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[atamatajiih]

Fundraisers for people trying to leave Gaza that are only about 10k or less away from their goals

Israel has been threatening to escalate the violence now that Ramadan is starting so PLEASE DONATE IF YOU'RE ABLE AND SHARE AROUND FOR MAXIMUM VISIBILITY! For a lot of these people, time is now of the essence

Also in the end there will be a few fundraisers for people who have already evacuated or are in the process of doing so but still require some assistance with funds.

Some might remember that I made an earlier version of this and luckily many in that first list have since reached those goals! However, some haven't and those will be included here.

The list of fundraisers still trying to meet their goals:

This person only needs 700 dollars https://www.gofundme.com/f/tscxk-ahmed

1.7k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-amina-her-family-escape-the-crisis-in-gaza

1.7k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-mosa-hammad-evacuate-to-egypt-from-gaza

3.2k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-evacuate-haythams-family-out-of-gaza-war

3.4k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-to-eacape-gaza

3.9k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-a-family-from-gaza-to-have-a-secure-life

4k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-our-family-evacuate-gaza-and-find-safety

4.1k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-evacuate-gaza-for-a-decent-peaceful-life

4.7k https://www.gofundme.com/f/aid-my-kids-after-gaza-war-with-your-generosity

5.4k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-mahmouds-family-escape-gaza-live

5.5k https://www.gofundme.com/f/evacuate-palestinian-family

5.8k https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-help-a-bride-in-gaza-rebuild-her-life

6k https://www.gofundme.com/f/vr25r-help-my-family-leave-gaza

6.2k https://www.gofundme.com/f/yosef-get-out-of-gaza-and-get-treatment-for-cancer

6.5k https://www.gofundme.com/f/reuniting-my-newborn-son-with-his-siblings-and-fam

7.2k https://www.gofundme.com/f/urgent-medical-evacuating-for-my-family-in-gaza

8.7k https://www.gofundme.com/f/cry-for-help-from-gaza

9k https://www.gofundme.com/f/nour-wants-peace

9.2k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-evacuate-my-kids-from-gaza-war

10k https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-hanins-family-get-out-of-gaza

And let's end this with a couple fundraisers for folks who have already evacuated or are in the process of doing so but still need some help with funds for travel and living expenses:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Help-My-Family-Escape-Genocide-Gaza

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-this-amazing-family-evacuate-gaza

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-amr-evacuate-gaza

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-israas-family-evacuate

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-noor-and-her-children-escape-from-gaza

Let's help out these people to the best of our abilities!

[atamatajiih]

The Ted vs Hazbin Hotel fanwar is some of the most forced and artificial internet beef in recent memory. Transparently exists only to drive up engagement on online content and for people's desire to be mad at things. Shame on you if you've ever seriously argued about this.

[atamatajiih]

To Hazbin Hotel fans and haters alike, a reminder: you hold very little power over this thing's success and you shouldn't really worry about that either

The web-show pilot turned Amazon Prime animated series Hazbin Hotel by Vivienne Medrano/Vivziepop is scheduled to finally start airing next January after a very long wait since the pilot of the show was first uploaded to Youtube. There's a big crowd who are looking forward to the show, both fans who are eager to spread the love and dedicated haters who are waiting to rip this show to pieces.

I'm not really gonna pour over the reasons why this show has such a strong fanbase and hatebase, because the reasons aren't really important to this message/call out/shout into the void. Good thing is that love is just hate turned inside out and vice versa so these two feelings have a lot in common! To be more specific, both of these emotions require heavy emotional investment. And, as someone who has largely watched The Great Vivziepop Discourse from the sidelines, I can definitely say that both sides are extremely emotionally invested in this show. People who love it really love it and people who hate it really hate it.

Just as I am not gonna go over the reasons people might love or hate Hazbin Hotel, I'm not gonna tell anyone how they're supposed to feel about the show. Whatever your thoughts on Hazbin Hotel are, they're totally valid. Instead, now that the show is only about three months away, I think both fans and haters need to start internalizing one thing about the show before it releases and the floodgates truly open:

You do not have any power to affect the success of this show.

A simple thing, no? Obvious one might even say. And yes, you'd be right. Most people, when they have feelings about a thing, can accept that it's success, or lack thereof, is wholly independent of their own actions. A show doesn't succeed or fail because you, as an individual, choose to support or not support it.

