#i'm calling it a story but yeah it's novel length again

[little-peril-stories]

coming soon

THE QUEEN OF LIES

Bringing you: Whump

Look away, Breanna ordered herself. The boy had not even flinched when Baden declared his crimes for all to hear, nor when he heard his punishment: twenty lashes with the cat o’nine tails. She did not know what that was, but no doubt it was bound to be unpleasant, and she’d thank herself later if she didn’t watch. But she couldn’t pull her gaze away as Curtis was drawn in and summoned forward to hold the thief while his wrist shackles were unlocked, his shirt forcefully yanked from his body, and then his hands bound to the wooden whipping post before which the crowd had gathered.  A round of jeers went up from the gathered watchers on the outside; titters rippled through the crowd of prisoners.

Bringing you: Romance

In unison, they drew closer, and her entire body tingled with every possibility contained in the moments between them, in their shivering breaths that seemed to go in and out as one, and in the crackling air that seemed now to connect rather than separate.

Bringing you: Angst

And she’d thought she was playing a dangerous game then? What about now? What about the way she was teetering on the edge of a knife, between lives, when the smallest action might pitch her back into the world she had known and to which she had no desire to return?

Bringing you: Sillies (do I dare to call it fluff? you decide)

“Goodness, you’re vain,” she said. “You look incredibly handsome. Stunning, in fact. Crooked seams will be all the rage by next year. That’s how wonderful you look.” Raising his eyebrows, he said, “Now, that’s what I was looking to hear.” “You,” she said, “are impossible.” “Impossibly handsome.”

#wip: breanna hatchett au #lps the queen of lies #whump #whump story #whump writing #lady whump #guy whump #everyone whump #romance #angst #original writing #original story #new whump story #this is a reveal #lps-update #new story #new original story #i'm calling it a story but yeah it's novel length again #also we are not going to talk about how fast i wrote this #i don't think it was healthy #it raises questions i don't want to answer #like 'what the hell is wrong with you?' #and 'how much have you slept in the past month?' #anyway #21 chapters of making everyone's life a living hell nothing new here #happy endings only club #i mean it's basically a romance but with some pain so yeah happy ending obvs #i love this story deeply and i love this iteration of Breanna/Bree #and i hope you do too

[hyuuukais]

.・゜-: ✧ :- FICTIONAL REALITY .・゜-: ✧ :-

pairing • bang chan x fem reader

synopsis • fiction or reality? y/n preferred the former, escaping into another world, escaping her problems. so what happens when reality takes that away from her; wiping her own story-in-progress off both her laptop and beloved usb? and what happens when she opens the door in the middle of a crisis to none other then the love interest of her novel... and he's holding her usb?

warnings • general, food mentions, minho implies he wants to kill someone lol, y/ns ex is possessive, y/n is called a freak and pathetic

MASTERLIST | PREVIOUS | NEXT

CHAPTER FIVE • AFTER THE STORM (1.6k)

"Yeah, no."

Minho blinks at you, confused. "Why not?"

"Why not? Why- Min-" you slump down into your office chair, laptop light highlighting your frustrated features. "I've moved on! I'm over it!" Chan's words echo in your head. "The past is the past and should stay that way."

"Clearly something thinks you're a liar," he crosses his arms. "Other than me."

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You're clearly not over it! Why would you be?" He throws his arms up, looking at you directly. You avoid eye contact. "I wouldn't blame you if you weren't. That guy was seriously messed up."

"You don't know the half of it."

"So tell me."

Growing more irritated by the second, you push yourself up, looking up at Minho. Eyes meeting, he crosses his arms again, holding your glare just as intensely. There's something there- between you. Old tension, feelings of hurt and betrayal. No one knew you like he did, once upon a time, but could you ever get back to that?

Lightly, he brings a hand to your face, the other making its way up your arm, onto your shoulder. You sigh, leaning into the touch. Human connection never felt so good, so needed. He knew exactly how to make you give in.

"I'll tell you the basics," you say quietly, removing yourself from him. You choose to sit back in your chair, Minho getting comfortable on the couch.

"I always imagined myself getting married, having the best night of my life with the one I loved more than anything. I never thought it would be so scary," you begin, closing your eyes.

Images flood your mind; you in front of a floor-length mirror dressed in white, him behind you, pulling your hair back and breathing in your ear. He didn't have to say anything, just gave you that look. Clueless to your plan, he kisses your neck, whispering about how happy he was to finally have you forever. That if you broke this promise, something bad was sure to happen.

"You're mine," a shiver runs down your spine. "Only mine. Understand?"

Blinking back tears, you nod.

"Words, darling."

"Only yours," you whisper, and he smiles. "Always yours."

Pressing a final kiss to your temple, he leaves you alone in the dressing room. Finally, you let yourself break, falling onto your knees with a hand over your mouth to attempt to stifle your sobs. Makeup runs down your cheeks, and you can't breathe.

Someone steps into your room, lets out a gasp; they're by your side in an instant. Through your tears you can barely process Yeji trying to talk to you, trying to calm you down. Eventually your sobs lessen, her hand rubbing soothing circles on your back.

"Hyun's outside in the car when you're ready," she gives you a firm look. "Are you sure you want this?"

Her eyes are sad, knowing there may be a chance she'll never see you again. She was the only one who knew everything. Of course, you told Minho some stuff, mostly when he pressed you for an answer, but there were things you couldn't share. If you told him, he'd probably end up in jail.

"...then I left with Hyunjin."

Silence. Minho doesn't speak when you finish, just looks at you unblinking. You can't tell what he's thinking, but his fists are clenched at his sides. Shaking his head, he lets out a sharp breath.

"What?" You question. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that if I ever see that guy again, he's dead."

"...this is exactly why I never told you any of this." You can't help but laugh, and he stares at you harder. "As long as I'm here, neither of us should be seeing Yeonjun for a very long time."

Minho looks at you. "You said his name."

"Yeah..." You didn't even realize. "I guess I did."

Quiet settles between you two, less suffocating this time around. Sunlight peeks over the horizon, lighting up the room ever so slightly, and you realize just how tired you are. Yawning, you move over to the couch, draping your legs over Minho's lap. He makes a noise, pretending to shove you off, but you know he doesn't mind if it's you.

A few hours pass before you wake again, and the warmth of Minho is gone. Before you can wonder where he is, the smell of food wafts up the stairs- he's making breakfast. You stretch, wrap the blanket Minho must have put on your during the night around your shoulder, and head down.

"Morning sunshine," you yawn again as he scrapes the eggs onto a plate. "You literally have no food, so you better be happy with eggs again."

Waving him off, you sit, and he brings the plate over. This time, there's toast too, with the slightest bit of jam over it. He brings a matching plate over, sitting across from you this time. You think of last night, the heavy feeling in your chest seeing him again.

"You couldn't have used more jam?"

"No, actually, because like I said before you literally have no food," he rolls his eyes. "I used the rest up."

"We can go out today. Assess the damage of the storm." The eggs are hot, and you burn your tongue on an eager bite. Minho laughs at you. "Shut up." You make sure to blow on your next bite. "People usually are out helping others clear debris after a storm like that, but powerlines might be down more in town, so we have to be careful."

-

The roads are covered in bits of sticks and leaves, but the damage is surprisingly small. A branch fell onto a local shop, so most attention was focused there, allowing you and Minho to pass through nearly unnoticed.

Nearly.

"Oh, Y/n darling, who's your friend?" Mrs. Yang walks over to you slowly, her grandson close behind. "I've never seen him before. Are you new to town?"

"Ah-" Minho glances between you and the little old lady. "Just visiting."

"Well, you should come by sometime," she looks him up and down, a sly smile on her face. "Are you single?"

A blush spreads over Minho's cheeks. You stifle a laugh, he clears his throat, thoroughly embarrassed. Mrs. Yang spots his arm linked through yours.

"Oh! Y/n, you're not as lonely as I thought," she chuckles. Jeongin looks uncomfortable. "Although I thought you were with that boy over at the café... ah, I suppose I can be wrong sometimes." Your eyes grow wide when she winks at you. "I'll see you around, dear. My husband is over at the shop today doing small repairs, the stubborn old fool, so don't worry about coming in later. He really should call someone to do it for him..."

She mumbles the rest of her sentence, holding onto Jeongin for support as she walks away. You and Minho look at each other. This was definitely a great start to showing him around town. There were a lot of places closed up after the storm, so you couldn't show him much, but you stopped outside the little store you worked at.

"There's Mr. Yang," you say, pointing inside. "I don't know him very well, but he's a good boss I guess."

The one place you avoid is the café, but it looms ahead. Although you're sure Chan has probably forgotten about your little, ah, moment, it lingers in your mind. There was no reasonable explanation for his behaviour, or for the letter, or for your laptop becoming sentient, or-

"Helloooo, Earth to Y/n?" Minho grabs your hand, giving you a weird look. "There you are. I'm hungry."

"Hi hungry I'm-"

"Shut up." Letting go of your hand, he smacks your arm playfully. "The only place I can see nearby that seems to sell food is that guys café."

"That guy has a name," you roll your eyes. "I don't really want to go there..."

"Aren't you like.. a thing? Why wouldn't you want to go?

"We're not- we are not a thing!" You blush, looking away with a huff. "Whatever, fine, let's go."

Walking in, you order quickly and take a seat by the window looking out to the road. There's an unusual amount of people in here, but Chan is nowhere to be seen. Part of you wants to ask the young cashier where he is, but she's too busy. Your order takes a while to arrive, giving you and Minho lots of time to stew in awkward silence. It shouldn't be so weird still, him being here, but you could barely look at him right now.

"Here you go." The waiter brings your plates and drinks, then faces you directly. "Um, the manager- er- Chan, wanted to let you know he might not be able to see you for a while."

"Oh," you're surprised by the sudden comment. "Did he say why?"

"Something about being 'not all there'? I didn't push," they rub their arm anxiously. "Anyway, enjoy your food. It's on the house!"

"Hey wait- aaaand they're gone."

"Smells delicious." Minho takes a forkful, waving it in front of his nose.

"You're just not gonna even acknowledge what that kid said?" He shrugs. "Unbelievable."

"Y/n I can barely wrap my head around anything that's happened in the past 24 hours, forgive me if I let the waiter's weird message for you slide." He takes another bite. "Besides, is it really that weird? Maybe he's just freaked out by you. Chan, not the kid."

You freeze. Maybe he's just freaked out by you.

"Babe, you're a fucking freak," his words ring in your ears. "Seriously. You should be happy I choose to stay with you, 'cause otherwise, you'd be all on your own. Really a pathetic way to live, huh?"

And you can't breathe, fingers turning white by how hard you're gripping the cushion of your seat. But Minho doesn't notice, continuing to eat like he didn't just remind you of everything wrong with you.

●

notes • it is 6am and now that this is done, i'm going back to sleep

taglist • @yongbbokkie @chaeryred @tenebrisirae @toplinelix @chansdoll @amaranth-writing @3rachachoo @linosjureumi @thebrownemo @tfshouldidohere @channie-143

TAGLIST CLOSED ^^^blue means i can't tag you

#.・゜-: ✧ :- FICTIONAL REALITY .・゜-: ✧ :- #skz #stray kids #bang chan #bang chan x reader #chan x reader #skz fanfic #stray kids fanfic #skz x reader #stray kids x reader #bang chan x fem reader #stray kids au #skz au #skz series #bang chan fanfic #bang chan series #stray kids series

[decepti-thots]

Do you have any tips for getting back into reading?

I do, anon!

So for context, as I said previously, I went from reading 50+ books a year to 5-6 a year max for about half a decade. Most of this related to a longterm downswing in my overall health and my executive dysfunction specifically. I would pick books up and never finish them; my attention span was dead in the water, as was my motivation to even try half the time. It took a couple years of active effort to get back to a 3 book a month average. So here's a few subjective tips I personally found helped. They may not be useful for everyone, but this is what personally helped me!

Some of the techniques I used:

Follow your interest and enthusiasm, and don't be afraid to hop around books. I was stuck in a rut for ages where I'd start a book, lose steam, and vaguely want to read another one instead... but I insisted to myself 'no, I need to FINISH this one, I can read that one when I'm finished!' Obviously, I just never finished the books period, rather than methodically finishing everything one at a time, as I'd hoped I would. I read less, not more. The most important thing period is getting momentum back up; better 4 'still not finished'-s on the way to the book you unexpectedly finish in one sitting than nothing finished, and just a vague sense of guilt. If a new book calls to you and your current one feels interminable, seize that urge and start the second book so you can keep your motivation going. At least you're reading something then; the alternative was usually just not reading either book, for me.

Try some shorter books. I read a lot of novellas to get myself going again last year especially, and it was fantastic. Again, it helps get the momentum going, to be continually working up to longer stuff. (Plus novellas are just a great medium in their own right! Length =/= depth. SFF especially is having a real Novella Moment rn!) Hell, read short story collections, read poetry chapbooks, read plays- if you can only read 75 pages before losing steam, find a 75 page book worth reading. There's tons of them.

Try and carve out reasonably consistent times to read. For me, I started saying that after work most evenings if I was still awake really late, that was now book time, not Twitter/etc time. I read on my lunch a lot at work, and on Sunday afternoons. You don't need to be rigid, that can just be restrictive, but make it a routine you can easily make time for on a predictable basis without hoping you'll spontaneously 'feel like it'.

Read shit you love. This sounds obvious but like. You can't easily branch out of your comfort zone into more challenging-to-you stuff til you have the momentum going, IME. Start off reading the shit you know you like, heady intellectual ambitions be damned. Yeah yeah, reading outside your usual lane is often rewarding, but it'll wait a year til you get back in the swing of it. Read 50 romance novels in a row if that does that for you. The other books will wait. Likewise: reread shit you know inside out. Your to-read list will be here once you got a few of those old familiar faves in.

Those are the big things I guess. A lot of it was locating what really resulted in bottlenecks for me and tailoring what and how I read to them, instead of trying to force past them. Finding the books that fit what I could manage helped me reach a point now where I can read more broadly again. It's like building endurance, you can't start at 110%, I found.

