#and it makes for 5 years of discourse between people who aren't even talking about the same thing

[randomnameless]

It's crazy how both Adrestia and Almyra have just as much (if not less) worldbuilding and development as the neutral countries in Fates; even moreso when the latter are canonically complete fodder to Nohr and Hoshido, are mostly irrelevant to the actual war, and are just there to give Corrin and their comrades something to do while they travel to Nohr/Hoshido/Valla to put an end to the main war, while the former are meant to be two of the biggest and most important players in the main war and are shown putting up a good fight against the other major countries

Why do you think so many people developed intricate headcanons about Adrestia and Almyra anon -

it's precisely because they are supposed to be "big player" important nations (let's say compared to Albinea) but their games dgaf about them bar some "in Adrestia people love tea" low tier of development lol

All jokes aside,

Some people already said it better than I could, but in general you come up with headcanons to talk about something you really like but has many holes in the canon, that's why you can have a lot of room to come up with whatever you want (or it's easier to avoid the "not canon compliant" hammer since canon is a puff of smoke).

Hell, I took the coliseum + Rhea's Seiros the Warrior's clothes + Word of God saying Adrestia is supposed to be based on Italy with german names to come up with a general "ancient rome" aesthetic for early Adrestia in my own hcs.

Some people really developped an entire lore with languages and patterns and a lot of cultural stuff regarding Almyra - kuddos to them! - because, for a place that is often compared to "Fodlan" by Claude and serves as the basis of his character, well, the Fodlan games are... really scarce about giving us any details regarding Almyra as a country -

(and then Nopes happened - sometimes it's better for canon to remain in a perpetual foggy state than to become what Nopes did to Almyra !)

I like every breadcrumb I can find about Adrestia through the various supports, books and NPCs, but well, you can't make a decent meal out of breadcrumbs.

And Fodlan scattered so many breadcrumbs around that at first glance you expect a banquet... and then only find out that the "promised dinner" is just, well, a handful of breadcrumbs thrown here'n'there on the table.

That's why I'm so upset at the "worldbuilding" lol, it could have been so much (some breadcrumbs are tasty, where's the dish???) but we end up with... a plate of nothing.

Sure FE as a series isn't the best medium to develop and explore different countries/cultures (even if Engage tried to have the cast visit different places and talk to different people, just like Echoes where you can visit villages and talk to people living in said villages!) but FE Fodlan really dropped the bar, and unlike Jugdral, we have no Treasure Book to reveal more about the crumbs we're playing with.

So yeah, I can't really see where the "better writing and worldbuilding than Fates!!!" spiel comes from, and I say this as someone who wasn't particularly fond of FE14 lol

[thatswhatsushesaid]

Why do you dislike 3zun? ( I'm always interesting about your mdzs thoughts , specifically that one that includes jin Guangyao( and his ships that's why I asking)

i've come back to this ask off and on for months now, so i'm sorry i've been leaving you in limbo about it! to be clear, when i'm talking about disliking an interpretation of the 3zun dynamic that involves a romance between all three participants, i'm talking about the throuple interpretation, but also n!elan and n!eyao. (not that i think that needed much clarification lol. i suspect anyone who has been following my blog for longer than 5 minutes knows i'm ride or die for xiyao.)

i'll put this under a cut because i don't want to make my romantic 3zun enjoyer mutuals sad 🥲 my response really isn't going to be very long, or surprising, but in short:

there's just no canon support for it.

i know this is not what everyone needs for their ships to be enjoyable, but it's necessary for me. "but ray, don't you ship chengyao and suyao? those ships aren't canon." you're right, but a romantic interpretation of those relationships also isn't the prevailing opinion on those character dynamics, either. most of the time when i encounter jgy interacting with jc or sms in fic (again, most of the time), their interactions with each other in the story don't strain credulity. this is unfortunately not the case when it comes to romantic 3zun, where 1) fanon 'nice mingjue' da-ge is the prevailing interpretation of nmj, 2) cold, calculating, murder kitten a-yao is the prevailing interpretation of jgy, and 3) lxc is equally emotionally invested in his relationships with both of them, when this is just demonstrably not the case in either the book or the show.

i do want to be very clear that i'm not saying this to shit on nmj or people who enjoy n!elan, as long as they're not being cunty at me, but the way n!elan is written about in discourse, meta, and fic is a blatant lift-and-shift of the canon xiyao dynamic onto this fanon interpretation of the relationship between lxc and nmj. years of enduring, supportive friendship where both parties are consistently seeking each other out? that's xiyao. i'm not saying that nmj and lxc were not good friends and that their relationship wasn't important, but when lxc is presented with a choice between nmj or jgy, he consistently, each time, chooses jgy: to empathize with him, and to protect him, and to spend time in his company. he isn't going to qinghe for months at a time to be with da-ge. he goes to jinlintai, to be with jgy.

i also don't see the relationship between jgy and nmj as being an emotionally intimate one. i don't think they're friends, let alone lovers, and i don't think that's something either of them are interested in at any point in their history. prior to his legitimization (and after, but especially before), meng yao would never have put himself in a position where even the hint of impropriety could be entertained about his relationship with his superior. and while i do agree with what others have written about nmj's hypocrisy and inability to read the goddamn room, i also don't think he would ever entertain the notion of taking advantage of one of his subordinates that way. i am hardly nmj's biggest fan, but i wouldn't ever characterize him as a man who would knowingly put his own desires ahead of his principles. if he did desire meng yao sexually--and again, i don't think he did--he would never act on it. and then of course after the scorching sun palace and jgy's legitimization, jgy is transparently afraid of being alone with nmj, and nmj's only thoughts about jgy involve wanting to kill him. the only way i can ship n!eyao is if it is written as a one-sided, unreciprocated, psychosexual obsession on nmj's part, but understandably that is not the vibe most people who do enjoy this ship go for.

anyway, those are my thoughts. i very much hope my romantic 3zun friends don't friendship-break up with me now, lol.

[devil-works-hard]

Why the books need to be canon to the Bendy Lore

By now we all know that the books have been decanonized. That was a dumb decision, and I'm going to explain why.

The Gent Corporation

If we only go off the games, we know nothing about Gent. Sure, we know they're engineers, that they're connected to the Ink Machine, and they're the next big villains of the series-- but who are they? What are their motives? Why did they get involved with Joey in the first place?

Luckily, the books actually talk about this! TLO paints Gent as using the "run-of-the-mill repair shop" type of facade to hide their ulterior motives. Plus, we learn that Gent was inspired by Joey's philosophy in his autobiography-- Don't you think that would be important to know?

The books show us the cost of Joey's and Gent's experimentations. People died- like actually died, in our faces- because of Gent, which is something we don't get to see in the games.

Not only that, but TLO actually sets up Gent as a legitimate, wide-scale threat. In one of Thomas's chapters, he mentions multiple Gent locations across the country. Imagine if they each have a project like the Ink Machine- something that messes with the fabric of reality, something that eats up people and spits out monsters? Now that's a threat worth building up!

The Coffins (and other employee deaths)

The books tell us that people did in fact die because of Joey. But with the introduction of the cycle, and the decanonization of the books, we don't know if that's still the case. But the five named coffins makes things even more complicated, especially since 3/5 turn into ink monsters (Norman, Susie, and Bertrum) and 4/5 have outright expressed distrust toward Joey (Norman, Susie, Bertrum, Grant). So did people die or not?

I enjoy puzzles, and figuring out mysteries. But I really, really hate that I'm questioning what even happened. Was Susie manipulated into becoming Alice? Did Bertrum have a falling out with Joey about the ownership of the park? What the fuck happened to Grant? Does Lacie matter at all?

