#as someone whose original fiction ALSO plays a lot with

[crimeronan]

i think there's something really beautiful about carpenter distancing herself from the trawler man every chance she gets and still getting showered by miracles while faulker, oh he of strong convictions, gets to bring the miracle of the trawler man to everyone around him but never quite gets to ascend to glory himself. i just love that they're both perfectly poised to stare at each other and each think "your goals are backwards and your methodology is dumb and possibly sacrilegious" and then still end up as something close to friends

also let's talk about how, despite these dynamics, at the end of the day, the trawler man is really just trying to give each of them what they want from him.

MMM YEAH. carpenter being beloved by multiple gods despite being such an ornery bitch who wants NOTHING to do with their sacrificial bullshit..... it really gets me. as does faulkner's ongoing crisis of faith and spiral into Faithless Cult Leader (TM). SO GOOD.

perhaps only tangentially related, but.

i've been thinking a lot about faulkner killing roemont lately. i was surprised that roemont's death ended up Breaking My Fucking Heart -- a real testament to his voice actor!! the whole pathetic old man losing everything he's worked for really.... Got To Me. ough. "don't you recognize me?" OUGH.

but i've been thinking about it in the context of faulkner's crisis of faith, too. because like. faulkner Knows that roemont is faithful. he considers roemont a heretic for trying to legalize the worship of the trawler-man, but it's like....

i feel like. killing roemont was a test of the trawler-man that faulkner devised on purpose. because if roemont dies due to the prayer marks that faulkner scrawled, then there are two possibilities:

1. the trawler-man really IS furious that the high katabasians want to legitimize the faith; the trawler-man really IS on faulkner's side; this schism really IS necessary to keep the faith "pure," and faulkner has never done anything wrong;

OR

2. the trawler-man really IS nothing but a mouth. this isn't a god with a plan or with sentience or with feelings, this is just a living river that chews things up and spits them out, and it doesn't care for its followers at all. and if that's the case, then faulkner is betraying nothing by being a faithless cult leader lying repeatedly to his people.

faulkner is devastatingly clever and constantly being underestimated. but he's also completely alone in the world. and he's Desperate for any sign that the choices he's making are the right ones. and he can't find that sign in anybody close to him, because he keeps destroying the lives of those close to him. so he has to devise his own trials....

hrugh. my boy. my boy my boy my boy.

#replies #the silt verses #the silt verses meta #faulkner #carpenter #horrible godsaint trauma pals #i keep just thinking about like. the constant question of how much gods care and how much agency they have #how much of this worship is a social construct made by people and how much is natural to the world? #does it matter? is there a difference between those things? #as someone whose original fiction ALSO plays a lot with #'magic is real but the way it's perceived is based in social constructs'.... I FUCK WITH IT SO HARD. #and the silt verses is a piece of media that like... i end up having different thoughts every time i listen to it #so in a few days or weeks i might not even stand by this meta. i might have different thoughts/interpretations entirely!! #it's a different story every time i listen. it's SO GOOD.

[sunderwight]

Okay, concept:

Luo Binghe grew up very poor prior to arriving to QJP. And when he first got to QJP, he was ostracized and neglected. So there are probably a lot of phrases, terms, and ideas that he didn't know were things until SY arrived and started actually teaching him. Right? So the bulk of what he did learn, he learned directly from Shen Yuan's own slightly messy attempts to fake ancient scholarly credentials.

Plus, QJP is supposed to be the peak of scholars and well-read, fancy intellectuals, and YQY probably also doesn't know shit about most of that stuff (having also been a former illiterate street child) and of course is incredibly predisposed to take Shen Qingqiu's side on virtually anything. Especially something frivolous or linked to their shared past, such as someone, say Qi Qingqi, accusing Shen Qingqiu of making up a literary reference or "gibberish" word. If something Shen Qingqiu says is something no one else seems to know, that just proves he's more worldly and well-read than the rest of his peers. Also, Shang Qinghua will probably know it, and despite his many (many) character flaws, Shang Qinghua reads a lot too. There's really very little to convince a former street child turned Demon Emperor whose former education began and ended with Shen Qingqiu specifically and Meng Mo (wildly out-of-touch with human culture anyway) to suspect that some of the difficult-to-source references his master makes really have no worldly source (in this world).

So Luo Binghe, in his quest to become as knowledgeable of all things about his shizun and keep up with him as well as possible, and maybe also put down some arguments he's overheard once and for all, eventually gets annoyed because CLEARLY there is a wealth of cultural knowledge contemporary to Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua that didn't survive to his own generation. His efforts at hunting down all the sources being referenced and origins of certain philosophical ideas or terminology keep coming up empty in certain departments. He's been over the entire QJP library with a fine-tooth comb, but QJP focuses on things pertaining to cultivation, history, and knowledge. Obviously, there are gaps. The archives are unlikely to keep pop cultural references and lowbrow literature, and Luo Binghe begins to suspect (from what tastes his master seems to share with his shishu) that that is that actual source he's missing.

The trashy yellow books and romance literature of their generation! Bawdy poems and lewd artworks so on! Heck, that's probably even where the shared "code" (bad English) comes into play -- disciples are always trying to sneak forbidden material past their teachers and smuggle naughty books into the dormitories. Knowing Shizun and Shang Qinghua, Luo Binghe honestly wouldn't be surprised if the two of them were racketeering that shit in their own disciple days. Shang Qinghua acquiring materials, Shen Qingqiu acquiring buyers, both of them making their extra spending money off of secretly supplying Cang Qiong's population with contraband fiction and art.

Also, that would explain why both Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua get flustered and refuse to elaborate if someone asks them what this or that strange turn of phrase refers to. Shen Qingqiu has a very thin face for actually discussing erotica, and Shang Qinghua doesn't like being caught doing illegal shit.

Luo Binghe desperately needs access to trash lit that's older than he is. However, most of that stuff is not printed to last, and turning it up is like trying to find old Spirk zines without the internet.

Shang Qinghua, the obvious go-to source, also seems to not really have anything that old anymore (intimidating him is laughably easy, if he had anything he would have coughed it up by the second or third time Luo Binghe asked and frowned at the same time), and if Shen Qingqiu did have anything he wouldn't want to be questioned about it. Asking too much might even get it destroyed in an act of excessive embarrassment.

Which means there is just one other person Luo Binghe knows who might be able to lead him to some sources. One other person he is absolutely, 100% certain was extensively reading trashy literature around the same time that Shizun was a young man. Someone who would know where to go to even begin looking for it.

Luo Binghe is going to have to ask Tianlang Jun for help with something.

#svsss #bingqiu #scum villain's self saving system #scum villain

[lily-orchard]

which fandom has it the worst when it comes into missing the point of the media they consume?

I can't really think of one, because I'm struggling to determine where "missing the point" ends and "ignoring the point" begins.

Actually shit, I have a scratchpad here about that somewhere.

What is media literacy? It's your ability to comprehend a work. That's all it is. It's when a work presents a theme, and that theme actually registers with you. So an example of bad media literacy is when Star Trek fans complain about newer shows "injecting politics" into Star Trek when Star Trek was always so political it bordered on straight-up communist.

But I'd go as far as to say that even that isn't their fault, because before Deep Space Nine came out and ruined Star Trek with the plague of serialization, it was always really good at balancing those really insightful episodes with episodes where Kirk punches another green alien, or Riker's beard seduces a woman, or the Doctor learns how to daydream and fantasizes about being his own self-insert fanfiction character.

Star Trek is just as goofy as it is political. So it's possible in the reality that is broadcast TV for someone to just not see those episodes. This is also true when Deep Space Nine comes around and just has less of those episodes because it's focused on chasing the trend of serialized Science Fiction about the Space Navy.

Voyager had way more of those episodes, but Voyager was the undeserved black sheep of the franchise for a long time. So it's not even that they didn't get it, they have always applauded Star Trek doing things other than being "Fully Automatic Luxury Space Communism: The Series."

And for several entries in the franchise, it was doing that. So even the best example of bad media literacy is way more complicated than Twitter would have you believe.

Fallout is probably the second best example, as it has tons of right wing fans in spite of the fact that the franchise as a whole has always been deeply critical of American jingiositic nationalism.

And yeah that's a deep paradox right there…

Until you factor in that the most popular entries in the franchise are the ones that don't do that. When you remember that, you realize it's suddenly very easy to be a right wing, jingoistic Fallout fan. You just have to not play the games that told you to your face that you're an idiot.

Which is a whole... two of them.

To give a less politically charged example, Baldur's Gate 3 has an origin character called The Dark Urge, which is a Bhaalspawn whose story is about resisting the impulses of their tainted blood. This goes hand in hand with another character, Orin the Red, which is both a second and third generation Bhaalspawn, being the daughter and granddaughter of Sarevok (no you didn't hear that wrong).

A lot of people who play Dark Urge save it for an evil murderhobo run, but I've heard many people claim they love the idea of a good-aligned Dark Urge that resists Bhaal's taint in stark contrast to their sister.

What most people who have played this game are unaware of is that this idea is literally the entire plot of the previous games. Gorion's Ward and Imoen's conflicts with their brother Sarevok, and the rest of their siblings among the Five, and how they resist Bhaal's essence and strive to do good is the entire plot of the best series of RPGs ever made.

Yes Good-Aligned Dark Urge players, this story would be compelling. I would know, because I played it twenty years ago.

And if I were a weaker human being, I could call this Bad Media Literacy, but I know better. Most people who have played Baldur's Gate 3 flat out haven't played the older games. They might vaguely know the story, but the level to which the story is about Nature versus Nurture would fly over their heads. This is partly why I often say that Baldur's Gate 3 is a better game if you haven't played the originals, because it often steals storylines and plotlines directly from the original games wholesale and repackaged them with more preservatives and lube.

I haven't found an instance of poor media literacy that has not been able to be explained away by the simple reality of personal preference or the reality that no human being can consume every last piece of art on the planet.

Most people don't have time to see everything, and honestly it isn't a crime to be dumb. What I have seen is this technical sounding term be thrown around by fandoms angry about discourse they don't like, because the worse a work is the more adversarial and abusive the fanbase is.

In the eyes of fandom, the themes of a work are self-evident of it's quality. It's impossible to both understand a work's themes and still think it isn't good. So if someone thinks their favourite thing is bad, they must not have understood it. This is an offshoot of the way fandom treat's a trope's mere presence as quality itself regardless of execution.

Fandom is full of self-protective bullshit arguments like this.

[hemipenal-system]

mechposting primer

at least for how i write it

so the mechposting and Pilot stuff is sort of a speculative fiction thing in which people are altered physically and mentally in order to epitomize their operating of a combat mech.

depending on the writer, this can involve anywhere from just brainwashing and conditioning to neurotransmitter injections and physical body modifications.

each Pilot has a Handler - someone whose job it is to control them while they’re Piloting. there’s a very dog/owner type relationship here. in most mech pilot stuff, the Pilot is entirely submissive to the Handler due to their conditioning. some writers have specifically one Handler for one Pilot but i tend to lean more towards “every Handler for every Pilot” type of thing.

note that being submissive doesn’t make them not dangerous. they are still weapons that can and will kill if their Handler orders it or if they feel something is a threat to them or their Handler.

these themes originate from Empty Spaces i think. you should google that one (warning for intense discussion of trauma if you do) because i can’t really explain it well here in one post, but it’s like kind of reclaiming the idea that you don’t necessarily need to be human.

