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hellzyeahwebwielingessays · 4 years

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Lets debunk the BS from this. Up top a lot of this BS comes from Bob Chipman/MovieBob who is the guy who if you recall said:

- Superheroes like Superman (and thus by extension Spider-Man who marry civilians were jerks for putting their spouses through the same stuff soldiers’ spouses go through

- Spider-Man appeals best to teens (even though he provably doesn’t since most people get into him before their teens and he appealed to college students in his heyday)

- The Spider-Marriage was nothing more than a forced publicity stunt

- Sins Past is worse than OMD

- Spider-Man is about passive aggressive power

- And the best one, ever since OMD Peter and MJ had become ‘more interesting’

That all being said lets dive into this:

Someone asked the panel what a queer reading would add to the character of Miles…Jesus…that’s just the greatest sign of hope for this podcast isn’t it? Shoot me now…

Miles was not 3 dimensional when he was created. Even if you disagree it is nonsense to say that Peter wasn’t three dimensional when he was first created. Just look at how much Stan explored Peter’s psychology in this singular panel from ASM #50

Look at that. Peter Parker pulled between the two sides of his life. Making a judgement of someone. But then calling out his own judgement of them and acknowledging maybe he’s in the wrong.

This was 1967!

That isn’t three dimensional?

Additionally other people would disagree that Peter wasn’t three dimensional early on.

And even if you disagree with that it’s nonsense to say he hasn’t SINCE become three dimensional or that retaining his origin story (which Miles broadly uses as the basis for his story in every version of his character) somehow holds him back from being three dimensional. If nothing else Peter was at least multifaceted for the time period.

Spider-Man wasn’t an example of stories about a 15 year old made for 7 year olds. Spider-Man was intended to be a senior in AF #15 and the stories were written by Stan for at worst an older audience but at best basically just for him.

Stan Lee confirmed that AF #15 was written not as a one off but as something that if successful COULD become an on-going series.

Its BS to say Peter makes no sense as a character because he makes sense about as much as any character within the confines of the superhero genre can. MILES doesn’t somehow make more sense whatsoever.

No. Spider-Man wasn’t merely a thrown together ‘hey here is a teenage superhero story with a downer ending’ it was a story about selfishness, responsibility and appealed via it’s relative normalcy and lack of idealization of the superhero protagonist.

The psychology and thematic idea of his exclusive powers (invisibility+venom blast) is the same…how? How is disappearing and repelling people the same thing? They keep saying that in the podcast as though it’s obvious and it’s really not

Great Power=Great responsibility isn’t Peter’s catch phrase it’s the philosophy underpinning everything he does

‘The young end millennials have been thrown under the bus by society so the optimism is reserved for the young end millenials like Miles and Gwen’ oh but also ‘you need 5-10 years added to each character to have this make sense and also Spide-Ham doesn’t quit fit’…So…the theory doesn’t make sense then does it. Also, what optimism is there for teen millenials in the late 2010s? We are all shit scared Global warming needs to be fixed within the next 10-20 years. The young end millenials will not be in much of a position to do that. Maybe not the high-end millenials either. The power rests in older Gen Xers or even older generations. So this ‘generational’ theory is bullshit. Yeah, Miles as the next generation maybe makes sense but not when you apply real world concepts of who the different generations are. Especially considering that’s made up bullshit anyway.

‘Blah blah blah for most of my life I’ve been uninterested in Spider-Man because I’ve believed him to be WHITE MALE teenaged wish fulfilment.’…*internally groans*…oh boy…this woman is one of those types huh. Frankly I, and I would advocate others too, take a salt shaker with them whenever they hear someone say something like this. But more importantly Spider-Man is seriously NOT what she describes. For starters Peter was a senior in high school when he began and shouldered adult responsibilities when his father died. That’s wish fulfilment? That’s a BURDEN. The reason that spoke to so many people was because he was just different and because his imperfections made him more relatable. The whiteness idea is also bullshit since he was intentionally or otherwise subtextually Jewish and has spoken to countless people of all colours across the generations. He very particularly has a HUGE following among African Americans which was partially what prompted the creation of Miles Morals in the first place! Shit, the showrunner for the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon was black for God’s sake. Many of the head honcho creators for ITSV were people of colour who were clearly MASSIVE Spider-Man fans!

‘As a woman Spider-Man didn’t resonate with me’. Spider-Man is male. And he acts in ways a male would in the context of the situations. But the character as a whole, in his deepest themes and concepts, is a universal character. He does and has spoken to people across race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, culture and generations. Spider-Girl, Mayday Parker, was her father’s daughter and far more similar than different to him. She spoke to male and female readers. Peter Parker himself has had female fans since his inception. There is no end of female fans here on tumblr or in other online spaces that are the proof of this, to say nothing of old letters pages.

Miles feels more like a real kid and fits together better than most other versions of Peter Parker?...how? I don’t like USM the comic but hwo the fuck do you take that, Spec Spidey, the 1994 cartoon and the Raimi movies (that MovieBob adores btw) and say ‘it doesn’t fit together properly like Miles’. Dude, Comic Book Miles Morales is a teenager in New York who goes to a bordering school for scientifically gifted kids and yet is supposed to be an everyman. That fits together well? He risked his life before being motivated to do so which is how most 13 year old woudn’t have acted. Then he feels guilty about Peter dying but his BFF explains it’s not his fault and he accepts this but then goes on to become Spider-Man anyway. And somehow this equates to guilt+responsibility. THAT’s better put together? His character got web-shooters two different ways by the same writer and the guy he was a legacy to was resurrected within like 3 years of Miles’ debut. That’s well put together? This makes more sense and is more believable than a kid who’s Dad dies because he didn’t use his gifts altruistically, so he spends his whole life striving to use them altruistically?

Blah blah blah MovieBob spewing more shit about how Peter is a teenage wish fulfilment power fantasy even though he clearly isn’t from a modern POV and REALLY wasn’t in the early 1960s.

By extension arguing Peter is an adult male’s retroactive teenaged wish fulfilment fantasy of working stuff out is so plainly wrong. Peter Parker in the early 1960s didn’t have everything figured out. The whole world was against him totally unfairly. He needed Aunt May or the Human Torch at times to give him pep talks. His social life was barely existent! You wanna see a middle aged man’s retroactive young wish fulfilment fantasy? Go read Brand New Day, which MovieBob claims was superior to the pre-OMD era. What is the wish fulfilment here? That attractive young women like him? Is that it? That one thing vs. all the horrible shit beating Peter down?

Bob claims there was a lot more Steve Ditko in the early issues of his run compared to Stan Lee because Peter was very angry. First of all Ditko was such a private person claiming he was definitely angry and that the anger was all him is a MASSIVE speculation. Especially considering Stan wrote Spidey as angry plenty after Ditko left. More importantly, Peter wasn’t angry in the early Ditko issues except for maybe issue #8. He had his moments sure, but it wasn’t at all consistent. He wasn’t raging out or smashing shit like he did later in Ditko’s run. He was more anxious and neurotic in those early issues which is comparatively closer to how Stan and Romita handled Peter in their earliest issues together. Peter and the whole world of Spidey got angrier towards the end of Ditko’s run. You know when Stan was letting Steve plot stuff more and more…It’s almost like Bob is full of shit or something

Bob tries to claim by the time ITSV was being written the kinks in Miles’ character had been worked out in the comics. Nah fam. If anything they’d been exacerbated. In reality it was the ITSV writers who took the wonky early Miles character and worked out those kinks themselves, creating an overall superior rendition of the character. A viewpoint I am not alone in.

‘The Prowler has never been a particularly noteworthy villain in the comics’ That’s because he’s not a villain. He was kind of a villain in his debut but he very quickly became an ally to Spidey

The panel then get into a very pretentious discussion about how ITSV preaches you arne’t stapled to your origin, you are not your trauma. That claiming that is pretentious ala Zack Snyder. But like…isn’t that the POINT of super hero origins? That they contextualize everything about the heroes thereafter? Isn’t carrying his trauma with everything they do practically the point of Batman and Spider-Man’s origins; you know the 2 most popular heroes? Uncle Ben’s death IS stapled to Spider-Man because it underlines everything he ever does. Shit it doesn’t even make sense when applied to Miles in ITSV. He does what he does because his Spider-Man died and then so did his uncle. There is even a whole scene in his dorm room where each Spider-Hero relays the grief that shaped their own lives. I’m not saying you need death and tragedy to be Spider-Man. But that’s neither a bad thing nor something that ISN’T applicable to Peter nor ITSV Miles. Aren’t these idiots supposed to be film buffs? How do you screw up such a basic reading like that?

One of the pundits claimed the movie preaches acting heroically in spite of your tragedies not because of them. Again though…that’ not Spider-Man. Peter is a hero specifically because his uncle died. Miles endeavours to become Spider-Man because his Peter died. His Uncle Aaron’s death further fuels him and allows him to make to final leap of faith. Yes, Peter B. continues to be a hero in spite of his failings but it is only his experiences with Miles that make that possible.

‘They don’t need the tragedies to be heroic they are already heroic in their own right. Look, I don’t disagree with that more broadly. Mayday Parker didn’t need tragedy to be a hero. But in terms of the specific characters in this movie? That’s clearly not true:

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This whole ‘in spite of tragedy’ shit is so pre-Marvel DC comics it hurts. Heroes who just innately do the right thing because it is the right thing to do is a dated and archaic invention Spidey and the other Marvel heroes were reacting against.

‘Spider-Man Noir detracted from the film’s message of diversity because he was a brooding WHITE MAN who prowled the night to enact fist based justice!!!!’ Do I even need to say anything to that? First of all literally every hero in the movie enacts fist based justice. Why does Noir operating at night make him worse than Peter B? Why does him being male make that worse than Peni or Gwen? Why does him being white make that worse than Miles or Peni? And as for detracting from the message of diversity, shockingly diversity can be found within the same ethnic or gender group. You know white/male people aren’t a monolith and all that. Plus creatively you want PERSONALITY diversity more than anything else. In this movie in particular you want shorthand conceptual differences too. ‘Spider-Man but an anime mech girl’ ‘Spider-Man but a noir character’. ‘Spider-Man but a cartoon pig’. This is how asinine this disgusting modern day mentality is.

Wow…MovieBob defending Noir from the asinine comment. I’m genuinely surprised. Too bad he doesn’t use the most obvious defence of ‘that is obviously a ridiculous statement to make you moron’

The next topic of discussion was related to Marvel moving away from Gwen as Spider-Man’s dead girlfriend. I spoke a lot about Bob’s ice cold take on that in this post.

He claims they introduced Spider-Gwen because the idea would be taboo and thus would get people talking. HA! Spider-Gwen was done as just a general idea not something to spark controversy. It wouldn’t even BE controversial. Marvel brought back a version of Gwen within 2 years of her death. They brought her back again 15 years after her death. They brought her back again 22 years after her death along with other versions who melted because it was the Clone Saga. During and after all those times they had AUs of Gwen in What If, Age of Apocalypse, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and other such stuff. An explicitly AU of Gwen Stacy in 2014 was one of the most aggressively uncontroversial things you could do.

Gwen’s ballet shoes differentiate her from every other Spider-Man ever. I mean yes in terms of being a dancer I suppose but in terms of being dedicated and studious, training hard and earning immense physical control? There have been plenty of versions of Spider-Man pre-2018 who are like that.

The only way you can make Spider-Gwen work going forward is by not tying it to her death in the canon? Boy…too God damn bad her debut and origin is entirely built upon that. Her origin in the comics and in the movies is built upon a role reversal because it is Peter who dies to motivate her. Film audiences would’ve still grasped that role reversal because it was only 4 years ago Emma Stone’s highly popular rendition of the character died. And that was in the last pre-MCU Spider-Man movie to boot!

‘The only Iron Man story anyone cared about was Demon in a Bottle’ Actually they only cared about that story and Armor Wars. But yeah, the MCU version is lesser for neither having his alcoholism nor a crippling heart condition. The mere fact people became complacent about that doesn’t mean it wasn’t reductive.

‘These are fictional characters they need to grow and change with the times to remain popular’ Gwen Stacy sucked shit in the 1960s-1970s and was then killed off and defined by her death. Somehow she still wound up becoming a fan favourite by the 90s and 21st century. Spider-Gwen sucks as a character but not in concept. I never had a problem with the concept. But the idea that she needed to exist to keep Gwen popular is bullshit because Gwen had somehow become immensely popular in spite of being a nothing character. And that even presumes anyone needed to perform maintenance on Gwen to keep her popular. No we didn’t. She was an irrelevant character beyond her death. It’s like saying we need to change Uncle Ben or Bruce’s parents to keep them popular.

Gwen’s affect on Peter Parker was important for awhile but we aren’t that society anymore. It’s not a fucking societal concern! Putting aside how a 2014 movie did Gwen’s death just a few years before ITSV, Gwen’s death is about a universal human experience. Death, grief, moving on. Oh, I see. This halfwit mistakenly believes Gwen is an example of women in the refrigerator.

Gwen died because Peter had this perfect lovely girlfriend and everything was too great for him and they didn’t know how to write beyond that. An oversimplification. Gwen died because they needed to shake things up for sales in general. Because Conway shipped Peter with MJ. And a 20 year old Spidey in 1973 really was too young to be killed off. Oh and you know she was written like shit. Yeah that’s the part no one ever talks about. Gwen is played up as this underserving victim of a character but she sucked shit.

