same with the characters. The more the series was dragged out, the more the characters deteriorated and became OOC. It means, often, they were not recognizable at all. And that's where we come to Steve. Because PL, in his desperation, didn't know what else he could do to Steve, and so he killed Joe White. He did it in such a cheesy way with a fake sunset that it made you sick.

Of course, one episode later, there had to be another gig of PL's favorite Barbie. He stuck a fake beard on poor Steve/Alex, so he couldn't even hug Danny/Scott properly. The episode also raised more questions than it answered any. And Steve? He still didn't suffer from PTSD, even though he had now lost Joe White and a fellow SEAL. Everyone is dropping like flies, except for Steve, who is standing like a rock. No matter what. He doesn't need in-depth talks with Danny, nor psychological care, nor any sleeping pills. No, he's doing great. He also opens a restaurant with Danny because apparently, the carguments are already getting on PL's nerves. Unfortunately, this plot device leads into nirvana. The idea was nice, but nobody thought it through to the end. And the merry-go-round continues. Until we get to season 10, where it gets even more absurd. Now PL is almost bombarding us with McDanno episodes, or at least it should seem that way. Oh well, he's already planning for season 11, so a new character has to come on board quickly. While in the beginning, Steve's mother, Doris, dies.

Alex was allowed to take on the subject. Of course, only under the strict eyes of PL. He then nullifies Alex's idea that Steve kills his mother. Because a good soldier and Super SEAL won't do that. Little does PL know. THAT could have been the opening of a PTSD scenario for Steve. However, apart from that, this episode would have had any potential for a multi-arc. Just imagine Steve chasing his mother across multiple episodes. Again, PL stepped in and butchered Alex's episode. You can really feel sorry for the guy. PL at his best or worse? He just can't help it. And then, on the very last meters of the series, he brings someone new, who is allowed to cruise around with Steve most of the time. Because Danny was kidnapped by Wo Fat's widow, PL also invented quite late to have some villain at his disposal. This wannabe mastermind must really have been living under a rock somewhere if she wasn't even mentioned by her husband or appeared earlier.

Because towards the end, PL obviously ran out not only of steam but also of ideas, everything culminated in a wildly illogical scenario. Steve has to live through a dramatic day with Eddie, who stands as a metaphor for Steve (as I said, PTSD was never a thing for Super SEAL), Danny bangs his brains out in a ladies' room with a complete stranger, who dies shortly after that in an accident with Danny's rental car. Apparently, there was no budget to turn the Camaro into scrap metal. Danny then also goes home alone, ignoring the incoming emergency vehicles. Everything remains open at the end of the episode. While Steve expresses his gratitude to Tani and Quinn and says, he would be just as lost as poor Eddie without the dog and all of them. The strange thing is that you never notice anything until that sentence. A few forced dialogues are supposed to make the drama visible, but they all happen way too late or are so poorly written that you miss them.

PL had decided early on to make Steve a Teflon hero. That also means he didn't need to put much substance into the character. Which you can clearly see if you compare the first three seasons to the rest of the series. But towards the end, PL wanted to turn the tide and forcefully rewrote Steve's past. There is a huge difference if you compare Steve from seasons 1 to 3 with Steve from season 10. It is only a sparse remnant of what made this character so great. This change in Steve's personality also affects his relationship with Danny. The witty, affectionate banter degenerates into a snappy, humorless bitch-fest that takes all the joy out of it.

The final two episodes could have been written for any other crime show. As mentioned, we have Cole, who even gets a book'em Cole from Steve, which can only be described as out of line. And it begs the question, was that what Lenkov originally had in mind? Danny out of the show and Cole in? Was the last episode, which mainly featured McCole, something of a test run? Did all the McDanno moments happen only to tear the two apart eventually? Was the real final scene the one where Steve and Catherine take Danny's coffin back to Jersey? Was Danny not supposed to survive? Was that the real reason Steve wanted to get out of Hawaii because he wanted to pay his respects to Danny? And would he really have returned to Hawaii later? Or would he have turned his back on Hawaii? To me, this ending is more plausible than what PL served us. Then, Steve handed over his credentials to Cole instead of Danny, his second in command. Honestly, you can't make the end of a series any more sloppy and dumber than that. And I won't even lose a word about the last 1:30 minutes because I think everything has already been said.

No PL, mission absolutely not accomplished. You created Teflon-Steve. You never wanted him to show any weakness. You turned him into a superhuman who can survive anything. Only to pull the rug out from under him on the last few meters to the finish line and spit on his legacy. How can you dismantle such a great series and its characters like you did? How much do you have to hate something to do that? In the final interviews, the showrunner didn't exactly cover himself in glory either. Everyone who grew up with the series from day one knows that its end was wrong on all the possible levels and that the showrunner is solely to blame for that. It takes a fair amount of egoism and carelessness to drive 10 years at full throttle against the wall. Not many people can do that. Whether you can be proud of that, however, I doubt.

My respect if you have made it this far. Each of you gets 10 extra brownie points for it.

#McDanno #steve mcgarrett #danny williams #scott caan #alex o'loughlin #H50 the final chapter #H50 series finale #Lenkov #Eddie #Junior #seal team

[canmom]

Animation Night 88: 08th MS Team

Hi friends, it’s a Thursday, which means I would like to show you some animations!

This week’s number is unfortunately inauspicious in political numerology, and what’s worse it will be a very long time until Animation Night 1312 by which point we’ll surely have run out of animated films, but since I have kind of already shown the major antifascist animated films I know about, let’s instead just use the number 8 to signify... a buncha gundams!

All together now... Moeaagre GANDAMU~~~!

...ok, not actually that particular Gundam, but the song is such a banger that I had to post it.

Gundam is of course the oldest and mightiest mecha franchise, the jewel in the crown of the venerable anime studio Sunrise, and highly influential as the lead of the ‘real robot’ subgenre that took over from the prior ‘super robot’ shows. Gundam models, or Gunpla, are one of the core otaku industries. Gundam is sufficiently popular that they’ve even gone and built ‘life size’ gundam statues - soon to be four of them, in fact. We’ll talk about how this came to be in a little bit, but first let’s try to lay out the map a little bit.

If, like me, you’re curious to know what the fuss is about, you kind of hit a wall in that there is just so much Gundam, and it’s arranged so haphazardly that being a fan of Gundam has been likened to being a historian. Where do you begin? You will fairly soon discover that the Gundam title comprises several different, separate multipart stories, known as ‘timelines’. So some Gundam stories, such as Iron Blooded Orphans, are separate stories linked to the brand only by some similarities of design and shared staff. However, most of the material falls into one primary series, known as the Universal Century timeline. That’s the one that began in 1979 with Mobile Suit Gundam (機動戦士ガンダム Kidō Senshi Gandamu).

At the time Gundam arrived on the scene, mecha anime (anime about machines, primarily humanoid robots) was already well established as one of the major subgenres, closely linked to tokusatsu in terms of target demographics and sensibility.

Back then, mecha shows typically fell into a genre known as ‘super robot’. Here, the robots were essentially a kind of scifi spin on a superhero: a one of a kind machine with wondrous abilities. So let’s begin our history of Gundam a little earlier, with a history of robot anime in general.

Humanoid robots in manga originate in Tetsujin 28-gō (1956) [lit. Iron Man No. 28] by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, which you may recall cited by Otomo as a major influence on Akira; it featured a military robot built in the last days of the Japanese Empire repurposed by the son of its creator. Yokoyama drew on a number of his sources: primarily the manga of Osamu Tezuka (Animation Night 80), particularly Metropolis (whose adaptation by Rintaro we watched on Animation Night 53). But it also drew on his experiences living through the levelling of Kobe by American B-29 bombers, the 1931 film adaptation of Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein, and the rumours of secret Nazi weapons projects.

Much like Frankenstein’s monster, the robot in Tetsujin is not intrinsically good or evil; the manga’s protagonist, Shotaro Kaneda, manages to get to it before a group of gangsters and becomes a kind of boy detective figure insistent on using the robot for peace. The idea of sitting inside a humanoid robot had not yet become established, and Shotaro controlled it remotely. Design-wise, it’s much more a product of 50s movies than the distinctive Japanese robot aesthetic which would snowball later.

Alas, beyond that short summary, I have not on a brief look been able to find any scans of the manga, so I can’t tell you how it ends, or what thematic resolution they find. Regardless, Tetsujin was wildly popular, which had a variety of impacts - awkwardly, one of them being the coinage of the term ‘shotaro complex’ as a counterpart to ‘lolita complex’. It received an early anime adaptation in 1963, which like Speed Racer (Toku Tuesday 20) was redubbed in the first wave of anime localisations in America by Fred Ladd as Gigantor, removing the historical setting and tone down the violence; the same happened to the 1980 series. Subsequently, the short-lived Palm Studio produced a more faithful anime adaptation directed Yasuhiro Imagawa in 2004.

(^ Mazinger Z (1972) - here you can see how much simpler mech designs are in this period: spheres and cylinders, and rather inconsistent dark reflections. as we’ll see, this would be refined to an insane degree over the coming decades)

However, this was not yet a genre. Super robots truly became established in the 1972, when Go Nagai (of Devilman fame) published a manga called Mazinger Z. This introduced the idea of sitting inside the robot, and set the pattern for many plot elements. The protagonist’s father Professor Kabuto is a scientist whose boss Dr. Hell (no really) finds an army of robots under the Earth and decides to go for world domination; escaping,  creates a special, advanced robot before being killed (and, trust Nagai, by “Baron Ashura, a half-man, half-woman”); his son must pilot the robot to fight Dr. Hell’s army.