But the thing is, when you become very emotionally invested in something, you start to imagine things. Fantasize a bit about how you'd wish for things to go. And if the posts I've seen online from both fans and haters are to be believed, both groups have stacked a lot of hopes and dreams on how this show's big debut will go.

On one side, Hazbin superfans have painted in their minds a scenario where Hazbin breaks all the records, wins all the prizes, Vivzie becomes the Hayao Miyazaki of indie animation and the Hazbin criticals get owned so bad that they shrivel into dust.

On the other, the Hazbin Hotel criticals have written in their mind another scenario: A24 despises the show, the whole thing falls apart under it's creator's lofty ambitions, the entire Hellaverse universe comes to an embarrasing end, Vizie becomes a pariah and the Hazbin superfans get owned so bad that they shrivel into dust.

And while there's nothing wrong with some flights of fancy like this, the problem is that it seems like both groups are so sure, so absolutely certain that their favored scenario comes to pass, that they have started to essentially treat it as fact, lambasting the other side for being delusional in the face of obvious facts. All of this ignoring the fact that, frankly, both sides are talking out of their ass. The only party involved in this who actually gets to decide whether this show is a success or not is A24, since they now own the series. What anyone else tries to tell you about how the numbers line up is at best making an educated guess or at worst talking nonsense. The circumstances that allowed show X to succeed or show Y to fail are not something you can actually use as a measuring stick when it comes Hazbin Hotel. The measure of Hazbin Hotel's success is not something that some rando on the internet can claim to be an authority on.

Now, this isn't to say you can't have any influence on the show's viewership numbers. A popular post on social media or your talks with people you know IRL can certainly influence a small number of folks to watch or drop the show. However, the actual impact these actions have is breathtakingly small. My current team at work has about 12 people in it and I'm not at all convinced I could easily sway all of them to watch or not watch a show. The exact numbers are all over the place, but Amazon Prime subscriptions seem to be somewhere in the ballpark of 200 million. That's, well, a really big amount. And I feel most of us realize that even the most popular, record breaking post on tumblr is probably not gonna be enough to sway 200 million people into your preferred opinion on Hazbin Hotel. If that huge mass of people has enough people who want to watch Hazbin, you'll have no choice but to accept that. And if that mass doesn't have any people who want to watch it, you'll have to accept that too.

Everything I've said is probably painfully obvious to people, but I have seen both of these groups get incredibly invested in their dream scenarios for how how the big Hazbin Hotel debut will go down, I am starting to really be worried about the folks who will inevitably have their dream scenario come crashing down before their eyes. And someone must, when the possibilities being proposed are either historic success or catastrophic failure. That's why, regardless of which side you're standing on when it comes the Discourse, I am urging all of you to start emotionally distancing yourself from this show, at least to the extent that you can accept the show's actual reality without having feeling emotional anguish. Because placing this much emotional weight on the success of a TV show, something that again, is completely out of your power to meaningfully affect, is just not healthy to you. Whether you love the show or hate it, please start processing the possibility that your desired outcome for it may not come to pass. Entertainment industry is a fickle business and really, as a viewer it's not even your job to really care about how a show is doing, that's the burden of the people working on it. All you need to do is sit back, relax and let your heart fill with love and/or hate. Not to mention the success or non-success of a show isn't even that conductive when thinking about a show critically. A successful show simply means it is popular, it doesn't mean it's good. Is your Hazbin hating heart really gonna step aside and not enjoy ripping this show a new one just because it made money? And of course, vice-versa for the Hazbin stans! Everyone knows tons of great fiction goes underappreciated by the masses, are you really gonna stop filling the internet with your endless gushing and adoration just because enough normies didn't like your hell cartoon?

So, really this heavy investment both sides of the discourse have for the show's future success is kinda preplexing. Discourse is about whether something is good or not! And sales and viewership numbers should barely be a footnote when it comes to that discussion. There's so many more interesting things to dissect in a show. TL;DR: Whether you love Hazbin or hate it, none of us individually can actually tangibly affect Hazbin's financial success, so it's best you stop making up scenarios about it in your head and getting invested in them + it's not like financial success actually matters when you wanna talk about the show's actual quality.

[atamatajiih]

Thank you for answering! No worries about length or rambling, there was a lot of material to consider here and I appreciate that you took the time to type this out and give some consideration to many different parts of Digimon. You even brought up the dub! So thank you for being so thorough.