It’s almost the 2020s! So fucking what? People still lose loved ones in the 2020s? I’m not even saying Spider-Gwen should have died in ITSV or revolved around her counterpart dying. I’m saying this dumbass is wrong for bringing it up as though killing Gwen off is dated on principle. But this is the same moron who unironically said ‘I never connected to Spider-Man because he is a teenaged white male wish fulfilment fantasy’. I’m sure she got top marks in her gender studies class

‘sOme PpL nEEd 2 gEt oVa iTTTTTTT’ I genuinely wish this person would wake up mute someday.

‘We could do a whole movie about Spider-Gwen’. I don’t respect where this opinion is coming from but I don’t necesarilly disag- ‘Get Seanen Maguire to write it’…nevermind. This gets even worse when you consider Maguire had only been writing Gwen for literally 3 issues at the time this podcast was released. Of the back of three issues you are declaring this writer qualified to write an entire movie about the character? Not even Jason Latour who created her. I smell someone who just jumped on the bandwagon or worse is blinded by agenda and ideology.

‘Gwen could’ve done with 5 more minutes’ It’s not her movie! It’s Miles’ movie and secondarily Peter B’s movie because he is Miles mentor. It is through their mutual relationship that Miles learns to be Spider-Man and Peter learns to be Spider-Man again.

It never made sense for an 80 year old woman to be raising a 16 year old boy! Aunt May in the 1960s wasn’t in her 80s. She just looked that way because, duh, standards of health were different back then. A 40 year old now looks much younger and in better health than someone who potentially might’ve been born in the 19th century circa 1962! A working class woman no less…With chronic health problems! Even if she was in her mid-late 50s her looking like that was totally believable in context! And her raising Peter was also entirely believable depending upon how old Ben and May were when Richard and Mary were born. It’s not beyond possibility at all that there was 15-20 years separating Ben and his younger brother, meaning if Peter was born when Richard was 25, Ben and May would’ve been in their 40s. Thus by the time Peter was 15 they’d be in their 50s or 60s.

These idiots keep treating Peter from Miles’ universe as a bona fide version of 616 Peter when it’s blindingly obvious he’s supposed to be an idealized rendition of the character. A version intended to be a juxtaposition to the version we all know walking into the movie.

Peter B. Parker having a more traditional version of Aunt May as opposed to a more proactive and involved version has left him with a sense of giving up. Er…no. It’s pretty obvious Peter B. Parker is the Spider-Man we know and love who normally doesn’t give up but one string of failures after another has brought him to his lowest. But he rises back up again. Look Peter is supposed to be a representation of human beings. Human beings need people and need emotional support. When you lose those people and are alone you can go to a very dark place. That’s Peter B’s story. If Aunt May had been more involved but everything else went wrong (including her death) he’d have still wound up in the dark place he went to. Blonde Peter might’ve weathered May’s death better in theory but he had OTHER stuff in his life to keep him afloat. Peter B lost most everything. What horseshit it is to argue if Aunt May was different he’d have not given up.

There was no purpose for Aunt May being as old as she was or on the cusp of death in the original comics. Er…yeah there was. She was that old because it made her more vulnerable and thus accentuated the loss of her husband and the need for Peter to be her support network. It also internally justified why she was so frail and unwell. Old people usually have health problems. Duh! But then Bob admits there is a reason for those decisions. So he is contradicting himself.

Bob presumes Blonde Peter told Aunt May his secret even though there is no evidence in the movie to support that idea.

Kids today aren’t resentful of their grandparents like older generations were, that’s why Aunt May is played differently now. Um…Peter was never resentful of Aunt May in the first place. He sincerely loved her and felt he needed to pay her back for all she’d done for him.

‘Kids today have cool grandparents because 50% of them would have been hippies.’ Hippies aren’t cool. And never were. They were pretentious losers that hid behind causes as an excuse to do drugs and have lots of sex. Over half a century later the world they claimed to fight for and want to build has yet to materialise and in fact is in a lot of ways far worse off than it was before their generation rose to the seats of power. The hippy generation are part of the baby boomer generation that are so thoroughly mocked today. The people in power who’ve fucked up the job and housing market for consequent generations. These idiots literally spouted a dumbass theory earlier on about how first wave millenials have been thrown under the bus. Who do you think did that? The baby boomers, many of whom used to be hippies! And NONE of this demands Aunt May has to be different. I have no problem with her being different in ITSV. But the idea of someone who used to be a hippy being doting? Being a worry wart? Why the Hell is that a dated concept?

These idiots clearly view the world aggressively through an identitarian and group weighted lens as opposed to how the world really is. I.e. 7 billion+ individuals

There was a weird amount of focus upon gangsters in the Spec Spidey cartoon considering it was for kids. Not really, the show was reverential of the original comics. The original comics (which were for children) had lots of gangsters

To the people who bitch and moan about getting another Spider-Man it doesn’t take away from the one you had before. No one was complaining about Miles as another Spider-Man in this movie. People weren’t claiming it ruins the Raimi movies or something. People resent it in the comics because it waters down the brand and makes Spider-Man himself less special when he is an ONGOING character. It’d be one thing maybe if the torch was passed from person to person. But nowadays it’s literally all of them co-existing.

Blah blah bah symbolism of a young black boy fighting a big WHITE business MAN. Blah blah blah this is the type of bad guy Miles would fight in real life blah blah blah…Jesus Christ… these people really just buy that type of Kool-aid in bulk don’t they? As if Miles, were he ‘real’ wouldn’t fight anyone who’s doing bad things. FFS they just got done talking about Tombstone from the Spec cartoon. Tombstone is an African American! And he’s in this fucking movie. He’s not some weird fantastical guy, he’s a regular gangster who happens to be albino. That’s it. Miles fights him in this fucking movie! Miles first major adversary in the comics was the Prowler who was another African American. Miles wouldn’t JUST fight ‘evil white businessMEN’

‘As far as I know about Doc Ock from Superior Spider-Man, which is excellent’ Wow. So, as would be obvious with anyone with a working brain and some prior knowledge of Otto, Superior is garbage. And saying you are basing your assessments of Otto on Superior is like saying you have never known about the character

Doc Ock is in so many Spidey stories as a scientific assistant to other people because the Green Goblin is always either dead or completely untrustworthy. Bob really just said that huh? This is further proof Bob has read precious little Spider-Man material. Doc Ock is NOBODY’s assistant. Even in Secret Wars he had to be threatened into compliance by Doom himself when Ultron was his attack dog. Doc Ock isn’t recruited by other people for his genius, he is the mover and shaker. He recruits other people and is the man in charge. And who the fuck is looking to get the help of Norman Osborn because he’s a scientist? Not to mention Norman is untrustworthy, oh but Otto?????????? The guy who tried to nuke NYC???????? WTF is Bob talking about?

Since we are in the ‘age of heroes’ (whatever THAT means?) it is impossible for Spider-Man to not be mentored by some other hero. Er…yeah it is? This is obviously a defence of MCU Spider-Man and it holds no water. First of all DC and Marvel have had young heroes show up when there are a plethora of heroes around they’ve not had mentors. Second of all it’s entirely possible for Peter to not WANT a mentor and it’d be entirely believable that the other heroes might not see themselves as mentors or might mistrust him.

The Spider-Heroes take their grief and turn it into action. WHOA WHOA WHOA! Didn’t these guys say earlier that the movie preaches the heroes are more than their trauma? That they aren’t stapled to their origins? That they move on from it? What’s this change of tune all of a sudden?

Miles Dad was probably made into a cop to avoid having a difficult discussion about how the police would react to a black super hero or a black Spider-Man. Yeah, or it’s because you know…his Dad worked in law enforcement in the comics so you know…faithfulness. Also the police don’t discriminate against black heroes in the MCU except Luke Cage. Also, also not every fucking cop is racist. Also, also, also how would they know Miles is black his costume covers his whole body!

Miles Dad was super authoritarian. Dude. He didn’t like vigilantes and he followed basic rules like stopping not abusing police sirens. That’s hardly akin to being a jackbooted fascist.

Miles would’ve had a different relationship with authority and the police if his Dad hadn’t been a cop. Er…no not necessarily. First of all being the son of a cop doesn’t mean he’d have not experienced institutionalized racism from the police. Second of all even if he had experienced that he could still believe in justice and taking down obviously evil and dangerous people like Kingpin.

They never touched upon institutional racism from the police in Luke Cage which was for adults. Er, yes they did. The rapper in the later episodes of season 1 (the Bulletproof Love guy) stated he wasn’t going to call the police. The police were stopping and searching black men in their hunt for Cage. Black people wore shirts with holes in them in order to protect Cage and defy the cops. The rap mentioned how nobody was interested in protecting their neighbourhood.

Nobody wants the tell a superhero story about institutional racism within the authorities. Isn’t that literally Luke Cage’s origin? Didn’t Black Panther mention that earlier in the year ITSV was released.

I’m going to disagree that Miles fighting Kingpin was unnecessary because of the cultural connotations we talked about….God…You couldn’t just say ‘the main hero obviously has to defeat the main villain. Duh!’…

Dan Slott is a dang genius! As if you needed more proof these people are unqualified to talk about Spider-Man…

Spider-Verse’s (the comic’s) fan service is what happens when you get Spider-Man fans to do the story vs. ITSV. Nah fam. ITSV is what happens when you get real fans who are talented vs. Spider-Verse is what happens when you get a real fan who fundamentally misunderstands the characters and is a hack

There is no real Peter Parker. Who cares! The real Peter Parker is the original because he is the one everyone else is derivative of and therefore based upon. And fans AND creators and Marvel itself clearly care about that because they sure as fuck didn’t kill him off so Miles could replace him. They killed off the secondary and surplus Ultimate Peter Parker. Treating the original version as the true one doesn’t invalidate any other versions because they can still be great characters unto themselves. But given how disgustingly SJW this whole podcast has been I am unsurprised they go in for this participation trophy form of analysis where everything is equal all the time.

It also doesn’t invalidate the idea of Spider-Man being anyone. Spider-Man CAN be anyone. But not everyone can be Peter Parker. If we are going to say otherwise the praise these jackoffs lauded onto Miles for how his specific identity was explored is invalidated. Peter is Peter. Miles is Miles. They can both be Spider-Heroes worthy of the mantle.

Because Miles is a POC people who don’t look like Peter can believe they can be Spider-Man. I’m not arguing against Miles but seriously, that was the case before Miles existed. The showrunner of Spider-Man 1994 was an African American and he related to Peter Parker in the 1960s. Poc can relate to Spider-Man regardless of skin colour.

The original comic book version of Spider-Man isn’t the true one just because he is the original. Er….yeah. It seriously does precisely BECAUSE he is the version all the other ones are derivative of. Hence he’s from the PRIME universe. Shit the Spider-Verse comic book the movie takes mild inspiration from literally says that. Granted it then contradicts itself but the point still stands. Because he is the original one he IS the true one because without him the others would not exist. He is the canonical one!

The true 616 Spider-Man will never be in any adaptation because there is too much continuity…Yeah…so? How does that make him not the original one in the broad context though when you compare every version?

Continuity is the killer of enjoyment when it comes to movies. No, this podcast is the killer of enjoyment. And btw, maybe ask all the people who went to see Infinity War earlier in the year ITSV was released and ask them if continuity ruined that movie for them. This is such a lazy, myopic attitude.

If continuity is used to exclude people it is bad. Good job nobody was ever saying ITSV shouldn’t exist because Miles isn’t Peter then

Infinity War is a fine movie even if you do not know who everybody is. No it isn’t. Infinity War is wholly inaccessible if you do not know who everyone is because it’s throwing dozens of characters at you with little-no context provided.

Black Panther is better than Infinity War, this proves continuity is bad. No. Black Panther not having to have it’s story wrapped up in everything else in the wider universe was what helped make it better. FFS, Winter Soldier is better than Avengers 2012 and that still relies upon plenty of continuity. Civil War is better than Thor the Dark World and the latter has way less continuity than the former. It’s not about having continuity it’s about how you use it. Black Panther was world building in it’s own corner. It wasn’t plugged in so directly to the wider universe the way Homecoming or FFH was. THAT’s what made it good but that’s not a continuity issue that’s a world building issue.

Continuity is toxic when you use it to claim a long running fantasy series didn’t satisfy you. Uh huh, hey do you wanna ask all the people who hated Game of Thrones’ final season that?

Oh, and one of the pundits, the one who bleeted on about Spidey as a ‘tEEnAgE WHITE mAle wish fUlLfiLmEnt fantasy!’ is a Hollywood actress. Now her views make waaaaaaaaaay too much sense

In conclusion…Sigh…For a podcast called School of Movies I think these guys need to go back to kindergarten.

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Licensing of the Monsters: How Pokémon Ignited An Anime Arms Race

"Hey, what do ya' got there? A rabbit?" Batman asks his mentor, staring at a video of Pikachu on a massive underground computer screen.

"It's a Pokémon," Bruce Wayne replies.