As usual, Nagai had his finger on the psychic pulse, and his new storytelling formula became wildly popular. It very soon received an anime adaptation by Toei, and inspired a wide wave of imitators which copied most of the plot points. Like tokusatsu, the format gave them the ability to design a variety of weird looking enemies each week - just drawings instead of rubber suits.

Action animation at this point was still pretty stiff: the complex multi-layered camera movements of Ichiro Itano were still a long way to being invented. But it was a time of major change: the gritty gekiga style popular in manga of the time was spreading to anime with series like Tiger Mask and Ashita no Joe, and this is about the time when a young Yoshinori Kanada was starting his career. So the new genre of robot anime rode this wave, and proved a perfect fit for the Kanada’s emphases: striking poses, light flares, strong solid drawing varying framerate, playful physical comedy... and indeed, much of Kanada’s early work is on early shows like Getter Robo G.

Still, despite the new flashy innovations in animation techniques which were starting to define a distinctly anime style that could make the most of limited drawing counts, these super robot shows were largely telling the same sort of stories with the same primary drive: selling toy robots to children. And while you could totally read them as geopolitical, nationalist metaphors - the robot fighting off the monster of the week sublimating the resentment of Japan defending itself against the allies - they were on the surface level pretty black and white.

So it’s time to enter... Yoshiyuki Tomino!

(he did not look like this in 1979!)

Well, OK, not so much enter. Yoshiyuki Tomino not only already on the scene by ‘79: he started work all the way back on Astro Boy in writing and storyboarding. Before long he started directing his own shows adapted a Tezuka manga, Blue Triton, as Triton of the Sea (1973), making an early stab at complicating the very black and white narrative of the original - and also setting up his reputation as ‘kill ‘em all’ Tomino by wiping out much of the cast by the ending.

He started working in the robot genre with Brave Raideen (1975) and Invincible Super Man Zambot 3 (1977-8), the latter apparently the point where the ‘kill ‘em all’ nickname stuck. But he was growing frustrated with the limitations of super robot shows. In Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3 (1978), he started introducing more complex story elements from other genres, like spy stories and ironic pastiches. Evidently something was ripe for a change.

But the real break came in 1979, with Mobile Suit Gundam. The idea was to mix a robot show with hard science fiction space opera, and realism became a central drive - which is as has been hashed out endlessly since, an inherent contradiction since humanoid robots are far from practical military equipment. But the combination of meticulously observed machine animation and tragic war stories with cool humanoid robots proved explosively influential...

(^ this is an ambitious cut for the period, but notice how the Gundam (white mecha)’s legs change in size and proportion! they hadn’t quite got it at this point)

The title ‘Gundam’ is quite literally ‘gun dam’. It actually began as a portmanteau of ‘gun’ and ‘freedom’, with early iterations of the story imagining that the protagonists would belong to a ‘Freedom Base’, but Tomino changed it to ‘Gun Dam’ with the metaphor of a robot holding back enemies like a dam holding back water.

What was science fiction like at this time? Over in the English language, we could look at the Hugo Awards shortlist, where we’ll see Le Guin, Asimov, Clarke, Haldeman, Cherryh, Niven... or perhaps we could look at blogs like @70sscifiart​. So a time of high concepts, space operas, and Vietnam metaphors... hard sci-fi was pretty central, and still considered a genuine speculative exercise rather than a nostalgic pantomime of a past genre.

And, of course, the US had only recently stopped sending people to the Moon, Japan was still riding an economic boom, there was still a Soviet Union and a Cold War and at least nominally still nominally a Space Race; the idea that humans would soon find their way to space en masse must have seemed much less of a romantic fantasy, but also the idea that once humans got up there they’d immediately stage an enormous scale war would have seemed all too plausible.

So Gundam is full of hard sci-fi concepts like helium-3 fusion and Lagrange point colonies. They go to great lengths to attempt to justify the central ‘humanoid robot’ premise as a reasonable military strategy with the convoluted concept of a ‘Minkowski particle’. But that’s details; what’s the narrative thrust?

(^ this twink is Char, the major rival character/villain.)

The first Gundam doesn’t walk too far away from its super robot predecessors. A secessionist faction called Zeta, who are portrayed at this point entirely unsympathetically as fanatical and more than a little fashy, launch a war using their mecha which wipes out half of humanity. The protagonists belong to a polity called the Federation, which has developed a powerful new robot called (guess what) a Gundam. However, when they go to collect this robot, Zeta attacks. The protagonist, Amuro, gets in the robot and fends them off; in the process, he discovers he’s some kind of new evolution of humanity better adapted to space which becomes known as a Newtype, and thus becomes the regular Gundam pilot.

He’s opposed primarily by Char, a Zeta pilot who is modelled closely on the career of the Red Baron. Although flying for Zeta, Char has his own designs, and exploits the war to do away with the rival Zabi family who killed his peace-loving father. Naturally the series ends with Char facing Amuro in a duel - but Char realises at the last minute that he’s lost sight of his true goal (killing the Zabis) and flees to finish them off instead.

This story of rivals on either sides of a war with all attendant sexual tension (and bearing in mind Tomino’s Gundam is, I understand, far from kind to its girls) proved wildly popular. For Tomino, the principal theme is famously an anti-war one: despite all the cool robots they get to play with, going to war brings only tragedy to the cast.

He pushed this even harder in his next project, Space Runaway Ideon (1980) about a group of humans in Andromeda running from a powerful military faction in ancient alien tanks, which despite first being cancelled on its original TV run, was able to finish its story in a final movie that’s known for mercilessly slaughtering its cast. (Which I would like to watch at some point so I can say something more about it than ‘haha... death...’)

Meanwhile, the Gundam juggernaut was getting seriously underway. The 1979 series was summarised in a trilogy of three movies (coming to a future Animation Night). The release became a notable event...

The first Gundam film, upon release on 22 February 1981, drew a large crowd of 15,000 people at its premiere, leading to concerns from police and media that it could lead to social unrest from a riotous crowd. The event is considered a turning point in the history of anime, referred to as "the day that anime changed" according to Asahi Shimbun newspaper.[20]

...although sadly I can’t report on a Gundam riot, fascinatingly as that would be.

Tomino set a certain tone for the mecha genre: a simultaneous fascination with military technology and deep antipathy, or at least ambivalence, towards its purpose. The psychological realism of his characters also developed, from the more iconic superhuman pilots of a super robot show to an attempt towards people who act irrationally, suffer war trauma, and can drive a story through their desires rather than stepping into the familiar roles of prosocial/antisocial. The mecha was increasingly a vulnerable body, able to be gruesomely destroyed; the dead pilot whose blood seeps out of the cockpit. (This was, therefore, a major step towards the territory of Neon Genesis Evangelion on the one hand, and the films of Mamoru Oshii such as Patlabor on another.)

This political theme was not a natural thing either, but explicitly contested by animators. Shortly after Gundam, the industry was shaken by the Future War 198X controversy, related by Matteo Watzky here. (Hey Matteo, if you read this, sorry I keep selling your name wrong with two ‘t’s. ><) In this event, a large portion of the industry signed open letters and protested the production of a near-future war film imagining a future World War III. Like Gundam, the film put a huge emphasis on realism, claiming to be an accurate projection of what such a war would look like. For many animators, this felt too much like profiting off militarism, and the unions were far from happy about its negative depiction of the Soviet Union. The result was a partial victory: the movie was made, but with an edited script ending in a rather clunky pacifistic ending in which a Star Wars-like program destroys all the missiles.

Over time, however, this political strand would diminish as anime increasingly became continuous with the notoriously apolitical otaku subculture. Gundam sits in an odd place: it is perhaps the epitome of otaku media as the source of highly profitable gunpla models, but despite that, its films and series insist on attempting to return to the same ‘anti-war’, more or less overtly political themes.

Of course, such territory is risky, and it won’t always be executed well. Gundam can end up as just characters with hilariously weird names launching into long but ultimately incoherent political rants. Over time, it attempts to add a more sympathetic dimension towards the aristocratic Zeon faction, with Char in particular swapping from antagonist to protagonist in the next series, and then going back round to antagonist again in the landmark film Char’s Counterattack (1988), a major accomplishment of animation which is unfortunately gated behind about a hundred episodes of TV anime to set the context. One day I’m going to figure out how to show it to you!

(^ note how much more detailed the mechanical designs are, and how much more consistently they are animated! the camera is also much more mobile, and the general sense of weight and motion is considerably more developed. Per sakugaboor, this cut was animated by Kouji Koizumi.)

Along the way, however, another strand of Gundam developed. While the main series emphasised big robot battles and dramatic rivalries playing out over decades, these side story OVAs tended to go for something a little smaller scale. War in the Pocket (1989), the one which I’ve seen, focuses on children in an O’Neill cylinder space colony who, running on militaristic fantasies, get pulled into the space war on different sides when some mecha crash into their habitat. Inevitably, they end up tragically dying in a futile skirmish.

08th MS Team comes much later, at the tail end of the 90s, when the realist movement in anime was well established. Its 90s stylings are certainly very clear in its character designs...

More so than the other Gundams, which tend more often to present superhuman pilots having flashy battles and high stakes duels in space, this iteration of Gundam attempts to be a gritty, down-to-earth war story. It pulls the battle down to Earth during the period of the first movie, with the fights consisting of tense jungle warfare emphasising lines of sight and logistics; its characters are seasoned and cynical soldiers rather than young prodigies.