[negamekos]

Various games Himaruya has worked on: a small compilation

(Warning: 3/4 of them are horror games)

With my newest hyperfixation now being visual novels, I've recently turned my attention to some of the visual novel-style games Hima has made in the past. There's a few super short personal project ones like Noto-sama and Cleaning Prussia which he made in pre-anime adaptation times, but I just want to share the more notable/interesting ones I know about.

Gakuen Hetalia (2011-2012)

You've probably heard of this one. Given that it was released in the early seasons of the anime adaptation, it has that art style, for better or for worse. I honestly thought the existence of this game was a joke when I first heard of it but no it's a real game, developed by the one and only Otomate and released for the DS and PSP. It's an otome game with Seychelles as the protagonist, and is fully voiced. From what I've heard about this game, there's not much romance and has mostly platonic interactions. Also Gakuen AU.

Since this is pretty much a game adaptation of the anime, this is probably the one that Hima least had a hand in making, as compared to the ones I'm about to talk about. Still a neat game in its own right.

The Hetalian Horror Show (2015)

Another one you might have heard of if you browse Hetarchive, which has a partial translation for this game. This one's a fairly short free game set in the Gakuen AU (again) with Bulgaria as the protagonist. It's basically about a couple of the nations gathering to tell 'scary' stories (whether they're actually scary varies). Features highlights such as:

Robul moment

America casually revealing Classified Government Secrets

Bear Grylls

Iggy bullying

Low-key nsfw illustration of Bul butt-naked and tied up

And a twist ending you will not believe! (not clickbait)

Like the other free games he's made, Hetahorror is completely made by Hima (even the background images were taken by him). You can download the game here from his blog. And Hetarchive's partial translation is here.

Now here are the non-Hetalia ones (which I think are a little more interesting)

Apathy Midnight Collection: Volume 1 (2007)

See those characters in the top right? That's Hima's art. Yeah. This game is a horror anthology game released all the way back in 2007, with three different stories and each having different writers and artists. The first two stories are the longest (apparently they have over a hundred different endings combined), and if you look around I think you can find some posts about them, they're quite interesting. The one Hima did the illustrations (and direction) for is the final story, Hashira no Kizu (or Scratches on the Pillar), which is the one that I heard leans the hardest into the horror atmosphere, and is quite different overall from the other two stories.

If you're curious about this game, you can purchase it here on BOOTH, and you can find an English fan translation here.

By the way, this game is a retelling of sorts of a much older game (from the 90s!) called Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi (Scary Stories at School). Which leads me to this game...

Inaka no Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi (2014-2016)

This is a full-length visual novel made by Hima's doujin group Shimaoka Kenkou Land, and it's a homage to the aforementioned Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi. It's pretty similar in setting to Hetahorror (in fact that game was probably inspired by that too), with students coming together to share their horror stories. It's very atmospheric, with a lot of ambient noises and background images which really drive home the 'inaka/countryside' part of the story. Hetahorror had shades of this too, so consider this a 'deluxe' version lol. Except unlike the Hetalia one I feel this game is actually pretty scary ngl...there's a lot of comedic moments, but also just as many genuinely gruesome scenes (I'm not kidding, some of the images are quite violent)

I only played the demo (which can be downloaded from the same page as the Hetalia game), and man the stories really range from 'I saw this lady walking her dog and holding a cute plush toy from afar so I asked if I could take a picture of it, but it turned out it wasn't a plush toy, it was a bag for dog droppings' to 'my friend and his entire family were mauled to death and it wasn't an animal that did it'.

The full game apparently has voice acting too, but this was a super-duper limited release (like it was sold in Animate stores for less than a year back in 2016) and I really liked the demo so I'm just considering getting it second-hand at this point. It's so obscure I can't find much info on the game in Japanese, much less English...

Just to show how atmospheric it felt, I have here a recording of part of the game which I can't stop replaying (sorry for no audio)

Anyway looking at the games he made really makes me wish he had the time to make one nowadays....he could probably make an amazing official Hetaoni horror game and I would pay real-life money to play it. This has been a PSA.

#well this got long #why did i write this noone's gonna read this #seriously that last game is crazy I want to play the full ver so badly #hetalia #aph #hws #hidekaz himaruya #visual novel #apathy midnight collection #gakkou de atta kowai hanashi #should I bother tagging characters #hws germany #hws italy #hws japan #also #horror game #long post

[cloudburst-ink]

Tagged by @hedgewyse . It took me awhile to get around to it but I did finally! I originally stalled because I've only ever been actively involved in two ship communities. But then I remembered... the third one. Which I've never been involved in, but it's still important. 💀😂

three ships

Kim Khimhant Theerapanyakun / Porchay Pichaya Kittisawat

It's the passion. It's the obsession. It's the angst. It's the fluff. It's the flirting. It's the hidden smiles. It's the stalker4stalker. It's the complete and utter lack of communication skills. It's the sweet pathetic boys. It's the bittersweet ending. It's the fanfiction in fanfiction. It's...

... alright well a lot of it's just me simping over Jeff Satur.

Magnus Bane / Alexander Lightwood

This was my first ship. I wrote my first full novel length fic in this fandom, and I even have a tattoo about it! They will always hold a special place in my heart as the ship that sailed me back into my passion for art and writing.

Reylo

So um, here's the thing. I'm not in the Reylo fandom. I enjoyed the movies well enough, but didn't have any particular interest in them beyond "oh, that was fun to see in theaters, I enjoyed it."

Many years ago, however, before I was involved in fandom at all, a friend of mine sent me a link to a Reylo fic on AO3 that she was obsessed with. It's the only Reylo fic I've ever read.

Long story short (I'll elaborate in another post sometime if I'm ever asked), it ended my impending marriage and changed the course of my life.

I have no idea what the fic was called or whom it was written by.

One day I should track that author down and thank them. I mean obviously other factors played into it, I'm not completely unhinged (well, debatable), but it was the spark that lit the flame.

So anyway, these two will always be important to me even though I'm not part of their fandom. 🖤

Honorable Mentions

I'm currently obsessing over KimVegas, KimArm, and ArmKimChay. If you notice a common denominator, shhh no you don't. ✨ I just didn't feel right using them in the three because they're all just extensions of my KinnPorsche the Series / KimChay addiction. 😅

first ever ship

I generally consider Malec to be my first ship, as they were the first ship I was active in any fandom community for.

However, they're probably not really my first ship.

I was baited into fandom as an adult by a friend who lured me into watching The Vampire Diaries. I kind of shipped Delena, but assumed they wouldn't end up together because he was the second / bad boy love interest and that's just not how the formula goes.

Little did I know 😌 that universe is far too much of a clusterfuck to care about formulas and industry norms.

Anyway I did write an Elijah/Hailey fic and post it on FFnet when I first started writing again after years of no artistic endeavors whatsoever. It's still there, but I choose to pretend it isn't. Straight smut is not my forte. 😅 And it's... well, you can tell I was a bit rusty. 😂

last song

👀🤫😇

last movie

I tend to gravitate more toward TV shows than movies, so I think the last one I watched might've been over the holidays. It's a pretty great musical--Mrs. Santa Claus gets fed up with being taken for granted, takes the sleigh on a joyride, and gets temporarily stranded in early 1900s New York. While there she protests for women's suffrage, fights for the rights of child workers, helps to reunite a family divided by an ocean, and repeatedly demonstrates the spirit of acab.

Yeah, you heard me. It's socialist acab Mrs. C here to sing dank tunes and fight for your rights.

Highly recommend 10/10.

It's also on Youtube for free last I checked.

currently reading

The Prince's Poisoned Vow by Hailey Turner.

currently watching

The latest season of Miraculous Ladybug 🥺

currently consuming

I've been making a lot of duck soup lately. I'm a bit of a duck addict, and there's something so satisfying about making use of the whole carcass and watching it slowly turn into rich, wiggly stock and then the most wonderful soup with duck meat and bok choy and bamboo shoots and noodles. ✨

currently craving

a quiet, vibey cafe to write at, and some peaceful time to spend there. the gay donut shop i used to write at shut down. 😭

-----

I'll tag... @staykimchay and @justanothervariant if they haven't done it yet.

#tag game

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 10/11/22

in which i read a book but completely fail to discuss it

listening Bloody! Bloody! by Junie & TheHutfriends. self-described indie pop, incredibly fun chorus! the same sort of frantic plinky..banjo? undertones that i liked so much in my absolute favorite song of hers, The Consequence of Imagination Is Fear.

very good spooky halloween song. i truly do love this band so much for how fucking Weird it is.

And you’re driving with your hands, not believing all the bleeding, and they’re calling you- Bloody! And the knife sits gleaming in the red back seating, and they’re calling you- Bloody! And they’re all still screaming in your head, and their lips dead, calling you- Bloody!

there are a couple creatives where i'm like "yes i WOULD like a new Frog Detective/twine novel/something every year, where i have a marvelous time for forty minutes and it's a little self-contained experience". this band goes in the same brain bucket, bc it feels like it is as much an excuse to collage and make felt puppets as it is to release a new single once every few months. now i am projecting bc i do not know this lady or her process, but i would like more people to be able to make art where i the art enjoyer get a little thing every once in a while, without the artist feeling the crushing need to be a professional artist hitting it big in order to make the art and any sort of living also.

-

reading The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

i had to think really fucking hard about if i wanted to talk about this book, bc like a lot of older scifi it critiques the problems of its time but is also very much a product of its time. and i then i remembered that i'm going to do what i want forever until i die :) and then i didn't really have time to even discuss this book much at all :)

let's yoink the description straight off wiki

The Man in the High Castle (1962), by Philip K. Dick, is an alternative history novel wherein the Axis Powers won World War II. The story occurs in 1962, fifteen years after the end of the war in 1947, and depicts the political intrigues between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany as they rule the partitioned United States. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a novel-within-the-novel which is an alternative history of the war in which the Allies defeat the Axis.

i do enjoy how scifi, especially older scifi, often refuses to resolve neatly or at all. this one left me unsettled. this is not a bad thing! it is unsettled in a way that is un-fan-ficcable. it is unsettled in a way that even though Philip K. Dick planned a sequel, he couldn't bring himself to write one bc the research for this book was so depressing. i do think i gotta let this one percolate in the back of my brain a bit, bc i don't have any useful thoughts aside from "wow yeah this series of events is totally plausible and plays out in a very 'yup i can see that happening' way". this entry is more setting down a marker to myself that i can in fact read full length books. maybe even do it again

how did i find it: this entry came about through a perfect confluence of events: i read this all in one sitting (rare) after seeing it in a thrift store earlier that day (also rare) and thinking "this probably isn't a book i'll reread, does my library have it" (near-miraculous).

-

watching Ōtomo Katsuhiro, director of Akira, has done three...whatever the animated version of a book of short stories is. is it just an anthology also??? anyway i watched Memories (1995) back in july, adored it, half the soundtrack is on my regular roulette wheel of data entry music, and i finally looped back around and watched the other three anthologies he was part of this week.

didn't like them as much! it is eleven forty three pm as i write this so i will not be going into great detail. overall impressions only.

robot carnival (1987) i did not care for very much at all. i think it is the weakest overall of the four both in animation and in story. it did give me this baller screenshot.

neo tokyo (1987) absolutely off the fucking chain with animation flexes. stories overall were not as strong as memories (i am going to be thinking about the first short in memories until i die probably). i have never seen such a perfectly animated cat that nobody seems to have really giffed? unrelated in a different short, i have never seen fire animated like that and now all other animated fire looks wrong.

short peace (2013) i liked much more both on strength of animation and strength of storytelling. "possessions", wherein a wandering samurai takes shelter from a storm in a shrine to...discarded objects? charmed me the most.

-

playing Card Cowboy by a large assortment of people and published by Luckshot. available PWYW on itch and it's like three american bucks on steam. you're out seeking "Revenge against the Gunman who killed your dad, wooed your mom, and kicked your dog" in a procgen fashion gathering cards board-game-style to progress along a web of little location options. and the little opening animatic has the best royalty-free morricone i've ever heard

this is a very polished game with all the quality of life features and smooth art one expects from a card game. it wants to be a phone game really badly.

this is not a moral judgement or a dig at how fun it is, bc it's very fun, but the whole time i played it i thought about how much fun it would be to play on my phone.

at one point i had three bandits, a wife, a baby, a baby horse (the game did not call it a foal don't @ me), and a gold lasso. the next turn i got Blood Money from sending the foal off to compete in the rodeo.

the below is how i got a baby

the below is how i lost the baby

this game is very easy to tell stories about like "oh yeah did you get the blood money from sending the foal off to the rodeo???" which is always super fucking helpful in both game discovery and selling the damn thing. extremely streamable bc it is procgen. i hope it sells a billion copies.

-

making having a fancy bathroom makes me feel like a rich bitch so i got a new shower head. the shower head of course did not fix the abysmal water pressure in this house but it does have an additional detachable head so possibly i will actually clean my bathtub more often. got to use a big fuckoff pipe wrench to take the old showerhead off which was fun. other than recaulking the little escutcheon to the shower wall (annoying) this was a fairly quick and painless process. suspicious. shower head here except i did not spend seventy five dollars on it, that’s ludicrous, i found a new in box one on eBay for thirty bucks.

in other news, acquired the Perfect double breasted trench coat in the Perfect length, it’s got the belt, the wool lining is intact, it’s in decent shape except for the horrible stain on the front. so it’s at the dry cleaners to see if anything happens. the armscyes are just a hair too tight for me in a thin tshirt to lift my arms over shoulder height without looking stupid as fuck so i may find a tailor if i ever want to wear it with a sweater or something. i cannot stress enough how much it is the perfect cut and the perfect length for me. i am willing to invest some dollars in a good classic trench coat i will hopefully have for the next twenty years.

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem

[theliteraryluggage]

The Magician, Justice, and Seven of Cups for the author tarot asks please!

Ohhh thank you!!

01. THE MAGICIAN: SPARK OF MAGIC (What inspired you to write your novel?) 

I'm going to brazenly interpret novel in this case to mean my current longfic Vox Populi because... I do have a novel WIP and I could talk about that, but I'm not currently actively working on it so it's not on my mind. And Vox Populi will be easily novel length.