Characters

Most of the character development comes from the books. Joey himself suffers so much if you remove the books; BATIM Joey is so different from BATDR Joey. Not only that, but how are you going to decanonize your main antagonist's autobiography? Plus we see more of him in the books than the games too. We see how selfish and manipulative he is. It's not just Joey, either. I cannot emphasize enough how little we know about Allison based on the games. Everything we know about her (and Joey's relationship to her) is from the books.

It goes without saying that some of the most developed characters come from the books. Buddy and Dot from DCTL. Brant, Constance and Bill from TLO. Rose, Archie and Evan from FTB. I am more invested in them than a majority of the BATIM cast, and the entirety of the BATDR cast.

More interesting people have had more interesting thoughts about the loss of diversity, so I won't beat that dead horse here.

The Ink and the Cycle

Once again, the books actually show us how the ink is dangerous. It has a mind of its own; if ingested, it can drive you mad and turn you to ink. The books make the cycle interesting too: you don't need the machine to enter the cycle.

In all

I don't know why they've decanonized the books. My running theory is that, between BATIM and BATDR, they started to rework the lore, and eventually realized the books can't fit anymore. Thing is, this only makes me doubt the overall integrity of the story. They've had eight years to get this figured out. Why are they changing such important canon now? And, in changing canon, they've abandoned some genuinely interesting ideas as well as material important to the original BATIM mystery. I can't shake the feeling that a lot of our original questions aren't going to be answered because the devs have taken things in a new direction.

I've got some additional thoughts about the "books canon?" discourse/discussion below, if you're interested:

Interpretation of the original tweets

First, I want to clarify something regarding this tweet:

Some people have interpreted this to mean that the books are still canon alongside the games, but if they ever disagree on something, the games decide the canon. This is a fine interpretation, but as Mike himself said:

With this in mind, I think it's safe to assume they don't consider the books canon, at all.

I don't know if I'm going to buy Bendy books going forward. Now that they've lost their canon, I just can't entirely bring myself to care. It's the same reason why I never got into the FNAF books, even at the height of my FNAF hyperfixation:

I don't want an alternate timeline, or a nod to the original story, or just side material. I want the story- the actual, canon story.

If the devs need to de-canon the books to make their new lore make sense, whatever. But I don't want to spend actual money on something that's only half connected to the original story. I hope that's not a selfish thing to say.

Books shouldn't be required reading to understand canon, but they should be actually important and relevant to canon. Otherwise, what's the point?

[sudusong]

What made you start shipping Joris, Atcham and Kerub? /genq

Ok this might sound insane but to answer this I need to start with 2015-2018 and talk about 5-6 other fandoms. uh ohhh.

2015-2019

At this moment, my main fandom is Undertale and Homestuck, with fluctuations between both. Me and my mutuals get heavily harassed, and some of us get doxxing threats from the harassment group consisting of illiterate fuckers making up the majority of UT fandom, and our ships get the good old incestjacketing treatment ("umm theyre actually adoptive siblings and found family in my headcanon. You can't ship that"). Multiple people quit the internet or delete all social media due to the death threats. One person stops posting in english and moves solely to Japanese UT fandom. Many accounts are wiped.

At this moment, despite my personal hate (I HATED THEM SO MUCH... LMAO. I wonder what past me would think...) for incest shippers in HS fandom, I think to myself "if even people who ship unrelated characters get hate for shipping them & portraying a character not as Good but as morally gray get attacked like this and can't stop it, I feel bad for people who actually ship problematic things. I don't think people who ship amoral things deserve the treatment me and my friends went through. They're easy to avoid and aren't hurting real people... Unlike some."

It... idk, it's silly, but it really affected how I view fandoms. I think about it a lot I guess. Idk.

Sometime during this time I first watch W4kfu. D0fus becomes my comfort media and I relate a lot to Joris. #neglected by parents squad. Lmao

2022-2023

A lot of things happen at the same time: i get back into UT fandom and become mutuals with multiple people in the same circles that I used to be in. I meet two mutuals, one of them being Egg. They were also veterans of this bullshit discourse. Me and Egg quickly discovered we shared multiple fandoms and had the exact same favorite characters and the exact same, similarly unpopular takes, besides our UT fandom trauma. (Liking Lisa Armstrong from Lisa the Painful, liking Pink Diamond from SU...)

Egg got me into Kingdom Hearts, where my main ship was problematic. At this point, I started using twitter to follow & see content by Japanese fans of UT and KH because they were the only ones who liked the same ships I do and weren't going to tell me to kill myself again ufuxjsndd. (And also because the ship I got into used to be popular, but then all of it's English speaking fans were bullied out of fandom, besides a small community on Twitter. Which I quickly became part of.)

These KH fans included incest shippers among them. Which was still a big squick for me. But I chugged along bc I'm not the one to judge.

In return, I got my friend Egg into Wakfu, because I thought they may enjoy it. And they did. During my rewatch something evil happens and I realize how deeply Insane and Fucked it is that Joris just lives for 600 years with his dad, who might not even remember him. A kafkaesque Metamorphosis occurs one night when, I shit you not, I spontaneously burst into tears while falling asleep because of thinking about how sad Joris must be. My friend egg ends up being a Qilbynome shipper & biiiig fan of Amalia by the end of their watch and they dgaf about Joris. 😭🥀 Egg plants in my head the seeds of "immortality corrupts people" concept with their Qilbynome posting.

At some point, I see another mutual from the same UT fandom circle begin sharing a lot of analysis posts about Hunter from toh being a victim of "covert/emotional incest". I research it, because I feel like this might fit what I think Joris's main issue is. And it does fit. I begin reading other analysis posts by the same person, and see that they ship Hunter and Belos, basing the whole thing off their own childhood experiences. I think "I wonder how they post fics about their experiences so bravely. without being afraid that people are going to go to their comments to tell them they're the proof that all victims eventually become pedophiles and that they should slit their wrists. I want to write this bravely too... like, about my neglect, and other dark topics... something as affecting and honest."

Sometime during this, I write Hocus-Pocus. Egg proofreads it. The entire concept of the fic is that Keke is woefully mentally ill, unequipped to be a parent, and treats Joris as a surrogate sibling/bestie/parent/wife which is fucking with Joris's self-perception in unfixable ways, which Keke isn't getting or seeing or acknowledging.

At this point, I am slowly going insane from having nobody to talk to about these characters and start to try and psiop my KH mutuals into watching D0fus via post-ironic incestposting. It turns out, however, that you can only make so many postironic posts before you start to suspect you're no longer being ironic or edgy.

At this point the "not platonic, not romantic, but a secret, eviler thing" phase started. I didn't want them to be in a romantic relationship (STILL DON'T, for the most part. I largely just like to think about Joris's unrequited feelings), or saw them in a sexual way (this has changed 🥀).

Amidst my slow freakout, Fragile Handle With Care is born. It is a platonic fic, but Joris having incestuous intrusive thoughts is a core part of its plot. I did my utmost to portray in a realistically twisted, mentally ill, sad way.

I was sure that I would get death threats or doxxing threats or suicide bait after posting it, but uhhhh... I gained multiple mutuals,,, in this fandom,,,, instead. Which was cool but scary. I wondered what any of them thought of the failed kiss scene but elected not to ask. 😭

2023-2024

I meet some cool people. I make my dofus blog because I really want to yap about my more "sane" ideas. I finally tell some mutuals in this fandom about my more insane takes, and we begin brainstorming even MORE insane ideas. I decide that, having drawn &written them sucking and fucking AND having imagined them kissing and cuddling in their sleep to calm myself while sad probably counts as shipping even if I don't want it to actually happen and think it's mostly OOC, and come to peace with it.

