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sol1056 · 4 years

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hey! i noticed that you’ve written a lot about how voltron fails as a mecha series, and it got me curious about what a GOOD mecha series looks like. do you have any recs for someone whose only experience with the genre, quite literally, is voltron?

note: that is NOT where I wanted the cut. who knows what the devs are doing over there at tumblr hq.

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Welp, there’s more than one kind of mecha. There’s super robots -- where (in general) the robots are ultra-powered and relatively indestructible. Then there’s real robots, which will break down and/or run out of ammunition at the most dramatically critical moments. And then there’s a category that at best might be nearly-sentient robots, which have minds and motivations of their own -- but I wouldn’t say that’s a true category (in terms of the genre) so much as a distinction I've noted.

I’ve never been big into the super robot series (with a few exceptions), and I mostly find the combining robot genre to be frustrating. Former mechanic and engineer who currently works with AI, so a lot of the hand-wavey aspects are frustrating for me, especially in super robots where things mysteriously repair themselves and there’s never a struggle to upgrade/repair. (And don’t even get me started on the idea of controlling a bipedal reactive machine with only two foot pedals and a damn joystick.)

Which is all to say, I suppose I should recommend that you watch the classics, except I’m not really sure what they are because I’ve forgotten most of them. And frankly a lot of them are really shoddy animation by today’s standards, and life is too short to waste time on that. I’ll need to refer you along to other mecha fans to add their recommendations, instead.

Well, I can at least recommend Gundam and Macross, but that’s kind of like saying I recommend Doc Martens and Aididas -- that barely narrows it down, since there’s so many options within each brand. Everyone’s got their favorites in each, as do I, but any mecha series that’s stayed with me is one that found a way to either twist the core trope, or explored implications that other series glossed over.

Note: I’ve never seen any version of Eva, and never felt the urge to, either. Sorry. Ask someone else for input on that. Plus there’s also ones I’ll leave off here ‘cause they’re veering over into AI/robots/tech and less what would usually be called mecha, but they’re still worthwhile: Battle Fairy Yukikaze, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, Broken Blade, Last Exile, and Voices of a Distant Star all come to mind.

Gundam

For me, I adore the technical geeky touches in Gundam F91, but the story is total spaghetti, so you might want to skip that until you’re more familiar with the gundam tropes. (It was meant to be a series, iirc, got shut down, and they took the pieces and made a movie from it, so it’s... kind of compressed, to put it mildly).

Gundam Wing and Gundam 00 are considerably less geeky on the technical (though they do satisfy the mechanic itch, with a bit more real robot, at least on the technicalities). I like the international core cast, and the way each series explores geopolitical dynamics. (That said, skip the second season of Gundam 00. It just goes totally off the rails into some really wild and wacky directions.)

A long-running concept like Gundam is recognizable across the series thanks to core concepts, and in Gundam’s case it’s the conflicts between imperialism and colonialism, war versus justified rebellion, and pacifism versus a first-strike as self-defense. What I liked with Wing and 00, in particular, was its central pilots felt more tied to (and aware of) the political ramifications of their actions.

I did watch about half of Iron-Blooded Orphans, which struck out in a new direction by having Mars as the colony instead of the lagrange points, but didn’t bother finishing. From what I hear, watch it with a box of tissues, as it’s a return to the classic kill-em-all perspective of the original Gundam series.

Macross

I’m sure someone else will tell you to watch the original Macross (the american version being Robotech, albeit highly edited). I know lots of people adore the first Macross series, but it’s just too late-80s for me. (The hair, my god, the hair.)

Personally, I prefer Macross Frontier -- the amination is much improved, though the fact is I also adore the voices of Yuuichi Nakamura and Aya Endō. Macross has some politics, but it’s mostly internal -- that is, the opponents aren’t human, so whatever debate there is about who’s right or wrong is mostly one-sided, since we only ever see humans doing the talking.

I tried to watch Macross Delta but it just didn’t do it for me -- and therein lies some of the issues (for me) with both Gundam and Macross. Because both have some core elements that they tackle in every series, it can start to feel a bit repetitive.

For Macross it’s always music, Valkyries (the mecha type for Macross), and a love triangle -- which sometimes isn’t even resolved. (I’ve read all kinds of debates about whether Alto ends up with Sheryl or with Ranka, but the series leaves it open.)

A good writer can explore these themes over and over, but between the two, I personally think Gundam has done a bit better of pivoting to take a new angle with each series. But at the same time, Gundam is pretty consistent about not building on a previous series -- with a few notable exceptions, most of its series are alternate-universe stories to each other. In Macross, they’re all continuations of the previous -- so if you’re not into its setup about aliens and weird diseases and whatnot, you’re only going to get more of the same in the next series.

Everything else

So here’s the series I like, but I’m not sure all of these would be counted as ‘true’ mecha by other fans (a debate I mostly ignore, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about that).

Escaflowne -- one of the rare breed of fantasy-styled mecha (Broken Blade being another one that comes to mind). The animation is strongly 80s, but the voice acting is superb, the story (originally meant to be longer, then budget cuts forced a much longer story to squeeze into half the episodes it really deserved).

[It’s also a series I’d call a harbinger, similar to tripping over little-known movies from twenty years ago and realizing every single actor including walk-on parts went on to be massive names. Escaflowne’s got that, but that also extends to its animation team, its director, its composer, on and on. All of them went onto work on some of the greatest hits of anime. That makes Escaflowne immensely (if quietly and somewhat subtly) influential, both for the genre and animation overall.]

Eureka Seven -- another not-on-Earth story. At first the mecha movement -- almost like surfing in the sky -- was odd, but they took some interesting physics concepts and made them not just worldbuilding, but integral parts of the story. Okay, I’m not keen on how the female lead gets successively down-graded as the hero ramps up, but there are some emotional implications of Massive Destructive Machines where Eureka Seven lingers that a lot of other series gloss over.

