#Expert Secrets

[harmoniouslymindful]

Putting In The Work But The Sales Aren’t Showing Up?

Dear Entrepreneur, You’re putting in the work, but the sales just aren’t showing up and it’s getting SO frustrating!! Is this you? Perhaps your offers aren’t landing or you’re struggling to get the right people to pay attention. Whatever the problem, it’s costing you time, money and growth. The Selling Online Challenge is built to address these exact pain points. For just $100, you’ll learn…

[wormtime123]

thinking hard. about last life grian saying about etho “he has no loyalty to you, he’s just immediately teamed up with the next guy that’s come along. if he loved you why didn’t he give you a life" and secret life etho saying about grian “he had to move on with his life, what was he supposed to do, mourn the whole time?" both projecting their own reasonings for ‘abandoning’ certain alliances when they turned south. these two being teamed and staying loyal until the end. can anyone hear me

[forgetful-nerd]

To drop Rise! Mikey into the hands of the 2012! Boys, so he comes back to his universe in a sick all-black battle outfit, covered in black make-up, with a sht ton of secret daggers hidden on his person is……….all I really want in life.

[lokidokeyartichoki]

an oceans 11 heist movie based on a team dedicated to burning down the Gävle Goat

[creatively-cosmic]

in loving memory

or: what did @pkmn-monochrome mean by this

[hotwaterandmilk]

I'm seeing "Wedding Peach was unsuccessful" trotted out on Twitter again and it's honestly kind of funny to me. You can dislike the series, but you're rewriting history if you suggest it was a massive commercial flop/astronomical failure — it simply wasn't.

The Wedding Peach TV series maintained viewership throughout its run which is why it aired an entire year's worth of episodes (the full length it was intended to run) and didn't get cancelled like Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, for example.

I'm not going to pretend it did Sailor Moon numbers, dear god, it absolutely didn't get close hence why it wrapped as it did. I would suggest looking back now, that it was the definition of a mid-performing title for the time period. It sold toys decently but not outrageously, it got viewers but not an outstanding number, and it garnered a small but dedicated fanbase of male otaku. All of which is par for the course when it comes to a mid title in 1995.

Wedding Peach DX was produced because the TV series LD sales were decent enough to warrant it. Children were not buying LD box sets at this time, adult fans were and it was this interest that justified the creation of the four DX episodes as direct-to-video releases. If a series doesn't sell well they don't make more episodes, let alone higher quality deluxe episodes specifically for the home video market (and thus for older audiences with spending power).

It is very important to point out that Wedding Peach DX had NO INVOLVEMENT from the original creative team. Tomita Sukehiro and Yazawa Nao did not contribute to its creation, Tadano Kazuko didn't provide designs. Yuyama Kunihiko was the driving force behind the production of the DX episodes and he served as both director and writer for all four episodes (bringing on Wedding Peach animator and soon-to-be frequent Pokémon collaborator, Ichiishi Sayuri to serve as character designer).

What inspired these to be fanservice dreck to the level they ended up being is honestly beyond me. I mean the otaku market definitely wanted more episodes featuring the characters (and more songs featuring the seiyuu, if you want to see how keen otaku were for FURIL please see this post) but part of what they liked about the characters at the time was their (barfbarfbarf) perceived purity and innocence. The DX including panty shots and swimsuits kind of threw them for a loop. Even now, if you look at discussions about the DX among otaku there's a bit of a divide in opinion.

The DX episode sales were (as far as I can tell based on magazines from the time) also mid, but enough to cover four episodes. Three and four don't seem to have sold as well as one and two, but again the stats from the time aren't comprehensive. I think the fact that there weren't any after episode four says it all, honestly. OVA episodes are expensive to produce and it was extremely common for them to stop immediately if the sales weren't there. DX didn't justify its existence beyond those four episodes and Yuyama moved onto a far more successful project in Pokémon.

On that topic, I think it's important to note that Wedding Peach was OLM's first television series (albeit a coproduction with KSS). If it and the studio's adaptation of Mojacko hadn't made some level of profit it would have been quite difficult for them to adapt Pokémon. Neither Mojacko nor Wedding Peach set records with their viewership or sales numbers, but they both did "OK". It was in Pokémon however, that that OLM truly found a successful property with the series still running today. Sometimes you've got to have a few runs at producing things before you find success. Wedding Peach was one of these early runs, a project where a lot of people cut their teeth but one that didn't justify its own continuation beyond a certain point. Just a very standard media mix from the mid-90s, in other words.

Wedding Peach is a problematic title with indifference through to outright objection to representing love outside of heterosexual romance. Looking back now it feels like an absolute dinosaur on so many levels. Between the anime's fatphobic episode and Momoko dropping some gender essentialism, I'm not surprised people want to relegate it to the dustbin of history.