(Romanticizing fictional family bonds is like crack cocaine when you have BPD & your parents didn't like feed or clean you enough as a child it turns out. 🥀😭 )

Learning about W4ven and Joris's war crimes does smth to my brain and I think "of course you'd do warcrimes. stupid dadfucker."

Slowly begin crashing out with paranoid thoughts that my takes are extremely obvious. Its exacerbated by the general uhhh. Well you know how this fandom is and what its dramas are like, lmao. I stop following most of my KH mutuals because I get so scared that some big name fans might make a google doc about me being an evil and fucked up person. Then I stop using twitter altogether. Then I see drama leak here too and get even more scared. (I don't.... Uhh... Give a shit about kr0smoz fandom drama, btw. Other peoples beef is literally none of my business. Dont bother me about it anymore. i beg.)

Then, in a quick succession, I

1. Implied I want to be a part of an anti-harassment server about kr0smoz too obviously and got called a pedophile for it. And that person then said that all russian people are pedophiles? I think it was someone really mentally ill lmao.

2. Something really bad happened in another fandom.

It all kinda... made me lose my last shreds of hope in any sort of respect or coexistence with people who are just going to call me a pedophile or an abuser for making art? And I felt like it was a matter of time until someone hated me enough to do something to me. So i decided to give up and make people hate me with my own two hands — instead of giving ppl the satisfaction of bringing me down, I made this satisfaction mine only. Ufjdjsj

I hadn't had any hate mail on except that singular ask, but I'm sure a lot of people dislike me quietly now. That's fine by me. I'm so much happier now lmao & I'm doing my part by tagging it.

[ugly-anarchist]

Okay, I can admit when I'm wrong.

However, that doesn't actually change anything. The original intent of the label alloaro itself was always for specifying aros who weren't ace. It was around long before the flag was ever made and one person's views doesn't actually change how the entire community functions, even if that's the most popular flag. Actually, you can see in the notes of that post that people are saying it's a flag for aros who aren't acespec and the creator does not object to that statement.

And the concept of alloaro actually including any acespec person is new. This was not discourse that was around back then. People like quoisexuals and abrosexuals were always included even though they were technically acespec labels but this trend of aroaces calling themselves "aroace alloaros" because they feel sexual attraction or have high libido or want to have sex is new and extremely problematic. Actually the creator specifically says it's not for aroaces and that the flag was made to boost the voices of alloaros and make it clear we're not aroace because we're frequently talked over by aces.

I've been in the community for 8 years. The way people talk about alloaros in the modern age is completely different from the way they were talked about 8 years ago.

There's a difference between the "aroace alloaros" that are around now, spreading misinformation and stereotypes around as fact, and the alloaros who, while technically were acespec in some way, completely rejected the label "ace" and would not be caught dead identifying as an "aroace alloaro" the way it is now.

I swear to god some of you are using this "aroace alloaro" thing to just do what y'all were doing 5 years ago: Breaking down aspec spaces that aren't specifically for aces and shutting us down so it can all be about you again. It's not exclusionism to have a space for alloaros that doesn't include aces. It's not exclusionism to not center aces in every single aspec space. It's not exclusionism to say that alloaro was always intended for allosexuals, aka, non-aces.

I never thought I'd have to say this but alloaro doesn't mean you have a high libido and says nothing about your sexual attraction.

"Alloaros have high libido and wanna fuck" is an alloarophobic stereotype and contributes to our ostracization and abuse. Some alloaros do in fact have high libido but claiming this is a standard or, in fact, a main experience of what it's like to be alloaro is alloarophobia. Some alloaros are sex repulsed or have a low libido and they're just as much alloaro as the rest of us.

I didn't think I'd see people saying "Asexual means you think sex is gross and you never wanna have sex and being alloaro means you just wanna use people as sex objects and are horny 24/7" in the year 2024 but here we are I guess.

[jyndor2]

My guess is that “this is a first for me” now refers to the fact that Cassian’s never been in prison while awaiting execution. He’s been sent to prison for crimes not punishable by death (not that prison wasn’t its own death sentence, at least on Narkina 5) but he’s never been locked in a cell knowing he could get a blaster bolt between the eyes within hours of being locked up. The Partisans were almost certainly planning to execute him, Chirrut and Baze; they just had to clear it with Saw first. As a secondary qualifier, it could also refer to the type of prison; it’s probably the smallest cell he’s ever been in, and it’s in a cave instead of an incarceration facility.

lol okay so i really went in on this as is my mo, not because anything you said is wrong or whatever lol it's your opinion. but it's sparked Discourse in my head rip

i feel like since the show aired i just haven't been explaining myself clearly with this but i'll try: i don't care what headcanon someone uses to handwave a thing that doesn't track 100%. i do it when something just doesn't track to ME or when i feel like telling canon to fuck off lol askdhasjdh but people will use their headcanon explanations to tell folks canon is still consistent. it's NOT lol it's a retconnnnnn

this is why i don't like retcons generally speaking. it just isn't that hard to stick to what canon already says, and while this one isn't really important at all (like it's a comment cassian makes offhandedly and can easily be handwaved like this) i think writers should try to avoid retcons (not always, sometimes things should be retconned because they're trash? but usually yeah retcons are meh). and then when you've got like a relatively small fandom like rogue one's that has been going along with what we all thought was canon until the show aired, it's extremely aggravating to be told that oh actually what we thought was true (even though until a few months ago it was) is not true anymore and aren't we crazy for not seeing that??? not that you have said any of that btw im not talking about you lol.

like i shouldn't have to qualify things to make them make sense with the main piece of media - which rogue one is. andor is a prequel to rogue one. rogue one is not a sequel to andor. andor has the responsibility to track with rogue one because it's supplementary material for rogue one. plus rogue one came out first. i shouldn't have to do mental gymnastics to make little moments in rogue one still make sense. and luckily i can divorce andor from rogue one pretty well and handwave shit and come up with my interpretations like yours and other fans' but we shouldn't HAVE to. it isn't a high bar to meet to be consistent.

when i analyze media, i always start with an out-of-universe (doylist) approach. i look for preconceived notions that might have influenced the writing, i look for motivations and at the history of the writers, etc. and then i can more easily take an in-universe (watsonian) approach. it's just hard for me to ignore inconsistencies, writer biases, real world context etc. probably because i have ocd and i am very literal. that's a personal problem lmfao.

so i can't even get there with things like this because it's obvious to me that tony gilroy, who did not write the film, wanted to tell a great story. he wanted to write what he wanted to write and wasn't super concerned with it lining up 100% with the film in a literal way. and he did. i mean all gripes aside andor is a fabulous show. easily the best thing i've seen all year. but i've still got my gripes lmfao.

in this case i think it's understandable that he'd do that because it actually doesn't make a whole lot of sense that cassian wouldn't have gotten caught by someone at some point. it is more reasonable that he would have. and for someone like the cassian in the show who is certainly anti-imperial, has politics despite what other people in the show say, but is not necessarily radicalized, yeah it makes sense that being sent to prison based on some bullshit xenophobic profiling would radicalize him. that is me doing some in-universe analysis btw.

but let's not kid ourselves. it doesn't fit with that line. before the show aired, not a single viewer thought he was lying or on some obi-wan bullshit with the "certain point of view" thing at that moment. yes, he's a liar. yes, he's a spy.

chirrut, who knows cassian is a captain not because cassian tells him he is but because of the force lol (this is why cassian gives him a weird look like 'how the fuck do you know that???'), takes him at his word and then says 'there is more than one sort of prison' meaning that just because cassian hasn't been literally locked up, it doesn't mean he doesn't have things that hold him back or imprison him metaphorically. that's the whole point of that moment - and lol it's actually kind of a more insulting retcon than I initially thought because chirrut reads cassian extremely well throughout the film with the force. but apparently he doesn't because he takes cassian at his word on jedha.