(edit 1: AC6 did def get a lot of people into it because that game is apparently tailor-made for the kind of thing this is about. idk i haven’t played it though)

i do not consider myself an empty spaces writer.

when i write mechposting stuff, it’s less about being willing to abandon your humanity and more about reclaiming it. the joy and struggle of being human and also something else, neither of which diminish the other.

i think that’s everything i can think of. if you want reading recommendations for that stuff or anything lmk and i will be happy to provide. you can also find really good stuff by going through the attached #mech-pilot tag

#housekeeping #terato blog #v0re blog #mech posting #mech pilot #pilot/handler #mechposting primer

[astranauticus]

orv 🤝 asteroid city

stories about stories that left a surprisingly large impact crater in my brain

anyway some more (frankly far too extensive) thoughts under the cut for an au i dont forsee myself drawing for again (cw: mention of suicidal thoughts and lots of talk about death)

for anyone reading this who hasn't watched asteroid city: it's a movie documenting the making of an in universe fictional play called asteroid city written by conrad earp (kdj) directed by schubert green (hsy) lead actor jones hall (yjh) who plays augie, very emotionally repressed guy whose wife (lsh, kinda) just died and is trying to figure out how to tell his children about it. anyway jones shows up at conrad's house for auditions and the two fall in love, then conrad dies from a car crash 6 months into the shows run and jones is left to play a character mourning the death of his wife while irl mourning the death of his lover and it drives him up a wall trying to figure out if he's doing conrad "right" (hence 'i still don't understand the play')

anyway for this au like everything that happens in the movie also happens i think but the character motivations are a little bit different like in the movie conrad earp writes the play before he ever meets jones hall so we don't really know why it's Like That but i think in the au kdj is either like. having suicidal thoughts or just fully believed he wasn't gonna live for very long in the like cptsd symptom kinda way lmao. so like it's not really that he wrote the play to help yjh process his own death (i think if that were the case the message of the play would be way different lmfao) but it's more like he just had death and grief on the brain and was also writing stuff. and like the answer he arrived at was that he didn't actually arrive at anything in the end. sometimes tragedy just happens and there's no meaning to it you just kinda have to live with that. like i know this is not how the process of play production works but if there's one change to the original movie plot in this au i want to make it's that kdj still dies by car accident but before the script is 100% finished or after he's been talking about rewriting the ending or something because i think he also doesn't figure out an answer he's satisfied with in the end about like death and grief and mourning. like you just know that in kdj's ideal world his loved ones wouldn't mourn him at all if he dies because he doesn't want them to be sad because of him and maybe he still hasn't fully 100% internalised that he has people who would care if he dies. anyway i think yjh kinda understands like subliminally that kdj was trying to Say Something with the play he just isn't sure what because he's looking for An Answer like some kind of meaning to everything that's happened but the point is there isn't one and if there is kdj hasn't found it either lmao. and like i think hsy understood immediately like as soon as she heard the news of his death she's figured out what kdjs thought process behind the play was and like she's absolutely not holding it together as well as she appears but she also sees yjh driving himself insane every night trying to find The Meaning or whatever and like whether or not she even agrees with kdj aside this is the only way she can think of to help him get out of that hole bc she can't exactly tell yjh like 'the point is that there is no point you just have to live with The Everything' so she's just trying her best to make him understand on his own. idk i just need someone who's watched asteroid city to see this and tell me if ive gone completely insane LMAO

#omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv #kim dokja #yoo joonghyuk #han sooyoung #joongdok #art i made #my contribution to the time honoured jdj fanwork trope of kdj pairing yjh with lsh against his will #that one last hsy looks so much like qiao ling from lc what the fuck #took some liberties with the outfits and the poses bc #ok honestly for most of this i was just drawing whatever felt right based on my memories of the movie like i only looked it up near the end #so i can get all the lines right #and also. im not drawing that fuckin outfit margo robbie was wearing in that scene christ alive #god some of the anatomy is so wack

[popculturebuffet]

Batmarch: The Secret Origin of Batman's Trophys (Comission for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy people and welcome back to Batmarch, or celebrations of all things that go bump in the dark knight

Today we've got a special treat... and i'm not just talking the nice art Kev had comissioned! Looks really good and I really appcirated it. Thank you KEv and thank you Alan Patreon. It was a nice suprise gift.

As for what this is about, this was a fantastic idea Kev cooked up: the batcave is one of the coolest hero bases in all of fiction. The layout is never 100% consitant across media but your usually guaranteed a batmobile, a big ass computer at the center, water falls, and over time a display for various costumes from past sidekicks, alternate outfits etc.

What really spruces the place up are three distinct decorations that we almost always see in the comics and ocasionally in other media, if not live action since these bitches would be expensive to make: A giant dinosaur, a big ole penny, and a giant playing card of a joker. These three are staples of the bat cave, to the point when the original was caved in during the earthquakes that ravaged gotham in the build up to no man's land, Bruce made a point of fishing them out for the new cave he built after that traumatic year.

Yet most of us.... have no idea where he got these wonderful toys. Even I didn't. The Joker Card comes from an obvious grinning source, but what CASE did it come from? Where did he get that dinosaur? What was someone using that giant Penny for? It's a question i've asked once or twice but never looked into. Kevin did though, and while the through and lovely DC wiki helped him find each one, he went the extra mile, asking for a review. And I was entirely on board with this comission as I just.. never had those answers and I doubt i'm the only one whose wondered what the context for these things were. So today we're looking at three disntinct golden age batman stories, at a time when goofy nonsense reigned supreme, logic was optional, and weird shit like this was just another day in the batcave. IN other words, this is going to be a LOT of fun so join me under the cut as we look at gambling themed death traps, penny obessed gangsters and batman being hunted by the most dangerous game: mechanical dinosaurs.

The Giant Joker Playing Card:

(from Batman #44)

I love these old titles, such flair and cheese. It's incredible.

Anyways this one starts because Joker decides to hit an off the books casnio after his win. Luckily for them, he just wants to play which feels entirely like a joker move: instead of robbing an easy target that can't call the cops and that the mafia presumibly running it would be stupid to retaliate on, he decides "fuck it let's try this whole gambling thing men, sounds like a hoot and a half".

And sure enough.. it goes really well. He spends what's implied to be the whole night just winning and winning until he cleans house. This being the joker this gambling bug can only end one way

I just.. love everything about this. Joker just had fun at a casnio and turned it into a death trap. It's such a brilliant setup.. and one that while nicely goofy, is also well done: it fits the joker's unpredictablity to just go a gamblin and it fits him just as much to turn a new hobby into a death trap. I also love Lewis' reaction calling it SUPERGAMBLING., like he's some gambling expert and most dangerous game shit is a type of gambling.. which given we're in the dc universe, you probably DO need a name for this kind of thing in the crime world.

So he set shte perfect trap: he has a random balding middle aged man tell the two he has info on a recent raidum theft, raidum a hospital badly needs. To save the presumed orphans about to die without eating their radium, Batman and Robin go to a sketchy island with one house perched on a hill

The World's Greatest Detective.. sees NOTHING wrong with this and goes ahead and gets caught in the most devious trap imaginable.

Several head injuries later, our heroes wake and joker reveals the radium theives, who he captured for this scheme but have kept the radium's location to themselves. This is by deisgn: the joker wants the two and their "radium screts" as the ante here, along with Robin to make sure Batman does this. Batman repedately states "I don't gamble' as if logic suddenly works on the clown man who set up a gambling death trap, so Joker reveals if Batman won't play his three supergambling games, he'll just kill the hostages. Batman reluctantly agrees,

Game 1 is super pinball.

But when Batman proves to be an expert at the snes Joker goes with plan b.. his giant pinball table of death. Sorry his giant SUPER pinball table of death.

As you can see the same joker face from the card is here and you see it all over his lable. it seemed to be Joker's logo back the. I love this whole setup and mostly show it not only because it' sdope but because those pins must've been what bumpers were. I also had no idea PInball used to be a gambling thing. Makes sense, it's just fun to find out.

The game goes well mostly though one of the guys nearly slams into a pin. Thankfully Robin is an expert gymnist and batman smartly saved laucnhing robin till the last minute and Dick's able to save the goon.

Game two is super rolling some dice, which apparently used to land on numbers. This yugioh style death game involves our bait being tied to polls on three of the numbers. If Batman guesses wrong, someone dies. Or maybe not since the board is pretty damn big. Not every death trap can be super murder pinball. Batman spots some mud on the dice though and correctly guesses they'll pivot. This is the weakest of the death traps here, a bit convolunted, not really guranteed to be as deadly. I know the chance of nothing happening is part of it.. but with pinball there's really almost no chance you won't hit the bumpers. Here it feels like pure luck or simple cheating that both dice flew at the joker.

Next game and the one that introduces our prop, though the dice apparently are also in the cave sometimes which I love. The game is a game of cards.. batman has to correctly guess which face matches the door Robin and the hostage goons are in or they'll choke to death on the deadly gas released inside.. and naturally he figures out it's the Joker card. It's too joker not to work.

Turns out though, naturally the joker isn't playing fair both having a final one on one game ofr him and Batman and having his goon go to get robin behind the joker card door... and Robin dispatches him hilaroiusly and awesomely

With that the hostages are free and the final death game begins. A giant super roulette wheel with both batman and joker getting in a slot. looser gets crushed alive. It's an awesome finale, and it fits joker to put himself at risk: after all he risks his life all the time why wouldn't he for such a fun gag?

Batman's able to get the wheel to turn fairly and then escape it, leading to a chase. THe Radium Theives agree to give themselves and the radium up but there's still the matter of the joker and we get a short but neat final chase as Joker uses the dice against the heroes then jumps off a cliff, gambling his life one last time.. and rightfully batman isn't betting on the joker having died.

Gamble With Doom is an excellent story. While the trophy we get out of it is only in it briefly the story itself is pure fun. It has some fun dated elements like Bruce's opinon gambling is EVILLLL and the old fashioned designs on the traps, but it's pure fun. The traps are clever, the tension palpable and the climax great. The gambling motif's really fit the joker and it adds up to an all time great joker story with a suprise impact. The Trophy Itslef. is barely in it but Robin DID break a guy's face with it so i'll say it was still cave worthy.

(From World's Finest #30)

The Penny Plunderer is a name I had heard but had no real context for. I assumed he was some goofy silver age villian with pennies for eyes who drove around chucking pennies at everyone.

I am an artiste.

Instead it's just a guy in a suit. He has the backstory of any good golden or silver age villian to justify his gimmick

I love.. everything about this backstory. It reads like if a writer was given the thought exercise "Make the pettiest batman villian origin you can find.". I mean other villians gimmicks make sense: Poison Ivy was a botonist, Mr Freeze had a horrible accident, the penguin was born looking like a penguin with a lot of money, the Joker fell into a vat of chemicals and came out a clwon, the riddler liked puzzles.

Here Joe just... got screwed over by pennies a lot. Even funnier is that the last one has nothing to do with pennies. Like.. even if it'd had nickels he'd still be arrested.

So Joe vows since pennies runied his life, he'l lbecome the penny! Sadly this does not mean him dressing up like a giant penny with a cane and top hat.. nad now I can't show you it that last drawing put me too far behind and... oh fuck it.

Instead he just wears a suit but makes his gimmick pennies. Commit to the bit man. I do get it as some golden age villians were just guy in a suit, even Joker and Penguin technically counts but one is a clown and the other is a rich penguin man. They have mor ethan just "suit and a vendetta against pennies that somehowturns into stockholm syndrome.