Fafner in the Azure -- another aliens-against-humans, but first off, I’m gonna say it: you either love Hisashi Hirai‘s character designs or you want to torch them with total prejudice. If you can get past that, Fafner is brutal to its characters well beyond most other series, excepting the earliest Gundams. Although (of course) the pilots are all kids, there are in-story reasons, and there are still adults running the show. And there are consequences, small and large.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion -- because what would life be if we didn’t have at least one mecha series with character designs from CLAMP. (Which, admittedly, I loathe, but somehow it worked here.) Can’t speak for the second season, but the first season played up something a lot of mecha bypass for just plain banging on each other, which is strategy. It caught me at the time, at least.

Full Metal Panic -- watch this after watching Gundam Wing and/or Gundam 00, to get the tropes they’re playing on with Sousuke Sagara (the ostensible protagonist who just cannot seem to relate to real human beings). I saw one description of him as “about as well-adjusted as a feral child” and that kinda fits. It’s more real robots, and of course parts require some hardcore suspension of disbelief (the commanding officer who looks 14, sounds like she’s 12, and has boobs that never occur in nature on a frame that teeny). But all told, a lot of fun and plenty of explosions.

RahXephon -- this is another oddball one, because the mecha aren’t mecha, they’re golems (as in, creatures made from clay). For all that, there’s a lot of significant mecha influence and tropes at work. It’s held up pretty well, animation-wise, considering its age (from 2002). and while it’s the same ‘strange aliens attack earth’ plotline, it spins all that off in a completely different direction.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (aka Gurren Lagann) -- don’t watch this one until you’ve seen plenty of others, though, because it’s a fondly affectionate send-up of nearly every possible trope from combining to super to real robots. Cranked up to eleven.

Knights of Sidonia -- of all the ones on this list, KoS is possibly my most favorite. It was an early all-CGI series, and a lot of people were turned off by that, but once you get used to it, the story can carry you along. Like Macross Frontier, it takes place in deep space, where a colony of humans fight for survival with an incomprehensible (and nearly unstoppable) alien foe. But KoS is true science fiction, with a lot of solid science driving its dramatic points. Also--unlike most of the others series--although the characters are technically human, they’ve also evolved as a result of their time in space. For one, they have three genders, for another, they don’t eat; they photosynthesize.

#mecha #sol thinks about stuff #recommendations

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mtg-thrill-of-possibility · 3 years

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A Reflection on Magic, the Pandemic, and the Dark Side of Arena

Hello to all the readers who may stumble upon this in the search for new Magic content. I wrote this mostly to fill a void in my life that has opened up over the last year and more of a mental health thing than some form of Magic related advice but since it is about that, I thought they’d go hand in hand. I love Magic. Or at least I have loved Magic? It’s hard to tell. Like nearly everyone on this planet, I’ve been shut off from in-person Magic and it had/has me left down. I normally volunteer at my LGS and help them organize their tournaments and judge the events and generally whatever else they ask me to do because I really love Magic. I love playing with my locals who don’t spend hundreds of dollars and craft GP/MF level decks. I love watching a group of people playing draft chaff and off beat home brews and where adults and teenagers can compete with one another on that level. I enjoy sitting off to the corner on the store’s EDH night and listening to games and drawing tokens for games in my own corner while I wait for my own games or sometimes my ow turns. I also love traveling with my wife to cities and go compete in GP/MFs where we usually both scrub out of the main event by round 3 or 4 and then hit the vendors and side events as well as explore the cities for new restaurants. I miss Welcome Days where adults bring in kids and I show them the ropes. I love meeting adults who poke their noses in and ask me “Magic is still a thing? I played that in high school” and show them the changes. I can still remember the Theros Beyond Death prerelease last year and thought how much fun it was to not work the event for once and just play. And looking back, boy am I glad I entered the THB prerelease.

February was the start of the downturn. Our EDH night was slightly less full but I just figured it was due to the weather since the winter usually has a downturn in the attendance for every event. But then the rotating cast of 10-15 FNM players was 6; Pioneer on Saturday had 3. The next week, the EDH crowd was down to from the usual 6-8 pods to 2. FNM and Pioneer failed to fire. The news that COVID-19 was starting to creep into the Midwest prompted me to ask the store what precautions we wanted to take and when we were going to stop in general.

I work in chemical research and I have a background in pharmaceuticals and once (or twice) studied the MCATs and considered going to med school. I was definitely concerned but in February it hadn’t reached my state (yet) and I wanted the store to be ready for the imminent shutdown and continued downtick in participation (my LGS and I had been strategizing how to move up in events and the store ranking on the WPN). But it’s a red state. Science denial must be a recessive trait that the Midwest incorporated into its identity for a long time and I was told that I had some freedom but to not go crazy. I thought I’m a volunteer. I’m not spending what little money I have on stuff for you guys. So, I did the best thing I could think of for free, I started a Discord server. I was really excited at the prospect. I had just bought a webcam in case my workplace started working from home and thought how cool it would be to be able to organize events in Arena and talk through Discord when the store wasn’t available. I asked if we could hang up a flyer and tell all the Magic customers that they continue with tournaments and Magic if they joined the Discord I set up in the store’s name.

My LGS asked how much this was going to cost them and I said exactly as much as it costs them now if not a little less since we don’t need the store’s utilities or a cashier behind the counter in the after hours to work the tournament. They were happy and I got the greenlight. Things worked okay at first. Those with Arena accounts showed for a few weeks. Others I knew were interested were convinced that we were overly sensitive to the virus and FNMs continued to limp along with 4-6 people until everything ground down to a halt.