The story naturally focuses on a connection forming between fighters on either side of the war - indeed, star-crossed lovers, Federation pilot Shiro newly assigned a command and talented Zeon pilot Aina. Shiro finds his loyalty in question when his rescue of Aina from a space wreck at the beginning of the show is discovered, and he is ordered to take his ragtag crew on a mission to destroy Aina. So it’s that juicy territory of personal vs political relationships, transcending inherited conflicts, etc. etc.

Animation-wise, 08th MS Team is also exceptional, coming at the tail end of the cel era and featuring many talented realist animators, such as Akihito Yamashita who would later work on Ghibli films - and even a young Yutaka Nakamura on his rise to the household-name (to anime fans) Sakuga Throne. The skill of these animators allows the robots to move with exceptional weight and presence, and interact believably with water and their environment, like in this iconic shot of a robot firing from behind a shield:

This makes fantastic use of an impact frame, slow-out, lighting on the environment, and especially secondary motion such that you really feel the force of this big gun. This is Sunrise at their absolute high point of traditional mecha animation, standing up to compete with the likes of Gainax’s Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (Animation Night 29).

The character animation is similarly strong, in that sharp 90s way; you can tell this is of an era with Eva and Macross Plus (Animation Night 64), but the characters are able to express a lot of subtle acting. For these reasons, and the strength of the story, 08th MS Team is widely recommended as a starting point for the Gundam-curious. So that’s where we’ll begin tonight - and if we still feel in a Gundam mood, at some point I’ll take us back to the trilogy of movies summarising the original 1979 Gundam, and then, well who knows?

(One strand I haven’t touched on much in this writeup is the actual mechanical design of the robots themselves - the substrate on which all of this is built. This is, alas, because I’m not particularly well informed about that subject! I hope I’ll be able to get to it in a future writeup, drawing on sites like zimmerit.moe. Surely someone has a compiled a history of Gundam design?)

We’re all out of time right now: we’re going to have to take a pretty brisk pace to get through the full OVA tonight, so, strap into your mobile suit and head over to twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll take flight shortly!

#animation night

[lee-scribbles-and-doodles]

My Top Ten Overlooked Movies With Female Leads In No Particular Order

Note: When you see this emoji (⚠️) I will be talking about things people may find triggering, which are spoilery more often then not. I mention things that I think may count as triggers so that people with them will be aware before going in to watch any of these.

Edited: 3/16/21

Hanna (2011)

So, before I get into why you should watch this movie, I just want to take a moment to say why it's near and dear to my heart. Growing up as a queer kid in the early 2000s, seeing portrayals of people like or similar to myself on anything was rare at best. It was mostly in more "adult" movies or shows that my parents would occasionally let me watch with them that I'd see any lgbtq+ rep at all. Often times they were either walking stereotypes, designed to be buried, evil, or all three.

Then here comes this PG-13 action thriller with a wonderfully written main female lead who, at the time, was close to my age, and who got to kiss another girl (her very first friend, Sophie) on screen in an extremely tender and heartwarming scene. To say the least, it was a life changing moment for me personally.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, Hanna is a suspenseful movie about a child super-soldier named, you guessed it, Hanna (played by Saoirse Ronan) and her adoptive (?) father Erik Heller (played by Eric Bana) exiting the snowy and isolated wilderness of their home and taking on the shadowy CIA operative, Marissa Wiegler (played by Cate Blanchette) who wants Erik dead and Hanna for herself for mysterious reasons.

It also has an amazing soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers, great action scenes, and it has an over arching fairytale motif, which I'm always a sucker for.

⚠️ Mild blood effects, some painful looking strikes, various character deaths, and child endangerment all feature in this film. However, given its PG-13 rating, a majority of viewers are presumably able to handle this one. Still, be aware of these going in.

Sidenote: It's recently gotten a TV adaptation on Amazon TV, although I have not watched it, and do not know if Hanna and Sophie's romantic/semi-romantic relationship has transferred over.

A Simple Favor

A Simple Favor is a "black-comedy mystery thriller" centered entirely around the relationship between two mothers, the reclusive, rich, mysterious, and regal Emily (played by Blake Lively), and the local recently widowed but plucky mommy blogger, Stephanie (played by Anna Kendrick). When Emily suddenly goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to find out what happened to her new best friend.

It's a fantastic and entertaining movie throughout, with fun, flawed and interesting characters. The relationship between the two female leads is also implied to be at least somewhat romantic in nature, and they even share a kiss.

⚠️ The only major warnings I can think of is that the movie contains an instance of incest and one of the main plotlines revolves around child abuse, although both of these potentially triggering topics are not connected to each other, so there is thankfully no csa going on.

Edit: I legitimately forgot there was drug use in this movie until now. So, yeah, if that's a trigger, be careful of that.

I Am Mother

I became mildly obsessed with this movie when it came out. I Am Mother is a sci-fi film that centers entirely around a cast of two woman, and a female-adjacent robot who is brought to life on screen with absolutely amazing practical effects.

The plot is such, after an extinction-level event, a lone robot known only as Mother tasks herself with replenishing the human race via artifical means. She begins with the film's main protagonist, Daughter. Years go by as Mother raises her human child and the two prepare for Daughter's first sibling (a brother) to be born. However, on Daughter's 16th birthday, the arrival of an outsider known only as Woman shakes Daughter's entire world view. She begins to question Mother's very nature, as well as what's really going on outside the bunker she and her caretaker call home.

⚠️ This movie features child endangerment and reference to child death.

Lilo and Stitch

When I decided to add a single Disney film to this list I initially thought it was going to be hard but almost immediately my brain went to Lilo and Stitch, and specifically about the relationship between Lilo and Nani.

On the surface, this film is about a lonely little girl accidentally adopting a fugitive alien creature as a "dog," but underneath that the story is also about two orphaned sisters and the older sister's attempts to not let social services tear them apart by stepping up as the younger sister's primary guardian. Despite its seemingly goofy premise, Lilo and Stitch has a very emotional and thoughtful center. It's little wonder how this movie managed to spawn an entire franchise.

Despite the franchise it spawned (or possibly because of it), I often find that Lilo and Stitch is overlooked and many people only remember it for the "little girl adopts an alien as a pet" portion of its plot, and I very rarely see it on people's top 10 Disney lists.

⚠️ This movie could be potentially triggering to people who were separated from their siblings or other family members due to social service intervention. There's also a bit of child endangerment, including a scene where Lilo and Stitch both almost drown.

Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind

Unlike the above entry, I did struggle a little bit with picking a single Studio Ghibli film. Most media of the Ghibli catalogue have strong, well-written, unique, and interesting female leads so selecting just one seemed like quite the task.

However, I eventually settled on this particular film. In recent months, Princess Nausicaä has become my absolute favorite Ghibli protagonist and I'm absolutely enchanted by the world she lives in.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world overun by giant insects and under threat of a toxic forest and its poisoness spores, Nausicaä must try to protect the Valley of the Wind from invaders as she also tries to understand the science behind the toxic forest and attempts to bridge the gap between the insects and the humans.

For those who have never seen the film, I think Nausicaä's personality can best be described as being similar to OT Luke Skywalker. Both are caring, compassionate, and gentle souls who are able to see the best in nearly anyone or anything. She's an absolutely enthralling protagonist and after rewatching the film again for the first time in well over a decade she has easily become one of my all time favorite protagonists.

Whenever I see people talk about Ghibli films, they rarely mention this one, and when they do mention it, it's often in passing. In my opinion it's a must watch.

⚠️ This movie contains some blood, and the folks who either don't like insects or who have entomophobia may not appreciate the giant bugs running about throughout the movie. (Although most insects do not directly relate to real life bugs, and are fantasy creatures).

A Silent Voice

A Silent Voice is an animated movie adaptation of a manga of the same name. While I've never had the pleasure to read the manga, the movie is phenomenal. It covers topics such a bullying, living in the world with a disability, the desire for atonement, social anxiety, and depression in a well thought out manner that ties itself together through the progression of the relationship between its two leads, Shoya and Shouko. It's also beautifully animated. Although very popular among anime viewers, I've noticed that it's often overlooked by people who watch little to no anime. So I suppose this is me urging non-anime viewers to give this film a chance.

⚠️ As mentioned above, the movie deals with bullying, anxiety, and depression (with this last one including suicidal thoughts and behaviour). If discussion of those topics are triggering to you, than you may want to proceed with caution or skip this movie all together.

In This Corner of The World

Another manga adaptation, this one taking place during WWII-era Japan. In This Corner of The World follows the life of a civilian Japanese woman, Suzu Urano, as she navigates simply living and her new marriage as the wartime invades nearly all aspects of everyday life. I think this movie is a good representation of what it must be like to be living as civilian in a country at war where the fight is sometimes fought on one's own soil. It was also an interesting look into pre-50s Japanese culture in my opinion. It's also beautifully animated featuring an art style I don't see often.

Despite it being well known among anime fans, I never really see it be brought up, even among said anime fans themselves.

Side note: I've seen many WWII dramas centering around civilians but they've almost always been about American or UK civilians. This was the first movie I'd seen that features the perspective of a Japanese civilain.

⚠️ Features the death of a child and limb loss. There's also a disturbing scene featuring a victim of one of the atomic bombs near the end.

Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

This film follows Hana, a Japan-native woman who fell in love with a magical shape-shifting wolf-man, and her trials with raising their children, who can also magically shape-shift into wolves, on her own. It's a very heartfelt movie about a mother's love and the struggles of doing right by your children when you have limited resources to actively guide and care for them. All the characters feel unique and alive in my opinion. Also, the animation is so good that my sister and I initially mistook it for a Ghibli film.