So the penny plunderer begins his reign of terror, setting up a penny arcade as a front, and cashing in a roll of pennies in the most diabolical scheme ever devised by man.

A true criminal mastermind.

Batman picks up on this pattern because it's what he does and finds his next case, a coin and stamp exibiton with a rare one cent stamp. It's here we meet the reason we're here: the giant penny!

Yeah to my shock the penny had NOTHING to do with the penny plunderer other than being at the site of one of his robberies. He prefered just.. chucking pennies at people.. which is awesome and a truly great tactic only topped by Batman's use of said giant penny

I adore the fact that this iconic artifact is there not because it was seized from the villians or a police options.. but because, presumibly, Bruce thought this penny he found was kick ass and bought it off it's actual owner.

Most of the theives escape but they find one willing to squeal. Unfortunatley he dies for his hubris

Yup bet you weren't expecting the penny guy to kill someone and to see his corpse weren't you but here you are. Also batman is apparently a cop now. George Lopez tried to warn us...

But we didn't listen! We didn't listen!

A fight breaks out at the gambling parlour and we get two of the best moments in batman history that much like the blue beetle film, ar ehighly underated.

I just.. I get the sense that is how batman ALWAYS plays pinball. Just judo kicks it every time even as bruce wayne. Both bruce wayne and batman have been banned from so many arcades.. often the same ones. Perks of having a secret identity. We then get coyne once again THROWING pennies at someone and it working. I don't know why he hasn't been brought back with the telkeentic ability to contorl pennies. Give him a copper helmet and a proper costume and oh dammit..

Then Joe knocks batman out iwth his one weakness: a roll of pennies. He's trapped them in the parlor for your standard batman death trap, having removed their belts and ripped out the phone lines as usual. He then throws them a few pennies when then prove to be a mistake as it's time for SCIENCE WITH DR. BATMAN, who uses one old penny, copper, and one new penny, zinc to make a battery. Good thing jimmy didn't wish it away THIS week.

The cops arrive to free one of hteir own and batman finds a clue once the parlor is cleared of gas. Turns out Coyne was catering a penny slot party for a rich billinoare's houseboat, and naturally their filled with gas. I swear it's always gas with these golden age villians. Get another knockout device fellas.

With that our final chase enses as Batman and robin chase Coyne and while he nearly bests them with a good game of 1940's donkey kong

He's foiled by his own gimmick: he has only pennies but the pay telephone.. dosen't.. take 5 seperate pennies for some reason? the hell? I get payphones not taking pennies once they went up to a quarter but come the fuck on 1940's payed telephones. he's foiled.. and sentenced to death.

Yes folks that's the cannoical till some lucky fellow brings him back fate of the penny plunderer: PUT TO DEATH.

This story is as you can tell nonsense that's only gotten more hilarious with the passage of time and I loved every page on it and on getting the panels for this review, I only found MORE hilaroius nonsense to laugh at. We have a story where a guy with a penny gimmick smacks batman with a roll of pennies, trips robin with more, kills a man without pennies, is foiled by pennies yet somehow dosen't actually use the giant penny that's the only reason people know he exists. It's beautiful bollocks and worth your time.

(From Batman #35)

As I hope you are, this issue had me hooked from the first panel: Batman vs dinosaurs being forced to fashion a bow and arrow for some reason. Yes... fuck. Yes. Also nice of bruce to eat Ollie's lunch.

Okay so this story starts, as many real life stories do, with a billionare having a zany idea; Mr. Hart is a man who puts on shows: ice follies, aqua carnival, 40's razzle dazzle type stuff. For his latest idea though he's going above and beyond: a DINOSAUR ISLAND. With mechancail dinosaurs and cavemen who throw giant sponges at you. Thankfully spongebob wasn't born yet but his great great grandpappys quarepants did the honors. Honorable old fool.

To ramp up the insanity, Mr Hart is inviting a club of big game hunters to eat mammoth steak with batman.

If that weren't enough, and in any other golden age story it might be... our heroes get CHALLENGED at dinner by one of the rich assholes. Yeah turns out rich assholes who hunt innocent animals for sport and eat reheated mammoth aren't the most stable indviduals and Mr. Breech scoofs at the fact Mr. Hart says Man is the most dangerous game. He's hunted man, they went down like cowards. COWARDS. He feels Batman couldn't hut a dinosaur without his gadgets, and certainly not his bare hands... even though as this issue with prove and has already shown early man had tools.

To prove his point he challenges batman to a fucking challenge: survive on Dinosaur Island: no utility belt, no vehicles. If the dinosaurs touch him he looses. Mr Breech will man the controls. Honestly i'm convinced Breech knew hart well enough to know he'd both agree to this for the publiclity and why he'd invite batman and robin and just wants to play iwth giant mechanical dinosaurs and also batman. Which granted if I were invited to this sort of thing i'd also want to chase batman with mechanical dinosaurs for fun, who wouldn't, so I totally get it and respect the game.

Hart is on board, offering 5000 to the winner's charity and Batman is like "Why the bat-fuck not. Let's go".

Now you might suspect Breech's real motive is trying to kill batman. I mean you have a setup where batman will be without his weapons, the plausable deniablity of a machine malfunction and a secluded island with 24 hours to kill the batman. And you'd shockingly be wrong. Breech really just wants to prove dinosaurs are the most dangerous game so when that Jurassic Park he's working on opens no one will object to him hunting them for sport.

But his plans are foiled by Chase, anothe rich knob who wants to kill batman and robin to, as he says later form a "crime combine". So he wants a bunch of middle aged guys drinking beers to yell at him for not training the joker on tackling well enough. I see.. well played.

So the game is afoot and our heroes take a bit to catch up, first brushing off a real rock among the sponge rocks as a mistake. Theis ends when a Triceratops to trismash them into a tree. Batman calls for a war council on a nearbye island but naturally THAT'S NO ISLAND

Batman fought a mechanical fucking seamonster. That.. that's cannon. To almost every batman timeline. God bless you Golden Age, god, bless, youuuu. Also i'd be stupid if I didn't say that Tally Ho, Batman! is one of the greatest phrases in batman history up there with "I Am the night" , "I'm batman" and "Something something joker's boner".

So now the games for their lives, Batman and Robin don't have to play fair and start fashioning bows, arrows and knives out of mechanical dinosaur bones. You know.. sometimes this job can be draining: 2-3 reviews a week, many a plan having to be delayed due to a review taking longer than expected.. but then you get a review where Batman and robin have to outrun a manical billinoare who hyjacked dinosaurs from a diffrnet billionare who was having a charity dinosaur hunt with batman and robin using a third billionare's dinosaur, while fashoining weapons from mechanical dinosaur corpses and fashion a kite from a mechanical ptreadon and remember why you love reviewing stuff so mucH: sharinng a good story with the world and finding a good one or two yourself while your at it. And thanks to Kev i've found three truly wonderful, truly bonkers batman stories, with this one being the easy winner. It's both a decent enough concept for the time and hilariously insane.

And I ddin't make up the kite thing: when, after a night of survivial, Robin brings up the batplane, Batman has an idea: since the flying dinosaurs are on a programmed pattren rather than directly controled, they can use them to make themselves a kite yor style.

So to win the day Batman has a plan: he uses himself as bait since Robin's the more agile of the two, and has robin CATAPULT HIMSELF into the air after chase, who is riding on t-rex back with an army of dinosaurs.. and how does he defeat chase' smighty dino army?

It's both genuinely clever and wonderfully bonkers: Robin defeats an evil billionare RIDING a mechanical t-rex.. with water balloons.

Also props to this story: in the previous two the trophy was impressive.. but it was taken from what felt like a minor point in the story: the card flip game was fun as was batman slammin ga door on a guy, but it's sandwitched between far more elaborate death traps, while the penny, again awesome, wasn't even something the penny plunderer used. Batman just bought it off some offscreen character to relive fond memoreies of crushign some crimianls alive with it. Here the main villian ROAD IN on the thing. Granted he still had to likely buy it off his actual owner, but this time at least a criminal actually used it as a murder weapon. I can see Batman wanting this thing for his cave.

Batman chases chase over the now still dinosaurs and punches the guy out. With this Batman's saved the day AND won the bet. 5000 for batmobiles for kids, donate your batmobile today!

As for chase...

With that our story and this trilogy comes to an end.. and as I said, it's great. check out all three of these issues their a lot of fun. Next time dc puts some up for sale I may have to get some 40's batman, this stuff is golden.

Thanks for reading

To conclude batman month: Wait'll you get a load of this

#batman #robin #bruce wayne #dick grayson #the joker #golden age #1940s #penny plunderer #dinosaur #dinosaurs #comics #dc comics

[onewholivesinloops]

Giving you an opportunity to talk about the parallels of satoko and sayo with this ask [both due to curiosity and because i enjoy reading your analysis posts about wtc]

Aaaaaaaaaa thank you. Incoherent Ramblings incoming.

Gou/Sotsu in general strikes me as Ryukishi revisiting the things he desperately wanted to convey to people through Sayo in Umineko and this is a huge part of why I love it so much. Because Umineko means so much to me, Gou/Sotsu also means so much to me.

I mean, the crux of Gou/Sotsu's loops is the syringe and how it can be used to create endless tales of tragedy, mirroring Yasu's endless catbox of fiction, and how the gold can be used to push anyone to become an accomplice in her murder schemes. Rena, Mion, Ooishi etc etc are all Satoko's 'accomplices' in these tales.

And Satoko's qualities as a witch lean into the idea of witches as creators who play with existing possibilities and scenarios, as well as leaning into the idea Satoko being an actress in a stage play before Eua who's the witch of theatergoing.

It's very much a literal expansion on the idea of the forgeries and the witch hunters were in Umineko, because it's Satoko presenting her fanfiction reinterpretations of the original Higurashi where she's the culprit this time. Featherine and Eua also play a similar role being omniscient deities who govern over works and the lives of others. Satoko saying all of these worlds are dreams, delusions, is very much like Sayo too.

Satoko may not be writing elaborate mysteries in the way Sayo made crimes and closed rooms that she wanted Battler to solve, but she's still communicating through her crimes and every action she takes, be it deliberately subverting Rika's expectations from the previous loops or leaving the syringes behind, is her desperately wanting to be seen by her the same way Sayo wanted to be seen.

Satoko is also obfuscating herself in a similar way to Sayo in terms of hiding herself behind fragmented identities and selves - the Satoko of 1988 vs the Satoko of 1983 vs Satoko the witch mirroring Shkanontrice. And though she wants Rika to see how she has been hurt, she also hides behind Oyashiro-sama and reframes Rika's 'sin' as a transgression against him in a similar way to how Sayo hides herself behind Beatrice.

People complained a lot about how a major theme of Higurashi is communication and how Gou/Sotsu ignores that, but Umineko is all about exploring how difficult things like communication and trust are, how difficult it can be for someone who is both literally and figuratively trapped, someone who's been abandoned all their life, and is deeply disadvantaged by society.

Satoko is an orphan, a queer young woman, a poor kid from a village in the middle of nowhere, and all these things make her disadvantaged by society at every level.

Everyone else's problems were resolved because the twins can easily reconnect, Rena can talk to her father and make him get it together, Rika is beloved by the entire village and their mascot, but Satoko is left with her comatose brother not back, an abusive uncle still out there, and Rika and that love is all she has.