SO

I am thrilled to be able to say I was inspired to write Vox Populi mostly by spite. I saw and started reading a fic that had a very interesting sounding premise, but it was centred on a different character than my blorbo who I most like reading about (i.e. Ed). And obviously there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not what interests me right now. And then the fic made some choices for Ed's character and role in the story that I couldn't agree with so that made me a bit bitter 😂 I stopped reading, but it wouldn't get out of my mind, so I decided to write a fic with a similar premise but with Ed as the central character.

The idea has since morphed and grown and would not, I think, be still recognisable as a version of the fic in question, but that's how the initial idea was born.

As I was trying to work out the plot, I thought of a few questions that I think are very interesting but I have never seen adressed in Fullmetal Alchemist fic before, so I decided to adress them myself, and the combination of those three questions essentially brought the story together.

11. JUSTICE: TRUTH (What is the 'truth' of your novel i.e the prevalent themes or overarching motifs?) 

It absolutely tickles me to be able to apply this particular question to an FMA fic. Very fitting!

This is actually something I recently wrote down when I went through a questionnaire to try and help me bring my plot together. Here's the major themes in Vox Populi:

What makes a person "good"? How do our actions and intentions influence how "good" of a person we are?

Is there such a thing as an inherently immoral act? Is there such a thing as sins?

Is it possible to fight for a good cause without being cruel in the process? Can change be brought about without violence? Does the cause justify the means?

How do you weigh the lives of those important to you against the lives of many?

The physicality of sin--Can sin be something tangible? What marks does it leave on our bodies and lives?

28. SEVEN OF CUPS: OVERWHELMED BY CHOICE (How do you decide which story idea to pursue? How many do you have?)

Unless I am writing for a specific event or open call, I don't think I really decide. It's just gonna stick with me.

When I first have a story idea I write it down in the broadest terms. For some ideas that's more or less it--I never really touch them again or perhaps read them again every once in a while and think ah yeah I should do something with that sometime.

For other ideas, they will keep coming back to me. I will keep opening that note and adding bits and pieces as I think of them. I will lie in bed at night and my mind will automatically drift into that story. I will listen to music and recognise themes and feelings of that story everywhere. That's how I know it's the story I have to be working on right now.

As for how many I have... I suspect not as many as a lot of other writers do. Where original fiction is concerned, good ideas are actually a very rare thing for me. If I ever do finish my novel, I don't really have any other original ideas in the drawer right now to pull out and dust off.

It's a bit easier for fanfiction, because I will have ideas inspired by canon itself--I want to look at this part more closely, what if this was different, what if I put those character in this situation. But even then I wouldn't say I have an abundance of ideas.

For FMA, in addition to the two WIPs I'm actively writing right now (Vox Populi and Eldritch Elrics) I have only three ideas written down that I want to explore in the future. A few more are probably hiding in my inspo tag here on tumblr, but yeah.

Thank you so much for these questions! I hope I didn't ramble too much 💜

Send me some Author Tarot Questions?

#ask #answered #nihi writes stuff #aliteraryprincess #ask game #vox populi #fma

[dramionediscussion]

Hey, so I'm the original anon that started the whole 'novel wordcount debate' (sorry about that 💀💀💀).

First, I'd like to say that I didn't know you were using the Hawthorne and Vine website, so that on it's own was enough of an explanation to me, thank you for answering.

But now that the debate has started, I think I should just clarify my point of view and what made me write that ask in the first place: I've seen a lot of people in ff discourse claiming that 50k words are 'short fics' or 'novellas' and they only ever care about reading longer fics. And it's just not true, going by the broader definition of what a novel is. And when I saw that post on dramioneasks, I guess I just felt the need to point that out. I never meant to be rude.

As an author myself, I know how incredibly hard it can be to write a story (and it's a fact that not all readers are aware of). On a good day, I can write 2-3k words at most and on bad days, I don't write anything at all. So to me, reaching a wordcount of 50k is quite an achievemnt and it makes me proud to be able to write a novel! It's a very nice feeling.

But then, I go on the internet and I see that people think 50k words aren't considered a novel and I guess I just feel disappointed with myself, I guess. (Which I know it's silly, but that's just how my brain works).

And maybe I missed something, but I ever only see you guys updating the 'novel lenght' tag with those 200k words fic. There isn't a separate tag nor a masterlist for the 50-100k (as far as I know, the tags have been acting up as of late, so forgive me if you do have a masterlist for those). And I don't know about other people, but I always bookmark those masterlists on my computer, so the chances of someone picking up a fic to read from your blog is greater when they are in masterlists (at least from what I understand)

This is what I meant when I said it was 'unfair' for the rest of the authors that don't write fics as longas 200k.

But I do know that you post lots of fics everyday and I love the work that you do. I didn't mean to sound as if I was trying to change the way you do things.

So yeah. Sorry for sparking up that debate. I hope I cleared my point of view up.

Hi.

I get it. Seeing the post unintentionally added on to your frustration.

We do have tags for other types of fics. Oneshots, T rated, short chapters, etc.

The thing is, some dramioneasks followers asked for fics of that length. They asked for longer fics. Someone specified "novel length 200k fics". That's what they called it, that's what H&V called it. So after a few asks, I made a post that I can send people to when they ask again.

Fics of that length are not common and we continued to get asked about those types, so I continued making posts.

I didn't mean to discriminate against authors who don't write fics of that length. We never had anyone say that before. That wasn't my intention.

I was just giving our followers what they want. They asked multiple times, I made a general masterlist type post for them. No one asked for 50k word fics. And if they do, it would be a bit impossible to make lists for it since 50k - 100k is standard lengths for most fics.

I feel like there was just one big miscommunication between us.

- Lisa

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Goes All Ham: Why Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 is Bad

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. Here we go.

Yeah. It's real Salty Fanboy Hours, except I'm a zoomer born-and-bred, too young to have known either Bubblegum Crisis 2032 or its hard reboot 2040 during their respective points of anime-culture relevancy. So I hope I don't come off as entitled-sounding as those dudes I described in that kotaku article's comments in an older post, the kind who refused to let Samusina Von Metroiddereich have a personality of any sort besides 'stoic' and presumably 'sigma female'.

But I've got a gripe, you see, a real stone-cold gripe. For MAL still has a great many positive written reviews of 2040, most surface level cheers for 'girls being cool' as though 2040 invented that in anime, and the other suggesting that 2040 has more character development and nuanced plot than 2032 (which is half-right. I'll get to that). And though no one I know well, physically or digitally, seems to labor under the conception that 2040 is worth a rewatch or whatever, I think it's time I conjure my bile into a ball and Linda Blair it out on this here keyboard, and in so doing settle what exactly it is that makes Crisis 2040 an anime I truly despise.

Button your butthole, bucko. We're about to go deep.

I should probably say right off the bat that I don't like Crisis 2040 solely because it is different than Crisis 2032, that I think Crisis should be this way and 2040 is that way and therefore it is bad. It would be so easy to pin such reasoning down on one being super 80's cyberpunk and the other being super 90's cyberpunk and then it just being a matter of preference which kind of cyber-nostalgia you prefer or whatever.

(And, well, I think a great deal of 80's cyberpunk has aged better than the stuff from the decade following it. If Blade Runner inaugurated the genre and defined a good chunk of its look in the 80's, the bland-ass hero's-journey grind of The Matrix was the culmination of 90's-era cyberfuturism trying so earnestly for the mega-mainstream that I think it just kind of buried the genre in its own way, a genre that's now unable to be revived without occasionally valid criticisms that the genre is itself now retrofuturistic and too obsessed with its own legacy, unable to find again what made the genre connect to the concerns of the future so well. New novels push boundaries, try to do things similar to cyberpunk while being more contemporary, but that's no guarantee they're good.)

But I can recognize that Crisis 2040 is trying to do something different with the core concepts of Crisis, modernize them, see them through to a completed story. Much praise is heaped on 2040 simply because it ends where 2032 and Crash do not. Only - it fails to do, at the broadest level, what it is trying to do. If it is modernity, I would like something a decade older, thanks. Shit, what it's trying to do, be a Highbrow Sexually Troubled Mecha Show just like Evangelion, is something that feels like it's aged poorer than the Girls-With-Guns-Make-Things-Go-Boom ethos of 2032's OVA-era sensibility. Sekaikei, I’m told it’s called in Japan.

Look - just - let me split my criticism into three big chunks. One for production quality, one for characters, one for the plot these characters inhabit:

1. BAD PRODUCTION QUALITY

- ANIMATION QUALITY: POOR

Oh my god. Jesus dick. You can tell this was made on a budget, because AIC has always been terrible at making full-length TV shows - even in the 90's, at the top of their game, their strength was OVAs like Tenchi or El-Hazard. Not - this.

Like, there's a scene I think as early as the end of episode 2 and start of episode 3 where it's a sort of cybernetically-enhanced flashback, Linna moving in Priss's place. Priss fights a Boomer, and backflips like eight times in a cheap-looking loop where we only see her bottom half as she spins around. It's just inexcusably bad.

Still shots with maybe some moving tentacles (more on the Boomers later) saturate this anime. Moving shots are single ones, simple grab-n'-go kind of shots, or they just lose a background as the fight happens. We are a long, long way from the excellently paced and placed Razordoll fight from OVA 2, and goddammit I wish we at least had competent 'bareskin' animations, where people actually moved around a bit more, like, oh, the steak dinner from OVA 4. Or at least, uh, more of them than the few we have.

Why would you watch an inferior copy of an original, guys? Because the plot's more complete? Somehow? People like 2040, but oftentimes they like it for things that 2032 did better, the robot fights and the kick-ass girls and things like that. And when pressed as to why 2040 is better, it's something to do with the plot. Well, fair enough. You sure as hell didn't come here for production quality.

- MEGATOKYO: STERILE

I think this was by design - a utopian, if relentlessly dull, city on the verge of destruction. Easy on the budget, too. Only the entire city looks dead on arrival. That sort of 90’s TNG-looking design. It’s not as bad as Crash, but it’s getting there.

Okay, so only the first 4 OVA's really kept the idea of Megatokyo as a cyberpunk city filled with grit and grime, and design focus gradually shifted to something brighter and more liveable, especially OVA 8 - but was that just because of perspective? Focus on Nene, and the city becomes nicer. Or - no. OVA 5 looks just a little less gritter than before, but it's still half-ruined, like those old vending machines Priss and Sylvie just find along the coast. But that's kind of a Priss episode, so... Where was I going with this? Oh, right.

Shots are reused constantly, like the one which shows the split from the Quake, how the city is split in two by height (Or we're just looking at a really big part of the Fault? Admittedly the OVAs did this too, but they didn't reuse their shots so many times that it feels just kind of annoying.)

- HARDSUIT DESIGNS: SIMILARLY UNINSPIRED

I could talk about blocky, ugly cars, or fairly dull-looking ADP mecha like the K-suit redux and the aerodyne copters they have to replace the FireBees from OVA 1. But that’s fine, the ADP’s hardware was designed mostly to be blown up. It’s the hardsuits, man.

Not just how they function in combat - that’s not one, but two separate gripes. But, it's like... Look. For the first half of the series, the Sabers use what are mostly minor recolorings of the second-generation hardsuits from OVA 8, similar more in shape and color than anything else. They do seem a bit less detailed, but that's the low budget rearing its head again. It's fine, really, because the OVA 8 designs are probably the best realization of hardsuit design, because they throw out the blockiness of the first-gen while still keeping the general body shapes we're used to. These ones don't look great, the colors seem either more severe (Priss) or more bland (Linna, Sylia), and their feet use that stupid little sound effect from Crash!, and they still move in high heels (this is a more feminist anime how?). But it's all - passably good-looking.

And then comes their second generation, made to be even lower-poly for the budget, and made to be even less interesting in terms of tech. The continuous thread through the Boomers and the hardsuits is bullshit liquid-metal morphin' powers, not even nanotech per se, just 'voodoo organic metal' or something (they call the Boomers Voomers here, I guess). Because, again, morphin' metal a la Terminator 2 looks cleaner, is easier to animate, then the grotesque fusion powers of even OVA 1.

So the hardsuits are all clean lines and joints, no real indication of them being more than a drawing, no sense that they're machines. And what does this bring us, anyway? Well, their weapons are the same, so... oh, right, the fucking battery problem is solved. Whoop-de-doo. More on that idiotic plot device later. Also, they don't get them for six or seven episodes after their first-gen suits are destroyed, which strikes me as missing the point of what BGC is about. Again.

- BOOMERS: SOMEHOW EVEN WORSE

One of the things I really like about 2032's Boomers, especially the 55C, is how they're neither machine nor monster. The 55C and other quasi-covert ops Boomers burst out of a fairly convincing human disguise, skin and flimsy flesh flexing, boiling, then bursting away not to reveal a Terminator-ish skeleton, but something with interlocking armor, bulging synthetic muscles, dead red fisheyes, and a snarling, aggressive look to them that just makes em' look ferocious on every level. They're the Boomer we see the most of in the mainline series, and it's good because they look at once like machinery - albeit very advanced, very organic machinery - and yet still demonic and monstrous and unrelentingly nasty. Same with other truly non-human Boomers: the 12B looks more crustacean-ish, but somehow the chunkiness of its design and its heavy-looking armor plating still convey the sense that this is something new and futuristic and you do not want to fuck with it. Even Miriam's Saber-hunting custom Labor models might look sillier, a little punier, but they still look distinct and uncanny, the more generic-looking Labor Boomers we see him work with then pimped out to an outrageous degree. Again - they always look just on the boundary between machine and monster.

The 2040 Boomers, though? Well, by default either they're big masses of colored blocks stapled together for maximum ease of animation, with the usual synthesized voices we expect from robots ever since Forbidden Planet, or they're waitresses or secretaries or bosses of human workers with grey-white skin and little tendency to emote except when told to. (Okay, so there is one scene where Mason tells his secretary Boomer, the one he keeps on creepin' with as well as a handy-dandy audience proxy so he can explain his evil plans, to just laugh. For no reason. And she does, at the same pitch, at the same tone, for a good long while until Mason tells her to stop. Some say it's creepy - I didn't really feel anything from it, though. More on its possible thematic significance later.) And then when induced into madness (no really the JP dub uses the word 'mad'), they mutate in the same way the one in 2032's first episode did - into roiling masses of cyber-flesh, sprouting teeth and tongues and other instruments until they end up looking like poorly-designed kaiju, or just straight-up zombies.