You bringing up Venusmon really reminded me of that period during the 2010s when Digimon in general felt a lot hornier than before or since (franchise teen years?). Not only in terms of the Digimon designs released at the time but in many other aspects too. Mervamon was a major character in Xros Wars and while I like her character a lot, I’m all for bold and brash swordgirls, there were definitely many, many moments they were showing her off. Also the mobile card games which were determined to have cheesecake for every feminine Digimon no matter how silly. I will always remember the cards that really emphasized the boobs on Nefertimon, of all Digimon. Suzuhito Yasuda started designing characters for the games around then as well, I definitely remember people raising their eyebrows when they saw Rina for the first time. And then of course there were many, many things in tri from the magazine spreads to Ordinemon fanservice in part 6 (again, of ALL digimon).

It does feel like they may have dialed things back since then, though no doubt some kind of sexyness will always be present in a lot of the designs. Still, I’m willing to bet that if Ghost Game had debuted ten years earlier or maybe even five years, Jellymon’s evolution line would have probably turned out very different in terms of designs.

This is potentially a very loaded question so feel free to not answer if you don't feel like it, but how do you as a woman feel about the handling of female characters in Digimon (anime of course, but also games, manga and even the Digimon themselves)? I've seen takes of all kinds from women over the years so I'm curious how you feel. But again, no pressure to answer if you feel uncomfortable with the subject or too daunted by all the material on the table.

Oh man, I don't mind talking about the subject in itself, but what makes it hard for me is just that the Digimon franchise just has so many things at once with so many different writers and different writing philosophies that I can't really treat the entire thing like a monolith. Especially when you have things running the spectrum from Cyber Sleuth (where female characters arguably drive the narrative far more than the male characters) to Next (which has gotten me angrily ranting about the absolutely awful way it treats its girls, a rant which I would prefer to not subject my followers to).

So before I go ahead, I do want to make sure anyone reading this understands that I'm just talking about my own personal experience and feelings regarding the situation, and I'm very sure that other people will feel differently. I definitely don't feel qualified to comment on what's the ideal way to write female charaters in media or whatever (as if there's even one right answer to that!); I can only truly comment on myself and my own stances on it. (And of course, the OP graciously asked specifically about that, but I just want to make sure nobody reading this post misunderstands!)

Well, I will say that if there's one thing that does seem to be consistent (and I say consistent, because Next absolutely violates this one and Frontier does kind of dangerously toe the line), it's that I haven't really seen Digimon fall victim to the problem of what I call making its female characters the Designated Girl Characters™. Explaining what that is is kind of tricky, but a lot of shounen series will have this very strong "consciousness" of its female characters like they're there to fill a quota, and thus treat them in a way that's kind of alienating. Or in other words, "they section off this character very weirdly in a way they would never do for the male characters." (Note that while Ruki's character arc is made with strong consciousness of her being a girl, the whole point is about condemning the idea she should be treated like some novelty just because she's a girl, so I don't count it as this.)

It was really refreshing to see a 1999 anime portray the girls as mingling with the boys like it was no big deal, and I do wonder if Adventure setting this precedent is a big reason later series have followed in this regard. Adventure through Frontier were made with heavy female creator influence, something that the fandom really tends to downplay (especially because a lot of people suspiciously avoid acknowledging their importance, like how everyone will talk about Hosoda but nobody will talk about the fact Yoshida Reiko wrote the scripts for everything he did, or how people virtually ignored Seki's existence compared to Kakudou until very recently). I think a lot of that shows in its writing; of course, that's not to say there aren't things that really could have used improvement (I think Izumi's treatment in Frontier is the one pretty much everyone universally agrees really left much to be desired, and Tomita even outright admitted he's not very good at writing girls, although that frankly kind of surprises me given how much of his other work has involved writing girls really well), but at the very least it does show a bit more conscientiousness about its female characters than you would see in other shows where female creators were either nonexistent or clearly had no influence in the staff room.

On the flip side, there's also things that were more tasteful in execution than may have even been intended; Sora's character arc isn't that much about her femininity in practice, and Juri does come off as better than your average damsel in distress character, but that doesn't change the fact that the nuance is still there (and that in the latter case a certain writer has outright indulged in that), so all I can do is just be grateful that it didn't get worse.