She's someone who's lost. Someone who's been abused her entire life and has been left behind. The literal definition of someone with nothing, and Satoko lives, every single day, with the name of an abusive, ostracized family. No father, no mother. All of her friends moved on and the only person in her world is Rika by whom she's abandoned in an environment that is actively hostile towards her.

She's someone with complex PTSD and is neurodivergent, someone whose friends keep moving forward while she feels stagnant and stuck in the same time period.

Everyone is like "but she should have reached out" when Umineko was literally about how fleeting childhood can be for most children and how most children end up forgetting and moving on pretty easily, which contrasts the experience of children who are being abused.

Satoko probably didn't feel like she was significant to her friends anymore. Sure Keiichi and Rena were good friends and were always nice to her, but Satoko knew them for two or three years. Shion hated her and abused her for some time. Mion might've been kind to her and gave her a safe space within the club to escape the discrimination of the town, but she was still distant because of her family issues. Satoko only had Rika, that's how she felt.

I'm not saying the club didn't love Satoko, but again Umineko is all about how children can forget very easily. Time moves too quickly for a lot of people.

A childhood promise that mattered so much to one person may not matter as much to another, and isn't that the core of Sayo and Battler's conflict?

In a similar way Satoko and Rika assume that no one understood the other as much as they do, that they are the ones who know each other the best. Sayo also assumes Battler meant every word he said, that he'd definitely never forget his promise, and that it was something that meant just as much to him as it did her, but Battler quickly forgets after leaving the Ushiromiya family and thinks of it as something rather silly.

Satoko is at a point of complete suicide. She could never go on living as she had been and she wanted to die upon realizing that she had no choice but to go back to the tormenting loneliness of St. Lucia, a place that broke her because it abused her and exacerbated all of her worst traumas.

Satoko was also forced into a situation where she either breaks Rika or commits suicide and loses everything. And Satoko even gave Rika this choice from the beginning (but people like to act like she never tried to communicate or that she's entirely at fault because they hate abuse victims who lash out but I digress).

Either she denies Satoko and leaves her behind for St. Lucia so Satoko can commit suicide, or she stays with her in Hinamizawa. Rika can't have both, but Rika wants both anyway. She wants Satoko with her at St. Lucia and she's not willing to settle for less so she won't back down, which leaves Satoko with two choices: 1) make Rika feel that she has to stay or 2) vilify herself in Rika's eyes, so that Rika will finally give up on her. Satoko keeps leaving clues as syringes and she does things that never happen in Rika's original loops. She also literally says she knows Rika wants to leave Hinamizawa to go to a rich all girls school, but Rika doesn't want to believe Satoko is involved.

Which is again similar to how no one looks at Shannon as anything but submissive tradwife material or Kanon as sad emo child, there's no way they can be resentful or unforgiving, no way they can be Beatrice.

There was a huge amount of people who were mad that their sweet princess Satoko could be suicidal and struggle with reaching out to people, that she had no regard for her life or the lives of others even though it makes perfect sense for her to snap. People used to say very similar things about Shannon and Kanon in the past.

It's truly a time loop because we've gone from "Rena Shion yandere" to all of this about Sayo including people calling her "maid yandere" and now this. And it's just the same. But people still don't get it.

Anyway Rika purposefully ignores these clues, but Satoko is someone who wants to be solved by Rika and seen by her just like how Sayo wanted to be solved and seen by Battler.

I rambled about this before but I think marriage being a huge source of stress for Satoko because of her childhood and the fact that she loves Rika in a romantic way also mirrors Sayo putting the idea of marriage on a pedestal as a symbol of a new beginning and something that could save her from her miserable life, and yet she feels trapped within those expectations imposed on women, because women who can’t give a man a 'proper' family (read: children) are seen as worthless, and this makes Sayo feel like something is deeply wrong with her because she's infertile.

Gou/Sotsu is also deeply tragic in a similar way because it acknowledges that there's no perfect answer for Satoko just like how there wasn't one for Sayo, but it still wanted to grant Satoko a 'miracle'. It's just like Lion. The witch Satoko, our Satoko, leaves that fragment in the end, because no matter how angry she may be, she still wanted a version of herself to be happy even if that happiness is something that could never be her reality. The kind Teppei isn't her Teppei just like how Kinzo and Natsuhi in Lion's world aren't Sayo's. Lion existing is a source of comfort for Sayo after she passed and the miracle fragment is the same for Satoko. It's very tragic...

The part where Satoko is waiting to be killed by Rika, after she smiled and let her take the sword because Rika proved she understands her heart...also very similar to Beato wanting Battler to kill her.

Anyway.

#asks #angel-lepus #umineko #gamo.txt

[takearisk-xo]

Hannah I'm so sorry but I don't see how consent does not apply to fictional characters. Is rape ok as long as the characters are fictional? What about child molestation? Also a lot of other real world morals are very much part of fanfics, including yours. I love your stories and love the way you write. And I'm not trying to police you. But this is a small part of AG, a story I am really really loving, that I have trouble wrapping my head around and genuinely wanted to hear your perspective. Sure it's completely fair that I don't have to read if it's a trope I'm uncomfortable with and I don't expect you to change your fic. I'm sorry that it upset you, I really only wanted to learn more about how you are approaching this.

ok there are like three conversations happening so let me break this down.

consent does not apply to fictional characters because they are fictional. they do not have the capacity to consent. they do not have agency. they are fictional. they are not real. they are constructs used as a very extensive metaphor to tell a story. full stop. ginny can't consent to any part of already gone whether it be sexual or not because i am making her do all of it. i am the puppet master pulling all the strings and these are my dolls that i play house with. she consents if *i* choose for her to consent. it's not her decision. it's mine.

if i chose to play house in a way that was noncon or dubcon that is my very real choice that i have and i would tag it as such and you would then need to make the choice if you wanted to play with me. it is not a conversation of whether rape and molestation are okay. literally all of us who live in the real world know that is absolutely not okay and a very real crime for very real reasons. but if someone chooses to use rape, or molestation, or whatever, as a vehicle to tell their story, that is their prerogative and that *is* okay. we cannot tell someone that they can't write a rape story. full stop.

now, let me get off my high horse. i think your question is: how is it okay for ginny, who has woken up with no memory past june of 1996, to engage is sexual urges/acts? my original answer to a similar question was "spoilers" and it still is but i have eleven messages in my inbox and i'm over it... maybe my show instead of tell is too much show, maybe i'm not as good as a writer as i thought i was, maybe we haven't quite gotten to the full realization of this storyline. maybe its all three! regardless, it comes down to how does ginny see herself. and how do the people around her see her. do they see her as a 14 almost 15 year old or do they see her as an adult? up to this point, ginny has asserted that she is frustrated with the way harry, her family, and her friends have been treating her. she, as a character, and on multiple occasions, has declared that she is an adult capable of making her own decisions. she had the conversation with healer silverberry where she had him confirm she was of age, she refuses to take outside opinions on situations when she feels she is perfectly capable of deciding on her own, she acts and manifests those decisions confidently and without second-guessing it. she is well on her way to accepting that she is no longer a teenager, but a 20 year old woman whose actions have consequences. i have plans for this to be a gradual awareness for both harry and ginny. this isn't a thing where harry is pushing himself on her or ginny doesn't know exactly what she's getting into. the sex is a resolution. it's them coming together physically as a representation of their decision to still be together after several more chapters of plot points and angst. but if that is not enough for you to feel comfortable with the explicit nature of the last chapter then that is okay and you do not have to read it.

did i miss anything? no? ok i think i'm done with this subject for today.

#ok let me tag for trigger warnings #tw rape #tw molestation #proship #anti-antiship #anon #answered #already gone #already gone spoilers

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here?

Good questions! I wish I had a short answer. I’m here on the next step of my fan fiction journey—and I think journey is the appropriate word. The first time I remember hearing about the concept of fanfic, I have to admit I really didn’t get it. It felt maybe a little silly or frivolous? But then I actually sat down and read some and I talked to others who were already engaged in the fanfic community, and my views changed dramatically. I saw authors and readers using fanfic to incredible effect for a bunch of different purposes…to work through challenging real world situations in a fictional environment that allows for a different or better outcome. To repair (for lack of a better word) otherwise beloved intellectual property that was disappointingly exclusionary when it came to representing certain identities and perspectives. And, yes, sometimes just to have fun in a silly or frivolous way with an engaging tale set in an existing fictional universe. Because, really, what’s wrong with that? If it makes me happy to write a lil’ story imagining how Háma of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings proposed to his wife, why is that a less legitimate way of spending my time than my husband imagining his ideal football team and then debating with strangers on the internet whether his fake team could beat their fake team? Or, for that matter, why would it be less legitimate than him getting together with friends in a park and playing actual football? It’s all about finding something that you find fun and rewarding, right?

So, I became a consumer of fanfic for properties that I love (almost entirely Tolkien-related, in case you couldn’t have guessed that from the random Háma reference above). And there is so much good stuff out there. Works that are beautifully written. Works that expand on beloved known entities and introduce exciting and interesting and engaging original characters. Works that are funny and sad and sweet and racy. And there is a real community of creators and readers that I have come to really appreciate in their own right—the way they support and cheer for one another and just generally display a lot more kindness and empathy than you’d normally see in the world.

Now, I don’t need this account just to find and follow and read and praise fanfic that I enjoy. I could have kept doing that from my long-term account. But I think I might be ready to possibly share some of my own stories soon as well? And that’s scary enough that I want to keep it separated in an account that doesn’t obviously link back to my real life and my other social media presences. So here we are. As I’m able (which might be very slowly!), I will try to post some work here. And maybe someone will read it and like it, which is great. And maybe no one will read it and that’s ok, too. I just want the outlet for myself, and I’m trying to be inspired by the confidence and vulnerability of other writers whose work and online personas I really enjoy (a particular tip of the hat to @sotwk who is a literal stranger to me but has been a really impactful model of someone who generates a lot of fantastic work in an area of lore that I love and also does so with really refreshing transparency about the joys and challenges of the process!). So for anyone who happens to be reading this, you can hopefully watch this space for periodic stories set in a Tolkien-inspired environment and usually written from the perspective of the reader. I’m a Rohan girlie through and through, but I have love and affection for all corners of Tolkien’s world and I’m excited to get into it!

#fan fiction #fan fic #tolkien #silmarillion #lotr #lord of the rings

[rpmemesbyarat]

Many times I see someone say that their original species/setting/culture/etc doesn’t adhere to human gender norms or view gender the way humans do. . .and what it turns out is, they do, just instead of viewing it like Western traditionalists they view it instead like (also Western) progressive-minded folks do in spaces like Tumblr, queer groups, etc.

The thing is though, that’s still a human viewpoint. As evident by the people in these spaces and with these identities and views on gender. . .are human. And I’m not saying it’s bad to give your original species/culture/world/etc these views, just, if you’re going to make the claim they aren’t the way humans view things, you’re going to have to work a little harder to come up with your own original stuff.

For instance, maybe genders are assigned by a trait that isn’t genitals, but is still physical, such as eye color, with according stereotypes and roles and socialization attached to this. Maybe people whose eye colors are hard to distinguish, or who have heterochromia, are ostracized, to say nothing of those whose eyes might shift color later in life. And people who wear colored contact lenses will be seen a lot differently for sure!

Or, what if gender is assigned based on something NOT physical and is easy to lie about, like what time of day you were born?