You can see what they were going for - turning what look like home appliances with legs into Resident Evil-style monsters. So I would forgive the boring basic designs if their other sides didn't, again, look like rejects from a Godzilla flick. Look, it's a design failure Crash! succumbed to as well, where the civilian-use zombie Boomers eventually mutate in Melt Down into that one Big Chungus which warbles about needing 'moto data yo' in a nigh-incomprehensible filter, and neither is particularly interesting.

It would be tricky, mind you, but I don't see why 2032's hybrid aesthetic couldn't be extended to the labor Boomers we almost never see in that series. The human-facing ones, the 'service industry' ones in other words? Uncanny valley: Eyes too big and fishlike, voice warbling up and down off-tempo the way real-life text-to-speech does, seemingly always reading from a script. The rest of them? Model them off of animals, give them the shape of things we know then plaster the elements of things we don't like on them. Fahrenheit 451's Mechanical Hound is a robot dog with the head of a mosquito, a massive steel injector needle its killing implement. That's a good example of how a Boomer could seem familiar, and yet designed as a machine to not ever try to look natural to us.

But that would be expensive, and 2040 has something of an aversion to budget, doesn't it?

- SOUNDTRACK: WORST TECHNO EVER

I have said to friends that one of the things that annoyed me greatly about The Matrix once I finally got around to watching it was its lack of kitschy late 90's techno beatz, the kind of thing supposedly in line with the anime and other cyber-y pop culture it was cribbing from. Seriously, the whole thing sounds so goddamn generically orchestral, and it really does give away the fact that The Matrix is just generic Star Wars-y action-romance with black and green smeared on top.

So let it be said that I don't have a problem with much of 2040's sound track sounding somewhat of its time. Yoko Kanno working on Stand Alone Complex had techno-y bits in her soundtrack and I would be hard-pressed to call that bad. But Crisis 2040 ain't got the stuff to succeed. It doesn't just use the same few bits of music over and over again for vaguely similar dramatic beats, it uses them in a way that brings nothing to the show itself. It doesn't enhance moments of tension, but even the first time the techno feels out of place, too slow for the drama it's trying to create. It just kind of... throbs and beeps and bleats and doesn't do much.

The rock is even more grating, somehow, because it's so goddamn slow. Okay, maybe not slow, maybe just lacking in flair. Mad Machine was slow, but it had a good beat, a drum-crashing march, a mechanical rock-grind that still had room for an epic guitar solo right at the last part of the song. You can hear tones of the kind of rock 2040 was cribbing from in Cowboy Bebop and FLCL to an extent, they're all drawing from roughly the same well, more post-punk than the Meatloaf-y arena rock 2032 cribs from. So why doesn't it work here? Probably because, like the action-techno, it feels like it's applied everywhere, all the time, with little emotional flair for what's going on. It is in perfect sync with a great deal of scenes where nothing is happening.

- PLAINCLOTHES CHARACTER DESIGNS: KINDA MEDIOCRE

Really, what gives away how little effort was put into this series is that a) Sylia's new design is a straight lift from Ifurita of El-Hazard, and b) Linna's new design is a lift of sorts from Afura Mann of the same series, except somehow even more dull. Linna in 2032 might have not had a whole lot going for her as a character beyond being the relatively normal one, but she still had a sort of athletic yuppie flair to her design and dress. Linna is an office lady, now, and not a very exciting one at that. But we'll get to that later.

One article from a site called The Anime Feminist insisted that because Priss didn't wear her lewder stage outfit, instead opening with Linna chasing after Priss for the sandwich thing, that the show was more feminist. (It also misread pretty rote yuri-baiting as genuine poggers lesbian character development, but that's to be expected.) But if Priss wearing her street clothes is good, why are the midriff-baring second-gen hardsuits an improvement?

It's weird, too, because no one would accuse AIC of dull character designs, except maybe in similarly cyberpunk-y anime Armitage III - well, okay, the titular android girl has a fairly fanservicey outfit there, but think of how the designs in El-Hazard or Tenchi have just enough flair to them without being fanservicey. It ties, I think, back into this sense that 2040 had to be dark and gritty and realistic and exactly like Eva (which doesn't have dull designs, so...). That all the flair the 80's version possessed had to be edited out to be... something.

Or maybe it was just they thought using Armitage III's character designer was a good idea? Hey, they got Chiaki Konaka to write both, why not just super-commit? Only, Armitage is its own sort of cyberpunk (more pretentious mid-90's-y stuff, but it does try, sometimes, to do interesting things) and it is not BGC's type of cyberpunk.

So you've got both budget too low to work with even interesting character designs, and artists who think that reskinning a very different anime as BGC will somehow work. That's not good.

Oh. But it gets worse.

2. ACTUAL CHARACTERIZATION (THEY DID EM' DIRTY FOLKS)

-PRISS ASAGIRI, THE STRONG SILENT TYPE

One of the great shames of 90's BGC fandom, I think, should be how people thought of Priss. So many wrote her off as a perpetual rageaholic stupefied by the cleverness of their cool new Self Insert (Twisted Path), or openly just said they hate her or that she's a bitch. It's... kind of disgusting. It might not be helped by how she behaves in OVAs 2 and 3, getting in tangles with Boomers way stronger than her. You know what I'm talking about - it makes her look kind of dumb.

Except - I don't think Priss is dumb, per se. She's the one who single-handedly figures out what's going on with the Gryphon in OVA 4, right? Her rage rises up for OVA 6, but wouldn't yours if you had to gun down your best friend / potential waifu to stop a bomb going off? She might barge into things really fast, but I never felt like she was characterized as dumb (except maybe in Crash?)

Hang on, let's get back on track here. 2040 Priss ain't dumb, but she strikes me as empty. Okay, she's supposed to be the brooding, silent type, here. I don't really like that she is that, now, because, again, it sucks a lot of the fun out of her character. Priss, here, doesn't have half the emotional range of 2032 Priss, and I don't even think that's the voice actress's fault. This is Yuu Asakawa we're talking about, here, best known for being Medusa in Fate, a real pro compared to Kinuko Oomori.

Then again, Yuu does do more monotone characters most of the time... Fuck, I'm back off topic.

Look, you wanna know what Priss's secret is? Why she hates the ADP in this timeline? It's not some dead boyfriend, it's not about the ADP being a bunch of assholes like they were in Files. No, it's that when she was a kid her residence was blown up and they destroyed her mega-hot mixtape.

That's the kind of characterization we're dealing with. It's not like Priss gets to make attachments besides one with Leon (she finally tsundere-blushes and kisses him after he saves her from small Boomer clown dolls I am not making this up), it's not like there's a sense of camraderie with the Sabers. Priss is just... Priss. She's just there.

-SYLIA STINGRAY, VICTORIAN-GRADE HYSTERIC

Jesus Christ. They did my girl dirty.

Look, I think of 2032's Sylia Stingray as grade-A waifu material, and that may cloud my judgement, but this is the internet, where hurricane-grade clouds over judgement is the perpetual logic-weather forecast. And now that I've beaten that metaphor into the dirt, let me explain why I simp Miss Stingray unapologetically: She is 100% leader material.

The other Sabers in 2032 are good at what they do individually, but Sylia's very good at being personable, keeping the girls all together and ready to face whatever crazy cyber-bullshit the Sabers are fighting that week. She's sleek and sexy and stylish, sure, but she's capable of stabbing Mason in the throat without making a big deal of it, capable of keeping what I assume is an intelligence network that expands well beyond Fargo fed and loyal, capable of designing those hardsuits herself to emphasize good tactics against tougher, bigger opponents like Boomers. Fanfic makes her a little stoic and unemotional, but listen to the series and there are so many times when Yoshiko Sakakibara, truly a pro voice actress in whatever she does, matches the wry little smile playing across her character's lips with a smile in the voice. For all that she is managing humanity's last hope against a corporation hellbent on world domination, she still manages to have joy in her life. (I also like the headcanon that she's a huge sentai geek, which is how you get her claiming her aim is 'to protect peace and justice and rid the world of evil' in OVA 1 with no detectable sarcasm.)

2040 Sylia is... Fuck. Jesus. Kind of pathetic. They tried to give her flaws, insecurities, instabilities - they basically made the fan theory about her enhanced brain from Daddy Stingray canon - and in the process made her unable to function. They went, as much late 90's melodrama which assumes overwrought pain equals character development, way too far.

Like, just the most basic shit - we don't see her in action, on the field, at all. 2032 Sylia was good at fighting alongside her comrades - proved that she was just as invested in fighting GENOM as they were by hacking Boomers to bits with arm swords, blasting them with laser guns, taking hits but still going. 2040 Sylia doesn't show up until episode 7 or so to bail the other Sabers out. Buuuuut she can't do it again! Because she's too old for the hardsuits to synch with her! So we've basically taken one member out of the fight on-and-off - why, exactly? Because she's a Christmas Cake? What is the point of this? She does come back for later fights, but can't go to face down her doppelganger in what would ideally be a satisfying conclusion to her character arc?

She's a bad team leader, too, hysterically angry (I swear she breaks a shotglass while getting a debriefing from some contact of hers like three episodes in a row), terrible at communicating with her team - or at least making it way too obvious that she hides stuff. And when she tries to be friendly it always comes off as kind of perv-y. Perhaps she is a lipstick lesbian - supposedly her reason for only employing women in the Sabers is that she, as a fashion designer by day, 'only understands women's bodies' - but the way she keeps on trying to get Priss and civilians to wear fairly racy fashion, it all feels like she's leaning too close to the Carmilla stereotype of lesbians, elegant and fashionable and all too willing to suck little girls dry.

Also! She's terrible at threat management. She doesn't realize her contact in GENOM is on Mason's payroll. She doesn't realize Mason is using her to trace her doppelganger Galatea (more on that later!). She can't get Mackie to stay away from the dormant Galatea long enough to kill the cyber-messiah like she intends to. She doesn't even go to space in the finale to fight her own doppelganger, denied of a proper climactic character arc because her having fits of weakness as Galatea builds power becomes a consistent plot point. And, uh... she isn't even the one who designs and builds and maintains the hardsuits. Her daddy-complex lover Nigel is.

And 2032 Sylia kept Fargo, the one dude we ever see in her life, at arm's length, and she was able to do Mason in with little fuss the first time, more difficulty the second time, and just dissed him, broke free of his mental lock, then wrecked his ass again the third time in Crash. Why can't that be the Sylia here? Why are there no layers to Sylia encasing the scared, neurotic little girl she may very well be even in 2032? Why is there nothing to her here but uniquely feminine weakness, and not feminine strength?

-LINNA YAMAZAKI, WHO EXISTS

So one of the things 2040 lovers advocate as a quality of the show that makes it better than 2032 is that we open with Linna as this normal office lady who gets sucked up into the Knight Sabers after getting her lunch knocked over by Priss on her bike. Yes, Linna chases after Priss and it's kind of badass, and so she's inducted into the Sabers... over the course of three episodes. This show is like that a lot.

The thing is I'm not entirely sure why we needed to see the induction phase for only one character. Yes, yes, normal-joe-discovers-a-fantastic world, but 2032 opened very differently. It opened loud and proud and explained itself visually, in a burst of unadultered Konya Wa Hurricane, and then the Knight Sabers show up, and it's in medias res but who cares? Crisis OVA 1 gets us in the world. It gets us in the mood. A gradual explanation of what is going on in terms of GENOM and Boomers and all that generally wasn't super needed.

Worse still is that because Linna is now the normal one who's just, you know, 'strong' because of a decent character moment or two, she's got even less personality than 2032's Linna, who at least had some moments where she was money-crazed, or boy-crazed, or whatever. Maybe people didn't like her for those moments, but there was enough foundation to build some good fanfics about her (I direct you to my Dance of Armor review to see what I'm talking about). Linna here... well, I'll just say that most 2040-inspired fanfics channel her more as Priss's lesbian buddy and leave it at that.

Christ, she barely gets to be the protagonist for like the first ten episodes or so, and then it's Priss and Sylia's game. It's not like I mind those two in 2032 (I mind them here), but if Linna was supposed to be our anchor in the Sabers' world then she can't even do that.

-NENE ROMANOVA, MARGINALLY LESS USELESS

Nene gets more screentime here. She's also arguably less moe. Fine. She's still cutesy as hell. Okay. I don't like her character design half as much, but it is a design which requires less animation work be done - her hair's less complex and all. Again, god forbid we spend more money on this show, eh? Yeah, it's hard to get a read on her. She's got a thing for Mackey, but it's never really paid off beyond a 'just because he's a Boomer doesn't mean he's not a person' shtick.

She's not exactly more useful in combat, though. The one time when a plan to take down a Boomer hinged on her, she was literally ripping wires out of a power box to rewire the Boomers power source to starve it out. (Electrical power, abstract energy fields, very un cyberpunk-y plot devices, these are all a recurring element in this show and I despise it.) Which isn't just kind of a dull way to hack, but she takes a really long time to do it, too, and even lifts her hardsuit visor to do it (that's an annoyance I have with the series in general - don't lift your visor unless you absolutely have to, girls - so we'll let that slide) That dartgun thing she has, supposedly a 'railgun' - it doesn't do jack shit except when popping off a weakpoint on a non-Boomer monster. But that's a problem a lot of the other Sabers have, too. More on that later.

-MACKEY, PLOT HINDRANCE

Mackie with an -ie sounds better. Fight me.

Anyway, yeah, the dub has him voiced by Spike Spencer, and that's all you really need to know, isn't it? Mackie in 2032 was kind of a non-presence except when he was lusting after his sister. He helped around, built the highway star, was just kind of there. Whatever plans there were to make him more of a POV character for the male audience fell by the wayside probably even before OVA 1's pre-production.

So Mackey here is... uh. He walks in on the girls changing and there's a Tenchi Muyo-esque 'it's not what it looks like I swear' moment with Nene? In, like, the first six episodes or so? Oh. So... they didn't change jack shit. When they probably should have.