Five seconds later, Batman is shocked so hard by the tiny yellow creature that he ends up flying headfirst through another computer monitor (Using a clip from the "Blackout" episode of Batman Beyond, an episode that would've aired for the first time just days earlier.) It doesn't make much physical sense, but this bizarre 1999 crossover promo did establish two things: 1) Pokémon was coming to Kids' WB, and 2) Pokémon was important. So important that Batman actually took time away from obsessing over crime and vengeance to care about it.

Echoing a 1997 promo where the comedic Bugs Bunny let us in on the "secret" that the serious, dark Batman was coming to Kids' WB, it almost seems like a passing of the torch. Kids' WB, up until then, was a programming service chock full of classic Warner Bros. cartoon properties like Bugs, Daffy, Pinky, Brain, and various members of the Justice League — all animated Americana.

Pokémon wasn't a huge risk as the 4Kids Entertainment dub of the show had done well in broadcast syndication, they had plenty of episodes to work with (sometimes airing three in a row), and it was based on a game series that was already a worldwide smash hit.

But the show was ... different.

And it would end up changing cartoons as we knew them.

Part 1: Batman Jumps Ship

It's hard to think of a better scenario when it comes to appealing to kids than the one Fox Kids had with Batman: The Animated Series. Debuting in September 1992 and airing on weekdays just after school let out, it received immediate acclaim due to its moody, beautiful animation and storytelling that didn't talk down to anyone. Little kids could get into Batman throwing crooks around and adults could marvel at plots like the one where a former child actress with a medical condition that keeps her from aging takes her former co-stars hostage and ends up holding a gun, hallucinating, and sobbing into Batman's arms.

It did so well that Fox tried to air it on prime-time Sundays and though this was short-lived — turns out, Batman was no match for Ed Bradley on CBS's 60 Minutes — it solidified the show as "cool." This was a show that could hang with the big boys. You couldn't say the same of something like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

And then, in 1997, it was gone. A five-year contract ran out and Batman leapt completely to Kids' WB, where a continuation of the show (the often even grimmer The New Batman Adventures) aired later that year. There, it joined Superman: The Animated Series in a one-two punch of programming called The New Batman/Superman Adventures. When it came to Kids' WB, competitors not only had to deal with the Merry Melodies crowd, they now had to face the World's Finest Heroes.

This, along with a departing Animaniacs, left Fox Kids with a gap in flagship programming. Sure it had various incarnations of the Power Rangers (which was still holding strong) and Spider-Man, but if you look back on 1998 programming, little of it would survive the year. Silver Surfer? Gone by May. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation? Out by December. Casper? Dead in October. By May of 1999, Warner Media would announce record ratings thanks to Pokémon, while its competitors, including the Disney-led ABC, Fox, and even Nickelodeon, would suffer losses in the Saturday morning area. Pokemon would have the best ever series premiere numbers for Kids' WB at the time.

A chunk of that has to do with 4Kids Entertainment's (or to be more specific, 4Kids Productions) handling of the show. Again, Pokémon was a proven concept. If you love monsters, adventure, and collecting things, you'll probably find something to enjoy in the franchise. But the dub was particularly strong. For years, dubbing was seen as an inherently laughable thing in America, full of exasperated voice actors trying desperately to convince you that they weren't portraying three different characters, and lips that didn't match the dialogue. Entire Japanese series were reduced to laughing stocks in the U.S. because why focus on the lovingly created miniatures and top-notch tokusatsu action in Godzilla if one of the actors sounds weird?

But while Pokémon wasn't the first great dub, it was a remarkably underrated one. Veronica Taylor's work as Ash Ketchum was relatable, funny, and consistent. And Racheal Lillis, Eric Stuart, and Maddie Blaustein's turns as Team Rocket's Jessie, James, and Meowth gave us villains that could've easily been the most repetitive parts of the show — you can only try to capture Pikachu so many times before you should logically find a second hobby — but instead were one of the most entertaining aspects.

Aside from some easily meme-able bits — Brock's drying pan and jelly donuts, for example — Pokemon became a seamless addition to the Kids' WB lineup and would end up giving many fans a lifelong love of anime. And it was great for 4Kids, too, as in 2000, they would be number one on Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies.

Fox Kids wanted an answer to this. And it would soon find one.

Well, two.

Part 2: Monsters Rule

Saban Entertainment was no stranger to Fox Kids. They'd been the one to adapt Toei's Super Sentai into The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers for American and international audiences, creating an unexpected sensation that combined monsters and martial arts. And in 1999, they nabbed Digimon Adventure, a series about kids that gain "digital" monster partners when transported to a "digital world," which had begun airing earlier that year in Japan. Based on a fighting virtual pet that had already been around for a few years, Digimon was a natural fit for an anime series and also a natural fit for a climate that was desperately trying to find the next Pokémon.

Renamed Digimon: Digital Monsters, it premiered in August of 1999. Of course, accusations followed that it was a Pokémon rip-off, considering that they were both about befriending terrifying laser critters, but they offered fairly different things. While Pokémon was more episodic, Digimon gave viewers a more Dragon Ball Z-esque experience (they were both Toei productions, too) with the titular monsters evolving and gaining "power-ups" due to fighting increasingly powerful villains.

Almost two months later, Monster Rancher would join the Fox Kids lineup, airing on Saturdays at 8:30 AM after Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (a Fox Kids lost relic if there ever was one). Together, Monster Rancher and Digimon would cover the programming block with monster action, sometimes airing twice each. Meanwhile, Pokémon would do the same for Kids' WB, and if you look at their Saturday morning schedules from 1999 and 2000, it appears they just shoved Pikachu in whenever possible.

Looking back on Monster Rancher is always odd, though, because it's so specifically trapped in the time period where it originated. The video games used metadata from readable discs to create new monsters for the player, meaning that as soon as people gained the ability to download or stream media online without having to travel to their local Circuit City, the game would look absolutely archaic in comparison to its peers.

Monster Rancher is a very fun show based on some very fun games, and the dynamic array of personalities and their particular squabbles in the core group actually reminds me a lot of One Piece. But even the show itself deals with reviving monsters on giant stone discs — a prehistoric-looking adaptation of a video game gimmick that would, a decade later, appear prehistoric itself.

The Monster War was waged across 2000 and 2001. And though it appears Pokémon was the clear winner — in 2020, it's the most popular franchise with the widest reach, even if Digimon does produce some stellar shows and movies — the ratings tell a different story. In the May sweeps of 2000, Pokémon (and Kids' WB) took the prize among kids 6-11, but in the end, Fox Kids would score a victory of a 3.1 rating to Kids' WB's 3.0 (the first sweeps win since 1997, the year that Batman left.)

Early the following year, Fox Kids would score again, narrowly beating Pokémon on Saturday morning in the same timeslot and even coming ahead of properties like X-Men. And what would propel this February 10th victory? The first appearance of BlackWarGreymon, the Shadow the Hedgehog to WarGreymon's Sonic.

However, Pokémon would still help create ratings records for Kids' WB, even though late 2000/early 2001 saw a slide that would often cede dominance to Nickelodeon. Jed Patrick, who was president of The WB at the time said: "I didn't think Pokémon would fall off as much as it did ... every fire cools down a little, but that doesn't mean it doesn't stay hot."

Even though, in retrospect, claims that "Pokemania" had died seem a little ridiculous — the latest games, Pokémon Sword and Shield, just became the highest-selling entries in seventeen years — big changes were ahead.

Part 3: It's Time To Duel ... Or Not

In early 2001, Joel Andryc, executive VP of kids' programming and development for Fox Kids, was looking for a "Digimon companion series to create an hour-long anime block." He felt they were too reliant on Digimon, as they were airing it three times in a single morning. Likely not coincidentally, that summer Fox Kids Fridays were dubbed "anime invasion," advertising Flint The Time Detective, Dinozaurs, Escaflowne, and Digimon. In one commercial, a single quote zips across the bottom of the screen: "Anime Rocks!" Nicole, TX

That it does, Nicole from Texas.

Meanwhile, 4Kids Entertainment would provide Kids' WB with another monster show: Yu-Gi-Oh! Known as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters in Japan, this anime adaptation absconded from retelling the stories found in the early chapters of the manga — which were mostly devoted to Yugi running into jerks, only to have his Egyptian spirit "alter ego" deal karmic retribution on them — and instead focused on the parts that involved the cool monster fights. So basically the parts that were the most like Pokémon.

But how would this be received? In 2000, Canadian studio Nelvana had licensed the anime Cardcaptor Sakura and turned it simply into Cardcaptors — an extremely edited version that removed many important relationships and plotlines and tried to streamline the show into a pseudo-Pokémon story. It's gone down in history as one of the most questionable dubs ever, and never really made a splash on Kids' WB. So they wouldn't want a repeat of that.

But would kids be into a card game? The cards did summon monsters, but in Pokémon and Digimon, the monsters are just there, moving around and not relegated to a glorified checkers board arena. It turned out, yes, kids would be REALLY into that. Yu-Gi-Oh! debuted at number one in multiple demographics in September 2001, and would remain a steady part of its lineup for years to come.

And how did Fox Kids respond? Did the "anime invasion" work out? Well, sort of, but not in the way they were hoping.

In 2001, due to diminishing ratings and audiences, Fox Kids Worldwide (along with Fox Family Worldwide) were sold to The Walt Disney Company. By November 7th, they'd canceled their weekly afternoon blocks, and the next year, they'd end up selling their entire Saturday morning block to a company that had provided their rivals with the very same TV shows that aided in sinking them: 4Kids Entertainment. The final show to premiere on the original Fox Kids was Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension, a live action series that stood beside Alienators: Evolution Continues (a cartoon sequel to the mediocre 2001 comedy Evolution) and the underrated Medabots as the block's last gasp.

Renamed FoxBox in late 2002 (and later 4KidsTV in 2005), the 4Kids run schedule would, over the years, include anime like Kirby! Right Back At Ya!, Ultimate Muscle, Fighting Foodons, Sonic X, Shaman King, and eventually, in 2004, the infamous One Piece dub. The first Saturday of the new FoxBox lineup would also outdo the previous Saturday's Fox Kids lineup. Disney would acquire the rights to Digimon and it showed up on ABC Family in late 2001 (eighteen years later, a reboot of the original series would air, which can be watched on Crunchyroll).

Eventually, in 2007, the Monster War would come full circle. 4Kids Entertainment announced they would be taking over the Kids' WB Saturday morning block entirely, renaming it the "CW4KIDS," as The CW had been born after UPN and The WB had ceased to be. Pokémon was long gone by this point, having been dropped by Kids' WB in 2006, and was now overseen by The Pokémon Company International on Cartoon Network.

"We wish Pokémon USA much success going forward," the CEO of 4Kids Entertainment said. Later sued over "illegal agreements" regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, the company would eventually file for bankruptcy in 2016. Pokémon Journeys, the latest installment in the franchise, launches on Netflix on June 12th.

Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

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

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years

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Martin Luther and Beer: the other reformation

Almost 500 years ago, an obscure Saxon monk launched a protest movement against the Catholic Church that would transform Europe. Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation changed not just the way Europeans lived, fought, worshiped, worked and created art but also how they ate and drank. For among the things it impacted was a drink beloved throughout the world and especially in Luther's native Germany: beer.

The change in beer production was wrought by the pale green conical flower of a wildly prolific plant — hops.

Every hip craft brewery today peddling expensive hoppy beers owes a debt of gratitude to Luther and his followers for promoting the use of hops as an act of rebellion against the Catholic Church. But why did Protestants decide to embrace this pretty flower, and what did it have to do with religious rebellion?

Therein foams a bitter pint of history.

In the 16th century, the Catholic Church had a stranglehold on beer production, since it held the monopoly on gruit — the mixture of herbs and botanicals (sweet gale, mug wort, yarrow, ground ivy, heather, rosemary, juniper berries, ginger, cinnamon) used to flavor and preserve beer. Hops, however, were not taxed. Considered undesirable weeds, they grew plentifully and vigorously — their invasive nature captured by their melodic Latin name, Humulus lupulus (which the music-loving Luther would have loved), which means "climbing wolf."

The church didn't like hops. One reason was that the 12th century German mystic and abbess Hildegard had pronounced that hops were not very good for you, because they 'make the soul of a man sad and weigh down his inner organs. So, if you were a Protestant brewer and wanted to thumb your nose at Catholicism, you used hops instead of herbs.

Even before the Reformation, German princes had been moving toward hops — in 1516, for instance, a Bavarian law mandated that beer could be made only with hops, water and barley. But Luther's revolt gave the weed a significant boost. The fact that hops were tax-free constituted only part of the draw. Hops had other qualities that appealed to the new movement; chiefly, their excellent preservative qualities.

All herbs and spices have preservative qualities, but with hops, beer could travel really well, so it became a unit of international trade that symbolized the growing business class, which was tangentially connected with the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.

Another virtue in hops' favor was their sedative properties. The mystic Hildegard was right in saying hops weighed down one's innards. "I sleep six or seven hours running, and afterwards two or three. I am sure it is owing to the beer," wrote Luther to his wife, Katharina, from the town of Torgau, renowned for its beer.

The soporific, mellowing effect of hops might seem like a drawback, but in fact it offered a welcome alternative to many of the spices and herbs used by the church that had hallucinogenic and aphrodisiacal properties. Fueled by these potent concoctions, church ales could be as boisterous as the Germanic drinking bouts church elders once frowned on. And so, to distance themselves further from papal excesses, when Protestants drank beer they preferred it hopped.