And if you can choose your gender, what are the options? What distinguishes these options from each other? What if none fit? Or if you want to change later? What is the process for choice? When is someone considered “old enough” to know? Is it ever considered “too late” to go back on a selection? What about those who never choose?

Also note that while a lot of people want their fictional people/society/etc to have a more enlightened view on gender (which is fine and good) another option is to have them have a very flawed and damaging system just like us, just totally different from our own too. You’ll notice all the examples I gave are based on things that don’t actually impact anyone’s personality at all. . .but what if you told them their whole life that it did, and raised them in different ways based on that?

Hmmm…sounds familiar.

Alternatively, maybe your world/people/etc doesn’t have DIFFERENT categories from our world. Maybe they still have “men” and “women” and those are seen as the only two, or at least the primary two, are still assigned based on how your genitals look at a glance, etc. But maybe how a “man” and “woman” are expected to behave are totally different! And I don’t mean just swapping the gender roles, that’s just the same thing, I mean stuff that doesn’t really have a human equivalent that I know of. For instance, rats have gendered behavior, it’s just nothing like human ideas of gendered behavior. Female rats tend to be very hyperactive, and love to run around and play and explore. They’re rarely cuddlers or lap rats, even if they’re very friendly. Conversely, male rats tend to be lazy lap potatoes who love to snuggle and chill with each other and their human. But, as with humans, there’s always exceptions—I’ve had some very snuggly and/or timid girl rats, and I’ve had a couple boy rats who not only behaved in a much more “female” way they even LOOKED more like female rats (smaller, thinner bodies are more typical of females, while a lot of the boys are LORGE) except for the massive testicles (yeah, rats have those)

So, what if we applied those standards to a sapient society? By their standards, your manliness would be defined more by your laziness and cuddliness, and feminine behavior by running around like you’re on crack. The little girl that would probably be labeled a tomboy in our society would be the height of girliness to them! So, it’s not just reversing human gender norms, it’s a set of gender norms that are just totally nonhuman even if it’s still the same conventional two categories. And since I mentioned that there are exceptions among rats just like humans—how are those exceptions regarded and treated? Are they rejected? Tolerated? Maybe they have specific roles in society of their own?

One more thing is that gender roles and restrictions don’t typically come out of nowhere in any human society. Most of them evolved for a purpose, often an awful one. If you tell men that their manhood and worth is measured by aggression and conquest, you’ll get a lot more young men eager to fight in wars. If you tell women that their brains will be overwhelmed by reading and their wombs shrivel up (yes, an actual belief in the Victorian era) then they’re a lot less likely to educate themselves and start asking questions about their roles. And, of course, queer and trans people must be demonized so that everybody continues doing what they are “supposed” to—if we let a couple women marry each other and not have children together, even the heterosexual women might realize they don’t need a man or have to have kids in order to be happy! Can’t have that! Similarly, many beliefs about the inferiority of POC evolved to justify their enslavement, colonization, genocide, etc. There’s always a sinister purpose behind bigotry, and it often doesn’t take long to figure out. So, in your society, how did their beliefs about gender come about, and what purpose, for good or ill, do they ultimately serve?

Basically, if you want to design a society with a wholly original view on gender that doesn’t have a real-world equivalent, don’t just copy-paste in a view that’s less mainstream but very much does already exist. You’re gonna have to do the work and think outside the box a bit. But I think that’s a lot of fun! And it can raise great points about the real world too!

#writing tip #writing ideas #writing #writblr #writeblr #gender #gender norms

[altairsarts]

Hi! Just a forewarning that this is meant with no malintent!

I saw on that post that you reblogged about misgendering Frisk/Chara/Kris in AUs and your tags saying something about ‘anyone who does that didn’t understand the original story’. I’m not sure if this is entirely true, but I thought that with Frisk and Chara having they/them pronouns (or being nb) in the original game, was to allow a greater variety of people to play and be interested? I thought it was just to be sort of a placeholder, so that if someone who uses he/him plays the game, he could interpret Frisk as a male (for example)?

Also, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to interact with someone who makes an AU with an altered Frisk/Chara/Kris? If I’m going by my previously mentioned thought, then wouldn’t having an AU of a specifically female Frisk be that creator’s interpretation? But also, AUs aren’t supposed to be like the original, that’s the whole fun of it! If someone makes an AU where Undyne is transmasc and is in a relationship with Papyrus, then would that make a difference? Would that be offensive?

Making an AU is basically making a whole twisted group of OCs based off of characters, so why can’t they take their own creative liberties?

Also, just a side note if it matters, but I’m speaking as a she/they genderqueer.

Hi!! I don’t interact with people a bunch so I wasn’t expecting any questions lmao- but!! I’ll try to explain as best I can.

So the short of it is: they’re not supposed to be taken as a player insert. They exist as characters outside of the player’s influence and this is established for every single one of them. Deltarune even likes to remind you at every chance it gets that Kris isn’t you, and you aren’t them. The idea that they only use they/them pronouns so that people can choose is incorrect because they’re not blank slates.

The idea that these characters would only use they/them pronouns or be nonbinary because it’d allow people to choose is also transphobic because it implies that as long as a person is using they/them pronouns anyone can choose, regardless of whether that person is actually okay with it or not. You can’t go up to someone who uses they/them pronouns and say “you’re a man because I’m a man and I relate to your experiences”, that’s just,,, not how that works at all. Someone, even a fictional character, using they/them pronouns isn’t an automatic pass to choose a set of pronouns for them. This is what you are given, and this is what you use.

I wouldn’t want to interact with someone like that for a couple reasons: the above thing that I just said, being that having a nonbinary identity isn’t a placeholder so that any random stranger can choose what pronouns they’re most comfortable calling you. If you understand that these characters are characters and not inserts and you still decide to disregard the multiple times they’re referred to as they/them then you are being transphobic, and I won’t be around someone who is okay with that.

There’s also the simple fact that I can understand not being aware of Frisk not being a player insert, as it’s not made obvious until the end of the pacifist run, but Kris and Chara don’t have excuses. If you can’t see the obvious multitude of times that it’s shoved in your face then I have to wonder if you’re actually paying attention to the core themes and characterizations, and tenfold for Deltarune. I mean, that’s like half the plot right there: Kris is being possessed and they’re making sure you know they hate it. They’re doing everything they can to scream at you without a voice, “I am my own person, and I don’t want you here.” If you can look at that and think “yea, that’s a character whose entire existence is up to me” then like. What else did you miss???

The reason why it doesn’t work the same way as making Undyne transmasc (to use your example lol) is because you’re not taking anything away from anybody or hurting anybody by doing that. There are not a lot of nonbinary characters out there, and the fact that we’ve gotten three main characters in one franchise is a goddamn miracle. It’s similar to making a canonically gay character straight or a POC character white or a binary trans person cis. You’re taking representation away from a group that needs it.

Also, a lot of people say this all the time, but you wouldn’t do the same for any cis character. Like Sonic, Omori, The Last Of Us, Mario, etc, you won’t say that just because we play as whatever character means that we’re supposed to project our gender onto them. Sunny doesn’t become a girl if a woman plays Omori and decides to call him Lyla Womanname, so why should Kris, Frisk, and Chara?

#not art #Undertale #Deltarune #kris dreemurr #chara dreemurr #frisk undertale #nonbinary #trans #transphobia mention #transphobia in the notes will get you blocked #also ty anon for actually just asking #I see a lot of people getting pissed off about questions #even if there’s no reason to believe they’re not being asked in good faith #like. people aren’t born knowing everything about the world #and if you bar people from asking questions that may be interpreted as offensive how do you expect them to learn #anyway feel free to reblog with your own points if I missed anything #it has been a hot second since I was hyperfixated on UTDR #I’ve got a highlight on instagram under the same name that talks about it a little bit too #so if you wanna go digging to look at that feel free #the highlight is just called IMPORTANT

[regicidal-optimism]

If everyone looked up unfamiliar things on wikipedia or tvtropes or whatever instead of asking enthusiasts about them then the world would lack the joy of enthusiasts explaining their enthusiasms, so if you'd fancy describing a fandom to someone who knows very little of it: What the fuck is Dream SMP? I'd thought they were just Minecraft LPers? But you're reblogging stuff that seems to be made in a universe where it's an angst-drenched long-running manga or homestuck or something of that ilk???

so, they’re not... not minecraft LPers. really, you were right both times.

the Dream SMP is a minecraft server. it is also the shared world of about thirty people who use minecraft streaming as an RP medium, acting as characters and playing out fictional storylines. the overall effect is a little bit like homestuck, a little bit like a D&D podcast, and a little bit like kids playing pretend on the playground at recess.

there are some characters whose impact comes from their player being incredibly good at minecraft (most notably technoblade and philza, but also dream himself). there are other characters played by people who are absolute shit at minecraft, but who get really into the story and RP aspect (this is the category that includes wilbur and quackity, who you may recognize from the sheer volume of fanart of them I reblog).

there’s political drama. there’s surprisingly accurate depictions of torture and abuse. there’s commentary on toxic masculinity. there’s a guy who says “muffin” instead of “fuck” and also his arc is about the moral injury he suffered while the leader of a mind control cult. there's heartwrenching trauma arcs. there's melodramatic suicide bombings. there's people quoting hamilton. there’s people accidentally dying in the middle of their villain monologues, lest we forget that this is still taking place in a video game. there’s a really outsized amount of cursed gay sex. it's a ride. which brings me to my next point!

the server wasn’t originally intended to have a plot at all; it's very much a “car that learned to fly” type of situation. it continued to be mostly improv for most of its existence— some of the RP is scripted, but a lot of it is just made up on the fly, and almost none of the character arcs were planned in advance. so the writing is... well, it’s spotty in approximately the way you would expect of an enormous group storytelling project from 30 people, none of whom were selected for being good writers. it’s also, however, often surprisingly poignant. sometimes it’s both at once! it is very much the homestuck of a new generation. I can’t say I recommend it as a fandom experience but I’m having a lot of fun.

#ask #imaginary gardens with real toads

[bestworstcase]

more on your ozlem/EA parallels-- I've been wondering for a long time about how some characters are based on fairytales as folktales, and some based on stories we culturally colocate with fairytales (Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are specific published stories, with no cultural/folktale direct predecessors afaik). (now wondering if we have any Hans Christian Andersen characters that I've just forgotten about.) Both are portal fantasies, both star little girls, both have like a weird shared cultural perception of their origins. Do you have any thoughts about the two stories we're looking at so closely being constructed/authored instead of told collectively, especially since oz and alyx themselves have their authorship under scrutiny in the story?