I guess in the end, my stance is "give or take". I like a lot of other kids' shows (including shounen) that have been better or worse than Digimon's average level, and Digimon itself is so varied that I think it just kind of mingles in there. There are things I like, things I don't like, but at the very least there haven't been too many things that crossed my personal boundary of "absolutely not" (there are, there just aren't many). I think Adventure and 02 in particular are often accused of being more malicious towards its female characters and "screwing them over" than they were intended to be, since a lot of it seems to be a combination of wanting to portray its characters a little too realistically and simply just accidental bad circumstances of how it presented (the fact Hikari's two most famous episodes are by two non-regulars on the series who seemed to be huge fans of portraying her with a brother complex really did not help here), and things like "the same things that feel personally relatable to me are also things that read badly to others, so I understand why people don't like it but I also feel kind of weird when they imply that this kind of concept is inherently Bad" (a lot of things related to Sora and Miyako fall into this category for me). And I mean, part of the reason Miyako became my central character back when I wrote fanfic more often was that I just found her to be an incredibly complex character for the kind you'd usually see in shounen works; I honestly don't know of many other things that would portray someone like her sympathetically instead of cramming her into a "hysterical woman" trope box.

There's also the fact that there's a lot more adult-oriented Digimon media coming up nowadays, so there's that awkward situation where "female character representation" starts having a blurred boundary with "waifu character". Which is not to say that I mind the idea of male fans also liking the female characters I like, but more so that when you get into this territory, I start getting conscious about whether the female characters are more obviously being written in a way to "please the male fans and make them into fanservice material" than it respects them as characters. And I mean, I say it's a blurred boundary for good reason; the aforementioned Cyber Sleuth characters do kind of have that (especially in their character designs), but they are actually written as good characters with agency, whereas you have things like the Adventure girls in tri. who are ostensibly written to follow up on their Adventure character arcs but came off to me as being uncomfortably shoved into the Waifu Character Fanservice troping boxes, especially Mimi and Hikari. (Hooters outfit Mimi and brother complex Hikari are among the few things that I would say have crossed a serious line with me.) So again...give or take.

I will say that the American English dub had a somewhat more misogynistic nuance in the way it treated Mimi, Miyako, and Hikari (it had a lot more condescending tone in the way it portrayed Mimi's airheadedness/materialism and Yolei's penchant for fangirling while also expecting Kari to just put up with Davis harassing her, and it exacerbated the already-kind-of-uncomfortable feelings I had about the unsympathetic way Sora is portrayed in Our War Game!), but it's not to the extent I felt it derailed the entire narrative.

As for the Digimon themselves, the feminine Digimon design sexualization didn't bother me much when I was younger (I remember I really wasn't bothered by Angewomon's design at all), but it does bother me a little more now, especially since you have more designs like Venusmon these days (really? really?). But then there are also really good designs like LovelyAngemon and Mastemon that are just plain cool! And then even designs aside, there's a difference in the way each work portrays them; for instance, you can tell certain anime had more fun with the chest jiggles on the same Digimon that other series were not weird about at all. Maybe the fact Adventure and 02 weren't really weird about Angewomon's design was exactly why I didn't notice it very much back then?

Well, that got long and very rambling, but I hope that answered your question to some extent!

[atamatajiih]

Thanks for answering, that's super enlightening! It's funny how different Toei and Bandai's approaches to the franchise can be depending on the exact subject and time period.

From one Appmon enjoyer to another, do you know what this series' standing with Bandai/Toei is? It really feels like the Appmon's inclusion and exclusion with the rest of the franchise is constantly pinballing. It's included in stuff like the anime anniversaries, the Digimon museum and is at least acknowledged in the questionnaire for the upcoming 25th anniversary book, but then it's a no show for the vote for best anime opening and the manga is missing from the manga competition PV. Any idea?

I've noticed this too, and this is only my personal observation and take on the issue, but the way I've been seeing it is like this: the Toei side (Digimon Partners, Kizuna website timeline, aforementioned museum, basically anything that has a stronger emphasis on anime production) has basically been showing no restraint about treating it like another Digimon anime and including it proudly in the lineup with everything else, whereas the Bandai side (Digimon Web, card game, Premium Bandai, etc.) has been waffling on whether to consider it as part of the franchise or not and has been more flip-floppy on it, probably leaning more on the side of excluding it.

In other words, basically the inverse of that really awkward period between 2014 and 2018 when the Bandai side had no problem treating 02 as normal while Toei was treating it like some kind of cryptid.