If the Catholic Church lost control over the printed word with the invention of the printing press — the technological weapon that ensured Luther's success — it lost control over beer with the rise of hops. The head went flat on monastic beer. Did Protestantism explicitly promote hops? Perhaps. But did it encourage the use of hops? More likely.

Luther would have relished his role in promoting hops. If anyone loved and appreciated good beer, it was this stout, sensual and gregarious monk. His letters often mentioned beer, whether it was the delicious Torgau beer that he extolled as finer than wine or the "nasty" Dessau beer that made him long for Katharina's homebrew. "I keep thinking what good wine and beer I have at home, as well as a beautiful wife," Martin Luther wrote. "You would do well to send me over my whole cellar of wine and a bottle of thy beer."

Days before he died, in February 1546, in one of his last letters to his wife, he praised Naumburg beer for its laxative properties. Luther suffered excruciating agonies from constipation, and it was therefore with immense satisfaction that he announced his "three bowel movements" that morning.

In an age where the water was unsafe, beer was drunk by everyone and was the nutritional and social fuel of Germany. It was a really natural and very common part of every household pantry. It would be compared these days to a pot of coffee always simmering on your countertop. Back then it was a kettle of beer. Beer was brewed less for pure enjoyment than for medicinal reasons (it incorporated herbs and spices) and for pure sustenance. Beers then were richer and heartier than today. They were a source of calories for the lower classes who did not have access to rich foods.

Not surprisingly, beer pops up at pivotal moments in Luther's life. Most notably, after taking on the formidable might of the Catholic Church, an unruffled Luther famously declared that God and the Word did everything, "while I drank beer with my [friends] Philipp and Amsdorf."

Luther's teachings were mocked as "sour beer," and one of his critics disparaged him as a heretic from the filthy market town of Wittenberg, populated by "a barbarous people who make their living from breweries and saloons." But as he gained fame and became a popular hero, a range of Lutheran merchandise was launched, including beer mugs featuring the pope as the Antichrist.

When the excommunicated Luther married the runaway nun Katharina von Bora, the town council gave the couple a barrel of excellent Einbeck beer. It was a fitting gift. Beer was soon to assume an even more central role in Luther's life, thanks to his wife.

The intelligent, talented and exceptionally competent Katharina not only bore six children and managed the Luthers' large household with its endless stream of guests but also planted a vegetable garden and fruit trees, raised cows and pigs, had a fish pond, drove a wagon, and — to her husband's undying delight — opened a brewery that produced thousands of pints of beer each year.

Her initial shaky attempts produced a thin, weak brew, but she soon got the hang of it and learned exactly how much malt to add to suit her husband's taste. Luther was ecstatic — “Lord Katie”, as he affectionately called her, had assured him a steady supply even when Wittenberg's breweries ran dry.

Luther's favourite spot to hold forth on theology, philosophy and life in general was not the tavern but the table. The long refectory table in the cavernous Luther home seated up to 50 people. "This was Luther's especial domain," writes Andrew Pettegree in his elegant biography Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned History. "The day's labors past, he would sit with his friends and talk. Fueled by his wife's excellent beer, conversation would become general, discursive, and sometimes unbuttoned."

Unbuttoned is an understatement. Voluble, energetic and beery, Luther's conversation zigged and zagged between the sublime and the scatological, to the amazement of his students, who hung on his every word. The church was called a brothel and the pope the Antichrist. Former popes "farted like the devil" and were sodomites and transvestites. His students collected these jewels into a book called Table Talk. When it was published, it went viral.

But though he clearly loved his tankard, there is no record of Luther being a lush. In fact, he could be quite a scold when it came to drunken behaviour. He lamented the German addiction to beer, saying, "such an eternal thirst, I am afraid, will remain as Germany's plague until the Last Day." And he once declared, "I wish brewing had never been invented, for a great deal of grain is consumed to make it, and nothing good is brewed."

This was no doubt a spot of grandstanding. For all his protestations, Luther's beer stein was always full. He loved local beer, boasted of his wife's brewing skills, and launched a movement that helped promote hops. Does that make him a patron saint of the craft brewery?

Luther might blanch a bit as a good Protestant at being called a saint, and there's already a brewery saint called St. Arnold, who saved his congregation from the plague by making them drink beer. In the interests of Protestantism, he would never have called himself a saint, but he was certainly a beer enthusiast, and many a beer bar and brewery today has a picture of Martin Luther on their wall.

Cheers!

#beer #martin luther #katherine #protestant #hobs #catholic church #religion #germany #medieval history

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cottonfreakz · 5 years

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Everything you need to know about MANGA Plus by Shueisha

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If you’re an anime or manga fan, you’ve probably heard of Weekly Shonen Jump, published by Shueisha. The story behind the very first anime you ever watched may even have sprouted from the world’s most famous manga magazine. Over Weekly Shonen Jump‘s sprawling 50-year history, they’ve published some of the most globally successful manga ever, including Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto.

Weekly Shonen Jump may have reached its peak weekly circulation of 6.53 million copies in the 1990s, but the march of time and the decline of print media haven’t stopped the magazine from expanding its net of readers. Jump’s audience has steadily become more global, as Shueisha looks towards digital distribution as a means of ensuring that their titles remain accessible towards a wide audience.

In 2014, Shueisha first launched Shonen Jump+, an online platform in Japanese that sells e-book versions of Jump manga titles as well as a digital version of Weekly Shonen Jump that can be read on mobile devices. The site allows users to read a large sample of Jump manga for free, and also serializes a number of original titles separate from the print magazine, including ēlDLIVE and DARLING in the FRANXX.

Meanwhile, in North America, popular Jump titles like My Hero Academia consistently top best-selling lists for graphic novels. From 2013 to 2018, Viz Media published a digital version of Weekly Shonen Jump, releasing new English chapters simultaneously with the Japanese magazine, and last December they launched a new website giving subscribers access to over 70 catalog titles.

However, this will not be the only means through which the latest Jump chapters will be available digitally from now on. Shueisha is launching a global version of Shonen Jump+ on January 28, called MANGA Plus. Not only will the site and app provide simultaneous releases of popular serialized titles like One Piece, it will also be available in every country except China and South Korea. The app will also be completely free, like the Japanese version of Shonen Jump+ currently is.

To talk about this new venture in detail, we visited Shueisha‘s offices and talked to Shonen Jump+ editor Shuhei Hosono, who also oversees MANGA Plus. He explained everything to know about MANGA Plus upon launch.

When did you first get involved with the project? And what are your thoughts as team leader?

I’ve been with Shonen Jump+ since it started in 2014. I was also involved in the online Jump Book Store that launched in 2012. Through my work on those projects, I wanted as much manga to be available as possible. Just like in Japan, there are a lot of manga readers overseas. So I want to bring Shonen Jump+ to people all around the world.

How exactly does Shonen Jump+ work?

Through Shonen Jump+, you can purchase a digital version of each issue of Weekly Shonen Jump at the same time the print version comes out. You can also buy e-books of the tankobon versions of Jump titles. On top of that, there are original manga titles that are serialized exclusively through the service.

The service itself is completely free to use. The first chapters of every manga on Shonen Jump+ manga are available for any user to read. Also, the latest chapters that are serialized will also be available for anyone to read for a limited amount of time.

When did the idea of making a global version of Shonen Jump+ start?

We started talking about it in 2017, and we’ve been working at it right until launch.

What languages will the service be in?

For now, we just have an English and Spanish version planned. The Spanish version will launch around February/March, although it may have a different lineup from the English version. If there is enough demand, we may add more languages.

What is the difference between the Viz‘s Shonen Jump app and MANGA Plus?

Well, for starters, there will be more titles available through MANGA Plus. We plan to add as many titles as we can, even relatively minor ones that previously never had in English release.

Viz focuses mainly on Weekly Shonen Jump titles, while MANGA Plus will have titles from other Shueisha publications, like Jump Square and the Jump+ online manga.

MANGA Plus will also be available in more regions. It will available throughout the entire world except in China, South Korea, and Japan, as they already have their own separate services. Previously under-served regions like Southeast Asia will be able to read manga through this app. Up until now, Shueisha‘s titles have been distributed throughout North America, Europe, Asia etc., via local publishers or distribution lines. This marks the first time that Shueisha is expanding direct service globally.

Will every manga that is serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump be available through this service (and not just the popular ones)?

Yes. The starting lineup will be almost everything that’s currently being serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. There will be over 30 titles being released simultaneously with Japan.

As for titles that have concluded and are not currently being serialized in the magazine, such as Naruto, we plan to serialize them through the app from the beginning so that new readers can experience them, one chapter at a time. 10 of these serializations are already planned, and more will be added gradually over time.

The full starting lineup is below:

Ongoing series

ONE PIECE

The Promised Neverland

Jujutsu Kaisen – Sorcery Fight

My Hero Academia

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Haikyu!!

Black Clover

Chainsaw Man

Hinomaru Sumo

Food Wars: Shokugeki no Sōma

ne0;lation

I’m From Japan

Teenage Renaissance! David

BORUTO

We Never Learn

Dr. Stone

act-age

HUNTER×HUNTER (Suspended)

Hell Warden Higuma

Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign

Blue Exorcist

Platinum End

World Trigger

Dragon Ball Super

Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V

Terra Formars

Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku

Summertime Render

Nano Hazard

The Sign of Abyss

Blue Flag

Abyss Rage

LAND ROCK

Soloist in A Cage

Curtain’s up, I’m off

Spotless Love: This Love Cannot Be Any More Beautiful.

Dricam!!

Moon Land

Completed Series

NARUTO

Bakuman.

Rosario+Vampire

Nisekoi

Claymore

Tokyo Ghoul

ONE PIECE Part 1

Assassination Classroom

DEATH NOTE

DRAGON BALL

Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Swordsman Romantic Story

BLEACH

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Note that the lineup will be different in Taiwan.

For the titles that Viz shares with MANGA Plus, will the translation be the same?

Yes. As for other titles they handle, they may use different translators.

Will the interface be similar to Shonen Jump+?

Yes, it will be based on the existing app. On the home page, you’ll see the latest chapters to be uploaded underneath each day. You’ll also be able to access the full list of titles available through a drop menu.

Do you think manga itself is changing as the medium becomes more global?

Yes, there are more readers from around the world, and more manga is being born overseas. These days, the quality of manga from around the world is incredibly high. Although we at Shueisha make manga primarily to appeal to a Japanese audience, we hope that the stories can have a global appeal too. It’s one of the many things that editors take into consideration when we think about what kind of manga to publish next.

However, at the core of it, manga is always about telling interesting stories, and no matter how much time passes, that side of manga has never changed.

As the artist behind Dragon Ball Super, do you get a lot of feedback from overseas fans? How would you characterize that feedback?

When I have been to overseas events, people have spoken to me. The way people overseas perceive and evaluate my work is very different from Japan, so it’s been very helpful to me as reference for creating the story.

How important would you say the international audience is for the success of Dragon Ball Super?

Because Dragon Ball is loved throughout the entire world, I think that the sequel Dragon Ball Super must also be loved in the same way.

Are you personally excited that your overseas fans can now catch up and read your new chapters at the same time as Japan?

I am very grateful that there is no time lag for the release of the manga. If the information from Japan is conveyed in a fragmentary manner, then readers won’t be able to taste the initial emotions and surprise. I am very excited about the simultaneous release.

Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto, also left a message: “Jump’s manga will now be available at the same time all over the world! Now that it’s an official service, there will be a lot to read! Wonderful!”

#Bakuman #Bleach #Boruto #Claymore #Death Note #Dragonball #Jojo's Bizarre Adventure #MANGA plus #My Hero Academia #Naruto.#one piece #Rurouni Kenshin #shonen jump #Shueisha #Tokyo Ghoul #Viz Media #Yu-Gi-Oh #Anime

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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Goldner on Elbaum

Commune has a new review out of the 2018 reissue of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which recounts the trials and travails of the New Communist Movement in the US. Written by Colleen Lye, “Maoism in the Air” is very sympathetic to the book’s central thesis: namely, that three distinct strands of American Maoism (Cultural Revolutionary, Third World nationalism, and orthodox Marxism-Leninism) shaped the politics of the post-’68 generation in a novel and generally beneficial way. Lye even goes a step further than Elbaum, remarking on the NCM’s institutional legacy that “today’s academic field of critical ethnic studies might well be described as a space where anti-racism and anti-imperialism continue, in a different key and perhaps even unknowingly, the Marxist-Leninism of the ’68 generation.”

She may well be right about this, but I hardly think this is a legacy to be proud of. Usually the so-called “long march through the institutions” is seen as a political defeat held up as an intellectual victory. Marxism’s relegation to the academy is a sign of its neutralization, in other words. I can only speak to the field of Jewish Studies, which is what I’m most familiar with, but for the most part I find it a useless discipline — despite my persistent interest in the history of Jews. Regardless, I was somewhat surprised to see such a positive review of Elbaum’s book in the pages of Commune, a magazine that I am very excited about. (For any readers who haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Jay Firestone’s ethnographic survey of alt-Right NYC and Paul Mattick’s outstanding piece on the centenary of the German Revolution.)