when cassian is about to go assassinate galen and he's avoiding jyn's eyes and being all shady lol, the camera keeps panning to chirrut looking away from the rest of the group but with a very disgusted expression on his face. he tells jyn that 'the force moves darkly around a creature that is about to kill' when she is like ??? the fuck do you mean by does cassian look like a killer?????

my point is that chirrut has a very good understanding of cassian's vibes in the force. chirrut takes him at his word on jedha but he is visibly disgusted by cassian on eadu. cassian actually being in prison before jedha changes chirrut's connection to the force for me. hmm now i'm mad LOL.

we were not intended to think cassian was lying on jedha. we were however intended to catch how shifty cassian was being on eadu - not making eye contact with jyn in a very overt way, not making a whole lot of sense to anyone, chirrut's callout, baze's deliberate use of "he has the face of a friend" but not that he IS a friend (although he is <333) because again. spy. mask. lying. that's what baze and chirrut call out on eadu, and what makes jyn realize that she fell for cassian's deception. it's really important that chirrut's connection to the force is credible because otherwise lol okay he's just some guy who fights well. he's not that - he's a guardian of the whills and his connection to the force is undeniable if not defined.

cassian's lying on eadu until he has his moment of truth. it's a different feel than his interactions with everyone else on jedha (although when he's talking to jyn about meeting tivik's sister he deliberately doesn't make eye contact).

cassian makes eye contact when he's being honest - the hangar scene, the eadu fight with jyn (which... lol im not even going there right now), definitely on scarif a number of times and most notably in the elevator. when he's lying, he gets avoidant.

that's a deliberate choice by the writers, director and diego ofc. in 2015/2016.

cut to 2020/2021 or whatever and tony gilroy, who did an immense amount of work on rogue one with the reshoots (allegedly mostly in the 3rd act of the film although that first scene with cassian is all him lol - also side note why couldn't he have cut the bor gullet smdh) to the point that he got a screenwriter's credit because of SWG(? the union idk) rules (totally fair of course, but i think a lot of people don't know that he didn't literally write the film or create cassian lol), is writing the best story he can and isn't really worrying about how much it tracks with minutiae from the film or like idk what pablo hidalgo wrote in guidebooks lol (pretty sure that's where the fest thing came from as well as him being 26 and jyn being 22? but also i mean im not sure if that hadn't been decided by the writers of the film).

i mean you'd have to ask him but im sure he'd say as much - that he wanted to tell a great story and as long as it was mostly consistent or could be considered consistent with who cassian will be in rogue one, it's easily handwaved or explained. and yeah that's true for most people but unfortunately for me i'm neurodivergent as hell with a hyperfixation on this dumb film and plus i have severe ocd so i notice discrepancies. and they annoy me.

i wanna be clear: i don't think this is the most egregious retcon of the show. not at all. but i'd like people to acknowledge that it is a retcon and that no, gareth edwards and chris weitz and gary whitta did not intend for cassian to be like "well actually what i meant is that technically, i have been imprisoned but i wasn't sentenced to death" or whatever reason we may now individually use to make it make sense. and i don't see a problem with doing that - i literally make headcanon all the time because canon ends in a way im sad about LOL. but this is headcanon. because canon doesn't track with itself.

also just a note: personally i think it's pretty clear cassian knows that narkina COULD be a death sentence. cassian understands narkina is dangerous as hell from the moment he steps his bare foot onto that metal floor. they fry people. he's smart, to me he knows it's a potential death sentence. but that's just my interpretation of the show.

i think the best way to handwave this retcon is to say cassian hasn't been imprisoned by rebels before or by alleged allies. or maybe in service of the rebellion.

*and cassian recognizes chirrut's force-ishness immediately, which is why he asks if he's a jedi. (it's why im like lol everyone just shut up about cassian not knowing what jedi are, i don't need an explanation for how he learns about them. i don't need them to make a big thing of whether or not cassian knows what jedi are because of course he does, jedi are in fact extremely well known in the galaxy and this is an area where im like tony gilroy stay on your lane XD)

[thejustmaiden]

So out of nowhere I was tagged and quoted by a SR shipper for a blog of mine posted in August of last year. Talk about throwback but, hey, gotta appreciate that level of snooping. 😉

Back in the day I actually used to encourage discourse amongst Inuyasha fans- both shippers and antis alike- but I've since realized that it's a lost cause. But for you, @feministmetalgreymon , I'll grant this exception. Just 'cause it's been a while so why the hell not. haha

I want to assure you, however, that nothing you say will ever convince me that Sesshomaru and Rin are meant to be together romantically or that the story intended it so. Nor will you find any validation here. You can ship them for all I care, but please for all that is good and holy while I have your attention try- I mean really try- to understand why it is so many of us Inuyasha fans are so against this pairing in the first place (newsflash: it's not about ship wars), and why we believe a romance between the two of them is completely and utterly out of character.

For those of you interested in reading this, the blog of mine in question that the above shipper mentions in their counter-argument is here for reference. It's titled "Jaken = Rin's Dad?" I'm going to try and keep this short, but I'm also making no such promises. After all, I'm not exactly known for my brevity. haha Now let's get crackin'!

Like you, feministmetalgreymon, did for your recent blog here where you took screenshots of mine to address certain parts, I will be doing the same and dissecting yours accordingly.

[Snippet 1]

I worked with kids for many years as a teacher, and many people in my family have too or still do. Two of them happen to be just over 5 feet which is quite short for the average adult woman living here. I've also worked alongside many a women of short stature, and never did I hear any of them complaining of issues with their students having difficulty differentiating them from their own peers just because they were short as well. I'm sorry but that's just ridiculous. Kids are quite smart and pick up on a lot more than you seem to give them credit for. Height is not the only characteristic they look at to determine who's an adult and who's not, and it's foolish to suggest otherwise. So unless you're a babysitter who's still in their teens and/or who has very childlike features or behavior then I'm afraid what you're getting at is total hogwash. This is just another example of how you shippers offer nothing of real substance to your reasoning, it's only ever cherry-picking or strawmanning from you guys. Stop deflecting from the real issues please, because this certainly isn't one and only winds up being a complete waste of time for all parties involved.

[Snippet 2]

Okay, calm down now. I wasn't insinuating that relationships between parents and children can't change over time in terms of how they get along. Of course that's possible, as all families experience their fair share of estrangement and abuse. What I was speaking about was in reference to the overall dynamic between the two. Because a bad mother or father can still be viewed as a parental figure to their child even if say they're not in said child's life anymore. Since Sesshomaru and Rin share a healthy bond- and just a friendly reminder that in my blog I even said that he doesn't have to necessarily be labeled her father but that a romantic relationship later would still be inappropriate- I didn't deem it necessary to address what you brought up. Plus, it kinda, umm, misses the point?? Please, let's stay on topic. And it's not captured in the screenshot, but stop acting like there isn't a small part of them that idolizes their parents at some point during childhood. Just like you mention later on how it's normal for kids to have innocent crushes on adults that they eventually grow out of? Well, guess what, the same concept applies here. Kids eventually learn that their parents are far from perfect and make mistakes too. Rin is so damn young in the OG series though that we never even get to see her reach that maturity level.