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that part of this is another of the Digimon franchise's usual "right hand not talking to left hand" issue. Toei produced the Appmon anime and thus understands very well that it's pretty much the same as any other Digimon anime in terms of substance, writing style, story concept, and even production pipeline (the Appmon staff list is full of people who worked on older Digimon anime too, after all). So to them, Appmon really is the same as any other Digimon anime and is another part of their portfolio they should be proud of.

However, Bandai has a much weaker relationship with the anime, and things get much more complicated when you start taking into account all of the Appmon-related things that are not anime. When you consider the Appmon "IP" as a whole, it is true that at first glance, it looks more like a spinoff branch than anything (it has its own website portal too, so someone giving it only a cursory glance could easily assume that there's no point putting Appmon things on Digimon Web because the dedicated Appmon site takes care of that), it had its own card game, it had its own trademark registrations, and its monster lines and evolutionary systems are somewhat more incompatible with the main Digimon lines than even the Xros Wars lines used to be. I imagine someone working with Digimon-related stuff at Toei is probably going to have a much higher likelihood of understanding how close of a relationship Appmon had in practice with the mainline series than someone at Bandai who only got a list of all the relevant merch lines and naturally jumped to the conclusion "yeah this is a spinoff branch, ignore it for now." Most of the people reading my blog here are probably coming from the anime fan perspective, but it's important to remember that the anime is only one part of the entire IP's branding.

In other words, it's basically the inverse of that really awkward period between 2014 and 2019 when the Bandai side had no problem treating 02 as normal while Toei was treating it like some kind of cryptid.

Another thing to consider is that, as much as it breaks my heart to say this, it is true that there is a certain not-insignificant branch of the Japanese fanbase that absolutely loathes Appmon with all of their being, or at least wants it to stay as far away from their precious Digimon franchise as much as possible. This attitude is much less pronounced in the Western fanbase (or at least, if you do have a condescending attitude about it you'll easily get a whole crowd of fans treating you like a laughingstock) mainly because to be this hardcore of a Digimon fan at all means you really need an extra level of dedication, but I have definitely seen an entire Japanese Digimon fan camp that cares more about the Digimon null canon and species/evolutionary lineup than they really care about any anime or anime story at all. To them, it doesn't matter how close the anime was in style to the traditional Digimon style, it doesn't even matter if the anime was good or not, Appmon was still that weird thing that threatened to dismantle all the existing Digimon lore they'd built up over the years and turn it into something unrecognizable, so they want nothing to do with it.

Even ones who aren't downright condescending about it still clearly don't want to see them mixing; I was watching a Japanese YouTube video recapping the history of the Digimon franchise, and once they got to the 2014-2018 period, they labeled it "heaven and hell" due to the rather turbulent period that was and labeled different parts of it "heaven" or "hell", but Appmon was branded "not sure if it's heaven or hell" because the YouTuber's attitude was basically treating it as a financial and branding failure that attempted to completely go off in a weird direction, and although he did acknowledge "people who watched the anime said it was actually pretty good, though" it was treated like a comparative footnote. And unfortunately, this part of the fanbase is responsible for funding a good chunk of the franchise in terms of merch, especially the card game, which is the franchise's current effective life support and is a reason I'm particularly apprehensive about whether Appmon will ever be able to get any representation there.

But on the flip side, things like Digimon Partners don't have to worry about that -- because anything that selects for the anime-loving part of the fanbase is therefore also likely to be more closely targeting people who care about the anime, and therefore are more likely to care about Appmon. Like for instance, the fact Offmon actually was a winner in one of the merch polls; I'm not too surprised that happened on Partners, but I'm definitely not as confident that would have happened on Digimon Web. Digimon anime fans are generally the ones who are most consistent about wanting to see Appmon included in the lineup (and, I mean, really, I don't exactly know anyone who actually liked the Appmon card game, and very few people played the 3DS game, so the anime and to a lesser degree the manga based directly on it are honestly the only parts of that entire IP branch that actually got any significant following), so it's understandable that the Toei side would be more likely to pick up on that and be more proactive about it. Which, mind you, is still something that's only specific to the last few years; after all, it wasn't even that long ago since they were in that phase of everything besides the original Digimon Adventure being unworthy of note, so it's really thanks to their attempts at restoring their relationship with the fanbase and improving their PR that they've been making headway at since 2020.