Come mid-March, COVID had finally reached the state and the city. Cases were light, a few hundred people tested each day, single digit cases detected but I again was worried. My workplace had already begun educating everyone on how to wash their hands properly and disinfect every surface and everyone was issued a bleach spray bottle with their name and a serial number on it. While the mayor and governor hadn’t ordered a shutdown yet, I advised strongly that the store go ahead and if they wanted to continue that I wouldn’t be there to assist until the curve was sufficiently flattened.

I’m not sure why but they trusted me and listened. I was glad and I pushed again for people to join the Discord server. Players were reluctant but I assured them that this may be the future for some time and if they get on now, they can still get the Ravnica intro quests and start building up their Arena collections. I got more on my side, we had 8-10 and got them all to try and hook anyone else they knew to join us. However, by the end of March, my workplace had moved to 100% virtual and with my extra time, I had begun to unwittingly shift the power dynamic in the store by accident. You see, I really love Magic. I was now working from home for a job that required me to have direct physical access to hundreds of thousands of dollars or sensitive equipment that need recertification when they get moved 12 inches down a work bench and dangerous chemicals I don’t want near me unless I know there’s an inspected chemical shower nearby. When the campus shut down, I got very bored. I did what research I could from my home portal, attended virtual conferences and webinars every day, but I had tons of down time. That meant watching my wife play Animal Crossing, playing with my dogs, marathon sessions of Civilization but most crucially, I also began grinding Arena.

My local meta had been defined by the understanding that none of us were really Arena players. I had played when the Kaladesh and Amonkhet closed betas were happening, but I was turned off by the fact that all my playing of those formats amounted to nothing when it launched with Ixalan and I would start from square one. Everyone in the group typically shied away from tier 1 tournament decks because to all of us, it was more fun to goof around with RG auras and Tilonalli’s Summoner decks than it was to grind Esper Hero or the new Uro decks. And the limitation that everyone didn’t have all the shocklands meant we were all playing on roughly the same card pools with some variation due to our play styles. So when I suggested we all start playing Arena to replace the tournaments, it worked because it meant we all played the same dumb decks we’d play in person with a few exceptions of having less than perfect mana bases.

But I would find myself grinding Arena everyday where my friends and locals were not. Even though I jumped into Arena at mid-March, I finished the Theros Beyond Death mastery at level 78 when Ikoria began to creep around the corner. I had just begun to get back into Magic when Fate Reforged hit and didn’t realize how much I love wedge color alignments over shards but boy did I love Abzan in Khans standard and now I was in love with Abzan again in Ikoria standard. Grinding the way I did meant I drafted most afternoons for the first month of Ikoria (and forced Temur every time) and started climbing the ranked ladder in the evenings. Ikoria would also mark the first time I spent money on Arena. I’m notoriously spend-thrift in video games and anything you can free-to-play I do religiously because you shouldn’t make a game grindable over the course of years if you give me that option. But drafting took gems and I really love drafting but most people at my LGS are too concerned about rares than learning to do it properly and a lot of younger players feel lost when I draft a zero rare deck and go 4-0 and collect my prizes. By the end of April, I would reach Platinum in constructed and Gold in limited. But now my LGS was far less inclined to play with me. I didn’t brag about any of my rankings but the skill disparity had begun to creep in as well as the difference in our collections. Having played so much Arena, I could see the tells the software gives away that paper Magic doesn’t. I learned to read when the game would hang up on the beginning of combat and end steps because they’re holding potential responses. I began to do the full control shortcut to bluff counter spells and removal. In paper Magic, if my opponent would sequence things wrong or tap their mana wrong, we’d make jokes and rewind it because it’s one of those human errors that we all make and redo it the right way.

But Arena was different; some learned the hard way to not trust the auto-tapper, some didn’t realize that the way they normally stack triggers in paper is backwards and too late to fix after a spell or ability resolved. And I couldn’t help them. And I let them make their mistakes because I can’t change Arena. If they use the auto-tapper and they realize that Arena doesn’t tap the Castle Vantress even though they couldn’t activate it anyway and they lose a dual source, I couldn’t help them. If they have the lethal Explosion in hand but forgot to hit Control in their second main so they can stack the Wilderness Reclamation triggers in their end step, I don’t concede out of pity.

In May, I try and keep the Magic going by suggesting that we shift the format to a draft limited but they’re unconvinced of the website that allows you to simulate an 8-person draft and then import the drafted card lists to Arena. Why? Because they don’t have the cards already and I’ve changed the dynamic. They know I’m much more skilled at Arena and Ikoria drafting. The news has also been reporting that the curve was flattening, and our state was lifting restrictions on gatherings. They want to play EDH and paper Magic, not this digital intangible game. I reluctantly agree but keep grinding on Arena anyway. My friends didn’t want to play Magic on Arena and I couldn’t understand why. I was getting burned out on drafting at this point and the drafts were harder to fire off a month and a half later, work was returning on a limited schedule where I was onsite 75% and virtual 25%, it really did seem like things were returning to normal.

In June I finish the Ikoria mastery and at this point my wife had begun to show more interest in playing on Arena and trying to get her account a little more stocked since our normal paper system is I aggregate everything we typically need and I make her desired deck and hand it off to her to wreck people on FNM but since I didn’t have to judge, I got to play and we couldn’t both play from my account at the same time. I casually start hers and I get the wild hair that maybe I should make a loaner account in the store’s name and if anyone says they don’t have the cards, they can borrow the store’s account for the tournament. I make the account but put the pipe dream on hold when Wizards announces that in-store play can resume with the Core 2021 prerelease. I could read between the lines and see that the curve was trending the wrong way and thought it was a bad idea but at my insistence, everyone would have to wear a mask at all times and hand sanitizer was available every 15 feet and the store had lots of space for players to spread out. The turnout was low which helped as well, and I had everyone who showed up at least aware that I was trying to keep the Discord going and that in case there’s another shutdown that there was another avenue for them.

