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Seeing this pop up after all these years inspired me to go looking. Turns out the line is called *Dango Mushi*, they're from Bandai, and can be had fairly cheaply and easily if you search for them places like Mandarake!

https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/listPage/list?keyword=Dango%20mushi&lang=en

The Tokyo Toy Show got underway in Japan over the weekend, bringing a bunch of looks at fun new stuff. I’ll just check out a couple of ‘em here. One of the first things that caught my eye was these guys, apparently from a line called Dang Mushi. There’s nicely-sized, detailed pillbug toys, that have little movable legs and can roll up and everything! They look real cute, and are a novel enough idea that I can see a lot of people going in for them. I definitely wouldn’t mind grabbing one, depending on the price.

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Of course the biggest post I write in ages comes just as Twitter, where I normally share things, starts really collapsing on people. So heck it, I’ll share it here for anyone who migrated or still follows me, y’all deserve it.

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I love the duality of this man <3

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Me vs. The Mitchells vs. The Machines

The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a really cool movie. Seriously! It’s the Spider-Verse crew continuing to be at the top of their game, doing their damnedest to elevate and evolve 3D film animation in a way apart from the ongoing Disneyfied edge-sanding seen elsewhere. Several sequences, especially the final fight scene at the end, are absolutely jaw-dropping. A lot of the writing of the movie is also genuinely clever, with some cool tricks of weaving in Chekov’s Guns that you don’t even realize WERE Chekov’s Guns until they’re deployed, but then make perfect sense. And I also just have to say there’s something oddly heartening about a movie that does a lot to target Millenials in terms of nostalgia, but not so much via our shows and movies and music the way other project might go about, but specifically by tapping the internet meme culture of the early-00’s that’s so media-unique to that emergent generation. There’s some genuine heart visible in so many of the levels of how this thing was made that I can understand its touting as an instant classic and the waves of praise and popularity that have followed its release.

Unfortunately, I can’t so unilaterally praise this movie, mostly because I can NOT stop thinking about how poorly-implemented and mis-framed its central familial conflict is.

Oh yeah spoilers for this movie I guess

So I’ll need to detour at first and talk about A Goofy Movie, which isn’t much of an issue for me since I fucking love A Goofy Movie. And watching The Mitchells vs. The Machines my initial takeaway was a pleasant observation that someone had basically grafted A Goofy Movie to The World’s End, which could have made for an extremely fun time for me. A Goofy Movie, so it goes, centers on the conflict between a father and child trying to understand each other, spurred on by the father conscripting the child into an impromptu road-trip which the child initially resents but eventually leans into as a vehicle for understanding as the family members open up to each other and end with a greater appreciation for their familial bond as well as healthier, more open lines of communication. There are comical misunderstandings, dramatic misunderstandings, and escalating Wacky Adventures that keep the trip feeling suitably cinematic in scope. And as The Mitchells vs. The Machines continued on, I kept finding myself rounding back to that comparison and asking “Why am I not getting into this as much as I do A Goofy Movie?”

It turns out to be a point of motivation, actually. In A Goofy Movie, Goofy dragooning Max into the cross-country fishing trip is immediately borne out of his (however misinformed) desire to keep his son from going down a wrong, potentially delinquent or criminal path. Goofy has concerns about the lessened connection and communication with Max, sure, but that’s a symptom of his inability to communicate his actual worries about Max’s behavior to him, not the sum total of the problem he feels needs fixing. Goofy is under the impression there are genuine problems Max is going through, and while he’s got the actual particulars wrong, he’s not really that far off, since Max still IS the kind of kid to elaborately hijack a school function or make up extravagant lies to get attention from the girl he likes rather than just talking to her and asking her out like a normal human-dog-person. Goofy’s objective is firmly centered on helping Max for Max’s sake, and he’s only taking up a few weeks out of Max’s summer and causing him to miss a single party in order to do it.

I lay all that out so you can try to understand my headspace coming at critiquing The Mitchells vs. The Machines and negatively viewing its own take on a plot concept I ostensibly love by default. The problem, as said, is one of motivation. In The Mitchells, Rick’s dissatisfaction with his relationship with his daughter Katie is purely that: Dissatisfaction with their relationship. Katie herself is, by all accounts, doing spectacularly. She’s got a healthy relationship with friends and other family members, she’s gotten accepted into a prestigious film school, and her YouTube account seems to pull pretty keen numbers (With all the tech jokes in this movie it’s a wonder there’s never a riff on her shilling NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends). The conflict between father and daughter is purely a case of them growing apart in her teen years demonstrably because Rick has no understanding of her current passions and makes no effort to do so, which leads to him having consistently questioned and doubted her ability to succeed in her field. The film frames the impromptu road-trip as his attempt to ‘fix’ the issues between them, but the only thing broken by the presentation of the story is Rick’s approach to parenting in the first place. He could easily have made Katie warm to him on the way out by replacing or paying for the laptop he broke and throwing her a subscription to her YouTube channel, but then the movie would be shorter and we wouldn’t be able to pretend the conflict was anything other than his own pursuit of self-centered actualization.