Again, like the previous two anime entries, I don't see it ever brought up outside of anime circles.

⚠️ There's some child endangerment present in the film, although none of it is the fault of Hana as far as I can remember.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday is about the fictional Princess Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn), who while on a whirlwind tour of Europe, finally reaches her breaking point over having her entire life be one big schedule and all her words and actions being rehearsed. In the spur of the moment, she runs away in hopes of experiencing what life is like for other women. Unfortunately, she was previously given a sedative, meaning she doesn't get too far before it takes effect. Fortunately, she is found by the kind reporter Joe Bradley (played by Gregory Peck). Believing her to be drunk and unable to get an address from her (because she has none) he ends up taking her home for safety's sake and allows her to sleep off her suppose drunken stupor. The next day, he realizes who she is, and decides to take her on a fun sight seeing trip across Rome in hopes of getting the big scoop. Along the way, they begin to fall for each other.

This is my favorite black and white, old romance film. I think the relationship between the main characters is absolutely beautiful and I have a lot of fun watching it.

⚠️ I'm not entirely sure what kind of warning this film would need. However, it was released in 1953, so values dissonance will probably be at play for many viewers to at least some extent. For example, early in the film Ann is given sedation drugs by her doctor for her behavior, something that is very unlikely to happen today. Also, Mr Bradley deciding to take Ann home to keep her safe rather than call the police or an ambulance is a very pre-90s decision in my opinion.

#hanna 2011 #a simple favor #i am mother #lilo and stitch #nausicaä of the valley of the wind #a silent voice #in this corner of the world #wolf chilren ame and yuki #wolf children #roman holiday #black and white film #anime #disney #studio ghibli #movie recs #top 10

[mocacheezy]

Things that made watching Transformers (2007) easier and even enjoyable:

[note: B'verse gets the treatment that it gets by fandom for good reasons. There are tons of posts that dissect the bullshit of these movies far better than my second-language-english-non-american self could ever tackle, so I am not doing that, or plan on doing that. But if I decide that I'll get through every continuity of the franchise I will find a way to make it fun for myself. And so, this is my search for golden nuggets in these movies, because they did bring in new fans to the franchise and that's why we have other continuities that we might not have otherwise. Credit where it's due, and some positivity for those that did find B'verse at least amusing if nothing else. ]

🍴🥄🔪🍴🥄🔪🍴🥄🔪🍴🥄🔪🥄🔪🍴🥄🔪

Frenzy

Anytime Frenzy was on screen made me smile because his movements and personality were hilarious, he is just so expressive despite looking like someone super glued a bunch of knifes together. I wouldn't know it was Frenzy if I didn't go to the Wiki, but no matter that, he was funny and that's what matters.

The original Cybertronian robot modes

We don't see them for long, but the glimpses were glorious. Just look at Optimus

Gorgeous. What I wouldn't give to see the details up close. Maybe I'll go looking eventually, but this is just so nice.

We also get a "sexily rises from the pool" scene with Ironhide (probably unintentional and I am biased due to being a robofucker. In any case, very very nice and Cybertronians look so good as aliens)

"Excuse me, are you the Tooth Fairy?"

You see this kid?

This little girl was the only human I cared about in the movie until I saw just how badass Mikaela is, and how cool the military dude is. I don't like kids, but I would lay down my life for this girl.

This one scene just makes me think of what would happen if her parents showed up way earlier. Ironhide would be her guardian and it would be both adorable and hilarious because "Honey, you have to drive in a sentient alien that looks just like our car because the goverment men said so or there will be consequences and potential alien threats."

There are so many joke potentials there; the cultural barrier, the "I am the ine that is supposed to keep her safe" glaring contests, there is just so much shenanigans that could happen.

Also, tea party with the kid. Tea party with the kid.

Sam Witwicky actually reacts like an average human would when faced with the situations he finds himself in

Do I like Sam Witwicky? No, he is the kind of character that I would want to punch irl because of his personality and actions. He is disgusting. But watching him scamper and scream and stutter when faced with giant metal robot aliens that can squish him like a bug? Good, that was a beliavable reaction and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Megatron. Just, ✨Megatron✨

(the best screenshot of the few I could take while watching, no, I am not going back for a better one, he looks perfect like this)

I also laughted at how they kept him frozen like a popsicle. And not even well, like, they COULD'VE made an actual freezer and pop him in instead of using those couple of tubes just so he was displayed for all personell to gawk at. HE CRASHED IN THE ANTARCTIC!

The design looks so good, because it looks ALIEN and POINTY and AGH!!! The colors? There are no colors that would make him stand out, he looks like someone opened a cutlery drawer, mixed up what's inside, threw in some extra knifes for a good measure and then shook the whole thing until this guy materialized from the pile. It is both incredibly annoying and satisfying.

🔪

Mr. Welker did an amazing job with his voice, I don't know what the directions were, but oh man it sure sent shivers down my spine. That is the kind of voice that spells "You are going to die" and I already have my coffin picked out.

EDIT: SO APPARENTLY! IT WAS NOT WELKER THAT VOICED MEGATRON.

It was Hugo Weaving, and yes the man did am amazing job, but I apologize a million times, I was CERTAIN that THE OG VA OF MEGATRON WOULD ALSO HAVE VOICED MEGATRON. LIKE, OKAY BAY, OKAY!

🔪

LOOK AT THE AMOUNT OF ICE! With how quick he came back fully online once Frenzy turned off the freeze liquid tubes, I bet he was half awake through the whole thing. Systems just below idling or something, in any case, AGENTS YOU ARE SO DUMB! WHO WAS GIVING SUBPAR FUNDING TO THEM, THEY BETTER BE FIRED!

I also was glad that Sam refused to call him by the name the sector asigned to him, despite Megatron being in stasis. And that he insisted they use the correct name. Good job Sam, acknowledge the threat by the actual name and show respect to a fellow sentient lifeform. Even though said lifeform is hellbent on destruction of the universe and your world.

ALSO, AND I CANNOT STRESS THE LAUGHTER AND AMUSEMENT HERE; the sheer DISRESPECT! They don't disassemble Megatron's corpse. No, these idiots, these absolute morons decide to dump him into the ocean, letting him sink to the lowest possible point (not sure if they did say it was the M' Trench or not), where there are proper freezing temperatures - good! You're learning, good job!! - just... In full. Full corpse. What's left of him. Just blup! Down with the fishies he goes!

I understand that they probably didn't know how to approach Optimus about it, but... At least behead the guy. He came back ONCE, who is to say he won't come back again?! Safety precautions my dears.

They also completely disregard what a giant extraterrestrial metal alien rusting away on the bottom of the ocean could do to the ecosystem at large. Like, I find this incredibly amusing, because this ISN'T something most folks think about when watching a movie but we have giant squids down there. We have so much weird things down there, the ocean isn't even fully explored AND YOU WANT TO CHUCK AN ALIEN CORPSE DOWN THERE?!

Now the real question: is he a looker? *looks at the pictures* hmmmm, depends on if you like knifes. Like, really like knifes. Like really, really REALLY want to get it on with a fine assembly of kitchen knifes that were exposed to the elements but somehow haven't rusted away completely.

I think he's neat.

Needs a good long powerwash though. Preferrably with something to help the whole "I was frozen for more than 50 years and sprang back to action as soon as I woke up" thing that happened.

My man needs to take a moment and get his bearings, like dude. Please. You can conquer the world after some energon and slow system boot-up period. The strain on the systems my dude, you ain't young.

Also love that this "death" was probably reused in TFP because lord golly, do we love our faves ending up under the sea. (Though Megan took a much bigger fall, Bayverse WAS PLOPPED INTO THE WATER LIKE A NEWLY ACQUIRED FISH I CAN'T YOU GUYS I CAN'T!)

In short: I love the comedy of american military giving such disrespect to an Alien Warlord. These guys are really sealing their fate.

I loved the way they got the Witwicky family to be important to the plot

The whole "selling my great great grandpa's glasses on e-bay" thing gives us a very good self insert/OC/rewrite/movie AU potential. Don't like Sam and his disgustingness? Find a way to write a cousin or some far off relative or hell, even just someone who buys the glasses off e-bay and go wild with it!

Archibald was also clearly an inspiration for Isaac Sumdac as far as I can tell, what with both of them using Megatron as a means of helping technology advance.

Only difference being one of them lived and actually talked to Megatron after he came back online and the other got driven to madness and death due to the amount of information beamed into his brain. Isaac also acquired a space baby daughter, so the guy is absolutely luckier of the two.

Mikaela being fucking competent and badass throughout the movie, and not being just fanservice eyecandy

I could do without the fanservice, but her personality? I loved it. I loved that she wasn't crawling to Sam and wasn't being "hard to get". Which is also why I was very displeased at the very sudden "oh yeah, romance! She returns his feelings after he took her for a ride and let her vent her frustrations!". The movie is 2 hours long and they could throw in some moments where these two connect?

Welp, it is an action movie, boy gets girl no matter what, can't complain about the staple in the genre.

However, Mikaela x Optimus? Now THAT is something I considered as soon as the two locked eyes and interacted. Like, even taking my shipping goggles off, these two could have a very interesting dynamic and Mikaela could be a very good protagonist. I wonder what the movie would be like with her as the lead and Sam being the fucking moron she has to drag along with her.