[Snippet 3]

LOL! Alright, okay, so the "unbreakable bond" bit you're mentioning was actually me quoting you sessrinners. Did you not catch that? I literally spelled it out. *sigh* The whole point I was making is that shippers like yourself make hypocritical and contradictory statements all.the.goddamn.time. One moment you guys claim that Sesshomaru and Rin were essentially strangers and meant very little to each other, only to say in the same breath a few seconds later that they were destined to be together and their bond is like no other. I agree, their bond is special, but why must that mean they're going to fall in love?

That is the root of the matter here. Too many animes/mangas have romanticized this older adult man & young girl growing up falling in love trope that it's become way too normalized and widely accepted across the world- and yes, in some cultures more than others. Sadly, you lack the awareness to recognize how this all works. You know how we know that? When we see that you shippers are so desensitized to sexualized images of girls in the media that you share posts like this one below which *subtly* imply a future romance although one half of that pairing is still just a child in the pic and then try and pass it off as cute. That's like super fucking problematic and it scares me that you can't see that (or deny you do). 🤢

After all that's said and done, Sesshomaru leaving Rin in the village with Kaede is to me the strongest indicator more than pretty much anything else he's done for Rin that proves he is her adoptive father. It's so funny to me how you somehow see the exact opposite though. 🤔 What I think is happening is that you got yourself on some squeaky clean ass shipper goggles fresh out of your little echo chamber. Because I hate to tell you, but what you're fantasizing is what you want to see and not what's actually there on screen or was written into the story. I'm strictly talking about Inuyasha and the manga of course. [For the TL; DR version skip to the last paragraph.]

Parents looking after their kids is what parents are supposed to do. A good parent will do anything to keep their child safe and ensure they are cared for, so what he did for her by leaving her there was in her best interests clearly. Besides, as a babysitter, you more than most people should understand that parents aren't always able to be there for their kids so sometimes others gotta step in to help. Haven't you heard of the saying, "it takes a village to raise a child?" Which in Rin's case is literally true! 😂 Sometimes kids are even sent off to stay with grandparents and that's who raises them instead. Or maybe they have to temporarily live with an aunt or uncle because their single parent's job requires they work out of town 4-5 days of the week so they're hardly home. But that doesn't mean that the parents care or love their kids any less, and it's foolish to assume that Sesshomaru must have thought very little of Rin simply due to the fact that he made the decision to leave her in the village. Come on, y'all are acting like he abandoned her there!!

It's just given the circumstances Sesshomaru finally came to learn that Rin traveling with him was no longer safe. I also like to think it's because he wished for her to live a more normal life and to learn how to fully trust humans again. Plus, continuing to travel with him as young as she was would have proven dangerous and unwise. Now for you to know all this and still manage to turn his past actions towards her while she was just a child into a romantic gesture is what boggles my mind. Regardless of how you look at it, from my perspective or your own, Sesshomaru is in the wrong. Either he's a father figure who impregnates his daughter at the young age of approximately 14. OR he's this man she used to travel with who maybe isn't a father to her but who nonetheless basically rapes her since kids her age can't consent to sex with an adult. Idk about you but it sounds to me like nobody here wins with either scenario we're given. In other words, you should be just as mad as we are. If only one side didn't choose to forsake their morals they know we both have in common for the sake of a ship. Welp. 🤷‍♀️

I agree, incest is disgusting but that's not the only problem we have with this pairing. A romantic bond forming between Sesshomaru and Rin would also constitute as grooming.

You realize that over the years he visited her in the village that he brought her gifts too and essentially watched her grow up right before his very eyes, right? I mean, I know you do, but I really shouldn't have to explain further why pursuing a romantic/sexual relationship with each other is plain and simple wrong. And before you say it's not because he didn't have any malintent, please understand that considering their history and power dynamic up to then that yes this is still considered grooming even if Rin supposedly "wanted it" or "made the first move." Whether you consider him her father or not, as the adult who took on a role resembling that of a caretaker in her early life- a critical developmental time for a child- Sesshomaru is obligated to turn down any advances by Rin and most definitely should not initiate any himself. As the first close adult figure she's had in her life since her parents died, it's unfathomable to imagine how Sesshomaru could go through with taking advantage of this young girl who was under his care and supervision since they met. To think he could be capable of betraying that trust sickens me to the core.

This. Now THIS is how a parent/guardian or a similar adult caretaker (babysitter, teacher, etc.) talks to a child. And, in turn, this is how some young children talk to adults. You'd be insane and delusional to deny it! We see it in our everyday lives, do we not? From where else do you think our stories draw most of their inspiration? Yes, obviously these fictional universes have aspects of fantasy that don't exist in the real world, but so how then do you suppose we're able to relate to them? The reason for that being is because these stories are written by people for people, so naturally there are going to be real life aspects embedded throughout. Sure, a little escapism doesn't hurt as we don't need to take everything so seriously, but ultimately we all need to recognize that the messages in the stories we tell matter. Most stories possess a combination of both light and dark themes, but when it specifically comes to the latter we gotta be careful with how we tackle this in children's media since kids are far more impressionable.

So if at the center of a story we have two of the main protagonists whose mom is basically their same age and to top it off she knew their dad when she was just a girl and who just so happened to help raise her, wouldn't you say that's beyond fucked up or at the very least so fucking weird? Like why would we think it's even remotely okay for our children to watch this garbage?? Really think about it. Try and be objective for once and think about how it would sound explaining this storyline to an outsider who's never watched IY or HNY. Well, antis have tried this before many times and we always get the same reaction: Ewww!

Like I said earlier, if you wanna ship it then fine, but 1) please stop seeking our approval or trying to change our minds - your ship wish came true didn't it, so why do you need us to validate it? 2) even though it's not canon, respect that we don't support this sequel portraying pedophilia in a positive light. It's harmful af to not only allow but glorify the continuation of sexualized images of young girls everywhere. And I shouldn't have to say this, but just because this trope is popular as you say does not make it right. Lolicon themes in the media have been an issue forever and it needs to stop. Yes, even some people in Japan or "the East" would agree. Shocker!

We're pissed off and rightfully so because Yashahime's TV rating is 14, not to mention it airs at the prime time kids in Japan watch TV after getting home from school. That's Towa and Setsuna's age, true, but if Rin being the mom when she's like only a year older than them (please don't argue w/ me about the math- antis have so far been right every time with it) is straight-up disgusting and not something we should be supporting or endorsing. Rin's a whole ass child!! Please don't start with the "but times were different then so her having kids at 15 is acceptable" argument either, because we've already debunked that and every other single excuse you guys throw at us. Besides, how or why would you expect young viewers to know these historical "facts" anyway, especially if as you suggest fiction doesn't affect reality so what does it matter? Yet here we are, arguing over a fictional show in real life almost a year and a half into the "Sesshomaru fucks?" sequel being announced. My ass, your ass, hell all our asses fiction doesn't affect reality!

Look, I do apologize if the tone of this blog came off as snippy or condescending at times. I do not wish you any ill will, it's just I'm not really sure what you expected to get out of all this besides maybe getting on my nerves perhaps. haha A lot of you shippers have been desperately scrambling to interact with us, lurking in our tags, jumping onto our posts screaming canon and getting so defensive even though you sought us out first. We've been sticking to our tags, so how about you stay in your lane too. By the way since we're on the topic, have you seen Twitter or Reddit?! SR shippers there are the actual worst and many Inuyasha fans (not just antis) have complained of not feeling welcomed to engage in fandom spaces anymore. Shippers swarm them and scare them off simply because fans don't like your ship and refuse to accept it. It's pathetic, really. No one should ever be bullied or harassed just because they don't like something you might. We're all fans of Inuyasha, aren't we? So let's act like it. Yashahime on the other hand, you guys are welcome to that pungent heap of trash. Fans have a right to criticize it too, but if you like it then good for you, so keep on liking it and don't mind us.