Well, they kind of did. Spoiler alert: Mackey is actually a Boomer prototype derived, as all Boomers are, from Sylia. As such, he's vulnerable to the Big Bad Galatea's mental influence, who is the same sort of thing. It's he who stumbles into Galatea's chambers just as Sylia's about to kill her loli doppelganger off before she awakens; it's he who is constantly mentally manipulated to hinder the Sabers; it's he who sacrifices himself to save the Sabers from... nanomachine walls? in episode 23 (I wish I was making that up)... and then it's his 'death' which so traumatizes Sylia that she fails to kill Galatea when she uses his voice, and then basically bows out of the show for the last few episodes because she's so fucked up.

In other words... he's a plot contrivance to make things worse that Nene just happens to have feelings for, for reasons unclear to me; in classic Tenchi styling the boy has about as much personality as a dishwashing rag. So without Mackie the plot doesn't really happen, and without any redeeming qualities to justify him holding up the Sabers so much, I'll now forever write him off as an annoyance. Sorry. Not sorry.

-NIGEL, HAREM PROTAGONIST

OVA 4 gave us Dr. Raven, who was, at most, a plot point of a character, a grouchy-ass Einstein-lookin' mechanic-y boy who built the Motoslaves and not much else. Raven's Garage, when we see it again in OVA 8, has no Raven present, just the Sabers doing training. So 2032's staff decided the character wasn't really an essential element of the series. 2040, on the other hand, decided he was, and turned him into Nigel Kirkland.

Priss seems to be carrying a torch for Nigel. Sylia fucks him on the regular, because she can't get over her father-figure issues. He's pretty much the one who designs the hardsuits, because he worked with Sylia's father on the Boomers, and the hardsuits are essentially Boomers with no brains. Cool, eh? It's almost like he's more important that Sylia when it comes to getting shit done.

Maybe it's not his fault, you know. He's just an expression of how dearly they did Sylia dirty, how they couldn't imagine a woman being as capable as Sylia without overloading her with mental problems that slip out every episode. They needed this incarnation of daddy issues with no personality of his own to be the new boss.

It's like... People gave Other M so much shit for undermining Samus, why is this allowed to pass? Why did those dinguses at Anime Feminist seriously think that in the end he's unimportant, and that's somehow a girl empowerment thing? I... don't know. I don't fucking understand the positive reviews on MAL, either, since most of them are gibberish, so there we are.

-LEON, GROWLCOP

Is it weird that for all he's meant to be a side character in 2032, I like Leon? He's voiced by Ataru Moroboshi, for godsakes, so there's this internal dynamic where he's clearly thinks of himself as the Cool Cop, a Loose Cannon Who Doesn't Play By The Rules - and certainly he has those moments, he has his fights with the chief just like a Real 80's Cop Movie - but he's also a massive goofball. Even if he's the equivalent of Comissioner Gordon to Priss's Batman, unable to totally crack a case himself, he plays the part with aplomb. I keep thinking of the scene where Lisa's trying to spy on Nene, Leon catches her, she lies that she wants to play a trick on the pinkette, and then Leon just spidermans along the floor to surprise Nene himself. He's so... earnest.

This Leon, on the other hand, is perhaps a better fit for the Priss of 2040: stout, gruff, constantly shouting around to figure out 'what the hell are the Knight Sabers up to this time? Daley gets off even worse, being the guy who exists solely as a foil to Leon, whereas in the OG series you felt like the two could exchange role of bokke and tsukkomi pretty freely. Here, though... I guess the Leon x Priss thing is a lot clearer? That both develop feelings that the other Isn't So Bad After All?

It still doesn't feel earned, though.

-QUINCY, SENILE CYBER-MANDARIN

You know how Quincy in the original was like eighty but still cut a pretty imposing figure? Okay, we don't see him all that often, but he's always clearly the man in charge. Mason takes orders from him, gets his last-chance warning from him in OVA 3, scares the bejeezus out of him only after he's torched multiple cities and even then he doesn't give a shit 'cause he was a decoy the entire time, learns from that experience and shows up to Reika trying to kill him as a decoy because he's already figured out who was going after McLaren after the first 15 minutes of the episode, and he only bothers to show up not because he's concerned with losing a scientist (Kill him, stick him in a pot and boil him, do whatever, that's literally the line) but because he can't bear to lose a good project - yeah. Stone Cold Killer, this dude.

Aaaaaaaaaand contrast that to 2040 Quincy, who wears this dress and sits on this throne in GENOM Tower like he's some sort of Chinese emperor, but never moves his mouth to speak, is wired up into the chair, and as such can be disposed of the minute Mason decides it's time for him to unplug the old bastard's life support. And his philosophy's all janky, too. He seems to think that Boomers should be loved by humans, wants to capture the Knight Sabers to see why they're so annoyed by the great things he's doing for the world, which - not the vibe I got from Quincy in 2032, who literally called them 'foolish rabble' in OVA 7 in a fairly scenery-chew-y rant. Like, that version of Quincy, he did not give two shits about the welfare of other people.

So Mason is able to work on his own sinister plans independent of Quincy without his boss ever finding out, and when he's no longer useful Mason just unplugs his life support and that's that. Dumbass in life, dumbass in death. Pity that.

-MASON, MIGHTY MASTERMIND AND PROBABLE PEDOPHILE

Shuuichi Ikeda, of Char Aznable fame, played Brian J. Mason in 2032 with not much aplomb. He's got few if any lines and honestly sounds like he doesn't give a shit about his own evil plans, but I'm never sure if that's the fault of the writers or the fault of Ikeda. Certainly VA's who had made their careers at the dawn of the 80's were still able to win me over here in Crisis all the way in 1987. Leon and Sylia, for example. So I think it's more that Mason never had any room in the original OVA trilogy to be anything more than a Slick Evil Corporate Bastard who may or may not have killed Sylia's father. As Largo, with a different voice he's a lot more of a rote megalomaniacal villain, but at least he has some hammy presence.

I wonder if the AIC holdovers who made 2040 decided to have Mason be the main villain for pretty much until like 2/3rds of the way through because they wanted a second chance at making him interesting. Except, well, he isn't, not really. His ultimate plan is to promote the robot apocalypse via Galatea for... what purpose? To watch it, apparently? Just to see the whole thing take place? Galatea straight-up exposits that he was a sickly boy who had his organs cyberized when he was little and is bitter because of that, which is a) a weak-ass revenge-on-humanity motive, and b) just told to us almost as a throwaway line.

For all his planning and plotting, Galatea pretty much gives him what he wants when he's absorbed into GENOM tower to become a human gargoyle, because his organ transplants were Boomers too, he literally put a little bit of her inside himself, it's kinda gross. An MAL review said the show is better because now Mason has a motive, but, uh, no. Just because you have a nonsensical and convoluted motive for a character does not mean that they have somehow now become better than a character with no motive at all. And we keep coming back to this, this assumption that just because 2040 has more of a plot that it must be better, even though that plot is so stupid-people-trying-to-sound smart that it makes the whole show worse.

Someone on reddit noted that, just a few episodes in, the anime felt hornier than 2032 despite all the claims it was more feminist (It really is hornier, especially during the final battle where the Sabers end up Akira-mecha-tentacled in Galatea's clutches, or just because there's a goddamn Mackey-walks-in-on-girls-changing scene in like episode seven), and Mason is... well, kind of a walking embodiment of that. His sexual relationship with his Boomer secretary - his sinister monologues he shares with her (doing this pretentious tracing of Hebrew letters golem-style is the cringiest, 90's-ass-I'm-12-and-this-is-deep thing I've seen in a long-ass while) - the man loves Boomers so much he wants to be mommy-dommied by them. It would be pathetic were it not for the fact that, in raising Galatea (he keeps her in a cutesy little room in GENOM Tower and everything), he largely succeeds, the Sabers don't even slow his plans down. That's what I liked about Mason - he got out of the way real fast, and Largo was infinitely more fun (and so were the villains in the non-Largo, non-Mason episodes). Sylia stabbed him in the throat and that was that, but she doesn't even get that here, does she? Fucking hell.

(Hornier still: Priss, Linna, Nene, all ending up nude in obscure parts of the world, the plot largely unresolved.)

-GALATEA, PLOT DEVICE

So... Galatea. Sotai. The genesis of all Boomers, built off of a neurochip modeled off of Sylia's brain (and I guess daddy Stingray killed his wife to make the chip, too? Why? Who cares? Sylia's mother is the 'Boomers are against God and should not be made' type, and every flashback scene where she shows up just annoys me, because they're trying to make us care about this woman and they can't seem to pull it off). Due to that origin she... has the power to infiltrate inorganic objects through some kind of bullshit energy field that warps them to her will, just like the fusion with the other Boomers. It makes no sense. But then again Mason accesses Galatea's chambers via a hologram bridge. So even the vaguest sense of not just being straight-up science fantasy is chucked out the window by episode fifteen. Or maybe episode one. Fuck.

Anyway, what is Galatea's personality? Well, when she really starts to do stuff for Mason she's cutesy, quiet, but keeps going on about how she wants to play. You know, like every other creepy ghost girl in every other piece of media. So that's hardly interesting. She grows up, exceeds Mason, turns him into a gargoyle, turns into GENOM Tower, and somehow turns that into a space rocket so she can boomerify the entire planet, every inch of mankind's cities turned into her gooey morpho-magic tentacle paradise. She's not a personality, or a person, or anything with an explainable motive so much as she is one of those force-of-nature villains... except the show seems to think she's a bit of both, neglected as a child, wondering why she exists before settling on the reason that she must become God so that humans can be forcibly fused with machine-flesh. Which... eh. Largo was the same sort of thing, but the show takes her Deeply and Philosophically Seriously here, whereas Crash's Largo delivered his lines in so hammy a register you couldn't take his lust to fuse with all Boomerkind very seriously... and 2032 Largo didn't believe a word of his own liberatory rhetoric. So she comes off as a budget Eva villain instead.

So we've seen Galatea before, except not so bullshit fuck-you all-powerful, and not so rote in her execution. Wot a pity.

I feel is as good a time as any to mention that most of the fights in the second cour, where Galatea has woken up, are very... bondage-y for the Sabers. It's a lot of dodging tentacles, getting grabbed by tentacles, screaming each other's names, etc. Towards the end the Sabers also have to contend with their own hardsuits being fused with Boomer goop unless they fight with the strength of their emotions and willpower, further compounding the how-in-god's-name-is-this-feminist factor. It's such a boring way to have fights play out, too, in sharp contrast with awesome heavy-weapon slugfests like the one in OVA 7 where Priss goes toe-to-toe with Reika's spidermech. It feels more demeaning, more grotesque but not in a good way.

3. THE ACTUAL GODDAMN STORY (WEIRDLY PACED, POORLY CLIMAXED, BEAT-TO-BEAT BORING)

-THE OL' WAIT-A-COUR-FOR-THE-PLOT-TO-START CONUNDRUM

Oooh, the MAL reviews say, the plot gets dark in the end, as there's a - zombie-Boomer apocalypse in the ADP HQ? And then all the Boomers eat Megatokyo whole basically? Bitch please. None of this was dark per se. Edgy and melodramatic in presentation? Sure. But they manage to evacuate the entire city offscreen, as they always do, because they can't exactly have the liquid-metal fusion apocalypse occur with people in the city at the same time, that would cost actual money. And it's not like the Sabers even beat the big bad at the end: Sylia doesn't get to go to space (why can't her character arc be resolved, AIC? Why is she always done dirty like this?), they try to fight Galatea, it goes miserably, Galatea decides she's God, becomes God, disappears in a shower of neutrinos, the non-Sylia Sabers drop to earth, Priss sings again, that’s it.

But before we get to any of that we have to deal with Monsters Of The Week. Mad Boomers, controlled by Mason for his own ends, except when they aren't (Why is Sylia so shocked that this is a thing? There's one episode, again, where she drops a shotglass and freaks out about GENOM doing Bad Shit With Boomers as though this is some sort of novelty). Also, the existence of such things is somehow kept a secret from the public? Like, Priss literally says to Leon that people are starting to realize that Boomers can go mad after the first cour.

I could get mad at the fact that they made the fan assumption that Boomers just rampage (which in 2032 is not true) canon. I could. But that's creative liberty. No, what I'm complaining about is that none of this shit advances the plot in any way. Eva kind of gets around this by having equal parts a-plot and b-plot in a given early episode, so we learn a bit about Misato and Ritsuko and the rest bit by bit, and also by having fight scenes that are actually good, and then the plot kicks in the second cour but we don't mind because we're already having fun. (So many eva-alikes don't get that, I think, that things have to move somewhat even while you're in MotW mode.)

2040, on the other hand, does not have interesting fight scenes, so that's right the fuck out, especially since it likes to stretch what could have been a single-episode fight into two (more on that in a bit), and the character development is glacial, at best. Actually, let's just get into that right now..

THIS SHOW COULD HAVE BEEN HALF THE LENGTH IT IS

Anyone who has seen this show knows what I'm talking about. There's so many still shots, so many conversations where information is hinted at but withheld, and so much stretching.

So, so, so many times we're faced with a problem the Sabers could solve in an episode, but don't, because a bunch of other stuff has to happen. Quincy and Mason comment on the action, there's some character scenes that you forget the minute they happen, some forced tension with battery problems or something... every single goddamn time in this first cour, and then even after that, the show refuses to resolve a plot arc in one episode, except for one or two times that are somehow even worse (Priss races after a car Boomer a la Revenge Road and it's the ugliest little shit I've ever seen, that guy). The Sabers fight a Boomer and are cornered by the ADP; they hunt a monster GENOM is also hunting; Linna goes on her first outing and almost gets a Boomer but runs out of power (battery metal). Those all sound like single-episode arcs, but no, there has to be build-up, and de-escalation, and an episode split to up the danger, and all this bloat. That's the right word for it, really, bloat.

-THE FIVE-MINUTE-BATTERY HOEDOWN

Yes, you heard me right. They ripped off the 5-minute battery from Evangelion. Which ripped it off from Ultraman. They understood nothing about why it worked in Eva and copied it for contrived suspense. Okay, so they threw it out once they got rid of the old hardsuits, but were the new ones an improvement in spite of that? Up for debate, folks.