BUT ALSO! Can we talk about the horrible, excruciating fact that her and Bumblebee drove around with Bee's damaged legs dragging over asphalt all the time he was shooting at 'Cons? There were sparks flying! SHE WAS DRIVING BACKWARDS! She took command of the situation and did what she could because Bee still wanted TO FIGHT!

Also, they way she beat up Frenzy? Gorgeous, I want to slap Sam's non-existent balls off for not atleast saying "thanks". The dude would be sliced thinner than cabbage if she wasn't there.

The millitary man we are supposed to care about because his wife gave birth while he was on duty and we see his baby three times in the whole movie, actually being a pretty awesome and well-written character

Look, personally, I was a little confused at the reason why we were seeing his wife and baby interacting/the scene where she thinks her husband is dead. Mostly because I don't like kids, so scenes like that, when I don't even know who the character is, have no impact at all. Him having a baby isn't going to make me like the guy more, unless I know his character. Him being absent because he's on duty doesn't mean he'll be a good dad (though he looks like the kind of man that will try his best, and I like that in a man). So seeing his wife and kid at the start of the movie seemed pointless to me.

BUT! FOCUSING ON THE POSITIVES HERE!

Lennox is a good character and whenever he was on screen I was invested in what is going to happen to him. He's the kind of action movie lead that would have me invested, despite my meh interest in mainly gun fight oriented action movies.

Essentially, loved the guy, would love to see more of him while also being able to tell what's happening on screen. Also the comedy scenes he was in were usually funny.

~

Okay so these are the things I like about the first movie! It was very long, had to watch it on 2,5x speed because it simultainously dragged while ALSO giving me too much information, but the moments like these and the way my imagination latched onto characters I liked made it watchable. It isn't a movie I'd use to introduce someone to the TF franchise, but it provided me with lots of material for my imagination to run wild.

#moca watches #transformers #transformers bayverse #moca screeches #Yes the cutlery divider is due to the Decepticons looking like they do. It amuses me greatly.

[scope-dogg]

Knight’s and Magic: Final Thoughts

Isekai anime have been very popular in recent years, and 2017′s Knight’s and Magic was one of many cashing in on that trend, with the added twist of being a mecha series. However, what many may not realise is that the Isekai genre of anime was originally born out of the mecha genre, with the first Isekai anime arguably being the 1983 classic Aura Battler Dunbine by Yoshiyuki Tomino. While Isekai has split off and diversified into its own extremely prolific and popular genre, mecha has kept a foothold within it, and subsequently some of the greatest mecha shows have been fantasy-themed, with great titles like Magic Knight Rayearth and The Vision of Escaflowne following in Dunbine’s footsteps over the years, so really Knight’s and Magic should be viewed rather as the continuation of a fairly long tradition of fantasy mecha rather than Isekai but with robots. Adapted from the early volumes of a currently ongoing manga by the same name, it’s a short series, but one with high production values, superb mechanical design and entertaining action. It’s also a series that I ultimately simply cannot stand.

The plot setup is that Tsubasa Kurata is an unassuming but highly talented programmer working in contemporary Japan - or at least he is until he’s killed in a road traffic accident. As he dies, he has but one regret - that he’ll no longer be able to live with his hobby of building plastic model kits of giant anime robots. As is often the case with such a setup, he finds himself reborn into a fantasy kingdom called Fremevilla as the son of nobles called Ernesti Echavalier. However, to his joy, he finds out that the main weapon for fighting back against these monsters is the Silhouette Knight, a kind of gigantic magic-powered mecha. Thus, he devotes himself to the art of learning everything there is about these machines and one day building and piloting one of his very own.

There’s nothing really wrong with this premise, but Knight’s and Magic is flawed in how one-track it is. The show’s really only about one thing - how robots are cool. Of course, I agree that robots are cool. Knight’s and Magic’s lineup of robots in particular is very cool, both in their form and unique functions. However, anyone who’s actually a fan of the mecha genre knows that just having cool robots isn’t enough to carry a show - you have to have compelling characters and interesting narratives. The all-too-frequently trotted-out line of “[x mecha show] is actually good, unlike the rest of the genre, because it focuses on the characters instead of just the robots” is probably the single most effective thing you can say if you want to piss off a mecha fan, because that sentence describes literally every mecha show that was ever worth a damn, even going back to the genre’s roots in the 70s. However, it arguably doesn’t really describe Knight’s and Magic. The series’ creators come off as just as obsessed with robots as its main character, and it comes at the expense of the characters and setting. Each new episode comes with a cool new robot or a cool upgrade for an existing one, but practically none of them feature development of the setting or its characters. Fremevilla and its neighbours never come off as anything more than “generic fantasy kingdom”, the supporting cast are all cut from extremely generic-feeling moulds, and Ernesti never undergoes any growth or exhibits any notable character traits beyond “likes robots.”

Now, there have been several characters in mecha anime who are in large part defined by their dedication to giant robots as an ideal, or simply to their aesthetic, and some of these are truly excellent characters. For instance, Gai Daigoji from Nadesico, Akagi Shunsuke from Dai-Guard, Noa Izumi from Patlabor, Sei Iori from Gundam Build Fighters, or the Super Robot Wars Original character Ryusei Date. The difference between all of these and Ernesti is that being fans of robots isn’t the only thing that makes them relatable or endearing characters, whereas in Ernesti’s case it’s basically the only thing that defines his personality. It also doesn’t help that he’s perhaps the biggest Mary Sue main character that I’ve seen in a mecha anime. His gimmick is that his past-life experience as a programmer also makes him profoundly adept at magic, and that he’s a genius Silhouette Knight designer. He’s always totally successful at everything he tries and everyone loves and respects him for his accomplishments. Ironically, it’s this that makes him an unlikable character for the viewer, because, again, he has no real admirable qualities beyond liking robots and being good at making and using them. It’s a character’s struggles and tribulations that ultimately make them truly sympathetic, and Ernesti is never really challenged until right at the very end of the series, and ultimately that challenge only feels like a mild speed bump for him. This results in a series that despite all its cool robots and flashy battles is fundamentally dead as a story at its core.

However, all of this simply describes a series that I would find boring and mediocre rather than one I actively disliked in a serious way. However, this is arguably the first series I’ve watched since Gundam Seed Destiny that really ground my gears quite badly, and it all boils down to one specific moment in the show’s narrative. To explain why, I need to diverge from my usual review format and spoil not only this show, but also it’s forefather, the original mecha Isekai, Aura Battler Dunbine. I really don’t think spoilers for the former is anything to worry about but spoiling the latter is probably more of an offense. As such, the remainder of this review is below this spoiler cut:

Dunbine is not everyone’s cut of tea. It’s old, has bad animation, it’s long-winded and has a sometimes confused and scrambled narrative in accordance with some of Tomino’s worst habits. However, it was also a work of great imagination that really delivered on communicating a valuable message in some engaging ways. It’s a message that Knight’s and Magic cheerfully and infuriatingly tramples all over. Let me explain.

In Knight’s and Magic, the show’s hero is an outsider who enters into a fantasy world and uses his real-world knowledge to bring about a revolution in technology. This also happens to be the chief descriptor for a major character in Dunbine too.

However, this isn’t the description of the show’s protagonist, Show Zama.

It’s the description of the show’s villain, Shot Weapon.

Shot Weapon is the creator of the Aura Convertor, the technology that powers the show’s mecha, the Aura Battlers, and other weapons besides. The introduction of this technology destroys the peace of Dunbine’s world, Byston Well, and causes it to descend into anarchy and bloodshed. However, the real devastation doesn’t occur until Shot’s creations are transported back into our world, where they inflict destruction almost beyond imagining. Ultimately, Shot Weapon’s actions condemn him to a punishment of being forced to live forever in Byston Well in a state of eternal suffering, like Cain after murdering his brother Abel. Dunbine’s ultimate, most crucial message is that those who manufacture weapons and spread death are to be condemned.

Knight’s and Magic gave itself the exact same opportunity to deal with this exact same theme. The show’s final arc is that a kingdom called Zaloudek has accumulated vast military power and used it to invade its neighours. We get to see as they descend into a neighbouring kingdom, slaughter its just and rightful rulers and install themselves as tyrants. Now, enter Ernesti and his friends at the conquered kingdom’s borders. At this point he’s achieved his aim of creating his own unique robot called the Ikaruga, and in its first battle effortlessly dispatches the Zaloudek soldiers guarding the border. In the aftermath, he examines the wreckage of a destroyed Zaloudek Silhouette Knight. He and everyone else see the obvious - this machine, the Tyranto is based on Ernesti’s designs. Previously, one of the prototype Knights he’d constructed in an earlier arc was stolen by a mysterious foreign agent, and now it’s become clear what happened to it. The source of the military strength that’s fuelling Zaloudek’s ambitions of conquest are the new technologies that he created, reverse engineered from the stolen mecha. As he looks upon the wreck of the Tyranto, the show is presented with a unique opportunity to do something that it’s thus far not done - challenge its protagonist with the consequences of his actions. Sure, Ernesti is not exactly the same as Shot Weapon - he only wanted to create robots because he thought they were cool, while Shot Weapon wanted power. However, in this case the end result has been the same - death, destruction and oppression. Ernesti has a chance to think about whether the things he’s done are right and acknowledge that he’s at least somewhat responsible for the disaster that’s played out, even if it’s just to acknowledge that he has a duty to set things right by beating Zaloudek. This is an opportunity for him to grow as a character for the first time.

The show swerves this opportunity without flinching.