That’s the other issue, of course, the way The Mitchells vs. The Machines consistently rounds back to the point that Katie is somehow shouldering half the responsibility for the father/daughter communication breakdown. But as stated above, it really has hardly anything to do with her. Katie’s succeeding on her own terms, and the only outreach she would theoretically need to do to her dad would be to make HIM feel better, something he could do himself if he’d only actually pay attention to the cool videos she keeps trying to show him and not constantly deciding that HE knows that SHE will fail. It’s a fundamentally one-sided conflict from what we’re shown, and yet the other members of the Mitchell family continuously treat Katie like she needs to accommodate her father’s personal whims and not hurt his feelings despite the fact that he’s the one who went behind her back and canceled her flight, even forcing her to miss her first week of college (!) simply because he felt sorry for himself that they didn’t like the same things anymore. Again, Katie’s doing great, it’s Rick that decides to make his problem the entire family’s problem, and while I’m going to hesitate to refer to this behavior as out-and-out abusive, it is still absurdly selfish and pointedly poor parenting. 

The movie seems to nominally strive for balance in the conflict, not making it entirely Katie’s job to fix her dad’s hurt feelings, and indeed having a whole sequence where he realizes what a Big Jerk he’s been about not trying to understand or support her passions, and resolving to actually Make An Effort moving forward. The problem is that this is still framed as one half of the equation, as Katie supposedly gets to understand where her dad is coming from, which...makes her feel better about all the times he said she would fail and so she should rely on and appreciate him more? And the reason that’s a fundamental issue is annoying, because it means we have to talk about Rick’s Stupid Fucking Cabin.

Look, I hate doing this. I personally try very hard to keep in the mindset that stories are stories and things happen in them because they are stories. I am loathe to attempt picking apart the points of particular plot points, but the problem is that this Stupid Fucking Cabin is positioned as the heart of the humanity of the entire movie, yet it hinges on a sequence of decisions that no actual human being would ever come by. First off, do you have any idea how long it takes to BUILD a home like that, let alone as one guy apparently doing it himself? Rick spent the better part of his twenties building this big Fucking Stupid Cabin to fulfill his lifelong dream of ‘Living in the woods’, only for his wife to get pregnant once it was finished, leading to him just dropping like that? Was there no planning in this family? Was Katie an accident that Rick immediately was this endeared to? I mean, he totally seems like a pro-lifer. But then why do they need to sell the Stupid Fucking Cabin on account of a kid coming along? How were Rick and Linda planning on living out their lives there if not with resources that could support them as well as a kid or two? Rick could have just raised his kids in the woods in his Stupid Fucking Cabin and they would have stood a better chance at turning out like little duplicates of himself and his own interests like he clearly wanted. That’s to say nothing of this sequence of events being framed as a ‘failure’, despite that fact that Rick handily succeeded at what he set out to do, only to turn around and abandon the thing he succeeded at himself on seemingly the same sort of impulsive whim that leads to him dragging his whole family on a road trip because he doesn’t understand YouTube. There are motivating factors to these decisions he made that could inform the whole context of this supposedly tragic backstory, but we aren’t privy to anything resembling them, and the result is a plot point that seemingly only exists to make Katie (and the audience) feel bad for Rick in the third act of the movie.

The real answer is the ultimate assertion of this thing by the finale, that Katie should be ‘grateful’ to Rick for his ‘sacrifice’ of his dream that supposedly allowed her to be in the place she is now. Except Katie had no part in Rick’s bizarre impulsive choice to build a Stupid Fucking Cabin then sell it as soon as a kid popped out so he, I guess, could feel some sense of important familial contribution. That’s to say nothing of the point about parental figures who make grand, sweeping gestures nominally for the good of their kids, but are effectively and emotionally unavailable in the day-to-day engagements of their lives. Because unlike Goofy in A Goofy Movie, Rick isn’t actually doing what he’s doing for Katie’s sake. Her motivation for most of the movie is to move away from home and go to college, a completely normal-ass thing that children do. Any of Rick’s outreach or efforts to ‘fix’ relationships and situations are purely for the sake of his own hurt feelings, and the way Katie’s mother and brother consistently push her into going along with them only highlights the overt way this whole family’s problems are hung up on the insecurities of of this single stubborn jerk. But then, that’s my other major misgiving with The Mitchells vs. The Machines: Its expected exaltation of the default biological family as some hallowed unit for which it is a tragedy to fall into any degree of dysfunction. This is with pointed dismissal towards the idea of Found Family, seen as a distraction, an obstacle to Katie realizing who her TRUE people are, and coming around to a sense of fulfillment because she managed to massage her dad’s ego for long enough that he stopped being totally dismissive of the things that brought her joy. You see, Found Families are fun, but they aren’t REAL or SPECIAL because they already accept and appreciate you for who you are, unlike these people you’re biologically obligated to share living space with for 18+ years whom you have to forge bonds with through varying degrees of communication breakdowns and compromises in self-agency.