*points at winter* kai from the snow queen

um i don’t know enough about the historical background of the oz books to have much of interest to say about them other than that the primary allusion constructed is to specifically the marvelous land of oz, and that sticks in the back of my mind a lot for what it might gesture at re: how things are gonna shake out with salem and ozma.

but wonderland. oh i sure do have some thoughts!

firstly while aaiw/ttlg are both original tales i will point out that they draw quite heavily from an established literary transition—almost all of the poetry is direct parody or pastiche of poems that would have been well known to contemporary audiences and there are a lot of cultural references and satirical jokes, for thorough cataloguing of this see martin gardener’s annotated alice. and further the stories themselves were essentially improvised in bits and pieces to entertain the liddell girls, with the books then being put together and edited from that wider and looser body of ideas—so while the story was authored by one person it does have this fuzzy sort of adjacency to fairytale, i think. whether rwby is directly engaging with that fuzziness remains to be seen (<- salem wrote it/sibs are fictional truther until soundly proven otherwise)

secondly—and i think more prominently—there’s a whole chasm of difference between the wonderland of the carroll books and the wonderland of pop culture, and that is something rwby definitively IS engaging with very deliberately, e.g. through the red prince and the red king as a play on the popular conflation of the red queen and the queen of hearts and the monster/nonsense poem duality of the jabberwalker. (<- both things i’ve nattered on prior so will not belabor the point) so i think we’re seeing a pointed engagement with both the original texts and the pop culture and the mutual unintelligibility that develops between these two ideas of what wonderland is—from an audience standpoint i’m finding it super interesting how different my emotional reactions to things is, as someone whose main point of reference for wonderland is the carroll books, vs the majority of the fandom whose primary familiarity is pop culture cf the disney cartoon and burton movies. and aside from being so much a wonderland-related trope in and of itself that it’s almost mandatory, from the amount of emphasis being put on ‘that wasn’t in the book’ i kind of wonder if rwby is making deliberate use of its audience’s general lack of familiarity with the carroll books to build tension and subvert expectations; people expect one thing because that’s how it’s always done in pop cultural depictions of wonderland, but get something different altogether because rwby is drawing heavily from the books. (see also, jaune is the hatter/hatta despite neo having been placed in the opening to evoke the pop culture image of the hatter; it’s a misdirection that relies on the audience not knowing the books but it was obvious from the start if you know what to look for!)

there’s a similar meta-awareness at play in the fairytales in that ozma alludes fairly overtly to the grimm brothers (<- …well i think it’s overt, the parts of the fandom convinced that the brother gods are the grimm brothers might suggest otherwise), compiling and editing and rearranging fairytales to suit his own agenda and push his own narrative. (this is one of several reasons “salem wrote it” has my brain in a stranglehold; positioning her as carroll to ozma’s brothers grimm is fucking fascinating if that’s what rwby’s going for.) so between that and the consistent emphasis on the fictional/unreal nature of the ever after in this volume (i mean at this point we have ruby straight up asking how the story is both real and not real!) i don’t think it’s out of the question that rwby might be like… really interested in the compare and contrast of, on the one hand oral folktales being collected and corrupted to suit an ideological agenda, and on the other a fictional story that was authored solely to entertain but becomes in some way more real as people interact with it. i think we probably need to get a definitive answer on who exactly wrote this book before we can get a proper sense of this, but like, the DNA is there.

#rwby v9 spoilers

[kalinara]

I have come to the realization that my reaction to that "which author has the funniest/worst opinion about fandom" post is probably a little disproportionate.

It's worth talking about why. But there's no need to hijack that particular post to do it.

The thing is, I always have a knee jerk reaction to posts that mock/decry authors for disliking fanfiction because I remember what happened when Anne McCaffrey died.

So Anne McCaffrey, if you don't know, was a science fiction author who, among many other books, wrote a series about people who ride dragons on a distant planet.

This obviously is the kind of idea that captures fan interest immediately. So there were and are a lot of people who want to play in Ms. McCaffrey's universe.

Ms. McCaffrey, throughout her life, has had varying opinions about fanfic as other related fan content with regard to her universe. At one point, she was opposed entirely. At another, she was cautiously okay with it, but not with her characters. She also had some odd and draconian rules when it came to role playing games.

To put it simply: she was a pain in the ass.

I do want to clarify: I do not agree with Ms. McCaffrey's stance(s). I think, personally, that fan creations are the moral right of the fans. The LEGAL right, I think, might be a gray area. I'm no intellectual property attorney, so I won't weigh in on that aspect of things. I do, however, support the idea of anyone writing or reading fanfic for anything that they enjoy on general principle.

But I think, sometimes, fans can be really ugly about it.

See, Ms. McCaffrey died in 2011. And that day, fandom got nasty. There were all kinds of celebratory posts saying "We can write fanfic now! Yay!"

And honestly, my view of fandom has never been the same.

I support fanfic. I love fanfic. I agree with the idea that fans should be able to write fanfic even if the author doesn't like it.

But to celebrate someone's DEATH because NOW you get to play in the sandbox SHE created?!

There's something WRONG with that!

Look, whether or not we like an author, whether or not we agree with them or think they're a good person, they still CREATED this thing that we're so passionate about that we want to write fic for in the first place.

Without McCaffrey, there is no Pern. Period. Whatever joy (or revulsion) that the stories and concepts give you, that comes from her. And she was a real human being.

She deserves better than to have people celebrate her death because she had an inconvenient stance on fanfiction.

So yeah, any time I see one of those "ha-ha, this author said something negative about fanfic! What a hypocrite!" posts, it reminds me that fandom, for all its talk about not treating fanfic authors as soulless content creators, thinks nothing of doing the same thing to the original authors whose work is the thing that brought us together.

#fandom woes

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really That Bad?

The 90s were alternately an amazing time for comedies and an absolute wasteland of garbage best forgotten. Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler both rose to prominence during this era, and both thrived in their niches, delivering some of the most well-liked movies of their careers. But it was still the 90s, and the ugly side of comedy of the time was always ready to rear its ugly head. For instance, in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, we have the infamously transphobic finale, the joke the entire film has been building up to and is so shockingly bigoted you’d think it was written by J.K. Rowling. But bad comedies were just like that back then, and even good comedies could fall victim to it.

We’re not talking about a good comedy gone bad, though. We’re here to talk about a film with a solid  1 on Metacritic and that obliterated the careers of its two leads: Bio-Dome.

At one point, it was supposed to be a much more serious film about slackers being trapped and forced to survive in the titular structure, but you know how studio executives can be, and so the film was transformed into a totally radical 90s slacker grossout comedy filled with sex jokes, farts, and other tasteless humor. There are also rumors going around that this was originally supposed to be the third Bill and Ted adventure, but those are just rumors, albeit ones that you can see how one would believe considering how this film rips off that dynamic duo while cranking their idiocy and homoeroticism up to 11.

Whatever the case, what we got was absolutely torn apart by critics, and ensured Pauly Shore would never rise above doing anything more than direct-to-video garbage for the rest of his career, and turned Stephen Baldwin into the black sheep of the nepo baby dynasty that is the Baldwins, ruining his career which then led to him becoming a born again evangelical Christian whose daughter married Justin Bieber (which is still a massive W compared to inspiring GamerGate or actually murdering someone). It’s also the film that Weird Al decided to use to describe the miserable plane trip in his song “Albuquerque,” and the way he refers to it makes it clear the film is worse than the plane exploding in the second worse aviation accident to happen over New Mexico in fiction.

(This one being the worst, obviously).

But hey, maybe the critics were just being too harsh to this dumb comedy that was clearly meant to be enjoyed by stoners. With my tray table up and my seat back in the full upright position, I strapped on in and took a look at Bio-Dome to see if this comedy has a few laughs in it, or if it really is that bad after all.

THE GOOD

Well… The soundtrack is pretty good. They’ve got a lot of solid tracks on it, and Tenacious D actually briefly shows up for a cameo. It lasts maybe three seconds, but it might be the best three seconds in the movie.

There’s also a montage set to “The Safety Dance” near the end of the movie, and it might be the single genuinely funny sequence the film has to offer. I thought a few of the gags in it were pretty good, and it’s the only time the protagonist's goofy idiocy felt charming instead of revolting. And then it leads into the climax of the films, which is actually decent because there are actual stakes instead of random vignettes of these idiots dicking around. Sure, it’s decent by the standards of the rest of the movie, but credit where credit is due.

Finally, William “Walter Peck” Atherton plays a character named Dr. Faulkner, a guy who absolutely fucking hates Bud and Doyle, and thus he becomes the most sympathetic character in the entire film. You will be begging him to kill these two morons by the end. It helps that Atherton is the only person in the entire movie who is actually trying to act.

Yeah, that’s it. Time to shift into Hater Mode.

THE BAD

The fact the entire movie hinges on these two idiots is a joke, and not a particularly funny one a that.

The 90s was littered with all manner of idiot duos, most famously with Dumb & Dumber, but Bud and Doyle are easily the nadir of such characters. The big issue is they are not merely lethally stupid to the point they fuck up a massive science experiment—no, they are horribly unpleasant people. They bumble their way through the titular bio-dome, ruining the work of the scientists at every turn, but that’s not even the real problem. No, the problem is that despite having two girlfriends they supposedly adore, they not only constantly flirt with the women scientists in the dome, and even worse they crawl into their beds while they’re sleeping and start feeling them up. Ah, the 90s, where you could have your protagonists sexually assault a woman and still expect people to sympathize them while playing the violation off for laughs! Ah, but it’s okay, because they feel really bad about it, guys.

Aside from that vileness, the jokes are just as juvenile and pathetic as you can imagine they’d be. You have fart jokes, pee jokes, sex jokes, Baldwin eating Shore’s toenails… Stuff like this has its place and can be funny, but this is really the only humor the movie has. There isn’t more clever than some lame fart a stoner can laugh at while high off their ass.

And maybe this could be forgivable if anyone was actually fucking trying. There are two types of bad acting in this movie: hammy, camera-mugging idiocy (our two leads) and bland, wooden delivery (the female scientists). No one in this film seems like they cared at all, and honestly, it’s not hard to see why. What is there to even give a shit about? Out of the two leads I do think Shore is probably the “better” of the two, but this is better in the sense that being kicked in the balls is better than being shot in the back of the head execution style

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Look, I went into this with an open mind. You all know I’m not above enjoying some nasty, trashy comedies; two of my all-time favorite films are Freddy Got Fingered and Little Nicky, the former film especially being one I hold in high regard. But… No, this one legitimately is as bad as it’s made out to be. Weird Al must be thanking his lucky stars that plane exploded over Albuquerque so he didn’t have to sit through the rest of the movie.

Like, in the movies I mentioned, there’s at least something to latch onto. Freddy Got Fingered is essentially the greatest troll in history, with Tom Green blowing a studio’s money to make the most bogus gross-out comedy ever, and in some bizarre ways it has some artistic merit. And with Little Nicky, there’s some entertaining villains, decent jokes here and there, and just a slew of memetic lines. Bio-Dome has absolutely nothing like that; it’s just two obnoxious, unpleasant characters being played by actors who definitely can’t salvage the material delivering the stupidest gags and jokes imaginable for an hour and a half. This really is the most bottom of the barrel lowest common denominator garbage you could scrape up.

Even still, I can’t particularly say it’s the absolute worst comedy I’ve ever seen, mainly because there wasn’t much expectations it would be good. It stars Pauly fucking Shore, the only guy from Encino Man who will probably never win an Oscar as long as he lives, it being dogshit was expected compared to something like The Love Guru or even The Master of Disguise. Those films starred genuinely talented comedians, while this movie just didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, this is still one of the worst comedies ever made, but it really was something I expected would suck even if I really hoped it wouldn’t.

I honestly don’t know how this managed a 4.4 on IMDB; I get there are some lunatics who actually love this movie, but there can’t be enough to pull this out of the bottom 100 gutter, can there be? It shouldn’t have higher than a 2.5, and that’s just being generous because there is nothing about this film that is so good enough that it deserves higher. 

But that’s also the thing: As bad as it is, it is utterly unremarkable. It’s just the epitome of bad 90s comedy, and while it is the worst among that crowd, it doesn’t really stand out in any notable way other than sucking really hard. This is a film bad in the most generic ways possible, and I think that’s part of why it has fallen to the wayside in terms of “worst movies of all time” lists these days. Like does it deserve to be there? Sure, but there’s just a lot more vile and offensive comedies than this to pick from. This is just a generic bad comedy at the end of the day.