Well, I got my wish because within a week of the launch of Core 2021, my state had regressed, and cases were exploding and gathering restrictions were sent back in place. Shortly after that, Wizards suspended in-store play again and with that I created the store’s Arena account. At the time, things were pretty good. The locals weren’t playing as much and my server was still fairly empty but most of the Magic Twitch community I interacted with had strongly adjusted to the new paradigm. EDH streaming was commonplace, I had my new Arena account to focus on building up as well as my own. Pro level events and Opens were being held on Arena and the expansion of Amonkhet Remastered gave me hope that Magic was on the mend. But I also think it was with Core 2021 that things started to slide into the negative for me. Grinding the second account was frustrating me a lot. The lack of human interaction was tilting me out for no reason. Some days the server would have me wait a whole minute (the horror?!) for a game and then my opponent would be the world’s slowest red player where everything seemed delayed. There would strings of games I would play where I couldn’t get a third land drop after a mull to 4 and other times where I’d flood out and would have won if it weren’t for generic whiny reason why everyone says they lose.

Maybe it was when I began to see that Arena is not Magic the Gathering as much as it is a video game that it began to really sour on me. For those of you who don’t play a lot of Arena and instead interact with humans over webcams is that Arena is designed for you to not play off beat home brews except in direct challenges with your friends. The game is meant for you to play the best combination of 75 cards and for you to help it machine learn through millions of matches what is and what is not the correct play pattern based on the available information you have. It wants you to play the very best decks in a format against the other best decks. I started to see this in Ikora standard when decks would scoop if you were on the play and went turn 2 Agonizing Remorse. Decks were and still are so linear that they can’t handle that kind of disruption or it’s a matter of the players know it’s faster to accumulate wins by scooping than grinding out a long game.

If you need evidence of whether or not this is true, you should play Arena now and see how often people scoop against the double Ruin Crab opener with a Fabled Passage back-to-back. Or if an opponent against your Lurrus Auras deck will time out when they know they can’t win. In paper Magic, when you drive 4 hours to a major venue, pay your entry fee, you never see your opponent rage scoop unless it’s Legacy and you know what your opponent’s on and you mull to zero so you can see what’s in their deck. You call a judge to your table if they start stalling. Nothing is more annoying that an opponent spamming “Good Game” at you through a match when it’s obvious that you’re not killing them that turn but they’re empty handed and have nothing relevant on board.

I’ll admit myself that what my wife calls “Wizard Chores” for the Daily quests, if I’m 1 red spell short of finishing a quest, I’ll log in for one more game and Boulder Dash my opponent’s creature or cast Shock to face and immediately scoop. Who is that helping? I’d spend the week at work in my down times thinking about what dumb cards I hadn’t played with from a set, start making a list, furiously find the cards on a Friday afternoon and grab dinner with the wife and then race to my LGS for FNM. Magic used to be something I only got to do twice a week with people in a shared setting and we’d unroll our playmats, shuffle up our jank, and laugh and generally have a good time for three to four hours. With Magic at my fingertips, Arena is a distillation of efficiency at spell slinging combined with the minor rewards system we’ve come to recognize the free-to-play traps to “encourage” us to play different things. If I want to play 100 matches in a day, all I need to do is sit at my computer long enough. If I want to play my old jank on Arena, I can’t even count on the Casual play channel to help since it’s always filled with people with 55 of the 60 cards that make the best deck learning how to play before they commit the wild cards for the deck.

Zendikar Rising has been a pretty dark point for everyone on Arena I believe. It seems like a lifetime ago that Omnath was printed and that I had immediately cashed in four mythic rare wildcards for the deck I would get to play with on Arena for 2 weeks before Wizards realized their mistake. Honestly before I had started writing this in the week before Kaldheim will hit Arena, I forgot that Omnath was part of the most recent set as all I can remember Zendikar Rising giving us is the extremely irritating Ruin Crab and Soaring Thought Thief. The few locals I had left on my Discaord server when ZNR released had lost interest in Arena since they enjoyed the Ravnica standard that was rotating out and Pioneer was not yet available for Arena. I’ve encouraged nearly everyone I know from my LGS to buy webcams since October given that the current state of the COVID world is not likely to go away and the new culture and channels that have opened up in the world to fill the void of EDH has some level of benefit even when in-person play resumes. Not many people play and I’ll search for an occasional game on the official Discord when the craving strikes. Some of my friends have been taking advantage of the webcam world and started playing older formats with me over webcam such as Pioneer and Modern to rekindle their love for Magic and the hope that we can start playing tournaments over webcam. Finishing up the ZNR mastery passes on my two accounts and my wife’s account has been giving me a much-needed break from Arena and honestly, it’s probably done the most to lift my spirits.

I’ve been taking a lot more time to reflect on why I love Magic and I plan on doing in the future. The first thing I know I’m going to do and stick to is not get a Mastery Pass for mt LGS store’s account. They don’t pay for all the work I put into the one already grinding multiple accounts is not good for my mental well-being. The second thing I know I am going to do is relearn how to have fun in Magic again. Not really hinted at in this article so far is the fact I love the art in Magic and I’m often inspired by my own crazy mind to illustrate my own works or reimagine my favorite cards with my own art. Since the release of Rise of Skywalker, I had been working on a personal project of creating a second expansion to the largely underground Star Wars the Gathering card game and ended up making 200 unique, draftable cards. I wouldn’t call myself an artist because I’m still learning and I don’t necessarily aspire to an artist but I would love to improve my skills and one day make a piece that’s so good someone wants on a card. Over the last two years, I’ve been deeply jealous of how amazing and hard working the Magic cosplayers are and that I should put my art to good use and make my own cosplays. And then there’s the playing of Magic. I miss the Gathering part of Magic. So this brings us to the bedrock of this piece. I hope to continue this blog steadily as time moves forward. I’m rarely ever satisfied or have my attention on any one project for too long but 2021 is a new year. And I hope that the title is a hint to the future. Whatever it is; whether it’s deck construction, art alters, or Magic cosplay, story, general discussion, that’s what I’m here for. It’s the Thrill of what I might work on next and I promise because I’m terrible right now at doing so, I’ll be sure to take pictures and try and stream when I can to keep myself honest about the whole deal. I hope you’ll all join me or at least join the Discord to yell at me.