Sure, Ernesti does liberate the kingdom in the end, but it’s clear that it’s not as a result of any real moral calling. He just wanted to build more robots and fight with them. His motivation in the final battle is that he wants to destroy the enemy’s flying battleship because he’s worried that battleships might replace Silhouette Knights if he doesn’t. He remains a totally one-dimensional character right to the end.

As I said before, Ernesti’s obsession with cool robots arguably mirrors that of the creators of this show, if its myopic focus on them is anything to go by. Perhaps this seems extremely out of character for me to say, but this is an infantile obsession. Yes, I like giant robots, but I don’t like them so much that I miss the point. The core of not only the real robot genre that both Knight’s and Magic and Aura Battle Dunbine belong to despite the fantasy trappings of the show, but arguably of the mecha genre as a whole, is that technology can be a force of destruction and great evil when not used responsibly. Yes, the protagonist mecha in these shows are meant to be heroic, but only in their opposition to those who’d use technology as a tool of death and oppression. This is the core of the soul that makes mecha as a genre compelling. It’s a point that Knight’s and Magic completely misses and why it’s fundamentally a failure. It’s as if it’s trying to be what the mecha genre’s detractors try to paint it as.

That said, despite my misgivings there is entertainment to be found if you only want dumb action. But I’d highly encourage you to check out any alternative. If you want a fantasy mecha series, Dunbine, Escaflowne and Rayearth are all much more compelling stories than this - even ones I’m not so keen on like Panzer World Galient and Ryu Knight are fundamentally more interesting as stories than this. If you want a story with a mecha fanatic in the lead role, you’re much better off watching Patlabor or the chronically underrated Dai-Guard instead.

#knight's and magic #mecha #respect the robot

[soupthatistohot]

Why do I write primarily mlm fanfic?

This was something I asked myself the other day. I am a girl, I think I'm queer (but I am attracted to men, whatever I am), so why do I fixate on mlm relationships? Why do I never feel compelled to write wlw or even just some good 'ol straight stuff? I brought this up to a few friends of mine who also watch anime. One of them said that it’s because lots of popular media only really focuses on developing their male characters well, and I think this to be a very suitable explanation (as well as the fact that I’m queer and thus gravitate towards queer stories).

Take Sk8 the Infinity for example. I could count the number of female characters in this anime on one hand, and one of them is a robot. The others are supporting roles who only serve to support the male main characters. I love Sk8 very much, and with the possibility of a 2nd season I’d love to see a prominent, well-developed female character (but if they make her Reki’s love interest I will literally stab someone). But as the anime stands right now, there are no female characters that aren't just basically plot devices.

Another show I love dearly, Yuri!!! on Ice, is much the same. While there can be more of an argument made here because 1) competitive figure skating is split up between men and women, and 2) I believe that the story Yuuri and Victor is absolutely meant to be a romance, so having the two men as the focus is somewhat necessary, there's an overwhelming lack of fleshed-out women in the story. All the female characters are supporting members that only exist for the benefit of male characters. Yuuko and Minako support Yuuri, Lilia exists so Yuri P. can improve, Mila is just... kind of there, and Sara's whole character is centered around her brother being overprotective of her.

Okay, so let's look at something a little less... fruity. Horimiya. I've only watched the anime, so if there's stuff I miss from not having read the manga (yet), please forgive me. I still think this is a valid perspective, though, because if there's female development that the creators decided was so unimportant that it could be cut, that still supports my point here. In my opinion, Miyamura is a lot more developed than Hori. He has his tragic backstory of being a loner, and having his secret piercings and tattoos and all that. A lot of the story ends up focusing on his side of things... despite the fact that Hori is the protagonist. The story follows her perspective for the most part, we learn things about Miyamura as she does, yet I feel like she's a bit dull. She has a uncommon home life and has to take care of her younger brother, that's her big bad secret? I get that it's kind of unexpected since she's the pretty, perfect, popular girl, but I still feel like it's a tad anticlimactic. It's hardly ever addressed beyond the first few episodes, too, and it just kind of exists as a fact within the story. Even beyond our main couple, it seems like the other female characters development and stories are all focused on the boy they're interested in (except for Sawada, but she's there for like a couple of episodes and then doesn't really show up all that much again... and her crush on Hori is handled really weird, I didn't exactly love it). Remi's entire character is pretty much centered around her boyfriend, and Sakura and Yuki are basically competing for Toru. Meanwhile, the guys have story beats themed around the girls they're interested in, but I feel like it's not as obsessive or dramatic as how the girls are depicted.

So, we're given these female characters, who are really watered-down and honestly kind of boring, and we're not super compelled to write about them. When we are given flat female characters, there's nothing to work with. It's more fun to use the characters who have had development and play around with the "what ifs" and our own personal headcannons. The characters who get this special treatment are primarily male. And while I commend a lot of shows for developing their male characters in such a way that doesn't exactly fit with society's idea of masculinity (ex: Reki's insecurities and depression, Yuuri's anxiety and femininity, Miyamura's isolation and depression), in the end these characters are still boys, men, males.

I also think mlm is so prominent because of both straight girls and queer people. For straight girls, it can often be fetishization (forgive my generalizing, I'm sure not all straight girls are like that, but an overwhelming amount definitely are). I think one of the best examples I can give for this is Phan. This is a bit different since it's not anime, but instead real people, but if anything that really drives home the point even more. The way Dan and Phil were (and probably still are) treated in the fandom internet space is disturbing, to say the least. Their audience, while much of it was queer, was also made up of an overwhelming amount of heterosexual girls who not only shipped them intensely, but also often sexualized them. And look, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a straight girl and writing smut, but it gets to a point where it can be kind of weird if its excessive. Like, if that's all the relationship is really about, and if the people you're writing about are real human beings, that's definitely overstepping. I will admit that I had a Wattpad and that I wrote Phanfic way back when, and this is something I'm not exactly proud of. Granted, I did not write anything explicit, it was still super weird, whether or not I was queer. And I'm not saying all the problematic aspects of the Phandom were because of straight girls, because what I contributed was arguably problematic, and I did not identify as straight at the time. At the same time, though, there were straight girls who wrote exclusively smut (or "lemons" as they might've been referred to at the time). There were those who analyzed every post, every bit of information they could find about these men on the internet. They obsessed over the fact that they occasionally shared clothes (which is fairly common for roomates of similar sizes to do), and gathered evidence to support the theory that they shared a bed. It was bad. It was invasive, and it got to the point where it wasn't about the people, it was about the fetishized fantasy these girls made up in their heads about these real, actual men.

Dan and Phil's online presence kind of disappeared for a few years... and I don't blame them.

Getting back on track, mlm is prominent for queer people because it's the LGBT representation they so desperately want to see actualized in media. If a show doesn't make their favorite queer ship canon (and they often don't), they'll do it themselves! That's what fanfic is for! I also know that queer people project onto these characters a lot, and that writing about them is almost like a form of therapy. They see these characters as queer, and they see themselves in these characters, so they write about these characters experiencing similar emotions to them. The thing is, the most compelling characters are male, so those are the characters they end up focusing on, even if the person in question is strictly sapphic. My best example is how I project onto Reki. Personally, I end up thinking of him as (and thus end up writing him as) having some internalized homophobia around being bisexual. That's literally what I am currently going through. I can't project this onto any of the female characters in Sk8, because I couldn't see them going through this experience because they're not developed enough to.

Despite all of this, I still enjoy all of the shows I mention a lot. I think it's just an interesting topic that I was thinking about. I'm not trying to bash anything that I used as an example, these were just my personal observations based off of what I know about these shows and their fandoms. I do, though, believe shipping real people isn't super cool, and I stand by that as someone who used to do it. I'm not going to stop you... I just think it's intrusive and inappropriate to pretend like you know enough about influencers to dictate who they should be involved with romantically. Their love life is, frankly, none of your damn business.

So, long story short, we should make anime (and popular media in general) less misogynistic.

(Also, please leave Dan and Phil alone, they deserve privacy)

#fandom #anime #mlm #queer #lgbt #lgbtqia #sk8 the infinity #yuri!!! on ice #yuri on ice #horimiya #kind of an essay #kind of a brain dump #I hope I got my point across #I spent a little bit too much time of this probably #yes I was a phannie a little while ago #don't judge me #I didn't want to tag this as phan for fear that they would attack me #I don't need the wrath of the phandom

[geshertzarmeod]

Favorite Books of 2020

I wanted to put together a list! I read 74 new books this year, and I keep track of that on Goodreads - feel free to add or follow me if you want to see everything! I’m going to focus on the highlights, and the books that stuck with me personally in one way or another, in approximate order. Also, all but two of them (#5 and #7 on the honorable mention list) are queer/trans in some way. Links are to Goodreads, but if you’re looking to get the books, I suggest your library, the Libby app using your library, your local bookstore, or Bookshop.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, illus. by Ned Asta (originally published 1977). I had a hard beginning of the year and was in a work environment where my queerness was just not welcomed or wanted. I read this in the middle of all of that, and it helped me so much. I took this book with me everywhere. I read it on planes. I read it on the bus, and on trains, and at shul. I showed it to friends... sometimes at shul, or professional development conferences. It healed my soul. Now I can’t find it and might get a new copy. When I reviewed it, in February, I wrote: “I think we all need this book right now, but I really needed this book right now. Wow. This book is magic, and brings back a sense of magic and beauty to my relationship with the world.” Also I bought my copy last July, in a gay bookstore on Castro St. in SF, and that in itself is just beautiful to me. (Here’s a post I made with some excerpts)

Once & Future duology, especially the sequel, Sword in the Stars, by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy. Cis pansexual female King Arthur Ari Helix (she's the 42nd reincarnation and the first female one) in futuristic space with Arab ancestry (but like, from a planet where people from that area of earth migrated to because, futuristic space) works to end Future Evil Amazon.com Space Empire with her found family with a token straight cis man and token white person. Merlin is backwards-aging so he's a gay teenager with a crush and thousands of years of baggage. The book’s entire basis is found family, and it's got King Arthur in space. And the sequel hijacks the original myth and says “fuck you pop culture, it was whitewashed and straightwashed, there were queer and trans people of color and strong women there the whole time.” Which is like, my favorite thing to find in media, and a big part of why I love Xena so much. It’s like revisionist history to make it better except it’s actually probably true in ways. Anyway please read these books but also be prepared for an absolutely absurd and wild ride. Full disclosure though, I didn’t love the first book so much, it’s worth it for the sequel!