If you want to see the concept done right, and shorter to boot, just watch the episode of Johnny Bravo entitled “Biosphere Johnny,” which is a parody of this film and does every single thing this movie tried to do and better, proving once and for all Johnny is a true Chad.

#is it really that bad? #IIRTB #review #movie review #Bio-Dome #Pauly Shore #Stephen Baldwin #comedy

[joyce-stick]

Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

Video of recommendations of girls (And media) which halfway through turned into a Bocchi the Rock video essay.

Transcript under the cut.

Previous video essay/transcript: Adachi and Shimamura's Second Season

If you're on desktop, you may find this more comfy to read directly on our Tumblr site.

If you enjoy this essay, please consider following us here or on any other platforms, and/or donating to support future works via our Patreon or Ko-fi.

Patreon • Ko-fi • YouTube • Twitter • Cohost • Tumblr • Mastodon

Hello everyone, it’s Audrey. So, it’s been some time, I was writing a script about problematic things, and then Joyce came along and started a separate script about things we had to recommend. I finished that script, and the end result of this process was a great incoherent mess, so I’m taking it from the top.

First thing we have to talk about today is Moonshine!~

Moonshine is a doujin visual novel produced by the now seemingly dissolved doujin circle Sakura Mint, whose origins I don’t have the resources nor Japanese language knowledge to trace any information about. It was released in 2007, and then translated to English in 2008, and, quite frankly, the fact that a freely available English translation exists for easy online downloading is a goddamn miracle. It’s really short, like, about an hour, or two if you’re slow like we are. Nonetheless, this VN made us cry like a little baby child. The reason for that being, it’s about a trans girl. And the other reason for that being, it’s about a trans girl falling in love with a gender ambiguous main protagonist who is, well, gosh, really.

This is a really raw and emotionally powerful little story with a really strong theme of how to move on with your life. From a life where you didn’t belong or weren’t loved, or from a life that you love but that can’t follow you, and how either can be equally painful, how change is always painful, even if it truly is for the better, and it’s just a whole lot of feelings. A story that made us cry this much needs to be read. The English version is available freely, it’s only a bit of time, and it’s very well worth it. You might need to fuck around with your graphics settings to get it to display in proper 4 by 3 if you want to play it in fullscreen without it stretching to 16 by 9, but still, very very worth it. Probably one of the best pieces of queer fiction that we’ve ever read, and the fact that it got translated the year after its release is incredible.

It also has a sequel, called Tsugi no Terasu, which is probably not called “Sunshine” in English because that’s not what the kanji means. This sequel never got any sort of digital release either officially or otherwise and it looks as if the doujin group that made it has long disbanded given that the web domain name they used to occupy is now populated by casino advertisements, sooo all their work is probably just kind of, gone, unfortunately. As is often the case when independently produced niche media exists and no one is doing any work to preserve it. These things just sort of go and vanish.

Unless it hasn’t vanished, and someone does care! Like, I dunno, the girl reading this. I dunno about y’all, but I’d prefer that this thirteen year old VN that’s a sequel to a sixteen year old VN about a trans girl gets to be read, by someone, and hopefully continue to exist, and not evaporate into the mists of time. Sure, we can’t read it, but, details details. We’ll learn! How to read. I hope.

So I found a copy of Tsugi no Terasu for sale on akibaoo. Presumably this copy’s used, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work with our computer, or that it won’t be scratched to hell, but hey, you have to take some chances sometime in life. So, I bought it, with a portion of our, uh, meager, monthly Patreon earnings, so that we can collect it and take some form of action to preserve it in some form. Because this is what we’re supposed to do. I know we don’t have that much money, I know we’re probably going to have to eat a lot of rice for another month, but, what the hell, are we doing this youtube shit for, if not this shit? And I for one, am tired of watching hazel do all the awesome Japanese media preservation actions. I would like to have some of that glory! Somehow.

And that’s the thing.

So if you’d like to support the thing, that is to say, acquiring and assessing niche subcultural Japanese media so that we can talk about it and maybe help make it accessible to other people, and making video essays about these exploits and our emotional discoveries from them, or whatever else we do, which all apparently comes ahead of eating a proper diet because we’re insane… then please, please, donate money to us via Ko-fi, Patreon, or whatever. You will be rewarded in some way, I assure you, unless you don’t feel rewarded, and then you won’t.

So here, I’m gonna tell y’all about other interesting content that we’ve had a look at.

2,

Witch from mercury!

Okay so I had a whole thing written about this show. And then I had a whole other thing. And then Joyce simplified that other thing to its base components. And I don’t feel like summarizing what she said about what I said. But really I just think you should look at the tweet I wrote. Which says,

“So basically this is the story of what'd happen if us talking to girls in our discord chats but we had mechas and were all caught in the middle of corporate/government space politics-wars-ing

“I’m sorry”

And also,

Suletta didn’t do anything wrong.

I’ve thought about this quite a long time, and others have kind of said it more succinctly, but I think that Suletta made, not the best decision, but a reasonable decision in this circumstance, to protect her fiancee from the guy pointing a gun at her.

I think the appropriate thing to do then would have been to emerge from Aerial apologizing profusely for the traumatic experience that Miorine just had of watching a dude get killed, instead of what she did do. That would have been the human thing to do. But Suletta didn’t act like a human in this situation because her mom told her that this behavior was a show of emotional strength. And that’s what’s happened here. And that’s interesting, because it plays really well into the story, I think, in showing that the shonen protagonist pluckiness that Suletta was trying to approach her circumstances with, doesn’t really work all of the time! Suletta, the main protagonist of this series, acted the most protagonist like that she’d ever acted in this scene, and it was the most out of character she’d ever acted, and like, gosh, I’m looking forward to seeing how they follow up on this. That’s really what I have to say about that.

Oh and also the show was good.

So yeah, that helped.

3,

How Do We Relationship?

Which I’m going to refer to as Tsukiage, a shortened form of its Japanese title, from here on out.

Tsukiage is a story about lesbians.

And yes, yes, I know, there’s many stories “about lesbians” that I’ve told you about before. No. This isn’t like those. Tsukiage is About Lesbians. Tsukiage is about the experience of being a lesbian in This World, with all its gross bigotry problems. Tsukiage is about the experience of being in a group of heterosexual women and being asked what guys you like, and being unable to answer. Tsukiage is about the experience of being someone you know your parents would hate. Tsukiage is about the experience of being a teenager with no adults to trust in your life, but also about being an adult uncertain if you can trust the other adults in your life, and about the ennui of living isolated in a place you’ll probably never find your way out of, and about,

Tsukiage is about two twenty something lesbians who date each other because they’re the only lesbians they know and they have no idea what else to do, and who are really good at having a lot of sex with each other but are also really bad at dating and even worse at dating on the days when they're really bad at having sex with each other. And they're also both young and both had traumatic high school romance failures because, being a high school student is plenty traumatic in its own ways, and those wounds are still fresh to both of them even if they want to pretend they aren't, and it's bound to follow them still in this town they've lived their whole life in, and it's just a lot of spicy drama about that! I’ve been only three volumes in so far, and Miwa and Saeko are the first main pairing of a yuri manga we've seen to whom I’ve kind of ended up saying “nope”. I don’t get the sense that these two are made for each other in the same sense we got reading Adashima or Yagakimi or Sasakoi. They argue, they bicker, they feel jealous about each other, and about, maybe, 2 thirds of the way through the second volume, I realized I was reading a breakup narrative.

I mean, look at the back covers of the first four volumes. They telegraph it visually!

But also that makes this manga even more compelling for what it’s going for, because, um, conflict is good! And two people not made for each other is damn well better! Just yes, please do try to eventually get these two back together and sell me on this horrible relationship sorting itself. Or don’t, that’s also fine! I’ve not actually got to the chapter where they broke up, because, gosh, and tough, but yeah. And also this is probably the first manga I’ve read that actually shows how school can be traumatic, when it presents a supporting character who was deemed “gifted” in high school but ultimately wasn’t as good as their sibling and then was extremely othered by her family, and just is, generally, awfully maladjusted to, reality, because of the sheltered and overstructured way in which they lived being forced to rank as high as possible on exams, and like, shit! Like, I know Japanese high school is brutal, and it’s a plot point in a lot of anime and all, but this is the one time I can recall offhand when it was actually something that impacted the story and characters outside of a relatively contained studying arc, and it’s probably some of the realest fucking shit I’ve ever read.

Oh, also, um, Tsukiage is really damn funny. Like, the early volumes had me laughing involuntarily so much that I was seriously concerned about attracting noise complaints from others in our living space, or, around, generally? It’s a really good story, the art and faces are really good, the humor is really good and that's pretty damn essential, I think, for a story that deals in such heavy topics. The whole thing is good, so, yeah, read it!

4,

Bad End Theater!

So yeah, I already used this game as b-roll in the Adashima video, so if you watched that, you probably already know that we liked this. And we do. It’s quite good. This game starts with, as Joyce said, *ruffles papers* “an unawakened lesbian is eaten by a demon… and in the next part of the game, the lesbian meets a demon lesbian who wants to eat her in the other way… and in the later part of the game, a reply guy apologizes for replying with violence… or actually replies with violence.”

So anyway this game took us a couple hours to 100% all its Steam achievements. Very short game, very good game, nice little queer vignette about the tragedy of people from different social backgrounds not understanding each other, and then understanding each other, one hopes. It’s not free, but it’s quite good, and easily recommendable! So yeah.

5, Spark the Electric Jester 3!

It’s a Sonic game. It’s basically a Sonic game. It’s much like the earlier game, Spark the Electric Jester 2, which is much like the earlier games Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog, the video about which we were going to make is apparently not coming out until it does, because we keep getting distracted by pointless bullshit. The developer of this series is a former developer of Sonic fangames and started with the 2D Spark the Electric Jester 1, which we could not finish because we suck at 2D platformers.

One really interesting thing about this game is how it treats the lives system. Yes, it has one, but only for the final level. I find this super super interesting, because while we were playing the Sonic Adventure titles with a friend of ours, we kinda generally came into the agreement that the lives system of all these games was a mistake. And Sonic Team seems to have agreed, because they, uh, removed it, from Sonic Forces onwards. But Spark 3 puts it back deliberately, only for the final level, and the final level is basically designed to make you lose lives. Not through difficulty, exactly, because while it is difficult, it’s not insurmountable, once you know the lay of the land- but rather, through compounding difficulty by length. Utopia Shelter doesn’t feel exactly like a level, it feels like a whole city. It feels like, I suppose, if at the end of Sonic 06, the whole of Soleanna became a level from which Sonic had to escape- oh, well, I guess that sort of did happen, huh. Sorry, just um…

Sonic 06 is cool? I’m very sorry to say so. It’s a horrible mess, but it also is cool.

Anyway, Spark 3’s acknowledgement of lives as a part of the Sonic Adventure experience feels like, kind of great? Like it doesn’t just go, “oh this part annoyed people, let’s throw it away” it says, no, dying in Final Chase repeatedly and falling out to the main menu is part of this kind of game, let’s just, give the player a chance to experience that, at least once. Let's make this a part of the game, but make it better, by making the level earn it, both by being an awesome level whose difficulty feels contextually justified, and also by being in a game with phenomenal 3D controls and platforming and movement physics where the appeal of such a difficulty modifier isn't spoiled by deaths that don't feel like your fault  And it’s done in a way that feels accessible, with the option of going back and just, playing more of the game more, if you feel like you need more lives to endure the stage, but odds are if you’ve done all the optional stages you don’t need that many. I got to the end of Utopia Shelter on my second try, with lives to spare.