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toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem · 4 years

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I was a preemie, here’s how that affected me, part 2

THIS IS REALLY LONG, JUST KEEP THAT IN MIND

I am not a doctor or any other type of medical professional; a lot of this is just my opinion, and observations of things in my life. The rest is stuff I’ve read on the internet about this sort of thing. If you are interested/curious about what I talk about here after reading my post, feel free to research sensory processing/integration issues on your own time.

Because I was born three months premature, my nervous system wasn’t fully developed. When a baby is taken out of the womb early, everything develops more slowly. I’m not sure why that is, but that’s how it works. It’s common for preemies to have various issues during early childhood relating to the nervous system, which manifests as sensory problems because the brain is still learning how to properly process the sensations its receiving from the nerves.

These sensory issues pretty much resolved themselves once I was an older kid and my nervous system had finished developing. (I no longer freak out when the telephone rings, for instance) However, there are some symptoms which have lingered into adulthood, and some of them do actually affect my life, if only to a small degree.

I’ve also heard this type of thing referred to as Sensory Processing Disorder, or SPD. SPD-related symptoms are common among preemies (which I was/am) or with people on the autism-spectrum (which I am not). However, keep in mind that it is possible to have sensory integration/processing issues without either of these things “causing” it. In fact, I’ve found that most people have at least one or two things that bother them in this way, particularly as children. But having actual SPD mostly applies mainly if you have a significant number of symptoms and/or said symptoms really affect your daily life.

SPD is not considered an official medical diagnosis in and of itself, but it is an actual thing.

I would say I have something close to borderline SPD, because there are quite a few symptoms that I still exhibit, but their effect is not strong enough for me to think I might fully have SPD. Basically, I have SPD tendencies which are above average, but are probably below “diagnosis level” or whatever you want to call it.

Symptoms Mom says I exhibited when I was younger (like, two or three) include:

-Freaking out over sand (apparently I was able to feel every single grain, because my brain didn’t know it was supposed to process it as one sensation rather than many at once.)

-Freaking out when the telephone rang

-Literally climbing up my mother as fast as possible because I saw a leaf blowing across the yard

-Sudden loud noises in general, particularly balloons

-Balance problems (apparently I would randomly fall over sometimes, though this could also have been because i didn’t walk ‘til I was... two and a half or so?)

Symptoms I remember exhibiting once I was a little older (say, 6 or 7) include:

-hyperticklish

-I still hated balloons until I was like 9. Then my brother told me being afraid of noise was stupid and something about that actually clicked, and while I still don’t like balloons, I don’t scream and run away at the slightest indication that they might pop either.

-certain textures in foods bothered me; I remember my mom trying to make me eat certain things and she didn’t realize i was literally trying not to gag while eating it, haha.

-seeking out high-intensity experiences (this includes things like roller coasters. Now, I know it’s normal to like roller coasters, but when a kid likes roller coasters so much they will go on one roller coaster like ten times in a row, only to turn around and go on a different roller coaster ten times in a row, it’s possible that their desire for the thrill of the roller coaster is a little excessive. Even now I love roller coasters, but not with the same intensity where I’ll go on it over and over and over and over again. I might ride one three or four times in a row sometimes, but then I’ll go do something else.)

-I’ve always hated having my hands wet. Unless I’m swimming, but that’s like, the only exception. I like the smell of lotion, but when I use it, I put the tiniest drop possible on my hand because i hate the greasy, slippery feeling it gives me. And even then sometimes it’s too much and I end up trying to wipe my hands off.

Symptoms I still exhibit today include:

-hyperticklish (OH MY GOSH do not tickle me unless you know you have permission from me for it. I only let people tickle me if I trust them not to take it too far. My brothers are allowed to tickle me because they only do it a little bit at a time and recognize when I’m serious about stopping, so they actually make it fun. My nieces and nephews are amused at the fact that my knees are ticklish, and they are usually pretty gentle when we have tickle fights, so I’m okay with them. But I genuinely dread the day when some random person finds out I’m ticklish and decides to act on it, and I hope that day never comes. For a hyperticklish person, tickle fights can be genuinely unpleasant if they’re tickled to hard or too long. When someone so much as pokes me in the side, I literally feel the effects for several minutes afterwards, no exaggeration. Also, my brother is the only one allowed to scratch my back without prior instruction because he knows how hard to scratch without it tickling, haha.)

-going along with the hyperticklish thing, I tend to react very strongly to unexpected touches. Not because it tickles, it just makes me startle badly and I jolt and/or jump. Mom has actually mentioned before that having that kind of reaction usually indicates abuse, and I’m just sitting there like, “...Well I wasn’t ever abused so I really hope no one gets the wrong idea because I can’t help my sensory problems...” Yeah...

-I also still startle pretty strongly at loud noises. Now, I know it’s normal to startle at loud noises, but I startle even when no one else reacts. At all. So.

-honestly I just startle too easily in general, and it’s kind of annoying. :P

-there are still some food textures that bother me, but I’ve grown out of a lot of that. also, it’s possible some of the texture thing actually came from my dad, because he has problems with certain textures too.