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum. This book hurt. It still hurts. But it was so good. It took me on a whole journey, and brought me to my destination just like it intended the whole time. The author’s note at the end made me cry! The sheer NEED from this book, the way the main relationship develops and shifts, and how you PERCEIVE the main relationship develops and shifts. I’m in awe of Ancrum’s writing. If you like your ships feral and needy and desperate and wanting and D/S vibes and lowkey super unhealthy but with the potential, with work, to become healthy and beautiful and right, read this book. This might be another one to check trigger warnings for though.

The Entirety of The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. I hadn’t heard of this series until this year, when a good friend recommended it to me. It filled the black hole in me left by Harry Potter. The political and mystical/fantasy world building is just *chef’s kiss* - the complexity! The morally grey, everyone’s-done-awful-things-but-some-people-are-still-trying-to-do-good tapestry! The ROMANCE oh my GOD the romance. If I’m absolutely fully invested in a heterosexual romance you know a book is good, but also this book had background (and then later less background) queer characters! And the DRAMA!!! The third book went in a direction that felt a little out of nowhere but honestly I loved the ride. I stayed up until 6am multiple times reading this series and I’d do it again.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. I loved this book so much that it’s the only book I reviewed on my basically abandoned attempt at a book blog. This book is haunting, horrifying, disturbing, dark, but so, so good. The character's voices were so specific and clear, the relationships so clearly affected by circumstance and yet loving in the ways they could be. This is my favorite portrayal of gender maybe ever, it’s just... I don’t even have the words but I saw a post @audible-smiles​ made about it that’s been rattling in my head since. And, “you gender-malcontent. You otherling,” as tender pillow talk??? Be still my heart. Be ready, though, this book has all the triggers.. it’s a .

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. This book called me out on my perspective on love. Also, it made me cry a lot. And it has two different interesting well-written romance storylines. And a realistic coming-into-identity narrative about a Black trans demiboy. And a nuanced discussion of college plans and what one might do after college. And some big beautiful romcom moments. I wish I had it in high school. I’m so glad I have it now! (trigger warning for transphobia & outing, but the people responsible are held accountable by the end, always treated as not okay by the narrative, and the MC’s friends, and like... this is ownvoices and it’s GOOD.)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. My Goodreads review says, “I have no idea what happened, and I loved it.” That’s not wrong, but to delve deeper, this book has an ethereal feeling that you get wrapped up in while reading. Nothing makes sense but that’s just as it should be. You’re hooked. It is so atmospheric, so meta, so fascinating. I’ve seen so many people say they interpreted this character or that part or the ending in all different ways and it all makes sense. And it’s all of this with a gay main character and romance and the central theme, the central pillar being a love of and devotion to stories. Of course I was going to love it.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom. “Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true, or false. Maybe what matters is the story itself; what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.” This book was so good and paradigm shifting. It reminded me of #1 on this list in the way it turns real life experience and hard, tragic ones at that (in this case, of being a trans girl of color who leaves home and tries to make a life for herself in the city, with its violence), into a beautiful, haunting fable. Once upon a time.

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. I need to reread this book, as I read it during my most tranceful time of 2020 and didn’t write a review, so I forgot a lot. What I do remember is beautiful and important nonbinary representation, a really cute romance, an interesting parental and familial/sibling dynamic that was both heartbreaking and hopeful, and an on-page therapy storyline. Also Mason Deaver just left twitter but was an absolutely hilarious troll on it before leaving and I appreciate that (and they just published a Christmas novella that I have but haven’t read yet!)

The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos. It took a long time to trust this book but I’m so glad I did. It’s raw and real and full of grief and trauma (trigger warnings, that I remember, for grief, death (before beginning of book), and gun violence). The protagonist is flawed and gets to grow over the course of the book, and find her own place, and learn from the people around her, while they also learn to understand her and where she’s coming from. It’s got a gritty, harsh, and important portrayal of found family, messy queerness, and some breathtaking quotes. When I was 82% through this book I posted this update: “This book has addressed almost all of my initial hesitations, and managed to complicate itself beautifully.”

Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro.  I wasn’t actually in the best mental health place to read this book when I did (didn’t quite understand what it was) but it definitely reminded me of what there is to fight against and to fight for, and broke my heart, and nudged me a bit closer to hope. The naturally diverse cast of characters was one of the best parts of this book. The romance is so sweet and tender and then so painful. This book is important and well-written but read it with caution and trigger warnings - it’s about grief and trauma and racism and police brutality, but also about love and community.

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden.  This is a sci-fi/fantasy/specfic mashup that takes place in near-future South Africa and has world-building myths with gods and demigoddesses and a trip to the world of the dead but also a genetically altered hallucinogenic drug that turns people into giant animals and a robot uprising and a political campaign and a transgender pop star and a m/m couple and all of them are connected. It’s bonkers. Like, so, so absolutely mind-breaking weird. And I loved it.

Crier’s War and Iron Heart by Nina Varela.  I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED the amount of folktales they told each other with queer romances as integral to those stories, especially in Iron Heart. A conversation between the two leads where Crier says she wants to read Ayla like a book, and Ayla says she’s not a book, and Crier explains all the different ways she wants to know Ayla, like a person, and wants to deserve to know her like a person, made me weak. It lives in my head rent-free.

Queen’s Shadow by E.K. Johnston @ekjohnston . I listened to this book on Libby and then immediately listened to it at least one more time, maybe twice, before my borrow time ran out. I love Padmé, and just always wish that female Star Wars characters got more focus and attention and this book gave me that!! And queer handmaidens! And the implication that Sabé is in love with Padmé and that’s just something that will always be true and she will always be devoted and also will make her own life anyway. And the Star Wars audiobooks being recorded the way they are with background sounds and music means it feels like watching a really long detailed beautiful Star Wars movie just about Padmé and her handmaidens.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story by Jacob Tobia. I needed to read this. The way Tobia talks about their experience of gender within the contexts of college, college leadership, and career, hit home. I kept trying to highlight several pages in a row on my kindle so I could go back and read them after it got returned to the library (sadly it didn’t work - it cuts off highlights after a certain number of characters). The way they talk about TOKENISM they way they talk about the responsibilities of the interviewer when an interviewee holds marginalized identities especially when no one else in the room does!!! Ahhhh!!!

Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie. Disclaimer for this one that the author was rightfully criticized for writing a Black main character as a white author (and how the story ended up playing into some fucked up stuff that I can’t really unpack without spoiling). But also, the author has been working to move forward knowing she can’t change the past, has donated her proceeds, and this book is really good? It has all the fanfic tropes, so much delicious tension, a totally unexpected plot twist that had me immediately rereading the book. This book was super fun and also kind of just really really good Star Wars fanfiction.

How To Be a Normal Person by T.J. Klune. This book was so sweet, and cute, and hopeful, and both ridiculous and so real. I had some trouble getting used to Gus’ voice and internal monologue, but I got into it and then loved every bit after. The ace rep is something I’ve never seen like this before (and have barely read any ace books but still this was so fleshed out and well rounded and not just like, ‘they’re obsessed with swords not sex’ - looking at you, Once & Future - and leaving it there.) This all felt like a slice of life and I feel like I learned about people while reading it. Some of the moments are so, so funny, some are vaguely devastating. I have been personally victimized by TJ Klune for how he ends this book (a joke, you will know once you read it) but it also reminds me of the end of the “You Are There” episode of Xena and we all know what the answer to that question was.... and I choose to believe the answer here was similar.

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. I wish I had this book when I was in high school. I honestly have complicated feelings about prom and haven’t really been seeking out contemporary YA so I was hesitant to read this but it was so good and so well-written, and had a lot of depth to it. The movie (and Broadway show) “The Prom” wants what this book has.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. I never read horror books, so this was a new thing for me. I loved the feeling of this book, the way I felt fully immersed. I loved how entirely queer it was. I was interested in the characters and the relationships, even though we didn’t have a full chance to go super deep into any one person but rather saw the connections between everyone and the way the stories matched up with each other. I just wanted a bit of a more satisfying ending.

Honorable Mention: reread in 2020 but read for the first time pre-2020

Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I couldn’t make this post without mentioning this book. It got me through this year. I love this book so much; I think of this book all the time. This book made me want to find love for myself. You’ve all heard about it enough but if you haven’t read this book what are you DOING.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan @sarahreesbrennan​ . I reread this one over and over too, both as text and as an audiobook. I went for walks when I had lost my earbuds and had Elliott screaming about an elf brothel loudly playing and got weird looks from someone walking their dog. I love this book so much. It’s just so fun, and so healing to read a book reminiscent of all the fantasies I read as a kid, but with a bi main character and a deconstruction of patriarchy and making fun of the genre a bit. Also, idiots to lovers is a great trope and it’s definitely in this book.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book is forever so important to me. I am always drawn in by how tenderly Sáenz portrays his characters. These boys. These boys and their parents. I love them. I love them so much. This is another one where I don’t even know what to say. I have more than 30 pages in my tag for this book. I have “arda” set as a keyboard shortcut on my phone and laptop to turn into the full title. This book saved my life.