With all that in mind, it highlights some of the smaller issues in the movie’s setup as well. This is perhaps petty, but jeez was I annoyed with the film’s framing of The Mitchells as this ~craaaazy~ ~weeeeiiiird~ family which included such outlandish quirks as ‘Dad who doesn’t understand technology’ and ‘Young boy who really likes dinosaurs’. And the wishy-washy tone of the familial conflict is echoed in the ‘The Machines’ part of the plot, which mostly led to me sitting on edge throughout the whole film as I wondered how it was going to come down on the subject of those kids and their darn smartphones. It ultimately doesn’t go full anti-technology, which makes sense given how much of Katie’s character revolves around using the stuff, to say nothing of the predilections of the people who actually, uh, made this movie. But the most it can manage is a halfhearted “Maybe unregulated big tech bad?” which even then is undercut, mostly I assume because of the various big tech companies involved in producing and streaming this thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m overall glad it doesn’t go full "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch", but a lack of any insight or ideas on that front means that the familial relationship element is the only conceptual element it really has to stand on, and I just spent over 1800 words breaking down why that fundamentally didn’t work!

It’s an aggravating situation, because lord did I want to love The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It’s gorgeous, it’s got some clever bits in the writing, and it can honestly sling a punchline like nobody’s business, there are some KILLER jokes in there. But it just became impossible all the way through the end for me to engage with the heart of the movie, its central connective conflict, on the terms it wanted me to. Now it’s admittedly possible that, perhaps like Rick Mitchell, that’s my problem. I’ve seen a lot of love for this movie from my peers, and it does make me question my own projections: I don’t want to get TOO personal on main, but I admit that it’s entirely possible that people who’ve enjoyed an actually functional fatherly relationship would better engage with the emotive connections this movie wants you to make. But even with that caveat, I was able to find my own way to resonate with the similar stakes of A Goofy Movie just thanks to the more effective way that one was framed, so if this one couldn’t hook me, maybe it was The Mitchells vs. The Machines’ fault after all.

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NOTHING in classical literature gets me like odysseus introducing himself to the people who are putting him up as “I am Odysseus, known for my many clever tricks and lies” like i would want that man out of my house immediately

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fuck instagram except for the lesbian couple i follow on there with two kids who got married 10 years ago as a “heterosexual couple” and then one night one of them came out as a lesbian and then the other one came out as a trans woman so they stayed together and now live their best gay life

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“Is that an OSHA violation?”

“I think it’s just a crime.”

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Rage and Replacements in Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII isn’t my favorite video game ever. Hell, it’s not even my favorite Final Fantasy game (That’d be FF4). But it is a game that I really, really like, and for that I’m immensely grateful that Final Fantasy VII Remake exists. Not just for letting me dive into an exhaustingly immersive version of this game’s world that, thanks to design, music, and general vibes, ‘feels’ pitch-perfect as a recreation of that, but also because it lets me experience a resurgence in Final Fantasy VII fan enthusiasm and discussions in our modern era. Just being able to scroll through my Twitter feed and see tons of great art and memes based on this old game I love is a testament to how worthwhile this project has turned out to be.

That said, as anyone who’s played through all of FF7R can now tell you, much of that rich retro-recreation is in service of the later twists in this installment. The whole thing turns out to be designed to pull the rug out from under the player and the characters by the end, an exercise in escaping the original plot of Final Fantasy VII as much as the walled-in city of Midgar itself. And there’s thus some trepidation from people who may have preferred that this revisiting of the story stay on the rails they remembered, sticking only to the plot of the original just with all those glossy current-console-generation bells and whistles helping it along. And while I can’t really condemn that mindset, I also can’t really adopt any element of my own.

As someone who’s played through Final Fantasy VII several times, and has played the beginning of Final Fantasy VII particularly quite a few times, the attention to detail in recreating the Midgar portion was worthy of applause. But as much as I was happy to get sucked back into the world, right from the start, pretty much, I was being even more drawn in by the presence of new elements. Right after that first reactor bombing run, where the demo left off (both in the original and for the Remake), we get a new illusory scene of Sephiroth and the appearance of the spooky plot-arbiters called Whispers as Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth himself all make cryptic statements hinting towards the idea that we might have Done This All Before. And as an absolute slut for metatext in fiction, that really drove me as I played through the thing. It creates an interesting context, treating the plot of Final Fantasy VII as a setting unto itself that we’re then drip-fed this new plot on top of. And of course that doesn’t become clear until right at the end, but it’s still an element, that question of what’s ‘really’ going on here even as we’re also enjoying being taken through an FF7 theme-park with fancy new takes on stuff like Wall Market and the Train Graveyard.