Admittedly, I’ve never understood the appeal of Maoism for American communists, either in the seventies or today. Perhaps it possessed some exotic aura back then, or was maybe just a dope aesthetic. Either way, the theory and practice of the Chinese brand of Stalinism ought to have been long discredited by now. Virtually all of the national liberation movements that were supposed to destabilize global capitalism and pave the way for international socialist revolution have been seamlessly reintegrated into the world of commodities. Nowadays, of course, there is the added association of Maoist ideas with the Black Panther Party, which is still celebrated as a high point in the history of revolutionary politics in the US. How much of this is simply mythologization after the fact is difficult to say, but it was certainly influential.

But even in light of this association, the attraction of Maoism is difficult to grasp. It was recently revealed, in fact, that the person who introduced the Black Panthers to the writings of Mao was an FBI snitch. Richard Aoki, the Berkeley radical and leader of the ethnic studies strike, informed his Bureau contact: “The Maoist twist, I kind of threw that one in. I said so far the most advanced Marxists I have run across are the Maoists in China.” Despite this ideological straightjacket, BPP spokesmen like Fred Hampton were able to say fairly interesting things (all this before he was gunned down in Chicago at the age of 21). While it gave Hampton the perspective he needed to denounce the empty culturalism of Stokely Carmichael, whom he referred to as a “mini-fascist,” it otherwise limited the Panthers’ scope of inquiry into capitalist society.

Loren Goldner’s review, lightly edited and reproduced below, provides a much-needed corrective to the laudatory reception Revolution in the Air has met with so far. Goldner grounds his critique of Elbaum in the left communist and heterodox Trotskyist tradition he belonged to at the time, even though he likewise went to Berkeley and knew many of the same characters. Other Maoists, such as Paul Saba, have gently criticized Elbaum’s book over the last few months. Saba contends that the main fault of the NCM — of which he was also a veteran — was its theoretical poverty, and that it might have benefited from a more sophisticated Althusserian-Bettelheimian viewpoint. Quite the opposite holds for Goldner: the New Communist Movement was wrongheaded from the start.

You can read a 2010 interview with Elbaum by clicking on the link, but otherwise enjoy Goldner’s blistering review. Maoism may still be “in the air,” as Lye contends, if the various Red Guard formations are any indication. According to Goldner, however, it might be in the air the same way smog and other pathogens are.

Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist/Maoist/“Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the “best and the brightest” coming out of the American 1960s.

Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum’s book (describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what “Third World Marxism” stood for in its 1970s heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled “progressive politics” for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing “progressive” forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neoliberal phase has shot its bolt.

I lived through the 1960s too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970s had spawned eight different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with “Eurocentric” Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third World “national liberation movements” and states resulting from them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists,” who cheerleaded most or all of them, were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left Opposition). In Elbaum’s milieu, the choice was between 1953 (death of Stalin) and 1956 (Khruschev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress). “Eurocentrics” that we were, we took note of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao Tse-tung at the time had criticized from the right); of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Third Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 “Communes” in Vietnam and China). We critiqued Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Popular Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to the abandonment of anticolonial agitation by the Vietnamese and Algerian Communist Parties in the name of “antifascism”). We were disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin’s 1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact, through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, We read about Elbaum’s one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest) of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish Workers’ Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970, which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too “Eurocentric” for him — they did after all take place in Europe — assuming he heard about them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described them as revolts against “revisionism.”

From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse anti-Stalinist milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; we discovered Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and the Situationists; we saw Chile’s 1970-1973 Popular Front once again crushed by the same collaborationist policies which Elbaum’s Stalinist lineage had first perfected in France and Spain in 1936, and unlike Elbaum and his friends, we were hardly startled when the Chinese Communist Party embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our “Eurocentric” attention that China itself had pushed the Indonesian Communist Party to adopt the same Popular Front strategy in 1965, leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands (a success for US imperialism that more than offset the later defeat in Indochina), or that it had applauded when the Ceylonese regime (today Sri Lanka) bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student movement in 1971. We were similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his friends, when China went on to support the South African intervention against the MPLA in Angola, or call for the strengthening of NATO against Soviet “social imperialism,” or support the right-wing regroupment against the Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974-1975. We “Eurocentrists” snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by the People’s Liberation Army in the course of the “Cultural Revolution,” the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant success in “putting politics in command” against the capitalist restorationists, technocrats, and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven for good measure. All of these writings of Chinese Stalinism struck us more as the second-time farce to the first-time tragedy of the worldwide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920s onward. Elbaum and his friends cheered on Pol Pot’s rustification campaign in Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao’s death (the arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to be a “Third World Marxist”!

We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the “early Marx” and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the “late Marx” in the Grundrisse, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the “early” and “late” Marx (though we did not yet know Marx’s writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly “late Marx” and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the “diamat” world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum’s world. It was of course “Eurocentric” to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, “not Eurocentric” to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840s onward may have been “Eurocentric” but the braindead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the “three goods” and the “four bads” were, for these people, decidedly not.

Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings — no doubt “Eurocentric” — on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on precapitalist societies everywhere in Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter’s lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukács similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940s and 1950s CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China’s four “revolutionary operas” and songs such as “The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers” while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter’s limitations) and Guy Debord.

Then there was the influence of “Monthly Review” magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World “anti-imperialists” to China; they were infused with the “Bandung” climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist “anti-imperialist” bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mindset, as did the later “Tricontinental” (Latin America-Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arghiri Emanuel, and the South American “dependency school” (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin’s theory of imperialism, with its idea of “imperialist superprofits” making possible the support of a “labor aristocracy” and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy’s economics, Elbaum still uses “monopoly capital” as one of his many unexamined concepts.

Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of Volume I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel’s Phenomenology only on the initial phase of “sense certainty” of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria’s “On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus,” reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: “the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars.” He might have added that it wasn’t worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers’ councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum’s own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the “socialism in one rural commune” of William Hinton’s Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong “democracy” by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin’s Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960s, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Dühringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the Left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx’s time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890s as power-political “monopoly capital.” This “anti-imperialism” was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the “progressive” regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960s, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the US, Europe, and East Asia (so much for Lenin’s theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to implicate the “white” (e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from 1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the US and Britain, May 1968 in France and the “creeping May” of 1969-1977 in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists” that they were bought off by imperialism.

A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum’s book from beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, ultraleftism. Elbaum never explains that “revisionism” meant to this milieu above all the ideological demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called themselves “antirevisionists” were identifying, implicitly or explicitly (usually the latter) Stalin’s Russia with some betrayed “Marxist orthodoxy.” In his counterposition of “revisionism/antirevisionism” Elbaum does not devote one line to the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of “socialism in one country,” a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin’s Testament called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, another “fact” that counted for nothing in the mental universe of “Third World Marxism.”) For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and affirmed it. As for “Marxism-Leninism,” Elbaum does admit that it was a concoction of Stalin. In its subsequent career “Marxism-Leninism” could mean anything to anyone, anything of course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every failed proletarian revolution of the twentieth century (Russia 1905 and 1917-1921, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-1937, Hungary 1956, France 1968) had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small totalitarians in Elbaum’s “Third World Marxist” pantheon put together.

“Ultraleftism” for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum seems quite unaware of the true historic ultraleft. One can agree or disagree with [Anton] Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin’s State and Revolution), [Herman] Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed onto western Europe) or [Amadeo] Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale. But such people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland, and Italy) that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct) League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of the “proletariat” as the commodity form of human labor-power). As indicated above, figures such as [Karl] Korsch, [Paul] Mattick, [Cornelius] Castoriadis, and the early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered part of an ultraleft, and unlike the productions of Elbaum’s milieu, their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002.

“Internationalism” for Elbaum means mainly cheerleading for the latest “Third World Marxist” movement or regime, but in reality his vision of the world is laughably America-centered. He refers on occasion (as a source of inspiration for his milieu) to the French mass strike of 1968, which swept aside all self-appointed vanguards, “Marxist-Leninists” first of all. This is lost on Elbaum. By the early 1970s, Trotskyist groups had clearly out-organized the Marxist-Leninists, and for what it’s worth, today the two largest Trotskyist groups, Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste, together account for 10% of the vote in French elections and are now larger than the Communist Party, without a Marxist-Leninist in sight. In Britain, similarly, Trotskyist groups out-organized the Marxist-Leninists hands down, played an important role in the 1972 strike wave (never mentioned by Elbaum), and today the British Socialist Workers’ Party (not to be confused with the American rump of the same name) is the largest group to the left of the Labour Party. Elbaum refers in passing to the Japanese far left of the 60s as an influence on some Japanese-Americans, but he seems blissfully unaware that the Zengakuren was overwhelmingly anti-Stalinist and mainly viewed Russia and China as state-capitalist. The most creative and internationally influential currents of the Italian 1970s, the so-called operaisti or workerists, were breaking with Leninism from the early 1970s at the latest. (To be fair, in Italy and in Germany large Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups did exist, and the Trotskyists were basically marginal.)

On the subject of Trotsky: I am not a Trotskyist, and have basically (as previously indicated) since my callow youth viewed all so-called socialist societies as class societies, and not (as Trotskyists do) as “workers’ states.” But I have more respect for Trotsky (who should be distinguished from the Trotskyists) than I ever had or will have for Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim il-Sung, Castro, Guevara, or Cabral.

Wearing the blinders of his milieu, Elbaum shows real ignorance of Trotskyism. (“Third World Marxism’s” philistine hatred for Trotsky, while generally not stooping to 1930s “Trotsky the agent of the Mikado”-type slanders, was exceeded only by such ignorance.) Blinded by his milieu’s acceptance of complete and positive continuity between Lenin and Stalin, the world events of the early 1920s, which decisively shaped both Trotskyism and the aforementioned ultraleft (and the last eighty years of human history) have no importance for him. Hence (as indicated earlier), the triumph of “socialism in one country” after 1924 and the total subordination of all Communist Parties to Soviet foreign policy are totally unproblematic for these people, as were all the debacles of the Comintern mentioned earlier. Similarly, the question of the relationship of the Bolshevik party and Soviet state to the soviets and workers’ councils, i.e. the question of the actual working-class management of society, which was settled (in the negative) by 1921, is of no consequence either. It is Eurocentric to be concerned about Soviet history before the rise of Stalin, not Eurocentric to admire Stalin’s Russia with its ten million peasants killed in the 1930s collectivizations, its massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the Moscow Trials, its factories operating with killing speed-up under direct GPU control or its twenty million people in slave labor camps at the time of Stalin’s death. For such a view, “revisionism” must therefore be Khrushchev’s (equally top-down) attempt to decompress (a bit) this nightmare. The memory of Stalinist Russia still weighs on the consciousness of masses of people around the world as the seemingly inevitable outcome of trying to do away with capitalism, and reinforces the still potent neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative,” but why the people Elbaum describes as the “most dynamic” part of the American left in the 1970s were so taken with the Stalinist legacy never seems to strike him as a major problem to be addressed.

Elbaum might also inform himself about Trotsky’s (and Marx’s) theory of permanent revolution, which was the centerpiece of the Bolshevik internationalist strategy in 1917, and its repudiation by Stalin the key to all the post-1924 politics swallowed whole forty-five years later by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists.” Permanent revolution-rightly or wrongly-meant the possibility that a revolution in a backward country like Russia could link up with (or even inspire; cf. Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto) revolution in the developed European heartland, and in that way be spared the bloody primitive accumulation process which every capitalist country from Britain to Russia to contemporary China has necessarily undergone. It is this theory, and not some “Eurocentrism,” that made (the small minority of) honest Trotskyists keep their distances from regimes using “Third World Marxism” as a fig-leaf for capitalist primitive accumulation. Most Trotskyists were howling with the wolves that “Vietnam Will Win!” Well, we have seen what won in Vietnam (and even more so Cambodia).

This is hardly the place to describe the devolution of Trotskyism since Trotsky, but honesty and courage of convictions were not the strong suit of the [Ernest] Mandels and [Jack] Barneses and [Michel] Pablos who shaped it after 1940. Elbaum sees the American SWP as the main face of Trotskyism for 1960s and 1970s leftists in the US (and he is right about that), and claims that Trotskyism’s involvement with “old 1930s issues” and “European questions” was the main hindrance to a larger impact of Trotskyism when the Third World, from China to Vietnam to Cuba was supposedly sizzling with revolution and the building of socialism.

In point of fact, watching the SWP (like their French counterparts Ligue Communiste) in the 1960s and 1970s, I could only laugh up my sleeve watching the way they buried their critique of Stalinism (as in the case of the Vietnamese NLF) in the fine print of their theoretical journals while rushing after popularity, waving NLF flags, in exactly the milieu influenced by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.” To take only one anecdotal example: In a 1969 debate in Berkeley between the ISC and the SWP, we put SWP spokesperson Pete Camejo up against the wall about the 1945 massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in front of a large New Left audience. And Camejo conceded that, yes, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had in fact oppressed the Vietnamese comrades of the Fourth International. I am sure most of the New Leftist cheerleaders present considered our point to be “ancient history” — just twenty-four years earlier! Today, as they watch Vietnam rush into “market socialism” with investment capital from Toyota and Mitsubishi, I am sure they do not think about it at all. I remember Camejo’s brother Tony telling a similar audience that we should not be too critical of black and Latino nationalism in the US because blacks and Latinos had not yet passed through their “bourgeois revolution,” as if American blacks and Latinos did not also live in the most advanced capitalist society in the world. But he had put his finger on a certain reality, since many of the black and Latino nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s were in fact on their way to middle-class careers, once the shouting died down, as uninterested in genuine proletarian revolution (and the true twentieth century examples of it) today as they were then. (They were and are in this way no different from the great majority of the white New Left.) Elbaum approvingly quotes Tariq Ali attacking those who (such as myself and the ISC to which I belonged) saw no difference between “Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, or Castro and Batista,” whereas all of world history since Ali uttered that remark has demonstrated nothing except that the main difference made between old-style US-backed dictators and “Third World Marxist” dictators with state power is that the latter better prepare their countries for full-blown capitalism, with Mao’s China exhibit A for the prosecution, and Vietnam following close behind.