Like, there's literally a bit in the 1996 BGC RPG, the one by RTAL, who knew a new series was coming but (probably) not anything about it, where a possible mission for player characters straight-up has the hook be "While the players break in their new powered armor against a rouge Boomer, they find that their power cells only last about five minutes in real combat. This is bad." And you know damn well why - the Sabers can't afford to have that tight of a time limit to enter and exit a combat zone by whatever means (Does the timer start the minute they launch out of Sylia's mass driver? Does it keep running after they've beat the Boomer and have to go home? How do they go home? I seem to recall them literally yoinking up into the night. Why the hell are their jetpacks so goddamn powerful and everything else is absolutely broke?). It's a design error that the showrunners should have ignored had they given their own show some thought, but they didn't give it some thought. Multiple times.

Evangelion could compensate for this because they're essentially playing Tower Defense with the Angels. Tokyo-3 is a combat arena built to favor the mecha, because all they have to do is ask and a charging umbilical or a skyscraper-sized weapon cache will pop out of the ground. Even if it is a dramatic conceit to make the fights a little more high-stakes, it communicates those additional stakes by cutting away to the pilot's own timer every so often. 2040 does not have the former - which makes the idea of having these suits be what they but having this flaw strike one as a forced contrivance ever more obviously - and it does not convey the latter, diminishing the effectiveness the viewer's ability to figure out what the fuck is going on. You have no way to count when the timer starts or stops, so in the end it just comes down to the timer running out whenever the showrunners feel like it. For example, when Linna goes out on her first hardsuited excursion, she is inches away from overcoming her fear of combat, having a moment of triumph, finally whooping a Boomer's ass even if she has to do it alone (since Nene is still combat useless), and it's good for her - except then she runs out of power, because the writers don't want to give her a moment where she wins, and instead want to drag this subplot out for another episode. But we've been over that already, the impulse to take one episode's worth of content and make two or three episodes instead.

-A POOR CHOICE OF ARMAMENTS, MISS STINGRAY, NOW YOU SHALL DIE

So all the Sabers now have one weapons system per suit in 2040. Nene has a dinky-ass flechette gun that she cribbed from 2032 Priss (where it could do some amount of damage), Priss has the Knuckle Bombers, Linna has those impractical-ass head ribbons, Sylia has arm swords. Three out of four melee weapons - for Boomers that are pretty good at melee themselves because they can do the low-budget morphin' metal-tentacle thing. What the fuck. Shit, a good deal of the time those weapons don't do proper damage without figuring out some gimmicky weakpoint or another.

The Sabers manage to compensate by being able to jump and run with capabilities far beyond the 2032 hardsuits, but even then it feels like the Sabers can never quite gain an edge. There's no tactics, they just get thrashed and then somehow figure out where a given Boomer's 'core' is. Christ, they don't even upgrade once the new hardsuits come into play - all that happens is that the battery thing gets dealt with and that's it. (Also the new suits are even more ‘low-poly’ than the last ones to be easier to animate and whatnot, the truth that they’re actually psychic Boomers aside.)

-THE ROBOZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

So you know how Boomers being like human beings was a theme played around with in Crisis and Crash? And even to a lesser degree in 2040? Well, by episode 16 all that goes out the window, because Galatea is the Boomer God, and all that is cyberflesh has no will but to obey her.

Yeah, so Mason releases Galatea's energy (???) through the GENOM-controlled power grid (the 'Dragon Line' centered around the Tower), which causes all the dead Boomers kept in the warehouses underneath the ADP warehouse to reactivate just as most of the cops have left on a strike. Of course Nene and the chiefs of staff are stuck in the building, with Nene trying to coordinate moving the boys around so they can get to safety, because the Boomers are essentially now a few hundred zombies. Their eyes glow red, they shamble forward, they clutch, they reach, and eventually they fuse with the building. This is what kicks off the Boomer plague eating Megatokyo whole mind you, but still, it's so fucking stupid. Not only have we destroyed any sympathy for Boomers that stuff like the waitress Boomer might have incurred, it's just... rote. Cliche. It was bad in Crash OVA 3, it's worse here: the ADP Tower even becomes a cyber-flesh monstrosity which grows a face just like 'moto data yo'.

I have to ask: Who thought taking anything at all from Crash 3 was a good idea? Because, evidently, someone did.

Did I mention this takes like three episodes to get through, Nene and the officers scrambling all over the building bit-by-bit? It took twenty minutes to resolve the ADP invasion scene in OVA 8, and it felt like all the events in that moved at a nice brisk clip where more and more scrambling against endless hordes is the default here. But we already talked about langorous pacing, let's not repeat ourselves.

-WHAT EVEN IS THIS LAST ACT?

So Megatokyo's been colonized by Boomers. Quincy's dead, Mason's fucking around with Galatea, and it feels like we should be moving the plot somewhere. Only we don't for the most part. But... eh. You know how it is. It's not until like episode 21 that we get to see the new (ugly!) suits in action, and even then their assembly is just fucking weird: a given operator is covered in 'inner metal', basically Boomer goop which looks too much like semen for its own good, and they... focus? On their heart? They must communicate in clear mental language to articulate the metal into a cohesive shape and to... oh fuck it, it doesn't matter, because then the girls are all bondage-d by a giant worm made out of power line (that's another thing that I hate about this show, its tendency to reduce all fights to 'who can dodge the grabby tentacles until the plot decides it's time to kill the beastie'), and so the new suits barely get to do anything interesting and they have to call on Priss's Motoslave to kill it (in what appears to be a callback to OVA 1 where she flies down the thing's throat... only there she shot the inner Boomer to bits so it vomited circ fluid, and here we just get a shot of her punching and then the thing explodes).

We don't actually get to the assault on GENOM Tower until episode 23, and it's grossly unsatisfying, with the Sabers fighting first sticky bondage nanowalls (this show has an obsession with restraining the Sabers so they can't fight, in case you haven't figured that out by now), and then magical zero-gravity fighting. Probably the only place where the show gets interesting, at least visually, is when the Sabers sans Sylia go to space via the skyhook and attempt to cut off Galatea's ability to beam magical boomerifying energy across the planet (it really is magic, I have no other way to describe it). They fail, of course, because this show won't give the Sabers a single success to take home. Galatea gains control, bitching about how annoying mere humans are, and...

-THIS IS WHAT YOU CHUCKLEFUCKS CALL A SATISFYING FINALE?

People say 2040 is better because it ends? Dude, what the fuck. It ends in the worst way possible. OVA 8 was ambiguous but at least was self-confident in a cuter, cheesier tone, ended, seemed to imply that the adventures of the Sabers could very well continue.

But let's look over the ending of Crisis, it's very last minutes: The Sabers except Priss (Not Linna, she's not the protagonist anymore) are incapacitated in space. Galatea has hooked up with the bigass space station, turning it into her body. Priss's hardsuit turns into a tentacle-tastic bondage monster, because that way of putting our heroines in peril hasn't been done already for every fucking episode. But she mentally overpowers the thing, fuses with her Motoslave by accepting it as a Boomer, rides it into the core of Galatea's operation, and Galatea is just like - yeah, okay, I'm done. She stops being a robot apocalypse, bursts into neutrinos that illuminate the world. Priss falls back to earth, Nene and Linna turn their Boomer suits into dolphins (fuck what?), everyone lands safely, but, uh, now what?

Why did Galatea stop? I barely remember. Her motives were the usual 'Boomers are a superior race who have been oppressed' shit, she must transcend normal life, and Priss comes in there, and turns Galatea into God. Because they... fuse? Reproduce? As life surely must... FUCK YOU HIROKI HAYASHI THIS IS JUST THE ENDING MONOLOGUE FROM GHOST IN THE SHELL!

And GITS did it better, too! Because Motoko was looking for meaning in her existence for most of the movie! This is just whatever psychotechnobabble they could come up with! Fuck!

Okay, so, it ends. But can you call that a satisfying ending? The Sabers got their asses kicked multiple times, and failed to really stop the Big Bad, who just sort of gave up and yeeted out of this universe. Mason got what he wanted, Galatea got what he wanted, did the Sabers really do anything except get bondage'd by various ooey-gooey-boomeys? Can you really call this a girl power show if so little proactive action is possible?

Apparently there was a sequel series planned (what would it even be about? You've stopped an Eva-scale apocalypse, where do you go from there?), but I guess AIC wasn't happy with its reception, they moved onto other things, and anyway the other big sponsor ADV Films went belly-up around 2008. So the chances of this happening are slim to none, which is nice, I guess. If more Bubblegum Crisis comes out, I'd rather it aim low and just try to ape the 80's vibe of 2032 than go shoot for the fucking philosophical moon... but then again, I just might get the worst of both worlds, there...

4. HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?

I actually have no idea.

Like, AIC finally secured the rights around 1996 or 1997, and supposedly during preproduction they got the last of their problems out of the way when Toshimichi Suzuki showed up with Yakuza in tow and demanded royalties - and then one of the Yakuza admitted who they worked for, which in Japan is Not Done Among The Criminal Classes, and Suzuki spent the rest of his life hiding out until he died in 2019, the poor bastard. So they had 2 years or so of turnaround time to make this show happen from late 98 to early 99, and they were co-producing it with ADV Films, who were at the time the richest American licensors of anime out there from having licensed Eva. And even if Hiroki Hayashi’s directorial claim to fame from the original BGC was OVA 4, and even if his claim to fame proper was Tenchi Muyo, I don’t think the man lacked talent - El-Hazard, a later creation of his, is quite good, if a bit simplistic and PG-ish. He might not have done most of the episodes here, but still.

But as far as I can figure out most of 2040’s history is much more buried than anything regarding 2032. I ain’t got shit on this one, fam. The ADV cofounder was the executive producer, but he was attached to plenty of things that seem to have turned out okay. Chiaki J. Konaka did the ‘screenplay’, I think he landed the gig after Armitage worked out well for AIC, but he’s hardly bad at what he does - Lain, The Big O, stuff like that. Sadayuki Murai did the ‘script’, okay, that’s weird that sounds like two different dudes in the same role, but his other writing credits aren’t bad either. Shinji Aramaki’s back for mechanical design, but he was on that duty on 2032 as well. Ikeda Shigemi is art director for both, and yet… What happened?

Budget woes I can guess at - the 1997 East Asian Financial Crisis compounded the woes of the Lost Decade I assume, and maybe ADV was stingier with cash than the money-hose from Youmex last time around. But I keep seeing little JVC logos on various ancient advertisements for 2040, and the Victor Company has money to burn. It may not always burn it even on its own anime through JC Staff, but if AIC had not one but two sources of income, surely two halves could make a reasonable enough whole?

I think what probably did happen was ADV said 'we made a gajillion dollars off of Eva, make us another Eva', and they did not understand what made Eva work, and so tried to replicate Eva with a lower budget and a belief in their own infallibility that failed to understand that Crisis was not and really should never be Eva. Plenty of mecha shows in this era tried to be Eva, yes, but does anyone remember RahXephon? At all? God, am I really chalking this bad anime up to Western meddling? I think I might be.

2040 was the beginning of anime getting really, really edgy and pretentious in the aughts before swinging back to flat-out retarded with endless harem light-novel adaptations, and now we've got the isekai boom, and what isn't isekai is either Shonen Jump or mindless rom-coms or mobage tie-ins. The aughts might have produced some good stuff, but after that it's just... ugh. I don't know anymore. Even ufotable has been chained to the shitty-ass mandates of Shonen Jump, because Mugen Train was the biggest anime film ever, and I just - I fucking hated it. I won't deny that the OVA era produced a great many disasterpieces, but here I am and I'm having good clean fun watching the Dominion Tank Police OVA's, and all I can think of is that I want more stuff like this even though I know I'll never get it.

2040 is the epitome of that disappointment in anime - the tail end of an era when girls had guns, mecha were painstakingly designed, and things exploded relentlessly. To see a show I want to be that way, turn out to be another way - it's the saddest thing I ever did see.

#bubblegum crisis #bubblegum crisis tokyo 2040 #bubblegum crisis 2040 #rant #gigascreed

[ask-alphabetboyluvr]

i know you mentioned not being offended, but you seemed pretty offended by the end of it 😂

my question was answered in the first few paras where you mentioned your real life doesn't resonate w what the plot of the book is, so i'm glad my question was answered

as for the rest of it, oof

like i don't remember saying that you shouldn't write something that deviates from my preferences, nor did i say i want the two in otte to have a happy ending and live happily ever after, my question was simply why write something that puts you through emotional hurt bc you know that would make it difficult for you to complete when people could potentially end up wanting more, which again, was answered, idk where you got the 'cookie cutter' ending idea from, because again, i never said anything about that, also bc otte doesn't even have an ending to begin with lmao

i never asked you to not write a fic that doesn't fit my standards nor was it an attempt at that bc i'm an avid reader of angst and would love an angsty ending if there's going to be one at all, all i was wondering about a complete book

half of your reply wasn't even what i was looking for?? it was simply unprovoked and hurt me a little because i try to put forth my question as respectfully as possible nor would i encourage you to stop writing bc i like your fics, i could expect a lil niceness too right? or does that irk you too 😂😭??

the hashtags apart from the first few paras were rude for no reason, especially when i made it clear i wasn't tting to be offensive and it never was my intention

thanks for answering i guess

also, another question, is there a posting schedule for the 'slut war' book? or would it be like bd?

i was annoyed, not offended!! and i've also slept on it so am a lot more chill about it now. you caught me at a bad time and that's on me, so I'm sorry for being a bit defensive with it all. if i'd have waited until this morning to answer it then yeah, you probably would have gotten a different answer.

that being said, tonally, your ask came across a bit rude to me--it questioned my motives in a way that I didn't really get, and made me feel like i was a bit stupid for publishing in the first place. it might just be your typical way of typing, but it's the kinda way i type when I'm fighting with someone lol, so it had my back up!! especially that final little lmao!!

you've also gotta bear in mind that I don't really have much of a presence on tumblr and that the otte was published 9 months ago, when my presence was even smaller. i really didn't/dont have reader expectations. it felt like you were calling me ingenuine and that's a shitty thing to be made to feel like!! especially when I've always been very open/honest with you guys about things!!

the story to me is done. it was never intended to be a fic!! or to have a resolution!! that's what I meant by people wanting a cookie cutter ending--you wanted something different to what was written. the ending is the ending.

i think i always strive to be kind, and I definitely wasn't trying to be unkind--but I'm also not a doormat and I do have feelings too, so even if you didn't intend for it to come across rudely, it kinda did and I responded accordingly.

the last thing i want is to leave a bitter taste in peoples mouths, though, so hopefully we can chalk this up to a misunderstanding/bad timing/me being a little reactive.

as for slut war--yes, it will be like bd!! I'm trying to commit to having the first 5 or 6 chapters ready for upload by the time bd is done so that we can have a steady couple of weeks of updates as we get into the story. it'll be shorter--a little over standard novel length, probably around 140k!