I'm almost done, but real quick back to Jaken! Let's not forget about how the official Yashahime website- which came out after my blog, mind you- described Jaken. This translation isn't the best one available but it's the only version a fellow anti friend could track down. They do recall a better one done by a native Japanese speaker who was also an anti, and that member confirmed that Jaken is indeed called Rin's babysitter. So you see, I was right in my interpretation. In the original post I did compare Jaken to a brother, but after talking to others (some comments can be found under said post) I did acknowledge that he's more of a reluctant babysitter who's not related. And if he's not at least a brother to Rin, then he's definitely not her father.

At the end of the day, the creator Rumiko Takahashi has the final word. Which is guess what? Hogosha. 💖 Probably should've just started out with that and saved us all the trouble, huh? Good day/night to you.

Papamaru bids you adieu now. 🤞

[sawthatmountainburn]

ig part of it is that I do genuinely strive to be an open-minded & caring person nd there's so much I don't know about the world & other people's experiences, so I do actually genuinely want to hear them out. and even when something is blatantly wrong (e. g. acting like "TMEs" are making shit up when they tell you their lives aren't as rosy as you imagine them to be) I start thinking there must be something wrong with me to be thinking it's wrong. after all, if so many people loudly agree with something, it's gotta be true right?

but between 1) the sheer amount of bad faith shown to literally anyone who doesn't fall exactly in line with whatever the current take is, even people who you're supposedly protecting (see: all the times discoursers attack people of their own gender for supposedly colluding with the enemy, even though they're simply disagreeing with a particular post), 2) the utterly paranoid behaviour displayed by some ppl and encouraged by others!!, and 3) the fucking zionists why the fuck are so many transandrophobia truthers zionists—

it's just not fucking worth taking seriously. none of this is advancing trans rights, it's just yelling at people and making yourself miserable to the point where you're mad about literal jokes and kinks (! of all things!!) for not being relatable to you. this doesn't even serve the people doing it, in 5-10 years they're gonna be talking about how much they regret axting like they did or, if they're more dishonest, acting like it never happened out of sheer embarrassment.

we can all save ourselves this greif! if we just logged the fuck off!!

ik it's been like a day or two but how the fuck was I taking this transcourse shit so seriously

[arcticdementor]

The University of California system is getting rid of its SAT/ACT requirement. More will follow.

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments of public K-12 schools, of aggregates and averages of students. The SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and similar tests are oriented towards individual ability or aptitude; they exist to show prerequisite skills to admissions officers. (And, in one of the most essential purposes of college admissions, to employers, who are restricted in the types of testing they can perform thanks to Griggs v Duke Power Co.) Sure, sometimes researchers will use SAT data to reflect on, for example, the fact that there’s no underlying educational justification for higher graduation rates1, but SATs are really about the individual. State K-12 testing is about cities and districts, and exists to provide (typically dubious) justification for changes to education policy2. SATs and similar help admissions officers sort students for spots in undergraduate and graduate programs. This post is about those predictive entrance tests like the SAT.

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are.

1. SATs/ACTs don’t predict college success. They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true.

…

2. The SATs only tell you how well a student takes the SAT. This is perhaps a corollary to 1., and is equally wrong. They tell us what they were designed to tell us: how well students are likely to perform in college. But the SATs tell us about much more than college success. Let me run this graphic again.

…

3. SATs just replicate the income distribution. No. Again, asserted with utter confidence by liberals despite overwhelming evidence that this is not true. I believe that this research represents the largest publicly-available sample of SAT scores and income information, with an n of almost 150,000, and the observed correlation between family income and SAT score is .25. This is not nothing. It is a meaningful predictor. But it means that the large majority of the variance in SAT scores is not explainable by income information. A correlation of .25 means that there are vast numbers of lower-income students outperforming higher-income students. Other analyses find similar correlations. If SAT critics wanted to say that “there is a relatively small but meaningful correlation between family income and SAT scores and we should talk about that,” fair game. But that’s not how they talk. The routinely make far stronger claims than that in an effort to dismiss these tests all together, such as here by Yale’s Paul Bloom. (Whose work I generally like.) It’s just not that hard to correlate two variables together, guys. I don’t know why you wouldn’t ever ask yourselves “is this thing I constantly assert as absolute fact actually true?” Well, maybe I do.

In general, progressive and left types routinely overstate the power of the relationship between family wealth and academic performance on all manner of educational outcomes. The political logic is obvious: if you generally want to redistribute money (as I do) then the claim that educational problems are really economic problems provides ammo for your position. But the fact that there is a generic socioeconomic effect does not mean that giving people money will improve their educational outcomes very much, particularly if richer people are actually mildly but consistently better at school than poorer for sorting reasons that are not the direct product of differences in income. That is, what correlation does exist between SES and academic indicators might simply be the metrics accurately measuring the constructs they were designed to measure.

And throwing money at our educational problems, while noble in intent, hasn’t worked. (People react violently to this, but for example poorer and Blacker public schools receive significantly higher per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools, which should not be a surprise given that the policy apparatus has been shoveling money at the racial performance gap for 40 years.) All manner of major interventions in student socioeconomic status, including adoption into dramatically different home and family conditions, have failed to produce the benefits you’d expect if academic outcomes were a simple function of money. I believe in redistribution as a way to ameliorate the consequences of poor academic performance. There is no reason to think that redistribution will ameliorate poor academic performance itself.

5. SATs are easily gamed with expensive tutoring. They are not. This one is perhaps less empirically certain than the prior two and on which I’m most amenable to counterargument, but the preponderance of the evidence seems clear to me in saying that the benefits of tutoring/coaching for these tests are vastly overstated. Again, a simplistic proffered explanation for a troublesome set of facts that then implies simplistic solutions that would not work.

6. Going test optional increases racial diversity. This one, I think, must be called scientifically unsettled. However both Sweitzer, Blalock, and Sharma and Belasco, Rosinger, and Hearn find no appreciable increase in racial diversity after universities go test-optional. “Holistic” application criteria like admissions essays almost certainly benefit richer students anyway. What’s more, we have to ask ourselves what “diversity” really means in this context. Private colleges and universities keep the relevant data close to the vest, for obvious reasons, but it’s widely believed that many elite schools satisfy their internal diversity goals for Black students by aggressively pursuing wealthy Kenyan and Nigerian international students, whose parents have the means to be the kind of reliable donors that such schools rely on so heavily. I’m not aware of a really comprehensive study that examines this issue, and it would be hard to pull off, but the relevant question is “do various policies intended to improve diversity on campus actually increase the enrollment of American-born descendants of African slaves?” I can’t say, but you can guess where my suspicions lie.

…

All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

…

The racial achievement/performance gap is a curious thing even in the context of an American political discourse that seems to get more bizarre by the day. That the gap exists is, on balance, not controversial. Gaps in performance are observed on essentially every measured academic metric, though the size of the effects vary from context to context, and the general distribution is Asian American students at the top, white students next, then Hispanic, then Black. The Black-white gap in particular has shrunk from the era of (explicitly) segregated schools but progress has not been consistent or linear. Most people in academia and politics admit it exists: prominent Black politicians like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris reference it, every major think tank and foundation operating in the educational space identifies it as a major priority, and the NAACP used to address if often, though their Education and Education Strategy pages have recently disappeared so it’s hard to know where they stand now. These things are faddish but once upon a time every other dissertation written by someone getting a PhD in Education was about the gap. We can observe it even outside of reference to controversial tests, such as noting that the white high school graduation rate is 10% higher than that for Black students. The achievement gap is a thing.