Further, Elbaum never seems to notice that many of the twentieth century Marxists still worth reading today (and he apparently has not read them), such as the early Shachtman, James, Draper, and Castoriadis, made their most important contributions in a break to the left of Trotskyism. In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.

Finally, while Elbaum rightly says that the turn ca. 1969 of thousands of New Leftists to the American working class was largely fruitless, he does neglect one important counterexample, namely the success of the International Socialists (the renamed ISC after 1970) in building the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and through it being the sparkplugs for the election of Ron Carey as President of the Teamsters in 1991. There is no question that this development, however much it turned into a fiasco, was the most important leftwing intervention in the American labor movement since the 1940s. I no more wish to go off on a long tangent about that terribly-botched episode than I wish to expound on the history of Trotskyism; I left the IS milieu in 1969. It is rather, again, to show Elbaum’s blindspot to the real flaws of his own tradition. The IS’ success with TDU came at the price of burying (at least for the purposes of Teamster politics) the fact that they were socialists, not merely honest trade-unionists (It turned out that Carey wasn’t even that.) Anyone educated in a Trotskyist group (and the IS, despite its rejection of the socialist character of the so-called “workers’ states” was Trotskyist on every other question), in contrast to most Stalinist and Maoist groups, develops a healthy aversion to the trade-union bureaucracy and to the Democratic Party. Elbaum provides a long history of how Maoism evolved out of the wreckage of the old CPUSA after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Some of these groups looked back to the CP under Browder; others preferred William Z. Foster. But almost all of them saw something positive in the CP’s role during the Roosevelt era, both in the Democratic Party and in the CIO. The problem of those working off of Trotskyism was, on the contrary, the “bureaucracy” that developed in exactly the era of CP influence; the problem of those working off of Marxism-Leninism was “revisionism” (Stalinists and Maoists for some reason don’t have too much to say about bureaucracy, except-as in the “Cultural Revolution,” when they are supporting one bureaucratic faction against another). And the concept of “revisionism” rarely inoculated these people against seeking influence in high places, either with Democratic politicians or with trade-union bureaucrats, as the CP had done so successfully in its heyday. It is certainly true that many of Elbaum’s Marxist-Leninists did neither. But he seems to ignore the fact that the ability of a group like the IS to intersect the Teamster rank-and-file rebellion of the 1970s and thereafter had something to do with the fact that they, in contrast to every Marxist-Leninist around, were not approaching the American working class with tall tales about socialism in Cuba or Albania or Cambodia or North Korea. The oh-so-radical defenders of Beijing’s line, whether for or against the “Gang of Four,” turned out to be defending a considerable part of the global status quo.

Finally, if Elbaum would lift his head from the rubble of “Third World Marxism,” he might notice that, in Britain and France, Trotskyist groups have a solid mass base (whatever one thinks of the politics involved), whereas Marxist-Leninists are almost nowhere to be seen; and even in the politically-backward U.S., groups such as the ineffable ISO, not to mention the youthful anarchist scene, are attracting more young people interested in revolution than any Marxist-Leninists. Being for the overthrow of every government in the world lets you see and do things that the baggage of Pol Pot or Shining Path or Kim Jong-Il conceals.

It is now time to turn to the merits of Elbaum’s book, which, contrary to what the reader may conclude from the above, it indeed has. First — and with this I have no quarrel — Elbaum attacks the “good sixties/bad sixties” vision of figures such as Todd Gitlin, for whom the late-sixties turn to revolution was the “bad sixties,” compared to the early sixties Port Huron vision of participatory democracy. Revolution was necessary then, and is necessary today, whatever the current ideological climate might favor. Elbaum is also right in critiquing Gitlin’s (and many others’) almost exclusive focus on the white New Left, seeing the movement essentially collapse with SDS in 1969-1970, and not recognizing its extension, particularly among blacks and Latinos (not to mention the thousands of white New Leftists who went into the factories, and the wildcat strike wave which lasted until 1973).

But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist/Stalinist/Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960s and 1970s, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the “post-Trotskyists” to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America’s “blindspot,” the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960s, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum’s milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were — whether they knew it or not — on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of “progressive” middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the “prairie radicalism” (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more “European” left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social/historical/cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly antinationalist itself.)

It is undeniable that the 1960s movements of peoples of color in the U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the decolonization of most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the “decentering” of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world history, following the 1914-1945 “decentering” of Europe in the new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by — and themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and moralistic to explain their attraction to “Third World Marxism,” Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that “they had the wrong ideas.” One important part of the answer is definitely the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups, who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes. But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao’s little red book or chanting “We want a pork chop/Off the pig” was not signing on for Stalin’s gulag, or the millions who died in Mao’s “great leap forward” in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in Sekou Toure’s Guinea (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more than the working-class militant in the CP-USA in 1935 was signing on for the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or falsified by “Third World Marxism” was available and known in the 1960s and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear certain truths. What Elbaum can��t face is that the entirety of “Third World Marxism” was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in 1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966-1969. Workers, white and nonwhite, in the American sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum’s minions, blinded by ideology. As Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, speaking of the English Revolution of the 1640s:

…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.

When the upwardly mobile middle class elements of the 1960s and 1970s New Left and Third World Marxism, both white but also important numbers of blacks and Latinos, had established themselves in their professional and civil service jobs and academic tenure, suburban life and VCRs drove out Ho, Che, and Mao. Things went quite differently, above all for blacks without a ticket to the middle class, as one can see in the difference between the ultimate fates of even the Weather Underground after years on the run, and black political prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt.

But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies that no one — himself included — misses, it is not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: “Finally, we have one book that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960s and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century.” The giveaway is Elbaum’s treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as momentous as the 1960s, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist groups (“Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” as someone once called them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to the 1960s, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CP-USA’s strategy within the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy of the CP’s role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930s is Elbaum’s legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us nothing about the CP-USA coming off its 1930s “heroic” phase, herding the American working class off to World War II through the enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of US imperialism’s moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a contribution to some new “progressive coalition” wedding the American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an all-out drive to “Beat Bush” around a Dean campaign (or something like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman as the still-dominant neoliberal paradigm of the past twenty-five years begins to seriously fray. While Elbaum’s book makes occasional passing reference to economic hard times times the 1970s, he does not see the extent to which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of “reform,” which can only be some kind of “Tax The Rich” scheme, share-the-wealth — the declining wealth — kind of left populism, with suitably “diverse” forces that will probably be the final fruit of the “progressive” middle classes, whites and people of color, that evolved out of Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.”

Despite what Elbaum thinks and what he and his milieu thought thirty years ago, the fate of the world is in the hands of the world working class. In contrast to thirty years ago, however, this working class is no longer limited to North America, Europe and Japan, but is now spread through many parts of the “anti-imperialist” Third World, led by China. The East will be red again, not as the bureaucratic-peasant hallucination of the “Third World Marxists” of the 1960s and 1970s, but as a genuine working-class revolt against precisely the forces that used “Third World Marxism,” in the Third World as in the U.S. and Europe, to muddle every social question and advance their social stratum. The remnants of these forces are positioned today in and around the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy, as well as in the antiglobalization movement, readying themselves to again revamp the capitalist system with torrents of “progressive” rhetoric, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s.

The only thing that is “progressive” in today’s world is working-class revolution.

#maoism #maoism third-worldism #socialism #communism #20th century communism #book reviews #dialectical materialism #communist history #new communist movement #communist theory #communist critique

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simplyonehellofahokage · 6 years

Note

Can I ask you why you don’t like Minakushi?

I put this under the cut because it got RIDICULOUSLY LONGJC.

I don’t necessarily dislike it. When it’s well-written, orfor some reason just jives with me I think it’s one of the cutest and arguablyone of the healthier ships in the series. For example, if you are the same anonthat sent those two MinaKushi asks, I thought they were rather fun. Othertimes, depending on the source at best it inspires apathy and at worst, createsa certain dislike for one or both of them. I think my conflicting feelings stemfrom the difference between how their individual characters are portrayed in canonverses how fanon portrays them. Please keep in mind, all of this reflects myown personal experience and nothing more.

When it comes to canon, I don’t have a lot of problems withit. True, I don’t care for the damsel in distress bit but I argue if Kushinahadn’t had the cunning to leave her hair as a trail no one would’ve found her.So she played a large part in her own rescue. Minato also suffers from theHinata complex of watching her from afar and not really doing anything until itescalates from school yard bullying to international incident. I understand hisreasoning, not wanting to infringe on her right to defend her own honor (let’sbe real she’d probably kick his ass if he tried to play her hero back at theacademy), but he could have at least let her know that he didn’t dislike her,as she had assumed. Maybe I’m nitpicking (I probably am, I hate themisunderstood/miscommunication trope I really do) but it isn’t the only issue Ihave with it.

It was speculated for a while that Minato was Naruto’s dadbefore it was officially revealed and that just drummed up the mystery of whohis mother could be even more. With that, came my own expectations and guessesand when Kushina was finally revealed…she didn’t exactly match what I imagined.She wasn’t a bad character by any means, in fact I found her rather fun but thedissonance between the reality and what I thought kind of stayed with me. Itdoesn’t help her full potential wasn’t really allowed to bloom. I have so manyquestions about her old home, about her that are never really answered andgiven the narrative, it’s understandable why. She is long dead before the firstchapter and it’s all thanks to ninja bullshit we even get to meet her but itleft me dissatisfied.

The video games that included her gave more crumbs but notones I necessarily liked. Let me be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrongwith being a housewife. It’s one of the hardest, most underappreciated jobs inthe world and it doesn’t have the usual benefits like a retirement plan or paidvacation. People are always judging. That being said, why would you make one ofher attacks be slapping the shit out of someone with a frying pan? I thought ‘oh,well that’s amusing at least. I wonder what her main attack is’ and….it wasjust the same thing she did as a kid. Turning red, hair floating and justbeating the shit out of the poor NPC you picked for that round. We are told shehas a unique ninjutsu style and uses fuuinjutsu….so why weren’t either of thoseused instead? Why wasn’t this used as an opportunity to learn more about her? Ilike Kushina, but I wished more had been done with her.

Minato suffers from the same problem in that we have some informationbut not enough. I still don’t know what his motivation was for becoming Hokageto this day. There are aspects of his personality I don’t really care for, butthen it may make me pettier of a person if I’m being honest. I don’t like thathe forgave Obito so easily, the man was responsible for not only his death butthe death of his love, and nearly destroyed their home. Also he nearly killedNaruto and made him an orphan. I don’t hate Obito but the dude did a LOT offucked up shit both in and out of the Land of Fire and Minato just….forgivesthat and even takes responsibility for it. It makes it hard to connect with himas a character that way because dude has to be a saint to do all that. I alsodon’t really care much for his naïveté when it came to sealing Kurama inNaruto. He grew up with Kushina, who was bullied just because she was from adifferent village. He should have known that Naruto would have it worse, butmaybe his blinding optimism is both a negative and a positive of hispersonality. His choices are also bound by the plot of the story, and becausewhat happened that night is told so far into the series, Minato’s hands arefairly tied so that the timeline stays consistent …even if it doesn’t exactly painthim in a positive (or always intelligent) light. I may not like any of thesethings but I can live with them and work with them.

Fanon portrayals can, in my experience, can either make thecharacters and the ship great or take one of their aspects and just…twists itfurther. It gets to the point where they are unrecognizable from their canoncounterparts. People are allowed to write what they want, I will never, ever tell anyone what they canor can’t write or what topics they can or can’t explore. But I take responsibilityfor my own happiness and health, and won’t read fics where Kushina is reducedto an overbearing bitch or ones where Minato is reduced to someone viler than theseries’ worst villains. Or the ones where they are the neglectful parents, apopular troupe in the Naruto and Harry Potter fandoms and I get the appeal, butthere is only so many times I could read it before I wanted to bang my headinto a wall because their actions crossed from cruelty into outright stupidity.These examples, I must admit, have left quite an impact on me.

In the end I suppose, I take it case by case when it comesto MinaKushi. I’m willing to role play it but I ship primarily with chemistry.Just because its canon isn’t a guarantee it will happen and I don’t want toforce a romantic involvement if for some reason the muses aren’t clicking. Itgets awkward fast. Romance isn’t the only aspect of their relationship I wantto explore either. What about them as friends? As rivals? As enemies? Asteammates? How would things change and how would they differ if they were in anAU? All avenues are open and I’m willingto walk down them at least once.