#in the wise words of hannah montana nobody's perfect!! #myself included #ask #otte #slutwar

[etherealbelphie]

Complete (Ft. Mammon and GN! MC)

Warnings: Injury, mentions of broken bones, Mammon’s in love with MC, self depreciating thoughts, MC insults Mammon but only a little, mentions of gambling.

Length: 1.2k words

Genre: Hurt, comfort, angst, fluff

Summary: Mammon falls down the stairs, and MC tends to his wounds. This gives him plenty of time to reflect on his feelings about them.

Alright, two fics in one week! Two Mammon posts back to back, I guess I'm just in the mood to write him right now. I'm pretty sure I've added all the right warnings, but as always, if I missed one, please let me know! This is based off the 'When He Knew He Loved You' concept I've seen circulating. I might turn this into a series, haven't decided yet!

-Ethereal (✿◡‿◡)

Story below, please don't claim as your own!

Mammon isn’t really one for video games, nor is he one to obsess over them like a certain younger brother of his. However, there's one thing that can make him interested in almost anything: You.

You and Levi had recently fallen in love with a visual novel that had just come out, and neither of you would shut up about it. Mammon isn’t the Avatar of Envy, but he couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of you two sharing an interest.

From what he could tell, the pastel dating sim didn’t really seem up his alley. Despite that, you insisted that he would love it. You even named a character you were sure he would like. And if you love it so much, it couldn’t be that terrible, right?

So, with your permission, he had borrowed the DevilSwitch Levi has given you for your birthday so he could check it out. You were more than happy to oblige, hopeful he’d find the game even half as cool as you did.

And he did. More than half, actually. The storyline was engaging and amazing. The characters were cute and relatable, and he did wind up liking the one you said he would, and the hidden lore left him eager to discuss the game with you.

He texted you as soon as he was done.

Mammon: Hey, I’m done playin’ that game ya told me about.

Mammon: I’ll come drop off your console, and maybe we could talk about the game…if ya want.

Mammon:

You:

You: I just got back from Purgatory Hall, I’m at the entrance.

Mammon: Alright! See you soon!

Soon enough, you hear his voice calling you from the top of the stairs.

“The game was so cool!” He exclaims, rushing down the stairs. “Which character was your favorite? Also, you’re totally right, I did really like Y-agh!”

You glance up from your half-finished text, horrified to see Mammon plummeting down the stairs.

He hits the landing with a loud thud and a sickening crunch.

“Are you okay!?” You exclaim, rushing to his crumpled form and dropping to your knees beside him.

He groans in response. Sitting up, he moves to get his hands under him. He feels your console smack the ground. Oh, right.

Oh no.

It got crushed when he fell down the stairs. The plastic shell is broken. Some of the pieces are even missing, revealing the circuit boards and wires of the device. The screen hasn't done any better, with several massive cracks dividing the glass.

He sees you glance at the broken switch momentarily, then back to him.

You look upset.

“Agh, I’m sorry!” he exclaims, frantically pressing the power button. The screen didn’t even light up. “Crap, I didn’t mean to! I’ll buy ya a new switch, I- ugh, your progress is gonna be lost, I’ll help you level up again-“

“I don’t care!” You cut him off sharply, grabbing the console out of his hands. His heart sinks. He just knew it was only a matter of time before you realized he was as useless as the game in your hands. You throw it down carelessly beside you, then shock him as you refocus your attention on the demon on the floor in front of you.

“Dude. Are. You. Okay,” you repeat slowly, grabbing his hands. Unsurprisingly, the broken glass and plastic has left shallow cuts on his palm and fingers.

“Y-yeah, I’m fine, but your switch-“

“Is replaceable,” You interrupt, examining the cuts a little closer. “Come on, let’s go get you cleaned up.

“You’re…really not upset I broke your game?” He asks, feeling stunned as you help him to his feet. “You looked upset.”

“You just fell down the stairs, moron!” You exclaim, bringing him back up the stairs at a much slower pace. “I’m glad it was the game, I thought that was your bone!”

“And…that would’ve been worse?” He confirms, blinking. You glance over to him, finding nothing but genuine confusion on his features. It hurts your heart that it was even a question.

“Of course,” you answer, gently running your fingers over the back of his uninjured hand. “You matter way more than any object.

You bring him to your room and into your bathroom, instructing him to sit on the edge of the tub while you pull out some peroxide and bandages. He lets you clean his injuries, sitting in a shocked silence.

“You matter way more than any object.”

The simple words you’d spoken to him repeat in his mind. You’d said it in such a gentle, genuine tone that he knew there was no way you were lying, and you reinforce that idea with how carefully you're tending to his wounds.

Almost the same way he had tended to yours after the TSL incident.

The difference was, he had used he all the time bandaging you to remind you that he was only doing this for the sake of the exchange program, he was only doing this because Lucifer would punish him if he didn’t, he was only doing this because leaving your injury unattended would make things harder for him in the long run. Telling you all that was much easier than admitting he’d gone soft for a human. You didn’t know him as well as you did now. He wonders—and hopes—you've figured out you were more than a burden to him, even back then.

You, on the other hand, work almost silently, reassuring him when he hissed in discomfort. And it was in that moment, with you kneeling on the floor beside him, his hand in yours, concentration unwavering, that he realizes he felt the same way about you.

You matter way more than any object.

When Beelzebub had teased Mammon about the possibility of you having a crush on him, he had felt like he’d just won the million Grimm jackpot.

No, scratch that. He had felt even better than that.

Now that he was reflecting, he realizes how many nights at the casino, how many games of poker he’s cancelled to make sure you felt safe in the Devildom, or simply to hang out with you.

Once, when you were busy with another of his brothers, he’d gone to the casino and won a decent prize. As the Avatar of Greed, it was no surprise Mammon loves money. Even so, he still didn’t feel as complete as when he was spent time with you.

He would rather spend time with you than win money.

And he loves money.

Like the pieces of a puzzle, it clicks into place.

If he wants you more than he wants money, that must mean he loves you.

“There we go,” you say, tucking the end of the gauze into the wrappings. “All done.”

“T-thanks,” he says, looking over the wrap job. “I…uh, appreciate it.”

You nod, waiting for him to start backtracking like he always does. Instead, he stands up, looking down at the floor.

“Um…did ya wanna watch a movie or somethin’?” He asks you. “It’ll make me feel a little better.”

You nod, smiling. “Of course."

Soon enough, you two are sharing a blanket, a bowl of popcorn, and each other's personal space. This isn't the first time you two had done this, but this time—now that he'd put a name to his emotions, love—it felt different.

With you snuggled up to him like this, he feels complete.

#obey me #obey me mammon #obey me mammon x mc #obey me mammon fluff #obey me mammon angst #obey me mammon comfort #obey me mammon hurt

[sherl-grey]

Shirley G what's your favourite Eleventh Doctor episode rewrite with Rose? Can be an existing fic, or just an idea of an episode you would have loved Rose to be in from Eleven's run! ☺️

hello loup!! this is so tough oh my... once again i'm lamenting my lack of organization, haha. i need to find a better way to save fics... apologies in advance, this will probably be long!

so, i might just be blanking, but i'm not even sure how many single episode rewrites i can think of with Eleven--a lot of them are either full series rewrites OR original plot + a "Day of the Doctor" rewrite at the end (yeah... here's one called "Time Rewritten" that's also Eight/Rose where Rose wakes up in Eleven's TARDIS with no memory and then gets stuck in the Time War, and here's one called "Three Doctors and a Baby" from the fantastic Tentoo/Rose and Eleven/Rose series Consequences, and another Time War one called "Battle in the Sky" that's mostly EightRose but ends with Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor... it's a good trope!)

that being said! the rewrite I go to most often for pure joy is "Until The End" by mltrefry, which is part of the "Run with You" multi-series rewrite. Specifically for Eleven's chunk of the series, I love "Vincent and the Doctor" (chapters 9 and 10) as well as.... I honestly think this is either original or maybe an EU takeaway, but there's an Eight/Rose and Eleven/Rose episode called "Before the Worst" (chapters 11 and 12) that I ADORE. This series also has Eleven show up in Blink in a previous fic which is incredibly sweet.

honorable mentions that came to mind:

there is a single episode pairing rewrite of the astronaut duo by no_nutcracker that i just read! ("if i believe in One thing")

there’s also one “i’m at odds and ends but that’s me” by CupofSonic if you like OT3 (tentoo is still here)

i absolutely refuse to read this one ever again because i am emotionally traumatized but here's the god complex ("in blackwater woods")

"when the wolf runs" is fantastic angst-with-a-happy-ending that isn't necessarily a rewrite but certain episodes are addressed and redone? essentially, Rose is woven in to Eleven's overarching plot really well and it's a great fix-it for River as well

i know this fic from the series "Tyler Family Adventures" has an Eleventh Hour rewrite at the very least; it's Tentoo/Rose at first and they actually semi-raise Amy growing up, but it shifts to Eleven/Rose when... well, you can probably guess.

"Out of Order" by lastincurableromantic also pops in on some canon adventures without doing full rewrites! we get a tiny glimpse of Venice and post-The Big Bang at the Pond wedding at the very least

I'm sure I'm still missing some good ones; I know there a couple Doctor's Wife rewrites (Sonic and I and someone else? maybe multiple someone elses?) in existence and that episode is always a pleasure since Rose and the TARDIS obviously adore each other, and I really want to read a reunion that takes place during or after "Hide." The line about "it's not a ghost story, it's a love story" and yearning across time and space... that's it. That's ElevenRose. I think one might exist but I keep losing the link.... Sorry for the novel-length answer but there are just so many good fics!

#remember when i said i cannot pick favorites to save my life? here i am #sorry the hyperlinking is a disaster because i wasn't gonna name the fics and then realized that was a bad plan #i think a lot of these are fairly popular too but that's what reareading is for haha #elevenrose #fic recs #specifically rewrites #asked and answered #loupettes #eleven x rose

[aylinaliens]

hii! do you have any chinese drama recommendations? i'm desperately in need of some good cdramas, and you seem to have great taste! :-)

Of course :) here’s a somewhat lengthy list of my favorite cdramas that I would recommend you watch! Almost all of these are available on either Netflix, Youtube, Viki, or the IQIYI app. If you have trouble finding links let me know!

Go Ahead (40 episodes): Hands down my favorite modern cdrama of all time. It follows these three children to adulthood who all come from dysfunctional families. They end up becoming this big found family with a widowed father who runs a noodle shop + a police officer. It’s adorable, hilarious, and absolutely heartbreaking. I still can’t listen to the OST without bawling my eyes out. If you like the found family trope and slice-of-life dramas go ahead and check this out. (spoiler alert: it DOES have a happy ending!!)  

The Untamed (50 episodes): I feel like I don’t need to explain this but in case you haven’t watched this I really recommend you do! The length is daunting (I’m still watching it right now) and it’s confusing but it’s worth it. 

Lovely Us (16 episodes): This is a hidden little gem that I wish more people would talk about. It takes place in 2007 and it’s about this group of friends who navigate high school, first love, family problems, and life together. It reminds me so much of the Korean drama series Reply because of the bond between the friends, family, and the neighborhood. This drama gives me the feeling of being wrapped up in a big blanket while drinking hot chocolate. You will find it hard to dislike ANY of the characters.

The Bad Kids (12 episodes): Okay @ EVERYONE please go watch this masterpiece of a drama I’m begging you. This is a crime/thriller/mystery about these three kids who witness a murder and essentially blackmails the murderer. It’s one of the best dramas I have ever watched. The acting, especially from the children, is phenomenal. I don’t think many people have watched this and it sucks because it’s so so good. I don’t want to give a ton of info about this because of spoilers but if you like crime/thrillers or dramas that generally explore the human psyche check this out! It’s pretty dark though so be aware of that!

The Romance of the Tiger and Rose (24 episodes): This is about this modern day script writer who gets transported into her own story! Except plot twist: instead of being the FL she ends up playing the role of an insignificant character who dies early in the story. Obviously she ends up defying this early death and changes the storyline completely. Along the way she gains enemies, falls in love, and well...creates chaos. It’s incredibly adorable, hilarious, and refreshing! The main romance between the script writer + the prince is swoon worthy (and kind of ridiculous in the best of ways). 

Put Your Head on My Shoulder (24 episodes): The best way to describe this drama is that it’s just pure fluff. There is zero angst which some would find boring because there isn’t that many conflicts but honestly? I loved every second of it. It’s about these two college students on the cusp of graduating who ends up moving in with each other. It follows the basic “bubbly FL and cold ML” formula but in reality the ML is never mean to her at all. Rather he’s just socially awkward and clueless about love. It’s my go to comfort show to watch and it always brings a smile on my face. 

The Best of You In My Mind (24 episodes): Childhood friends to lovers gets me every time and this drama really delivers on that front. It’s about this veterinary student and this archery player who attempt to navigate the woes of young adulthood. The romance is super cute and so are the side characters! It does focus a lot on archery + the team the ML is on but I thought it was interesting. 

A Little Thing Called First Love (36 episodes): This is one of the most wholesome and sweetest dramas I have every watched. It’s about this shy/awkward girl who falls in love with one of the most popular guys in schools. They end up at the same college and slowly shift from friends to lovers. But this is a slow burn so if that is not your style you might want to stay away. Still, the wait was worth it because the ML and FL are honestly just awkward little puppies :)

Winter Begonia (49 episodes): I’m still watching this so I have no clue how this ends but EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP SLEEPING ON THIS!!! This is in the same boat as the Untamed and The Guardian in which it’s based on a BL novel but is censored. It’s about this Peking opera performer and a wealthy businessman in the 1930′s-1940′s. It explores the Japanese invasion in Beiping and how the ML’s + characters around them struggle with it. Even if it’s censored it’s pretty clear to tell that the ML’s are in love with the way they look at each other and their actions. Plus they call each other soulmates so like...yeah. But it is a quite heavy historical drama full of angst so it’s understandable why this would not be everyone’s cup of tea. 