And yet I also find a rapidly-congealing social prohibition against talking about these gaps in progressive spaces. If you refer to a racial achievement gap in a lot of liberal or left contexts now, you’ll find that people clam up fast and get visibly uncomfortable, even if you take pains to point out that an academic achievement gap does not imply an academic potential gap. People just don’t want to acknowledge that gaps exist at all; our racial discourse appears to have become such a blunt instrument that the acknowledgement of racial difference is controversial even when you preface discussion with the belief (that I hold) that the gap is the product of innumerable environmental and sociocultural factors rather than genetics or other inherent differences. Simply saying “Black students consistently score lower on tests like the SATs, have lower average GPAs, and have worse metrics on ancillary concerns like truancy” - again, Barack Obama’s position, Kamala Harris’s position, Cory Booker’s position - is enough for people to start launching into harangues about the inherent violence of those comparisons. People just do not want to talk about this stuff.

…

Those concerns with group differences, at least, have some sort of basic political logic and are amenable to complaints that they are the product of systemic inequality. (They are, but not the inequalities that people think, and again the SAT gap is a result of systemic inequality, not a cause of systemic inequality.) More disturbing to me is the rise of resistance within academia to the notion of inequalities between individuals. When I was in grad school more than a half-decade ago, I observed with some considerable unhappiness that it had become increasingly socially unacceptable to speak of some students as simply better students than others, as being more talented, harder working, or more prepared. All of this was seen as inegalitarian and, eventually, as “white supremacist” even if every student being compared in a given context was white. There were many instructors back then who bragged about giving all students As, etc., and I must assume this practice has only grown over time. In the humanities and social sciences especially there is a growing movement to reject assessment, including grading - the means through which we sort better students from worse - as the hand of illegitimate power that “does violence” to the students who voluntarily attend college.

…

Of course, that complicity in the neoliberal machine is not some recent injustice; it is the very reason that colleges and universities are funded by our society at all. If this trend continues, not just eliminating SAT requirements or increasingly refusing to hierarchize students with grades but in rejecting the entire sorting function of the university, academia will collapse. Wealthy parents aren’t paying Harvard to enrich their children in the humanistic sense. They’re paying Harvard to act as a marker of their child’s superiority in the labor market and the social hierarchy. Employers value college because it provides at least some meaningful information about who will succeed as a worker; remove that function and the financial justification for a hideously expensive system dies. I would love if education dropped its association with meritocracy, but that cannot occur within our current system. The professors who self-aggrandize through their rejection of their hierarchizing function, if successful, would cause the doom of the modern university. (These tenured radicals, of course, never are so moved by the inherent inequities of academia that they quit the profession.)

Today, it is somehow controversial to say “some people are smarter than others,” a reflection of one of the simple brute realities of human life and something that has been accepted as true for thousands of years.

Here is the essence of it: hierarchies of relative academic performance are remarkably stable throughout life, due to differences in inherent or intrinsic academic ability of whatever origin, and the SATs and similar mechanisms reveal those differences in a way that liberal America is increasingly unable to accept. This is the source of all of this angst, not the technical details of whether a test is fair or valid or just, but a liberal intelligentsia that is incapable of honestly confronting the fact that different human beings have fundamentally different intrinsic abilities. I believe in political equality, social equality, equality of rights, equality of dignity, equality of protection under the law. But the notion that all people are equally talented, in academics or anything else, is an absurdity, and as much as people will rush to deny intrinsic difference, I suspect that pretty much everybody knows that they are real. When you were a child you casually assumed that some of your classmates were naturally better at school than others, and you did because it was true.

This is the conversation that I tried, and failed, to force with my book: left-of-center political movements, from center-left to radically socialist, cannot achieve the goal of the greater good for everyone, including greater political and economic equality, while pretending that we believe in equality of human ability. The only way to intelligently address various social, economic, and political equalities related to differences in human potential is to acknowledge that those differences exist. The current rending of garments regarding inequalities within our education system has led to certifiably bizarre situations like the movement, currently gathering steam, to teach math as if it is as subjective as literature or art. But this won’t make Black kids or poor kids or girls or anyone else actually better at math. And if the universities really give up their function of creating an academic hierarchy for political reasons, employers will find new systems that do that, or a lot of people will get hired and quickly fired for not being competent. This is not an intelligent policy approach. Getting rid of the SATs won’t make unprepared kids prepared. It won’t make naturally untalented students naturally talented. It won’t make kids who aren’t smart into smart kids. All it will do is hide the reality of those unpleasant inequalities.

[recentanimenews]

OPINION: How Umineko Changed My Entire Approach to Fictional Media

All screenshots captured on Playstation 3 by author

  The following article contains a discussion of thematic elements and motives that appear during the second half of Umineko When They Cry. While no actual plot details will be revealed, some might still consider it spoilery. So if you want to experience one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever completely untainted, you should check it out on Steam right now.

  The internet is pretty rad, isn't it? You can follow your favorite creators, watch tons of awesome shows, and talk about your favorite things with other people. How about we do that right now? Well, too bad, because YOUR FAVORITE THING IS BAD, ACTUALLY! You made the mistake of posting about it online, so prepare to be sent lots of negative comments linking to 5-hour video essays pointing out every single flaw about your favorite story and why you are wrong for enjoying it!

    It's a situation I'm sure many of us have experienced at least a couple of times online. While the internet can be fantastic for finding like-minded people to chat with about things you deeply love, it can also be a gamble and sometimes you end up in a discussion where your conversational partner seems more interested in showing off their intellectual superiority over a work instead of openly discussing its merits or flaws. I certainly know — I used to be one of them.

  "As I've eaten my way through countless tales to escape boredom, I haven't really been eating them. I've just been killing them." - Hachijo Tohya

  The rise of social media has opened the gates for some incredible in-depth discussion and has changed the way I experience things over the years. But there is also a dark side to the discussions on the internet and that is the trap of wanting to feel intelligent in how you approach stories, which is often accompanied by not really being emotionally earnest. I myself tried to come off as perceptive by pointing out so many mistakes and bad things about media which led to exactly one thing: me becoming absolutely miserable. All I cared about was consuming as many things as possible (FOMO's also one of the many downsides of social media) and appearing as "smart" about them as I could. Until one fateful 10-month stretch in which I played a certain visual novel known as Umineko When They Cry.

    Umineko really is tailor-made for catching people with that mindset: It depicts a mystery story about how mystery stories are told and consumed — and what genre would be more fitting to challenge someone concerned with intellectual superiority than one that is all about the clash of Author vs Reader? 

  "Books aren't a competition. It's not about who's read the most. But boasting that you've read all your ever need to read is just as wrong-headed" - Battler Ushiromiya

  Umineko starts off with a well-known mystery trope: A family meets up in a mansion on a distant island, gets cut off by a storm, and then slowly gets murdered one after the other until everyone is dead. And just as in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (which served as one of Umineko's main inspirations), a bottle detailing the events of the incident to the public eventually washes ashore. But this only serves as Umineko's prologue, as its main character Battler quickly finds himself facing off against a self-proclaimed Golden Witch known as Beatrice on a meta-narrative level where he must prove these gruesome killings could have been committed by a human culprit, or be forced to acknowledge her existence and allow her to fully revive.

    Thus begins a game of chess filled with exceedingly preposterous murders in which our protagonist's family gets killed by demons, giant goat butlers, and sharpshooting bunny girls — all supplemented by the so-called Red Truth, a truth-revealing tell not unlike Martha's vomiting in Knives Out. Battler must use these authorial proclamations and find a loophole that enables him to explain the murders in a way that does not frame any of his beloved family members as the killer and still allows him to deny the existence of the gruesome and torturous witch.