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book hurts to read - it’s a story about trauma, about working through that trauma, healing enough to be ready to hold the worst memories, healing enough to move through the pain and start to make a life. It’s about found family and love and pain and I love it. It’s cathartic. And it’s a little bit quietly queer in a beautiful way, but that’s not the focus. Look up trigger warnings (they kind of are spoilery so I won’t say them here but if you have the potential to be triggered please look them up or ask me before reading)

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.  When asked what my all time favorite book is, it’s usually this one. Gail Carson Levine has been doing live readings at 11am since the beginning of the pandemic shut down in the US, and the first book she read was Ella Enchanted. I’ve been slowly reading it to @mssarahpearl and am just so glad still that it has the ability to draw me in and calm me down and feels like home after all this time. This book is about agency. I love it.

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman @chronicintrovert . I’ve had this on my all-time-faves list since I read it a few years ago and ended up rereading it this year before sending a gift copy to a friend, so I could write little notes in it. It felt a little different reading it this time - as I get further away from being a teenager myself, the character voice this book is written in takes a little longer to get used to, but it’s so authentic and earnest and I love it. I absolutely adore this book about platonic love and found family and fandom and mental illness and abuse and ace identity and queerness and self-determination, especially around college and career choices. Ahhh. Thank you Alice Oseman!!!

Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray @claudiagray​ . I have this one on audible and reread it several times this year. I love the fleshing out of Leia’s story before the original trilogy, I love her having had a relationship before Han, and the way it would have affected her perspective. I also am intrigued by the way it analyses the choices the early rebellion had to make... I just, I love all the female focused new Star Wars content and the complexity being brought to the rebellion.

#red white and royal blue #aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe #osemanverse #star wars #queer books #lgbtq books #books #alice oseman #miri personal #wow this took so long but was so worth it! #long post #book recs #PS: if you've read any of these or have questions about any of these books #this is your formal invitation to talk to me about them!!!! even if i don't know you at all! #even if i don't follow you and even if you don't follow me! #my ask box is open anon is on! #original content

[hard-times-paramore]

Yo, nobody told me the Free Guy movie was gonna be so adorable. I really liked it, I thought it was gonna be a shitty "clearly made by a coorporation trying to be #Relatable" but it really wasn't! It was really on-point with how videogames actually are.

Granted, it had some cringe moments, I could have done without all those youtubers and the "loser gamers" (SPECIALLY the sock dude. Just why.) Almost like if you like videogames you're either a failure or a child. Unless you manage to monetize it and become famous, in which you're still a cheesy kind of famous. Idk if that's what I was supposed to get here, if that's what the joke that was being made. Probabbly not. It just really grinded my gears.

That and that pop culture weapons scene that reminded me Disney owns every piece of media on the planet and will rub it on your face. But I suppose a reality check is always good.

Other than that, though, the movie was excellent. It really felt like an actual, creative story in the setting of videogames, with an understanding of how they feel when you're playing it. Everything in Free City, from the lighting to the way the characters moved and talked, felt like a videogame, except played by real people. Also, all the relatable GTA and Fortnite moments. Videogames literally just look like that and no one questions it and idk, it was great.

I also really liked that, despite the movie's romantic plot, Guy still broke up with Millie at the end, showing that "getting the girl" wasn't the end all be all main goal of the protagonist. I thought it was gonna be a "love is what makes us human" kinda ending, but it wasn't. I don't usually see that, so I liked.

And man, I really liked the way they portrayed Antwan, the AAA company dev that overworks and underpays his staff, releases unfinished, barely functional games full of bugs, and straight up lies on his marketing. Surely we have not seen anything like that in real life.

Anyway. In conclusion: really good movie. Adorable. I loved it. Guy was adorable, his innocence and cheerful personality were super sweet, and his and journey of self-discovery spoke to me as a lover of robot stories. I hope he's having not a good day, but a greay day.

...Sorry, that was cheesy. But yea movie good.

#Free Guy #my posts #review of stuff

[ronnytherandom]

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.

#the truman show #horizon zero dawn #rimworld #factorio #destiny 2 #d2 #film #movies #video games #i dont know what im doing #hzd #opinion

[theshoddypenmen]

2021 spring spotlight: Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s song.

Each anime season, us fans of the art are showered in a torrent of titles every few months. Some are titles that are continuing that we love. Others are new works looking introduce its story to the viewers in hopes in capturing new hearts. While each is unique, there are some that emerge and separates itself from its peers and demands the attention of the community for its quality. Vivy: Fluorite Eye's song is a work that offers high tier entertainment on all levels for the viewer. A candidate to be considered for anime of the year as well most certainly best of the season, This piece not only has all the components that make A great anime, but all those components are elite and should be something others in the industry should aspire to. Plot and Premise Our adventure takes place in A futuristic setting where artificial intelligence technology is at an advanced stage and is growing rapidly. The story is centered around a female android Vivy, whose program is to sing for humans and make them happy in doing so. One day suddenly a virus, that has over taken an android teddy bear (gosh i love anime) approach's Vivy and reveals to her that in 100 years there will be an AI uprising that will kill all humanity. That virus was sent back 100 years to find Vivy and together change key events in history to avoid the genocidal war and save the world. The story is actually a topical one, exploring the idea of Artificial Intelligence in similar ways we are in real human life. Taking a look at moral questions like " should AI's have rights" and " how do we feel about Ai's and human relationships?". Human beings becoming dependent on these artificial beings is another fascinating concept this piece touches upon. Truly a fun fascinating story, especially for Sci-fi fans.    While the premise of the story isnt necessarily unique, what makes this piece great is the way the story is told. The progression episode to episode unveiling the story is perfect. The changes in the environment and technology as the years and episodes continue is excellent and while the time travel aspect could be considered a weak point for the story ( how does a virus travel back in time?) your interest in the plot is still maintained throughout. In order to stop the future crisis, the characters are challenged to make difficult life or death decisions to change the past story line. Having that task not be clear all the time, or changing that particular event not having the precise expected outcome is a fun aspect of the series. Characters The story is centered around the pop star singer android VIvy. What makes Vivy such a fascinating character is that she is some how A lifeless emotionless being, but still remains full of emotion and depth. At the heart of her character she is just designed to sing and entertain humans, which on its surface isnt at all deep. But during her journey you begin to relate through the idea of everyone and everything has its purpose. Everyone wants to know what there purpose in life is. Like a lot of people in real life we believe we will find fulfillment in finding that purpose. This is a layered concept that will resonate with astute audiences. However, there is a parallel idea that we are not a monolith and we are capable of many different things, and just like Vivy, things we had no idea we were capable of. Vivy is strong. Dedicated to her mission and both grabs the heart of the audience through her love and kind nature, and garners respect through her actions. complex, likable protagonist.   Throughout the story Vivy and her virus companion Matsumodo  meet various characters, and each of these characters are used to discuss the questions regarding humanity and the future of artificial intelligence. meeting a scientist who falls in love with an AI. dealing with terrorist groups that are anti-Artificial intelligence and carry out operations to destroy the industry. Vivy interacts with politicians who lobby for policy regarding the humanity and rights that the machines are entitled to. Each encounter is a fascinating look into the possibilities people may have to deal with going forward with the technology. Vivy meets a variety of other AI models. Some of the models are even directly descended from Vivy's technology and the piece takes looks at Inter-AI  relationships and the complexities of them. music and visuals Vivy: Flourite Eye's song has some of the most compelling music of the season. This fact is only rivaled by having some of the best fighting scenes and just visual designs  this spring as well. The music is high quality throughout the story. The singing is beautiful and strong in every character. The scores that play under the scenes are always on point and really sells the moment to the audience. The scores are noticeably great and adds to the overall viewing experience. The tracks under the fight scenes really get you pumped and are real jams. The tracks under the more emotional scenes are beautiful and brings out the type of response that is appropriate for the scene. Having a nice pop song that jams as its opening, and a absolutely beautiful piano ending the music in this work is just elite.   Fighting scenes are the easiest way to get your audience hype and frankly i was really surprised at the level of those scenes in this show. VIVY KICKS ASS. The action can feel really intense watching and each moment is animated very well. The way Vivy's super speed and strength and quick super human reflexes is conveyed in the fights are really exciting to watch.  Also lets just be honest, i will always love super android robot fights with explosions and lasers. That's kind of the whole reason we are all here right? Either way the fight scenes in this are incredible. They grab your attention and do not let go.   The scenery drawn is top notch. The futuristic backgrounds are cool and sure to please sci-fi fans.    Vivy is a solid project all-around. Great music, good protagonist, fun story, beautifully drawn fun action. Anime of this quality are not common. especially ones with female leads that don't make me feel like the show has been overly sexualized. I don't leave this anime feeling like i watched the female lead sexually objectified at all. meanwhile, Vivy showed she was strong, brave, kind and strangely relatable.....for a robot. Highly recommend this piece and kudos to its staff all-around.

#vivy: fluorite eye's song #vivy #anime #anime / manga #manga #music #spring #2021 #artificial technology #artificial intelligence #science #sci fi #television #internet #story #books #comics #comic