-I. DETEST. PRUNY. FINGERS. It’s just... for some people with sensory issues, it is actually painful; that’s not the case with me, but having pruny fingers is really uncomfortable for me. In a non-painful manner. Especially when I go to touch stuff afterwards. The only thing I like touching after having my hands submersed in water for a few minutes is a towel. Touching anything else with pruny fingers just makes me cringe, especially touching my own skin. I will literally go to the point of wearing gloves when doing chores like peeling pears or washing dishes, because i do not want my fingers to prune.

-I actually still randomly fall over sometimes, but it’s pretty rare, and when it happens I am able to correct myself quickly enough that it doesn’t cause a problem. :P

-I don’t like being touched softly. It doesn’t even have to do with being tickled or anything, I just don’t like it when someone like gently touches my arm or brushes my back or something. If you’re gonna touch me, do it firmly. Be solid like a wall, not soft like a feather. :P

There are probably others I can think of, but those are the main ones. :P

If you’re curious about SPD in general, here’s a couple links to some websites that discuss it (idk how links work on here so I’m just gonna copy/paste and hope for the best):

https://www.sensory-processing-disorder.com/

http://sinetwork.org/

#life #sensory issues #preemie

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years

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Thoughts on Sarazanmai Episode 5: “I Want To Connect, But I Can’t Be Forgiven”

I’m just gonna go and open a window and casually scream into the abyss because this show is already destroying me and we’re only :) five episodes in :)))

We’re already rapidly approaching the part where the established episodic patterns start getting broken, and oh boy I can only imagine how the rest of the show will go from here.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

Oh boy where to even begin with this one. There’s already so much happening and we’re not even halfway into the story, lol. Part of me’s still slightly worried that we haven’t really gotten into anything related to Sara, Reo and Mabu, or the apparent otter-kappa conflict going on in the background, but this episode does make it more clear that those parts will get more important soon enough. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the next episode mostly wraps things up with Kazuki, and the second half of the anime is focused more on Reo and Mabu.

But anyway, on the topic of Kazuki, there’s a whole lot to say about him after this. I ended up being mostly right in my guess that he was adopted and that Haruka’s disability was caused by an accident that Kazuki feels responsible for, but it was still interesting to see how it all played out. I think one of the things that surprised me most is how, in spite of everything we learned, it still feels like there’s a lot going on with the topic of Kazuki’s birth mother that we don’t really understand yet, and there’s the whole lingering question of why Haruka apparently had her scent pouch. So I think there’s some further reveals to be had there. I was kinda confused about how casual Kazuki’s birth mother seemed to be about reuniting with him, since that’s not really how you’d expect it to go, especially since it also didn’t seem like she was looking to bring him back into her family. It made it come across like she was kinda oblivious to how much turmoil the adoption situation had put Kazuki in, but I want to wait until we learn more before I try and judge her.

I reread the last few chapters of the ReoMabu prequel manga recently, and it’s gotten me wondering if there’s a deeper connection between Kazuki and Sara than what we’ve seen thus far. At the very least, it feels like too much of a core, recurring part of the story for it to not have some deeper meaning to it, though most of all I just think it’d be a bit lame if there’s nothing more going on there.

Specifically, I was wondering if maybe the ending of the ReoMabu manga was about Sara transforming into her teenage self and leaving her dads, but deciding to leave a clone or a sibling of herself behind for them to raise in her absence, and I was wondering if maybe that hypothetical other baby could somehow be Kazuki himself. I don’t really feel confident in that theory after this episode, at least not after how we outright saw Kazuki’s birth mother, but I still feel like there’s something going on with how the ReoMabu manga ends on the confusing note of Sara leaving but them seemingly still having baby!Sara with them, and there’s also the fact that Sara’s connection to those two has yet to come up in the anime, but it doesn’t look like they’re still raising her.

The whole reason why Kazuki has even been doing this whole cross-dressing ruse in the first place still feels kinda mysterious and confusing after this episode, but I think the simplest explanation just based on what happens in this episode is that Kazuki has a lot of self-loathing about his “fake” connection to Haruka, and the whole situation with Haruka’s accident, so he probably doesn’t feel able to connect with Haruka ‘as himself’, and so he latched onto whatever alternate persona he could find instead. I still feel like it’s deeper than that, but I dunno.

One thing that stuck out to me in the flashbacks was the part where Kazuki and Haruka talked about how Kazuki has been ‘dressing differently’, and how Kazuki ‘doesn’t want to look like his family’. Which makes me think that Kazuki developed a habit of cross-dressing sometime after learning about his family situation, before the whole Sara thing began. And if that’s the case, then I think there’s probably more to the idea of Kazuki cross-dressing than just Sara being a convenient persona for him to adopt to connect with Haruka indirectly. But it’s kinda hard to piece together the logic of it if Haruka did get into regular cross-dressing if it was to ‘not look like his family’. I mean, unless we assume that he actually is trans. If it wasn’t for the whole Sara thing I’d assume that it was just about him, like, getting piercings and stuff to try and assert his individuality, but I don’t think it’s that.

I’m curious to see more of Haruka’s side of things, since I think there’s more going on with him than what we’ve seen, going by stuff like the mystery of why he has Kazuki’s mother’s scent pouch. I think that he must know something about Kazuki and his birth mother, since the entire reason for his accident seemed to be that he was afraid that Kazuki was going to abandon him. Which makes me think that Haruka knew that Kazuki was meeting with his birth mother, and he assumed that it meant Kazuki wanted to go back to his real family and leave him behind. So I wonder how Haruka might have known about that, since Kazuki apparently kept his meeting with his mother a secret.