However, I think it is very telling that Tomita Sukehiro, when presented with the opportunity to tell a similar story in the modern day, chose to represent not just queer love, but platonic and familial love in Wedding Apple. While he can't undo the regressive and cringy elements of the original series, as a creator he has progressed and I'd like to think we can all continue to improve our outlooks and output as we grow.

Disliking Wedding Peach in the modern day is completely understandable. I'm not going to pretend anyone should watch it in 2024 without knowing that it is a camp, cheaply made relic of a time when heterosexuality was considered magic. However, just because it pandered to all the worst things trending at the time doesn't mean it didn't sell enough products or hold enough viewers to justify its production. It did, it just wasn't a strong enough property to go beyond that and that's representative of mediocrity rather than mind blowing commercial failure imho.

[iamnmbr3]

love that draco knows harry well enough to immediately know Harry wasn’t opening the chamber of secrets even when many other people suspected him and despite his parseltongue powers

[katyspersonal]

Healing church setting up the sprinkler in the front yard of the grand cathedral so Amelia can run around and bite the water. Enrichment.

Dude fdshhfdh This is so wholesome xD

This is how Amelia's era as a vicar SHOULD have ended *sob*

[poorlydrawnstraydogs]

what is beastzai's opinion/response to the prev ask and everyone else's reactions

[lulublack90]

Prompt 21 - Speech

@rosekillermicrofic September 21, word count 345

CW - Mention of past abuse (Not described)

Previous part First Jegulus part

It had taken them two weeks to sort out the finer details of their little plan. He and Sirius had met in secret, not wanting the others to find out just yet. He’d told Evan of course, he’d never been able to keep anything secret from him and Evan had cackled himself silly at the thought of Walburga and Orion coming home to find they’d been ransacked. 

Barty was struggling with the fact that he thought Sirius was actually alright. He’d stopped himself and tried to see it from his side. Walburga and the rest of the Black family had tried to force him into being the perfect little heir, but when he’d rebelled they’d beaten him to within an inch of his life. Sirius had shown him the pictures. He hadn’t known quite how bad it had been. He knew he’d left, but not like that. No wonder he hadn’t taken Reg. By the looks of it, he was lucky to be able to get out at all. 

“Hey, er, Sirius, I think I owe you an apology.” Barty grimaced. This was the second Black he’d be apologising to in less than a month. “I thought for years you’d just walked out and left Reg, I had no idea they’d got to you. So I’m sorry, I said a lot of bad things about you to Reg and that might be why he didn’t try and contact you,” Sirius stared at him for a second then shook his head. 

“I didn’t try either. So, no need for the heartfelt speech, as far as I’m concerned, Mother sowed those seeds long before that day, and we played right into it. But jokes on her now.” Sirius winked and went back to what he was doing. 

Barty watched as Sirius expertly used a calligraphy pen to write an invitation to a prestigious party, hours away from Grimmauld Place. “There,” He said with a flourish as he put the pen down and held up the embossed card. Barty grinned wickedly at him. This was going to work.  

[imunbreakabledude]

I can’t quite explain why but I just don’t like Lea Michele for Florence, I don’t like it at all. it’s not like she can’t sing the part and it’s not like the story is so intricate that she can’t handle it but idk. It just feels wrong to me

[keepthedelta]

not people losing their minds over oscar's broken rib saying he'll take everything to his grave we'll never know anything about his life as though he didn't tell us all about it completely unprompted??? if he was really trying to keep it private we wouldn't have found out about it until lando wrote a jenson button style tell all book that mentioned it off-hand in a paragraph mostly about golf and mcdonalds

[carlottastudios]

Every day I get closer to making an unhinged behemoth of a post listing all of the things about Kaeya and his possible connections to mythology & stuff that I notice but NOBODY ELSE SEEMS TO BRING UP IN THEIR THEORIES

(edit: OMG I reached the tag limit I'm so sorry)

[mothman-stolemyeyebrows]

Tim Drake is a coffee gremlin who solely survives on excess amounts of caffeine to get through cases: not entirely backed up by canon characterization but overall harmless

But consider! Tim Drake is an AuDHD king and caffeine has a paradoxical effect on him. It’s the hyperfixation of it all that keeps him going

[goldfinchwrites]

Possibly controversial opinion: when it comes to those “evil toxic masculinity characters”, such as Patrick Bateman, Walter White, Tyler Durden and so on, I don’t think it’s really any more “media literate” to just deride them as bad people and stop there. Of course treating such characters as aspirational does show piss poor comprehension but I also think you’re not fully engaging with the text to say “this man is a BAD PERSON” and leave it at that. And in a lot of cases I think that it’s at the detrimental of actually examining such characters because you’re stopping to scream I DONT ENDORSE THIS every five seconds.

[gemini-queen42]

I need to fix expressions / push the poses more and obvi refinement for clarity BUT-

Meet the sketch wip that is overtaking my mind instead of me just putting the Last Damn Details on Eve's ref♡