I guess my hang-up comes in comprehending the real issues of FF7 faithful upset that we didn’t get a straight recreation. A lot of times my attitude towards new versions of things is “The original still exists, so if you don’t like the changes made to the new one, you can still go back to the old one.” And indeed, if all these folks are as big of fans of the original FF7 as they profess to be, they can understand that Remake isn’t going to cause their PS1 discs to blink out of existence. Part of me can understand a fear that with Final Fantasy VII Remake 2 (whenever that manages to come out) pointedly going in an ‘unknown’ direction plot-wise, we may miss out on seeing reenvisioned versions of our favorite later FF7 stuff, but this is Tetsuya Nomura we’re talking about. I think it’s clear that whatever else you think of the man, Nomura is a HUGE fan of FF7. Cait Sith has already popped up, and Cid, Vincent, Yuffie? Safe to say all those characters will still be in there. The Gold Saucer will almost certainly still be in there. Chocobo breeding and fights with the Weapons, probably all still going to be in there. They’ll probably still make us do the Wutai sidequest again. The contexts may end up changing and there may be all sorts of wild new shit in-between, but to think a massive FF7 fanboy like Nomura is going to completely excise a lot of the most enjoyably iconic parts of it is to ignore the sheer unbridled love for the game that came through just in this first part.

And god, how can you not be excited to actually have no idea how or if Aerith is going to die in this version? They’re setting me up for another shock based on one of the most overspoiled spoilers in video-game history, and that’s friggin’ brilliant, if you ask me.

Because the fact is, all those elements in the original FF7 are what make it still hold up today, and if you want to experience them in their original iteration, you can absolutely still go back and play it. Heck, I’m amazed at how much playing through Remake has me hankering to return to the original, never mind revisiting all that Compilation material. This game has me curious about checking out Dirge of Cerberus, a game that everyone knows is bad! But on the subject of the original, there is the point of those who seemingly were counting on Remake to ‘replace’ that old game, or newcomers who jumped on thinking this would be an ideal way to experience that story for the first time. And with that ending up a wash, I don’t think it’s as big a deal as some are making it out to be, again for the simple fact that the original FF7 still exists, and can be bought and downloaded and played on more platforms than I can list at this point. You can play FF7 on your phone! If you’re reading this and getting mad about Remake’s plot changes on mobile, you can just download the original FF7 on that device and play it instead.

Because it’s important to admit that graphical fidelity and robust modern gameplay flourishes do not a masterpiece make. I like a lot of the touches in the original FF7, its prerendered backgrounds used for a sense of style and perspective that would’ve been unthinkable in the sprite era of RPGs, but it is true that a lot of its other graphics, especially its overworld models, look a bit shit. They’re chunky, awkward first attempts at translating the old Final Fantasy style to a polygonal place, and they definitely don’t hold up. But for something great, looking like shit shouldn’t matter too much. I said my favorite Final Fantasy was IV, and that game looks like shit too, running into simply awkward translation to the 16-bit era the same way VII did with 3D on the PlayStation. But IV is still a wonderful game to play that tells a killer story with characters I love. And FF7 does the same, with its own systems and interfaces to gameplay that make it great to go through even as those characters are represented by shuffling tinkertoys. If you love FF7 so much that you were all-in on its Remake and compelled by the nostalgia it summoned, then you should still be able to derive joy from that original and recommend it to newcomers for the same reasons. To feel betrayed that this new version didn’t sufficiently replace it is to admit that you thought your timeless favorite needed replacing.

And finally, I have to laugh at anybody arguing that Final Fantasy VII Remake was ‘falsely advertised’ as it was, since you know what other game famously misrepresented itself in its advertising?

Final Fantasy VII.

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I summarized several animorphs books for a friend I’m lending them out to

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“FUCK yeah I’m gonna give that kid a goodberry!”

Fuck yeah

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Working from home cuz of quarantine and I’m procrastinating lol so have some Charbee snuggles.

I feel like if Bee was told he had to practice social distancing from Charlie he’d die. Good thing Bots don’t have to worry about that.

Charbee discord

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PS1 graphics

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Gimme your best Animorphs summaries, y’all

My own best attempt so far:

You know how there’s a trend right now to do hyper-realistic superhero stories as horror-comedies, à la Watchmen and The Boys?  Well, Animorphs is the only series from that genre written and marketed as a way to teach cool animal facts to 8- to 12-year-olds.

I assume I’m not the only one who’s ever been asked about Animorphs merch or books and found myself trying to explain the entire series in ≤ 10 seconds.  So give it to me.  How’d you explain, and how’d it go?

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CRAB!!!!