I also get the feeling that, even though on some level he’s probably hurt for obvious reasons now that Kazuki’s whole secret has been revealed, he probably cares more about being able to connect with Kazuki. I think that if they were able to talk things out, Haruka would just be happy about being able to properly connect with his brother, without the whole Sara thing.

And on the topic of Sara, we got to see her in the flesh in this episode, and it certainly looks like she’s some kind of a kappa that has a human form it transforms into. Which I think was fairly obvious by this point, but it was nice to see it laid out explicitly. It’s also worth noting that it also means that she is indeed a real person who is separate to Kazuki. After the narrative misdirection in episode 1, I was wondering if maybe there’d be some larger twist about Kazuki literally being Sara, somehow, but they seem to be pretty distinctly separate people.

Since we’re nearing the halfway point, this seems to be where the patterns are breaking and things are coming to a head, which is happening on a few different fronts. For one thing, Kazuki’s big secret has finally been laid bare for everyone to see, so we’re gonna have to see how that whole mess pans out now. This is also the first time that they’ve failed to defeat a kappa zombie, so now they’re gonna be stuck in their kappa forms until they actually beat this one. Which might be difficult, since Kazuki seems willing to just live as a kappa forever now. Last week, Reo and Mabu said that they’d try and raise the desire power of their next victim, but I get the feeling that the main trio ‘losing’ wasn’t because the kappa zombie was tougher than usual, but more because Kazuki was so viscerally unwilling to acknowledge whatever truth was being made apparent by his secret leak that the entire process forcibly stopped. Which seems to be about the mystery of why Haruka had Kazuki’s mother’s scent pouch. It looks like Kazuki probably has an idea of what it means, but it’s somehow so extreme and shocking that he refuses to look at it.

Considering how it looks like Kazuki is going to have to come face to face with his current situation in order for them to beat the kappa zombie and return to normal, I think a lot of this will probably get answered and resolved in the next episode, so I’m really curious to see how it turns out. And after that, it looks like Reo and Mabu are gonna be more important in the second half.

And on the note of those two, we got another post-credit stinger scene that was about them this time. I think I’ve basically already been spoiled on this from stuff I’ve seen on twitter that I guess was from people who’ve read the first light novel volume, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to me, but it was still a good scene. My understanding of the situation is that Mabu is maybe possibly dead, but his body is being kept alive by some outside force, and thus he has a mechanical heart, and he apparently needs to be ‘maintained’ regularly. It also looks like his situation has also lead to him becoming emotionally dead, which you can really see when you read the prequel manga about them, in which Mabu was a huge dork who was very emotionally expressive. Which really makes their whole current situation even more tragic.

I was reading a translation of a recent magazine interview where Ikuhara said that these two have a ‘completed relationship’ that has begun to fracture, which gets to the heart of why I think they’re such a surprisingly interesting duo. It just seems very rare for Ikuhara to write about characters that have regular, healthy, adult relationships like this, especially not ones between gay men. So it’s interesting to see him writing about how a pre-existing relationship can be warped by time and circumstances.

We’ll see how it goes, but it looks like Mabu’s ‘maintenance’ might involve him pretty much going out and sleeping with random people, which on the one hand seems kinda odd, but on the other hand we’ve already heard about the idea of ‘desire energy’, so maybe casual sex is literally the fuel source for Mabu’s mechanical heart. And if that’s the case, there’s a whooooole lot of interesting subtext going on there, especially when you think about the ‘desire/love’ conflict that’s been set up. I’ve also been wondering if this series would end up exploring monogamy vs polygamy via the conflict between them and the main trio, and so it’d make sense if their own relationship is currently in conflict because of the struggle between casual sex and faithful monogamy. I get the feeling that Reo wants to have him and Mabu stay strictly faithful to each other, but he also might not want to force himself to regularly have sex with him just as a fuel source for Mabu’s heart, since that would be all kinda of messed up, and it’d probably make Reo feel insecure about the validity of their relationship. And so Mabu has to find other people to have sex with, and because he seems emotionally dead now, he doesn’t understand Reo’s concerns. Reo’s mocking line about how Mabu ‘is just seeking pleasure’ also seems to play into the whole desire/love conflict.

I’m really curious to see where things go with these two. I have a feeling that Reo might end up allied with the main characters, given that it seems like he’s only working for the otter empire because he needs to.

I still wonder if they’ll show off their backstory in the anime, especially with them having raised Sara, but we’ll see how it goes.

#murasaki rambles #sarazanmai #this got pretty long but there's a lot to say about this episode lol

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thezolblade · 6 years

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Ship Meme! Tagged by @the-cryptographer ~

1) Ultimate Otps:

Which of them have ‘ultimate’ qualities...? GS Isaac/Alex would be kind of an ‘ultimate power’ ship, if they got a plot with twists and turns and character development and reasons to cooperate. I’d expect that more from fic than canon - so many other canons have lots of epic slow burn adventure fics for hero/villain-or-antivillain ships. But so far in GS, for those two, I’ve mostly found (good) crackfic, or non-shippy ‘they fight to the death and Isaac wins and marries Mia’ stuff that doesn’t treat them with even as much nuance as the canon.

Not that I mind mudshipping - my ultimate GS polyship would be something like Isaac/Mia/Felix/Alex(/Veriti/The Ice Queen), with interesting dynamics between every two characters in that set of four (and Mia/Veriti), even with some of the bonds possibly being platonic. Though when I’ve written long plotfic it’s very easily gotten platonic/ambivalent/angsty bc it tends so much towards drama, and conflict may drive plots (hence its abundance in plotbunnies), but I find it hard to headcanon characters getting past hurts and grudges very easily; I want to see them make the effort, but it feels like they’d need a lot of time and personal growth to get there, and I might not even figure how well they do until I’m almost 100K words in. And in some very angsty verses there’s no chance. I want to read other people’s adventure fic too, with fun ideas that manage heel-face turns or antihero plots in a slightly lighter way...