    Umineko's all about how stories are perceived and told by both their creator and their audience. It explores how remarks by the author in every situation — no matter how off-hand they might be — can be used, applied, and twisted to shed a completely different light on a story regardless of its original intent. It shows how adding meaning to a narrative that wasn't meant to be there can both add to or subtract from its most important element: The heart its creator wanted to convey.

  "If I had found meaning in only exposing the truth, I would have sunk to the level of a truth-revealing witch and fallen into ruin, spreading only hatred, [...], crushing and refusing to acknowledge anything but the particular truth I seek, unable to escape the cycle of misery." - Ange Ushiromiya

  Umineko goes through many different angles of how we create, share, and discuss the tales that fuel our discourse. It ponders the importance of rules when creating storylines and tackles how easy it is to overlook major themes and motives by just focussing on minute details that are open to misinterpretation and irrelevant to a story's soul. It even includes the typical misanthropic yet oh so intelligent detective that usually gets idolized in most media (think BBC's Sherlock or House, M.D.) and puts them at odds with every other character because who would really want to cooperate with someone that completely disregards you as an equal human being and merely perceives you as an amalgation of hints, motives and alibis?

  "Sheesh! Just one more step and I'd have been able to take a heart as innocent as the smooth sand just after a wave had pulled back and tear it to bits. What a shame. This isn't fun anymore." - Erika Furudo

  And just when you start to really get into Umineko, it moves away from its main conflict, providing you important hints for its solution which most readers ignore as they aren't presented with facts and logic but on an emotional level distanced from the characters we long to get back to. But most importantly, it conveys how one single element is so indispensable to enjoying the narrative odysseys we embark on in our lives, to cherishing the characters that are presented to us in these tales, and to truly understand a story's message behind things like story developments, plot twists, and narrative tricks. I, of course, am talking about love.

  Be it the love you feel for characters, for certain staging elements, phrasings of prose, orchestrations of music, design of sound effects, implementations of themes and motives, or cinematographic puzzle pieces — the one thing that is indispensable to truly enjoy all kinds of media, is love. Or, to quote Umineko directly, "Without love, it cannot be seen."

    By the time, I was nearing the end of Umineko's eight main chapters, it had transformed from an intellectual battle between author and reader to an all-out war of a story against its community of readers who simply wanted to tear it down to cold, hard "facts." I had spent ten months and over 100 hours. The first half took eight of those months to get through (owing to a few lengths in Episodes 2 and 4), I finished the second half in less than two despite my busy schedule. I even dedicated a whole 15-hour marathon to the final episode as I was too glued to the grand finale to move away from it.

    A new me came out the end. I no longer had an interest in tearing apart media for minor missteps. I enjoyed them much more deeply and honestly and began taking my time with the things I consumed. Instead of filling my plate at the buffet of stories as much as I could, I gave each dish its own course on the menu so I could appreciate its flavor in a different way — one bite at a time and not stuffed up simply to give the outward appearance of a seasoned gourmet. And for that, I will never be able to thank Ryukishi07 and his co-creators at 07thExpansion enough.

  "The point of theory-making is not to create a culprit or to trample the truths that lie in the hearts of those who have not sinned. If you want to play detective, don't neglect the heart. Otherwise, we're just intellectual rapists. Don't forget it!!" - Willard H. Wright

  If you are interested in reading Umineko When They Cry, you can find both its Question Arcs and its Answer Arcs on Steam, GOG, and MangaGamer. You can also read the manga adaptation digitally on Bookwalker (though I personally recommend the visual novel for its award-worthy soundtrack alone).

  What work of fiction has touched your life in a profound way? Tell us in the comments!

      René Kayser works for Crunchyroll as a PR and Social Media Manager in Germany. You can find him on Twitter @kayserlein where he tries to get people into Umineko every single day.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[lettiegrief]

If you are an agender who labels yourself as a lesbian and the person you date discovered a trans man, then you aren't a lesbian. Lesbian is a sexuality about attraction to people who aren't men. Using this label improperly is insensitive and ignorant.

And that's if your girlfriend discovered she was a trans man, not a butch lesbian trans person, who doesn't see herself as a man, but likes to be read as a man (like me, for example, and Leslie Feinberg, and making it clear that we aren't men). If she is a trans man, then either you aren't a lesbian or you don't see her as a man, has no middle ground.

Labels don't exist just for comfort, they're here both to make it easier for someone to find themselves, to define someone's sexuality more easily, and for inclusion and knowing what to fight for.

I'm not here to change lives and shit rules, I speak what I think based on history, but don't come here and say that lesbian covers trans men, because it doesn't, in the same way that gay doesn't cover trans women. This is both lesbophobia, homophobia and transphobia. This perpetuates the discourse that lesbians "don't actually exist, because every woman misses a man", as well as perpetuating the discourse that "trans men are women, that's why they can be lesbians" and also that gays only didn't meet the ideal woman.

Using labels inappropriately, saying that you can be in a lesbian relationship with a trans man, perpetuates prejudice. Many lesbian people still have to deal with compulsory heterosexuality and you still do it.

Labels are not here only for comfort, there is context and historical weight too. And you know the funny thing? It's just that I see this discourse more in relation to lesbian people, as if for you it was impossible for there to be a sexuality that isn't about men.

I hope you don't see this as an attack, but as something to clarify. I don't believe that these speeches are coming from prejudiced people, but from people who don't see themselves as heteronormativity, which is totally valid, even more so when you're a queer person. However, there are thousands of labels for all types of people, no one needs to use any label inappropriately and end up invalidating someone for the sake of their own comfort.

However, these discourses do perpetuate various prejudices.

The "mess" that chap people like to talk about is our diversity, but our diversity needs to be organized, both the labels and the people who don't use the labels are important, and if you know the slightest about class warfare then you know what I mean by that.

There's no point in saying that you're in a lesbian relationship if your partner is a trans man and that "life is more complex than labels", because then you'll be emptying an entire cause by thinking you're being progressive just because you don't cares about labels. You're not being, it's just inconvenient and disruptive.

If you don't care about labels, then don't use any, or use one that makes sense to you and doesn't invalidate the struggle of thousands of people. Fuck, I myself struggled for 5 years to find a balance between my gender and my sexuality, having to deal with compulsory heterosexuality that made me need male validation and be desired by men.

Lesbian is a sexuality about attraction to women and non-men. Trans men are men. Don't confuse.

I don't understand this new wave that trans men can be lesbians.

If a lesbian person (who already knows their sexuality) dates a man, then they isn't a lesbian. Why then should this be any different when it comes to trans men?

Trans men are men. If a lesbian person dates a man, then they, at the very least, doesn't see him as a man. When it comes to a trans man, don't you find this at least questionable?

Of course, sexuality + gender can cause dysphoria. However, this doesn't give anyone the right to invalidate and disrespect the entire history of a movement that has always fought for their rights as homosexual people, as well as another movement that has always fought for their rights as people who don't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

And if you know what homosexuality and transgenderity are, then you know what I mean.

History and context of labels are extremely important, they're how we can be seen and heard.

And of course, labels must be questioned regarding the binary that still prevails in their movements and the violence committed by them (which is why it's so important to refute heterosexuality and cisgenderity), but never used inappropriately.

Trans men are men, and anyone who is a trans man who only feels attracted to women and non-men, but doesn't see himself as heterosexual, there are other terms that were made to include them that don't disrespect anyone or even himself if will be used correctly.

And it makes perfect sense that a trans person doesn't see themselves as heterosexual either, okay? Heterosexuality is, more than anything, a controlling system that must be questioned and rebutted.

So if a trans person doesn't see themselves as heterosexual, not only is they within their rights, they're also being completely lucid.