#anon #tldr: i don't hate minakushi #i even like it #mostly #but its not an otp #i hope this is okay #ooc #tw: long

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bid00f-archive · 6 years

Note

my boy tamama for the character thing. and or keroro

Yeah buddy! Time for a double feature, I can practically write an essay about these two, though really, I can write an essay about all five of the main Keronians. It is Not That Deep, but it certainly could be. So, thank you! They are surprisingly interesting characters to talk about in length if you read between the lines, so time to blab about the sugar guzzling tadpole and the sergeant himself~!

Favorite Thing About Them:

🔰Ever since I got into Keroro like, three years back, I absolutely adored how he is the parody of the classic “cute and lovely” mascot character. He is obviously designed to look the cutest out of a cast of cute critters, just look at those huge eyes, sweet smile, and adorable little tail; so when it was shown that he has a less than cutesy side to him, I started to like him! It made him less of an archetype. I do have major issues with episode 7 Part B, but that was the episode that made me actually like Tamama since it showed that despite being cute, he still has problems and consequences for what he does which causes that sweet, sweet internal conflict.Tamama is truly a good guy, he just needs to grow but in an anime/manga that is like, 99.9% gags and slapstick that is on shaky ground.

⭐What I like most about Keroro is that, he can actually be a very sweet guy even though he usually has his own interests front and center. Episodes that show him actually helping out others tend to be the sweetest to watch, even when it ends more bittersweet, such as episode 5 when he tries to help a doomed toy store and its’ owner. He may be lazy and incompetent, or at least appears to be, but that is what actually makes him more appealing to me!

Least Favorite Thing About Them:

🔰 His love for Keroro, while sort of sweet, can make him do some uncool things. First example being the aforementioned episode 7 Part B, the episode is done less severely than in the manga where he kidnaps Angol Mois to take naughty photos of her to send to Keroro, even going as far to strip her down. The anime adaptation took it down a notch by having Tamama put her through “bootcamp”, but still, not cool! There is also episode 266 when he tries to kiss Keroro without his consent despite Keroro very obviously begging him not to, luckily Tamama realizes that the mature thing to do is to cut it out (plus he looked ridiculous in that pink lipstick) but again, still not cool! Actually, if I remember it right, he goes back at it by the end of the episode. What gives!

⭐Let’s be real here, there are times where Keroro is the one who first antagonizes Natsumi. She is already not very popular with fans because of her role, like how Dib is in Invader Zim though I am 95% sure that folks are less sympathetic to how many of Keroro’s schemes seem to focus more on just plain humiliating Natsumi than invading Pekopon because she is a girl. It is a shame because there is more to their relationship than being constantly at each other’s throats. In the beta, Keroro was supposed to be Natsumi’s Keronian partner and they still share enough similarities reminiscent of that. But anyway, sometimes it seems like Keroro targets Natsumi rather than her being the main obstacle blocking his invasion plans, since she is just a thirteen/fourteen year old kid it feels kind of weird to me. Prime example of this being episode 99.

Favorite Line: I still do not keep track of favorite lines, but here a paraphase from the dub that really made me laugh;

Tamama: “Well, he’s smarter than a jellybean, or most of ‘em.”

Angol Mois: “He tries his best when he’s not busy not trying.“

Tamama: “A jellybean can try but I’m still gonna eat it.”

brOTP:

🔰 Taruru for Tamama! Though I do ship them romantically together, it is an underrated and uncommon pairing but it actually has some traction on with JPN/Korean fans and for good reason! Taruru may not hero worship Tamama as much as he did, and they may have clashed during the Garuru Platoon arc, but there are still no hard feelings between the two!

Taruru still throws a shoutout to Tamama in the manga chapters afterwards, and in the anime, lying to Taruru about the Keroro Platoon and the Pekopon invasion was Tamama’s biggest regret until he comes to peace with it and that only happens seasons after the Garuru Arc, Tamama still remembered and felt bad about it for all that time, and resolved it peacefully, and felt much better after it! That is probably the closest thing Tamama will get to positive character development so savor it. Like the Chibi-Keroro segments, sometimes I wish that the audience could be shown snippets of Taruru and Tamama’s time training in the Keron Army together, it could be a great way to world build since the Keron Army is still shrouded with ~mystery~.

⭐Keroro and Kululu is like a match made in heaven! Okay, maybe I am exaggerating that but those two are yet another underrated pairing even though they work so well together in all the wrong ways; they both like to scheme and can be self-centered jerks but with a heart of gold… which is located deep, deep down in Kululu’s case. I wish there was more focus on these two in canon, Kululu is one of the very few characters who seems to catch on that there is more to Keroro than Gundam, Gundam, blah, blah. After all, Kululu is the whole reason why Keroro has the Keron ☆ (Star) in the first place; but why would Kululu pull the strings to bring who is probably the least qualified to one of the top positions in the Keron Army? Did he do it for kicks or does he actually think Keroro can somehow pull it off? …It is most likely the former, but at least Keroro can make the job *~interesting~*, Kululu likes chaos and things that go against the status quo to keep himself from getting too bored, Keroro practically makes it his job description. Kululu probably has all the opportunity and resources to move to a higher elite platoon if he wanted, Sergeant Major remember, so to me it sometimes almost seems like he sticks around just to see what Keroro does next…and how badly he can screw it up this time.

OTP:

🔰 KeroTama, baby’s first gays! Though honestly, I am not sure who was the first to bring it up but I second the idea that Keroro is sort of like, Tamama’s awakening. Sure he loves him, but Tamama is still young and as far as we know, nobody else has made him feel quite the same way as Keroro does and he copes with this badly. What I do like most about this pairing is that Tamama truly idolizes Keroro but he is just as ready to call him out and keep him in check too; like checks and balances, I think Keroro/any works best when he is with someone who is willing to go along with him but can also tell it to him straight. This is most apparent in the later (subbed) seasons and manga, Tamama becomes less of a yes-tadpole and more aware that Keroro is not the all mighty-hero he used to think back on Keron.

⭐On the other hand, for Keroro…he is my shipping bicycle, I dunno know exactly why but he seems to work out so well with so many characters though it varies a lot. Like, compare KeroDoro with KeroTama and the dynamics become very different; though for the record I am not a huge fan of KeroDoro due to how anime!Keroro lacks the most tact when it comes to Dororo, and how manga!Dororo basically treats Keroro like an annoying ex. Not exactly healthy but I do feel like there is potential if the two found some common ground and reconciliation, but that defeats the fun of shipping, canon is supposed to do the heavy lifting. So anyhoo, there is no OTP for Keroro; which may contradict what I had already said about Tamama, but in Keroro’s case it opens a whole different perspective.

nOTP:

🔰 Oh geeze, I think I have only seen this once and thank goodness but Tamama/Momoka. They are an underrated pair, Momoka herself is a very underrated character but together they are just plain underrated. Hm. I feel like the anime is somewhat at fault since Brutal Momoka is often seen snapping at Tamama, but to be fair, Brutal Momoka will snap at Paul, her guards, her maids, and just about anybody besides Fuyuki.

There are certainly moments cute moments between the two where you know they care for each beyond Momoka putting up with him so she can get closer to Fuyuki, and Tamama only sticking around to freeload, but I still think this comes across to an audience that Momoka does not care much for Tamama at all. I personally see their relationship more like an older brother and younger sister, which is kind of funny given Tamama’s more childish tendencies. I do feel like that he sees her as the little sister who can 100% beat him up while Momoka sees him as an older brother who can still annoy her sometimes at best…or a beloved pet at worst, which is not so bad since Tamama tried to do the same thing. They are two birds of a feather who flock together, but it is far, far, far away from a romantic context.

⭐A nOTP for Keroro would be Fuyuki, which for the life of me I have no idea why it has traction with JPN fans but it is…there, I guess. I think I see it popping up more often than GiroNatsu, to put it in perspective. Keroro is very obviously an adult, alien or not, and there is enough emphasis on the power of friendship to show that Fuyuki is doing what Mois should probably be taking notes on. Keroro is the fun and goofy adopted uncle who takes Fuyuki out for adventures, and they have been through like, six near-life or death experiences together and pulled through so if that is not a sign of a beautiful friendship then I dunno what is.

Random Headcanon:

🔰 Tamama likes eating fruits and vegetables, on an occasion! The food has to practically jump through hoops for him to accept it though. Fruit has to be candied or covered in chocolate, and the vegetables have to be very tender and thoroughly glazed with honey. It kind of defeats the purpose of healthy eating, but hey, Tamama may love sweets but even he has limits such as in episode 310.

⭐Keroro has ADHD and dyscalcuia, though the ADHD bit in particular might as well be canon. He is a very relatable character and call it self-projecting but I am preeetty sure that he has like, learning/neurodivergent disorders up the wazoo much like how Tamama acts like he has an almost textbook case of Borderline Personality Disorder. I doubt that Yoshizaki actually researches mental illnesses/disorders though, special mention going to his portrayal of Momoka and her mother’s disassociative disorders which are far from accurate.

Unpopular Opinion:

🔰 Tamama’s jealous behavior is not a good thing, it is not cute. I almost never find it funny, it is more…sad. Seeing him antagonize, hit, and verbally abuse Angol Mois is close to painful to watch because you know Tamama is only doing it to make himself feel better and Mois, who genuinely sees him as a close friend, just takes it and no one intervenes. In the end, Tamama still feels like crap and one way or another, gets what’s coming to him. There is no actual conflict resolution so the joke becomes old hat.

It may be played off for laughs, but Tamama’s infamous jealousy is self-destructive and while this may be ~relatable~ to other fans, it is obvious to see how unhappy Tamama is when it comes to dealing with his negative emotions or even maintaining a sense of self, like, his greatest fear is a glamorized version of himself as seen in episode 123. That was…interesting. When Tamama acts out on negative impluses, which is always, he never comes on top so why anybody would say “that’s so me!” especially when considering Tamama rarely makes the effort to hold his own actions accountable is beyond me.

I would probably be more receptive towards it if Tamama’s jealousy tick was not so selective. Like, you would think he would be more jealous and resentful of Giroro or even Dororo’s relationship with Keroro since those three have known each other since childhood and still keep it pretty tight; or even Pururu since she can be just as tooth-achingly sweet as Angol Mois and shares close moments with Keroro yet Tamama has never felt threatened by any of them.

Jealousy may be a natural emotion but Tamama’s attitude is unhealthy and it is flanderized to the extreme in the anime. He almost got himself killed for bottling up his negative feelings but lashing out at others (*cough*Angol Mois*cough*) is not the way to go either. The manga version of himself seems to be more adjusted, or at the least by comparison though the regrets and self-loathing is kept consistent. Tamama in the manga may not even be as infatuated with Keroro anymore, in the later volumes it so rarely gets brought up again and in particular, his reaction to being asked if he “still respected Keroro ” was such as strange response that I am just like 🤔. Of course, infatuation is different from love and “respect” could be just how Tamama no longer trusts in Keroro’s leadership at all, but still, the idea of Tamama not being obsessed with gaining Keroro’s affection anymore is almost like imagining an entirely different character after watching 300+ episodes. But, the way I see it…in the manga, the fixation is just not there anymore.

⭐For Keroro’s case, hmmmm…well, not much to say about Keroro since the anime and manga does a bang up job at calling out his flaws and holding him responsible when things mess up, he gets away with nothing. There is no widely accepted headcanon or canon interpretation of him that I feel like counteracting either; in my bloomin’ onion Keroro is well rounded enough for being the resident loser/villain protagonist.

Song I associate with them:

Party Up (Up In Here) by DMX 🔰

Crayola Sunrise by RunFoxRun! ⭐

Favorite picture of them:

This is so sweet, so pure, so perfect!

#anonymous #keroro #tamama #keroro gunso #gif #long post

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thesummonerofaskr · 6 years

Text

Salt 2: Tharja

Rant under the read more.

Oh Tharja. How I hate thee. Let me count the ways. I was ready to do a rant upon this character back during the Enduring Love gauntlet after she won, the only character to take two wins after multiple gauntlets and prove that people absolutely enjoy psychopaths more then they love to admit. And I mean... I like psychopathic characters to a degree as well. I’m just more aware that if half of these characters I like were real, they would deserve to die in horrible, painful manners. But Tharja... Tharja doesn’t click with me. I don’t find her entertaining. Still, I decided not to do the rant then because I figured it would prove nothing. She took her second win and surely wouldn’t be in another gauntlet for a while, right?

Well now we have Winter Vs. New Years. And since as with any gauntlets they do internal eliminations first, we already have a million people predicting that the final match will come down to Winter!Tharja vs. NewYears!Camilla. And needless to say, while I am loathe to admit it, I do understand the anger and frustration that comes from the fact that the reason these two characters are so popular has less to do with personality and more to do with their physical assets. Because a lot of people who play this game consist of two groups, those groups being prepubescent straight men and prepubescent lesbians who see big tits and immediately rate that character high because “daaaaaaaaaaaaaaayum!” Meanwhile Faye from Shadows of Valentia has a similar personality with a more modest character design, yet notice how many people despise her because she isn’t built like a supermodel. A good number of these people who hate also like Tharja and/or Camilla. You wanna talk about double standards?

Now to be fair I know there are reasons to like Tharja. I like Camilla. And Faye, while cute, doesn’t get a lot of writing outside of her obsession for Alm. But if I had to take any of these girls in real life, it would definitely be Faye because she’s not ready to murder Celica for her man. That being said, though, why do I hate Tharja personally? I like Camilla. I like Henry. I even like Peri. It doesn’t get more problematic then Xander’s literal problematic servant. What’s my beef with Tharja?