Take My Brother Away (30 episodes): Yet another gem that is not talked about that much. This is about a pair of siblings who become codependent on each other because their mother left + father is absent. It’s very comical and wacky but it’s also really heartwarming.

Other C-Dramas that I recommend (** are the ones that I high rec)

Dating in the Kitchen

Arsenal Military Academy **

You Are So Sweet

A Love So Beautiful

With You

My Huckleberry Friends **

Professional Single

Le Coup de Foudre **

Begin Again

Guardian

When We Were Young **

When a Snail Falls in Love 

The Best of Us

#i hope this helps! #i'm always down to give recs/talk about my favorite shows #my favorite cdrama genre is youth/modern so i haven't watched any of the lengthy historical ones #but i heard that nirvana in fire/love and redemption/ashes in love is well liked #ashes of love ** #cdrama recs

[citylightsbooks]

The Motor of the Essay: Rachel Kushner in Conversation

This is an excerpt of a free event we held in conjunction with Litquake for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Rachel Kushner in conversation with Dana Spiotta celebrating the launch of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, published by Scribner. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our Youtube channel.

*****

Dana Spiotta: I know that everyone's going to ask you these questions about writing fiction versus nonfiction. And I read somewhere that you said, with your novels, you begin with imagery more than an idea or a character. With the nonfiction, there is a range of pieces about writers and specific books to journalism--like the prison story and Palestine--and then there’s the ones that are personal essays, right, like the girl in a motorcycle. So I guess they might all have different origins. But where do you begin with that? And how is that different as a process from what you write in fiction?

Rachel Kushner: Yeah, so it is kind of a different process for me, although I sometimes feel guilty to try to make declarations about which is harder, or how one does one thing, because you know, for some people, the essay is what literature is.

For me, fiction is more difficult. And so in a certain way it's what I've signed on to do with my life, because the process can be so mysterious and fickle and unreliable. And I'm waiting to catch a wave, or get the drift and then try to figure out how to sustain it, and then how to change it in order to sustain it. Managing so many different things at once is a very curious hermeneutic, because you need to know where you're going.

But then you also need to let happenstance inform you. I think some of the ways that we are challenged, and how we learn in our lives and also as writers, are by having encounters that we did not anticipate or predict, and that happens in fiction. And then you're kind of in a "taking mode" and you know exactly what's for you and you go with it and you run.

Essays are a little different for me. I mean, obviously. Time is shorter. But usually the motor of the essay is a sprung sentence. I come up with one sentence that is doing something in the syntax and it's making something sort of declarative. And it's kind of a gambit. And it needs to be followed by another. And sometimes I'll have a whole paragraph like that. And those paragraphs will just be floating in the void of the potentiality of the essay that I haven't written yet. And I don't sweat, like, "How am I going to link this to that?" yet. Because I just know by instinct that they're both going in. And if I put them in the essay, then they are interrelated by virtue merely of their proximity to each other. Then I start to build links.

Some journalism is a very different process. Like you mentioned, for the piece that I wrote, originally for the New York Times Magazine, about prison abolition and the carceral geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, they said it can be any length and made it long. So you know, it was like 20,000 words. And it was my version of that essay, and it probably was a pretty good essay. But I think the weakness in it was that I was not speaking to their audience. And they really--you have written for the New York Times Magazine--they want to be able to countenance everything you say, sentence by sentence. It's not like writing an op-ed, where you just say your thing and then people can fight it out in the comments. They want to be fully on board. And I wouldn't want to have to do that all the time.

It's extremely difficult, because you have to keep remembering how to bring in somebody who may have wildly different ideas about how society should be organized, and not seem polemical, not seem pushy. It's a kind of seduction I think that really benefits from collaboration with an editor. It's arduous, it takes time. That essay took two years to write, but because the subject matter was important to me, ultimately, I decided it was worth it.

Dana Spiotta: Yeah, it's such a great essay. And I learned so much from it.

Peter Maravelis: When you're writing about events and feelings from decades ago, how do you return to the experience? What takes you back?

Rachel Kushner: That's a really great question. So, you know, with some of these essays, like the first essay in the book called “Girl on a Motorcycle,” which is about the Cabo 1000--a no longer existent, illegal motorcycle road race where you span the Baja in the course of a day--was the first thing that I ever published and I wrote it 20 years ago. And after looking back over it, in order to put it in this book and to improve upon it, I opened it up; I wrote a new beginning and a new ending. There are so many details and scenes in that essay that I never, ever would have remembered had I not written them down when I was much closer to the meat of that experience.

But there are other essays like the title essay which I just wrote quite recently. I'd put the book together, and I knew it was going to be called “The Hard Crowd.” And then I just basically sat down and wrote this essay. And I think, you know, as maybe you're telling a story, or going through your life, sometimes things really do sort of trigger the release of a memory. And Proust has this conception of two different kinds of memory that he calls voluntary memory and involuntary memory. And voluntary memory is the kind of fixed story that you tell, you know, "Oh, he's telling that story again," meaning it's a kind of sclerotic, hardened account that, for Proust, doesn't really have any real artistic or intrinsic wealth to it. Whereas involuntary memory is maybe when you would smell a perfume that you haven't smelled in 30 years and it reminds you of this or that. And I think that writing itself can activate involuntary memory, because you start to see into spaces you haven't seen in a really long time.

Like when I was writing this essay, I somehow ended up talking about Terence McKenna, and remembered that I'd seen Terence McKenna give this lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts. And then I saw the Palace of Fine Arts and him on the stage and where I was sitting, and who was in the audience. And so then I mentioned in the essay that this noise musician who I don't know, but I knew who he was, was sitting right in front of me. And that was a funny thing because the New Yorker called him and asked, "Were you at a Terence McKenna lecture in 1991." “Yeah, I was.” I mean he probably thought like the FBI is after him or something. I can start to see things and details in pretty haunting detail, particularity once I'm starting to build the framework that will allow those kind of involuntary memories to come up to present themselves.

Peter Maravelis: Do you feel that maybe kids who grew up in a certain era share communal memories, like growing up in San Francisco in the 70s is full of shared moments and scenes?

Rachel Kushner: Yes, I do feel that, but I would maybe even particularize it to not just an era, but to kids who grew up in a certain world within San Francisco. And I'm going to just be blunt: it's the kids who went to public school in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. We all traversed a world together, and the particularity of that world. I'm not saying that it's special or different. Everybody has a world that they traversed, and that stays inside of them as memory. And ours is ours. And those who experienced it do feel bonded, I think, for life, in a way. And it's something I've thought about a lot since that essay was published in the New Yorker because of the number of people who reached out to me and wanted to talk about their own memories of this same world that we shared.

Peter Maravelis: In the New York Times review, Dwight Garner mentioned the phrase: “At the party, she was kindness in the hard crowd," from the Cream song "White Room." Is that in fact where your title came from?

Rachel Kushner: It is. I mentioned that in the title essay, it all becomes clear, or at least somewhat clear where I heard that song, and why I made it the title of this book. It's a good line.

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[themarginalartist]

Gotta agree with the fact of every character being OC. I doubt there is difference between chars with studios behind them and chars made by one peep. Most interesting is the creativity with most of all, I think. Could read anything as far as it is creative. But how do you set good vibes to reader to make him stay and be excited for next chapter? I can see it happening on me when reading something, but I don't seem to find the key of doings to do so while I'm really interested on how

(I am so sorry this got really, really, really long so I’m putting it under a readmore, I am not kidding, this is ridiculously long. I checked before posting and it’s 1576 words (not including this bit here), which is like my normal chapter length so read at your own risk I guess???)

I mean a character is usually created by one person, or at least the initial concept of them is, then expanded on either by that person or the writers in order to weave them into the story. 

As far as getting a reader interested… I am not really sure why a lot of people are interested in my things…

But usually the way that gets me interested in reading something, and I am basing this off my response to different novels I’ve read (I’ll get to fan fics in a sec), is a combo of the synopsis and the first chapter being the hook. Now not every synopsis makes me want to read a novel, I have read many books where the synopsis made me go “huh” which is like mild interest, and then I start the first chapter if I have time, if by the time I am done with the first 2-3 pages and I haven’t found anything interesting the book gets put back. 

There was one time at a scholastics book fair that I read like the first 3 chapters of a book, it was while I was in high school and my brother was still in elementary school, but like I was hooked the moment I read it… The title escapes me though… 

As far as fanfics go, I used to be the most avid reader of them in my friend group, admittedly at the time I was looking for a very specific fandom and such, but my preference for fanfics is a longer story or longer chapters. My friends were not that way… Which made getting recommendations and giving them hard. 

But as far as what I like to see when I am browsing for a new fic is if the fic is hosted on FF.net or Ao3 a synopsis that doesn’t give the main plot away, but gives a quick intro to the idea, so for example on Think Ink (which I should update that synopsis I think) the bad version would be “Henry’s also been turned into an Ink Demon and now he has to figure himself out. Fighting different studio members and searchers in his journey to understanding himself.” where as “Henry woke up covered in ink, a spike of fear rushing through him, his life forever changed from that moment on.” is a bit better (not the best but yeah). 

Then comes the spelling and grammar component which I can’t stress enough. If the fics first chapter is extremely bad, and I am talking to the point were the word used is wrong, the spelling is wrong on a number of words, and there isn’t a clear tense being used, then I exit out, it doesn’t matter if I really like the synopsis or something or it’s an AU I liked, if the grammar and spelling makes the fic unreadable then it’s game over. 

Next is characterization, similar to spelling and grammar, if the character you are using is portrayed wrong, it’s also a game over. However there are a few exceptions to this. For example I used to really love Hetalia, the basic gist of the anime is that all the countries have a human representative but is also heavily biased as the Japanese stereotype of those countries. Italy in Hetalia is seen as an airheaded, easily frightened, guy who is a womanizer, eats pasta for literally every meal, surrenders in a second, and takes naps whenever possible, again this is the Japanese stereotype based in WW2. So if he’s characterized as being really serious there needs to be a damned good reason for it. You can’t just change a character to fit what you want if you’re basing it on someone else’s work. 

Next comes plot. Plot is key for any fanfic, I mean yeah every once in a while it’s fun to read a one off or throw away fic of cute activities like baking and stuff, but there’s no action or craziness (unless it’s a fic disguising itself as such which is also fun). The goal of the first chapter is set up. In a novel the first chapter is about introducing the main character(s), the world, and what the problem is. And fanfic is no different, however it has the luxury of us already knowing the character (in a way at least, take Spiderman, there’s the basic concept but there’s also a number of versions of him from different cartoon series and comic series). We might also have the luxury of knowing the world already as well, so that can be sorted out really fast, the rules and nature of the world are defined so we don’t need to explain anything. So then comes the problem, what is the character facing, is there something going on right now or is it coming, do(es) the character(s) have the power to stop it now or are they going to have to travel. The goal of the rest of the story after the first chapter is to show how the character(s) grow and change as a result of the difficulties they face in order to take care of the problem. 

And finally cutoffs. First what I mean by cutoffs is where an author chooses to create a time skip, scene change, or end of chapter point and I’ll talk about each of those in brief. 

For a time skip, the only reason that should happen in a fic is if the task at hand would be meaningless for the reader to know about like them going through all the steps of baking a cake (unless it’s to show the characters relationship with each other then don’t skip) or if there is a large gap of time where nothing important happens and I am talking about years of time, which is what happens in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there is a 7 year period where Link is “gone” from the world and so when he comes back to it many changes have taken place and so it’s a call to action for him. 

A scene change is similar to a time skip in some cases such as character x and y are driving and now scene change to x and y being at a motel for the night, but in other cases it’s a shift in who’s talking like we were getting told x’s point of view for a long time and now y is saying x is stupid or something. 

And finally the end chapter cutoff, which is honestly a hard one, there has to be a reason for the end of a chapter, a lot of times cliffhangers are the main way to go about it, but also resolution of a current problem is important to consider. For example chapter 4 of Think Ink was a cliff hanger I purposefully put in, one because it was evil and made people want the next chapter, and two because I wasn’t ready to continue on with the story at that point, I can’t tell you the amount of “omg what the heck why did you cut off there” I got from people. Now compare that to chapter 10 of Think Ink, the end of that chapter is Henry and Bendy finally coming to an understanding of each other, what has been going on with each of them separately, and the beginning of repairing the bond. It ties up loose ends that Henry and Bendy had been facing for a long time. 

Good vibes come from the care and dedication to the fic that you have. And every reader is different, they pick up on different things, they read something in different ways. I mean hell I have been asked if I wrote lines on purpose when the reality of the matter was I was just like hey this sounds good and it was by accident. But I think what a lot of people don’t think about is how not all stories have happy beginning, middle, and endings. Sometimes there is loss, there is anger, there is dumb decisions that a character made, there are mistakes and problems and too often I see fics that are just “oh everything is happy and good and light”, and that’s not interesting for a multi-chapter fic, maybe a chapter but not the whole thing. 

So in reality there isn’t a short answer. It just depends on how well you can connect with your readers. And it takes time, there have been plenty of fics that I begin reading after 4-5 chapters are already out or the fic has been completed, so don’t worry if people aren’t reading yet, just keep going and stuff. And not everything I said has to be a part of the fic, time skip and scene jump all over the place, make mistakes and get wild with writing. And the biggest thing, and best way to get better, is to make note of what you like the most, what caused you to like a writer’s style, why did this work, what hints did the author drop in order to lead you to this plot point. And it sounds like school work… but that’s because this is what you have to do for basically every English/Language Arts essay ever. analyze the text…

Congratulations on making it to the end of this monster wall of text btw. 🎉🎉🎉

#thoughts in the margins #LONG ANSWER #I am so sorry #I just #have a lot of thoughts