And yeah, so, anyway. Spark 3. It’s a really good game. It’s got pretty great level design and a great sense of visual style, really good music, good movement except for those damn cars that glitch and start going sideways all the time… I started just doing the car stages on foot because I couldn’t be bothered. But other than those, great game!

And finally;

Bocchi the Rock!

Okay, so I’m not sure what about Bocchi I can say that isn’t already said by other people but y’know what, fuck it, Molly’s convinced me, I’m gonna tell the weird age gap crush story.

So, when we were like, 16, 17, thereabouts, we were presumed a cis boy, and about six entire feet tall, and because of this, non-attentive viewers would often mistake us for a college-age dude. This factor, alongside the color of our skin and the general, uh, emotional neglect, of our parents, lent itself to our delinquencies, i.e., doing basically whatever the fuck we wanted at the expense of getting verbally and/or physically harassed by our parents who weren’t happy with us doing whatever the fuck we wanted but were slowly giving up after whatever point at which they stopped paying for the therapy that didn’t fix this brain immediately. So it was one night, while we were out of the house, as we usually were, talking to people at a charity event for the community org we volunteered for back then, that we saw her.

That woman who played guitar. Who was, back then, about the age we are right now. Maybe a little bit older.

Don’t think I need to describe her elsewise, really!

We had played guitar, too, once, for several years even. But I think we’d given up on music, like, the year before, after our mom harassing us to practice the “right” way made it not fun for us anymore. Seeing that beautiful, talented, very nice, woman almost made us want to try again. Although, we didn’t, because our mom didn’t want us to ever touch an instrument again unless we were truly serious about trying to make money with it, because those lessons are expensive, and I guess that’s one of the many ways we disappointed her, by ostensibly wasting her money.

But anyway, this woman. She was nice. That’s most of what we remember about her. She was a nice, cool, and to our eyes then, pretty, older woman who felt easy to talk to, and seemed to empathize with our anxieties, as, little of them as we felt comfortable telling, and, we were awkward around here and didn’t say much other than to compliment here and to talk about Edgar Wright’s movies, but like, y’know, she was good. She was good. Remembering how she smiled and how she looked at us like… well, probably the same as she smiled and looked at everyone, but still, it seemed like she liked us, or liked having us around. Although, now, being a performing person, we understand it’s kind of in your best interest to smile at everyone who comes to see a show. But. Yeah.

And we knew we never had a chance with this nice older woman, and that our crush on her was inappropriate, but, still… we still thought about this nice, talented, tall, pretty, interesting woman, and how much we wished we could be closer with her, but alas, and curses, age gaps, strike something again. Our heart, most likely, but maybe something else too.

And you know where this is going, don’t you.

Yeah.

[Kikuri Hiroi, a clip]

Kikuri is far, far more unhinged than that woman. The woman we knew was, uh, hinged, enough, to not drink around the absurdly tall and cute 17 year old that kept coming to her gigs for unknown reasons. Kikuri meanwhile is hardly ever seen without a can of sake nearby. And she’s also a bit more, y’know, open, with Hitori-chan, whose face around Kikuri is constantly a mixture of mild terror and grand astonishment. And, yes, Seika and Kikuri, is definitely, the more appropriate ship, and the one more likely to happen in the actual story, if any explicit lesbianism did happen, which I don't expect it to, but Hitori and Kikuri, in my opinion, is much more compelling, precisely because of how inappropriate it is. There’s just something particularly compelling to us, anyway, in the thought of our dead-in-the-water teenage crush, or something adjacent to it, actually going, someplace. It’s true that had we acted on it in real life, assuming we weren’t just rejected and told to abscond permanently, it’d almost certainly have gone extremely badly, for all the reasons it’d have done that, but, y’know, fiction is meant for exploring those culturally taboo fantasies of these sorts without necessarily needing to consider those unsafe and undesirable consequences. Although… you can, cause that’s conducive to drama.

So anyway, as far as, the actual show, goes, I dunno, I think it’s all pretty clear in this moment. This entire surreal bit with the psychedelic rock concert, where Hitori sees Kuroi reach out to her in this imagined intimate moment and whisk her away through this weird and new aspect of music and life experience that she’s not felt before, and it’s just like… Yeah! Yeah, that’s how it felt to us back then, watching that nice older girl on that stage. It was really kind of nostalgic actually. So, there’s one layer of the appeal of Kikuri’s inclusion in the show, Hitori’s feelings for Kikuri as someone who is a mentor figure and has things to teach her. You could say the thing Kikuri has to teach is music, or, something else, and though Hitori isn't eloquent or brave enough to articulate whatever her crazy teenage feelings are, it's clear she… has some! Which are ambiguous enough that they could be interpreted as just her wanting to be like Kikuri, which was also an aspect of our teenage emotions about our cool guitar woman, or that Kikuri playing in front of her triggered a spicy homosexual awakening! Not wrong either way. Though I think it's both.

And the other layer of the appeal is just… well, Kikuri herself. And our adoration of and relation to Kikuri as not just a stand-in for our teenage age gap crush, but also as a character in our age range who is relatable to us as a young adult who feels similarly to her about life!

I don’t think I need to explain that one, but I will anyway.

Kikuri is an alcoholic.

At some point after we turned 21, when it wasn’t us, but Joyce, Joyce discovered alcohol, during one of the low points in our life when we were unstably housed, and gradually started to rely on it a fair bit more than she should have. For a good year or two there, Joyce was drinking off our ass about once a month, sometimes twice, and y’know, just sort of thinking, who cares. If I die, if I lose, if I go out. Who cares. cause I’m not going to! We only really stopped drinking as much as we did because it started costing money and we started finding ostensibly better ways to hurt ourselves, like buying the disc of an ancient Japanese-only doujin game and telling ourselves it’s media preservation. I don’t think we were ever as much of an addict as Kikuri but, just, watching Kikuri, and watching her ruin her life in, basically the same sort of a way, is extremely relatable and gross and eugh

And the whole gosh contrast of THIS WOMAN being Hitori’s mentor figure who she takes her cues from and then embarrasses herself trying to do it

Is just incredible and perfect and gosh

Both these lovely women are both ruining themselves trying to be cool and likable and awesome, and… SUCCEEDING, because, the… the people LIKE the women, ruining themselves! and it’s beautiful.

I’m sorry, it’s beautiful.

Anyway Bocchi good. Bocchi good.

We've been reading the manga of Bocchi since writing that bit, and I think the Bocchi manga is just, for one thing, somewhat inherently let down by not being an anime and not having songs play in it, but, it's got more humor, at least one more crazy adult, and it's got more happening in it, as there is in every manga, and I really like it.

[I had to transcribe this part because I ad-libbed it. - Audrey]

I also like how it goes about, y’know, putting forth the, general, thesis or idea that, you know um, quote, “Rock Touches People’s hearts, because it’s coming from a loser, but you can’t call it rock if it’s from a successful person” Because that’s a- that’s a statement to make. That’s a statement that I’m kind of into. because we’re very not successful and uh. Seeing characters like Kikuri, and Bocchi, and y’know, and her, underground band, and uh, characters like Aiko, and her… Shady Underground Journalism, and the fact that the manga presents all of them, all of these very unsuccessful women, as cool, because they are cool, and that’s, real, rock!

*giggling lightly* uhhhh ahaha and you know but also *mutters sheepishly* please donate to our patreon- *laughs*

And one thing that I’m, one thing that I, one other thing that I really like about the manga is that it, it focuses so much, it’s like- it’s not so school-centric as a lot of other manga about y’know, music teenagers, tend to be, like- They’re not the light music club! They’re- they’re, a real underground band and you know that’s…

That’s freaking cool! *chuckles* That they are, they are, y’know, actually doing concerts for money, and that’s, y’know, it’s about doing the concerts, for money, and about working with adults who also have been doing concerts for money! and drugs *laughing quietly*

And also the fact that so little of it is set inside the school, like, y’know, th-the one moment where like, th-the online journalist writer who’s just like spotlighting, who’s y’know, writing about bands, and looking for Hitori. And then she goes to the school and she’s just like… Kicked out of the school! Because she’s not- she’s… she’s a creep! Who doesn’t belong! In the school! A-And *laughs* And then y’know, in like, another manga where it’s the light music club that that’d just kind of be where the plot… stops! Where that plot line… stops! But she- But then she finds out that y’know, they don’t perform at school, because they’re not a school band, and then, she… goes to the live house… and advances the plot. And is also a kind of… fucked up, self-interested woman, who tries to… sequester Hitori into… agskjhgdkfhkdhjfdddd because she’s afkhjdhkhf she’s interested in money, and promising more than she’s probably able… able to give, she is……

[trails off laughing]

This- this chapter…! This is- This is a scene where, *hiccup* This is a scene where this woman tries to buy Bocchi, buy Hitori, with the promise of exposure! *laughing* That- That is literally: That is the literal description!

[long pause while Audrey gets herself under control]

Okay, I’m done ad-libbing.

One thing I wanted out of the anime, watching the anime, was to see the group grow and expand to the point where they actually do become a famous and successful band. That's basically what I figured it'd head for since, Hitori is already a successful YouTuber, as YouTubers go, and since Nijika said that's where she wanted it to go, that she wants to grow the band and become popular and help everyone reach their dreams. We kind of do have the whole "high schoolers become music celebrities" thing in Love Live, but I'd love to see that sort of thing be done in a way that feels more grounded and believable in a world where people actually seem to worry about money, outside of the fantasy confines of a nationally famous school club, and have it done in a way that the story doesn't stop happening once they graduate! Given how much the story already focuses on adults who are implied to be varying levels of fucked up just as well and seriously as its lead teenage characters who are implied to be varying levels of fucked up, it feels like the sort of story that's kind of made to transition to follow these girls out of their school lives. And I hope it goes there, and I also hope that the anime eventually gets further seasons because the material of the later manga chapters has itself a fantastic foundation if the rest of it is adapted in the same way, so, yeah.

And that's just the feelings I have on that. If you're interested in more bocchi content then um, sakugablog has a couple writeups and translated interviews which talk about the production which is itself its own really interesting story! It also got us to read the manga, because the way that the anime's character designer expresses such passion for Hamaji's work is utterly palpable and gosh things. Also I think it's really funny that Kerorira decided to animate the Bocchi ice bath scene with her wearing a school swimsuit because that adds another deeper layer of hilarious cringe that isn't quite present in the manga version of the scene when you see that she's so mentally conflicted about the merits and demerits of this scheme that she can't bring herself to fully expose her own body to the ice water which would, uh, probably make the intended effect of catching a cold more likely and thus make the plan work better, and also the scene probably couldn't have become as much of a twitter meme if they'd decide to illustrate her without the school swimsuit like the manga does, since then instead everyone would be mentally and sometimes textually debating the merits and demerits of bath scenes in anime, again, except it'd be funnier than that because it'd be about *this* scene and that would be goshdarned hilarious.

I think that’s really kind of it for this one. We’re out of time. So we’ll see everyone next time. And thanks to our patrons.

Brea,

Dorian Newlin

hikari no yume

L Tantivy

pigeon

Sally

Scimitar

And Thijs

And everybody else.

oh wow that was, that was a, that was almost 48 minutes, okay um—

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