PMMM Madoka/Homura is another ‘ultimate power’ ship, if they can get to a point where Godoka and Homucifer can deal with each other as equals again, both with full knowledge of everything that’s happened and the resolve to truly save themselves, each other, and the rest of the universe. :o

Utena/Anthy is quite an ‘ultimate reality’ ship, when they find their revolution.

2) A ship you’ll always 💜??

The Harvest Moon fan in me is going ‘purple heart? that’s not a very high level of affection??’ ...but taking it as an emoji for ‘love’... without repeating anything above, pokemon Green/Red is always nostalgic (gameverse Ash/Gary, the names get a little confusing as there are localisation differences and I like the old manga and anime too but haven’t watched/read anything recent in those canons).

GS Imilshipping, too, in fic verses where they had a close bond. FE Lucia/Ilyana, I wish they had epilogue content after their support, still mean to write out a plotbunny for them sometime. Soren/Ike, of course, and Tibarn/Reyson.

ToS Lloyd/Colette/Sheena/Zelos, again with strong bonds between all of the pairs in that foursome. They did so much to help each other find hope by striving to save and trust each other, creating a new kind of salvation together.

Skies of Arcadia Fina/Aika/Vyse, Vyse/Ramirez, and Ramirez/Galcian. Never found much fanstuff for it, but it caught the imagination.

3) Current obsessions??

Lots of MadoHomu vibes after getting a oneshot written for them. Confident!Madoka makes both of them happy when they’re not dying; it’s a shame she doesn’t get much screentime as her confident and cheerful self, since so much of her time as a magical girl passes offscreen. Even while she was more unsure during the series, she demonstrated her desire to protect her friends, and Homura commented time and time again on her kindness - she loves her for it, and when she discourages it anyway, it’s because she’s come to believe that it’ll be the death of her. If they were truly safe, they could support each other so well - it could be a world away from the desperation that marked the end of Rebellion, when neither of them are at all okay. :s

Also getting quite into darkfic plotbunnies, and I know ‘darkship’ is a term in some cases for character dynamics fulfilling their worst potential, descending into violence and destruction that at least one character Does Not Want, but in the verses of those plotbunnies I guess they still fit the label of antiships better than ships.

4) A ship you never thought you’d like??

Uh, a lot of the stuff on the gs kink meme caught me by surprise, when rarepairs got suggested and the fills or plotbunnies got interesting - Alex/Ivan, Eoleo/Rief, Alex/Amiti (in a BAD IDEA way). And on lj/tumblr, Mia/Sheba was pleasant surprise too. Not that I ever had any preconceptions about disliking ships, they just hadn’t occurred to me.

In FF7, I don’t think I expected to see compelling Cloud/Seph or Zack/Seph at first, all those years ago, but I quickly found that there are a lot of good AUs and darkfic. Especially when they’re alongside other good ships like Cloud/Zack, Aerith/Zack, Aerith/Cloud, Aerith/Tifa, Tifa/Cloud etc.

5) A ship you used to like but don’t anymore:

Uh idk exactly. I used to read a lot of Buffy fic by ship to find characters whose dynamics were interesting in the show, but iirc I ended up skimming any content that was really ‘shippy’ to get to the plot and jokes and emotional bonding over real stuff, not random physical attraction, and nowadays I don’t think I’d bother skimming so much stuff just bc I hoped it’d be interesting and wanted to keep giving it a chance.

6) A ship that should be canon??

Well some that are very strongly implied but not explicitly stated feel like ‘yep that’s canon’ but could maybe use some more in-universe and author confirmation when not everyone seems to agree - Ike/Soren, Utena/Anthy in some versions of canon, etc.

7) A canon ship you hate???

I like to hate the way darkships go sometimes, but that’s what makes them an interesting story, going ‘noo’ about characters’ bad decisions, though that usually only works if they had better potential that they’re falling short of, not necessarily in a romantic sense... Can’t think of many cases where that happens in canon. Uh I think most explicitly canon relationships are either one option among many routes (and I get tired of support grinding), or I’m a bit indifferent, or if I dislike how it’s done I’d still start playing devil’s advocate and wondering how it could have been done differently if I spend any time considering it.

Oh in FE Awakening I kinda hated how Virion’s flirting in the main plot cutscenes was creepy and painted him as a bad joke, but his supports are much better and some of them are great - how do you explain liking his ships when he has such a bad start (and such bad English voice acting)? I also hated the way the player character’s support options didn’t all show up until endgame, so I missed them the first time and had to replay and wait until then to support grind, and then it all got repetitive grinding the same dlc maps so many times over just for such short supports, and the endgame marriage candidates that were most interesting (bc how the hell could the game make that work, with a head of state or a former enemy??) ended up with really rushed and unconvincing relationship development, and the child recruitment maps were hellishly difficult at that point in the endgame, and all in all it got a bit un-fun and not worth the effort. :/

8) A ship you shipped for years??

Most of the above. Also stuff like Saiyuki Sanzo/Goku, GS Alex/Felix or /Saturos, Jenna/Sheba, Karis/Sveta, Pokemon Misty/Erika, FE Florina/Lyndis, and, uh, probably stuff that I’m forgetting right now.

9) A ship everyone 😍 but you don’t care for?

...Was there anything? Some of the cliche stuff bugs me, but I’d usually think ‘what about writing the dynamic this way and maybe adding poly?’

10) Favorite rare pair???

Mm what's rare? Any gs Alex!ships at this point...

Edit: I forgot to tag anyone, so. If meme time sounds like fun, @sazandorable, @meganekkomeguca, @droory, or anyone who feels like it?

#meme

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