Well for starters her personality doesn’t appeal to me. Tharja is dark and broody. She intentionally acts this way because she doesn’t care for social contact and because she feels it is the way a harbinger of death, destruction, and doom is meant to act, heavily contrasted with her fellow Dark Mage in Awakening in Henry whom is upbeat, cheerful, and has a bad joke or pun at the ready even while committing horrible acts of atrocity. Both are morally bankrupt as far as ethics go, but who sounds like the more entertaining character out of the two? Camilla may be as obsessive as Tharja, but she’s also got more charm in her unbridled and unquestionable love for her family as well as her adoration for children and animals. Tharja’s just kinda... dull to me. She’s either dull or scheming. All of her good acts feel forced because it doesn’t seem like the character she is. It’s similar to Peri’s support with Odin. Most of her supports involve her being heavily problematic and being scolded for her practical murder fetish, yet when Odin does it, she’s apparently leading a group designed to rehabilitate the disorderly such as her. I love Peri for being more entertaining, but she’s a psychotic bratty womanchild! Where the fuck did that come from?! But for Tharja, that’s nearly every support she has. The only one where you could see her being that nice is with her stalker crush Robin. Speaking of which...

My second gripe is that it’s never explained why exactly she’s obsessed with Robin. Nor is there any real way to headcanon it either. I once posited it might have something to do with Grima, but was then reminded that Tharja is willing to destroy Grima for Robin, meaning she cares for the man more then the dragon. So why is that so? I don’t know. Nobody does. Compare that to her expy in Fates, Rhajat. Corrin saves Rhajat when she’s a little girl from a life-ending experience. Then they save her again during the Faceless rampage. Rhajat was already smitten the first time, but the second time around sealed her obsession for Corrin. Camilla’s obsession? As she explains in her support with Niles (another popular character whom I despise, go figure), she saw Corrin as a scared, lonely child who now had the entire world against them as a Hoshidan in Nohr. During the Concubine Wars, she was a living weapon against her half-siblings, unloved by her own mother and hunted by her other family until the bloodshed ended and she was able to live peacefully with Xander, Leo, and Elise. She doesn’t want Corrin to feel as alone as she did and so she utterly smothers them with affection. She knows that her other three siblings can handle themselves since they also lived through those bloody times, but Corrin is this sweet, naive person who can’t even murder Hoshidan prisoners on King Garon’s orders. Clearly they need more affection and more time to grow in Camilla’s eyes. Faye doesn’t have as much writing either, but there’s at least enough to headcanon why she’s obsessed with Alm. She might’ve had a regular old crush on Alm as a child, but then Slayde comes to Ram Village ready to kill Kliff, Gray, and Tobin as well as her, though it’s implied in his dialogue and the dialogue of his men that she was also considered a target for rape! Because God knows the women can’t be spared in pre-Tellius Fire Emblem stories.That would naturally be a very traumatic experience that was delayed long enough for Mycen to come save them by Alm acting like this brave hero, charging out and punching Slayde in the face despite the fact that it would’ve cost both him and Celica dearly if Mycen didn’t show when he did. Psychologically speaking, Faye could very well see Alm as an anchoring point, something comforting to her now scarred psyche, and thus that dependency manifested itself into an obsessive desire that causes her to become more and more unhinged when she goes into battle alongside Alm and the others in the name of the Deliverance. But if I keep going on about how much I like Faye and how much I wish she’d gotten more development, we’ll lose the topic completely, so onto the final reason I hate Tharja.

You know what all of these characters I like do that Tharja doesn’t? They respect their children. Camilla loves children. Faye doesn’t have children as far as I know, but I imagine she would love them even if she does disappear for days on end because of that mangled psyche of her’s. Henry and Peri both end up surprisingly good parents despite their usual disturbing behavior. Even Niles, whom I stated above I do not like, is a good father... well as good as a Fates parent can be. Tharja, however? Tharja openly experiments with magic on her daughter. And here’s the thing. We’re not counting the Tharja in the future who went mad with grief and started experimenting on Noire to “make her stronger” or whatever. In Noire’s support with her father, she’s come down with a runny nose and it’s Tharja who cursed her with it. Progressing further reveals that he tried to get her to undo the hex only for her to move it to him as well. Noire gets upset because that was how it was even in the future and thus it seemed to her that nothing was changing, so by their A-Support, her father goes balls to the wall and takes all of Tharja’s cursing implements, which makes Tharja chase him around violently and this... lifts Noire’s spirits because it’s different. I’ve seen people try to defend this by saying “it’ll make Noire stronger,” but that is often used as an excuse by abusers to defend what they do to their children in real life. It hits too close to home and I find it absolutely disgusting that this is used by some of her fans to excuse her actions. A few others have mentioned it should be taken as goofy, but again this is a character who seemingly values tradition over mischief. I doubt that she meant her anger to be taken as if in jest. So as far as I’m concerned, she did it because she knew she could, because she knew Noire had taken it before, and because she figured Noire made an easy guinea pig, making her a shitty mother and a disgusting human being.

I can forgive a psychotic personality in fiction. I can forgive obsessiveness. I can forgive violence, especially since I can be quite an aggressive person myself. I can forgive a lot of things in fiction as long as the characters are entertaining. I don’t expect to make people like Peri or Camilla if they hate them. If either of those two were real, I imagine the former would need to be put to death immediately and the latter put in a psyche ward at least if not put to death as well. But Tharja isn’t just dull, uninteresting, and morally bankrupt. She also represents how disgusting some people will get in order to defend her. You can tell me how disgusting I am for liking Peri because “I’m woobifying a serial murderer,” even though I haven’t called her anything short of disturbed and monstrous, but I won’t try to turn around and convince you that it’s not her fault since her father raised her to kill people and encouraged her as a child to murder her butlers and maids since it made her happy. He should be put to death too, sure, but Peri is far too broken to realistically save and only Fates’ stock writing could even hope to try. I’m not gonna tell you to dislike Tharja if you’re reading this and like her. I only hope you have proper reasons to like her whilst accepting that she isn’t a hero, she isn’t a nice person, and she isn’t morally just in her actions.

Or you could like her because she has big tits, I guess. Seems to be the go-to reason for Tharja/Camilla fans.

#ooc #michele rants #character hate #not gonna tag the character's name #but it is in the title #sorry to all the fans if it shows up regardless

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scrawnydutchman · 7 years

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Why “Boyscout” Characters are Underrated

In any given narrative in any genre, be it film, novels, comic books, video games, cartoons or stage plays, having a likable main character is important. Very important. One could argue it is the most essential part of the puzzle of storytelling in fact. After all, a story is all about following the adventure(s) of a person or collection of people who go through trials and conflicts and drama to fulfill a goal. Whether it’s a wannabe superstar tenaciously working towards glory or a strong man in tights seeking justice and apprehending criminals, we’re going to be sticking with this character for a while, so by all means the last thing you want is to make your character somebody who the audience is uninterested in or, even worse, neglectful to follow.

But that said, opinions on what makes a strong lead can very among different audience members. It’s only natural; all art is subjective and has an appeal not everybody will appreciate. But sometimes certain tastes can trend; and that taste comes with a bitterness to it’s alternative. In this case I’m talking about the hardening and darkening of heroes, the promotion of moral ambiguity . . . and the mocking of “boyscout” characters. Characters often criticized for being too unrealistically moral and upstanding, “perfect” is the word often used. Superman is the prime example of this: for years people have been calling him boring because he’s so impossibly powerful he can resolve any situation and he’s so morally upright that his conflicts with bad guys become rinse and repeat. Even with the character gaining significantly more depth over the years the sentiment has been the same; Superman is just too good and powerful to be interesting. The same has been applied to other heroes, albeit to a lesser extent, such as Wonder Woman, Shazam and Captain America. Meanwhile, those characters more favored by a larger audience are more flawed individuals; people who make mistakes, whose acts of selfishness have consequences, whose good nature is often challenged and will go to a farther extent at apprehending criminals then boyscouts, perhaps even going as far as killing. Batman, Wolverine, Spawn and Lobo all have these reputations. The “Badass” of the crew is always the top seller: because it’s not enough for a reader to be morally upright and just. They also have to be badass and edgy.

Now I didn’t type up this long winded article to bash anybody for liking brooding gritty characters. Far from it; I understand the appeal of them perfectly well and am also a fan of these characters. It’s not a bad thing to have leads who feel broken from loss and torment, and thus distance themselves from others and have a hard time trusting people, putting up a tough guy attitude to hide the fact that they are actually quite sensitive. This is a very real thing that many people in the modern world feel. Plus zealousness and confidence along with the capacity to back up such bravado is very endearing. If anybody is proof of that fact it’s the late Muhammad Ali.

But the question I want to ask is; are these characters naturally superior in likability to boyscouts? Are non problematic, morally upright people in fiction just not interesting? Again, this stuff is subjective, but if more people gravitate towards the gritty brooding Batman then the sunny, happy go lucky Superman, so much so that DC has been essentially making Superman out to be a tortured alien soul, then does this give us a window into what it means to be an objectively likable character?

My answer is: Not really.

Think what you will about Superman, but consider how long he’s been around and how much he has shaped our culture. The character has been around for over 80 years now, and he’s gone through many changes and adaptations to be sure (most comic book characters go through the same process) but his core elements and ideas have remained in tact and, to be honest, his franchise has told some of the finest stories of the 20th century. He’s still the highest selling comic book superhero franchise of all time. I think it’s safe to say there is something about this boyscout that sticks.

So in defense of these boyscout characters who I have an admitted fondness for, I will be pointing out the main criticisms against these characters and giving a retort against each.

1: Morally perfect characters aren’t interesting.

I disagree. Often times this criticism comes from a misunderstanding of what a “morally perfect” characters conflict really is, because it isn’t as simple and clear cut as “will this guy defeat this guy?”. Superman often comes under criticism for resolving his situations and defeating his bad guys way too easily, and as a result bad guys always resort to either repetitive weaknesses or are absurdly powerful themselves to even compete. But here’s the thing about Superman: It’s not about whether he’ll win or lose. It’s about whether he’ll do the right thing. He’s already proven time and time again that he’s the most powerful character in all of comics, possibly in all of fiction. His dilemma is whether or not he’s managing those powers responsibly, and whether he still belongs to the human race in spite of those powers. He may be on the level of a God, but he’s still a Cansas born farmboy raised by Christian locals, works on a reporters salary, is in love with his attractive female co worker and has an affinity for beef bourguignon. That sure as hell sounds a lot more relatable then a boy born into wealth and fortune, most likely went into private school, who traveled the world to study under the greatest masters of martial arts on earth after his parents were suddenly murdered, but that’s just me ;). Captain America’s conflict is also commonly misunderstood. He’s all about being a fish out of water who has to do his best to do the right thing in a world where other heroes such as Iron Man represent the modern age far better then he does. Superman and Cap are quite similar because they hold onto traditional values and morality. Make no mistake, traditional =/= perfect. Both of their ethics have been challenged and shaken time and time again in comics.

2: Boyscouts aren’t relatable.

So let me get this straight: You DON’T relate to trying to be a good person as often as possible? You DON’T relate to just wanting what’s best for yourself and people around you? You DON’T relate to seeking justice and hope and love? Maybe not everyone does; again, subjectivity is a real thing. But just because you may not aspire to higher ideals doesn’t mean nobody does. If nobody ever did I don’t think superheroes would even be a thing.

But that said, relatability isn’t objectively necessary for a main lead to have anyway. Don’t get me wrong; it’s always a nice and welcome touch. Depth is NEVER a bad thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the thing that drives the story nor does it have to be the thing that defines what makes the character so likable. What’s more important then a character being relatable . . .is a character being motivated. For evidence of this claim, look no further then some of the most popular VILLAINS around in pop culture. Relatable villains can occur and get popular, certainly, but more often then not the villains that become the most romanticized and trend the most are villains who are so malicious, so intent with their evil, so driven to make everything around them miserable that you can’t help but get involved with the chaos they’re bringing. Perfect example: The Joker. EVERYONE loves the joker, but I sincerely doubt anybody would say they relate to him. Moreover I think people are just invested because HE’S invested, and we’re interested to see just how far he’ll go to carry out his goal . . .whatever the hell it is.

Heroes can work in very much the same way. How far will they go to seek out justice? What are disciplines they set for themselves? How committed are they to their cause? Will they ever break their code, and if so, can they be redeemed? I don’t buy the idea that good people don’t invite conflict because doing good even when it’s hard and having restraint even when people disagree with you is a conflict in and of itself.

3: Good guys don’t lend themselves to conflict.

Allow me to repeat what I just said: Doing good even when it’s hard and having restraint even when people disagree with you is a conflict in and of itself. You don’t have to be flawed to invite conflict: matter of fact, heroes are literally DEFINED by their desire to seek out conflict because they would not be heroes if they remained indifferent to tragedy and crime. I know what you’re thinking: “What people mean when they say this is INTERNAL conflict”. People are interested by tortured souls who all too often do morally ambiguous things. Again, I understand the appeal of that, but on the other hand, if you aren’t convinced that people wouldn’t want to enact good in the world unless they learn first hand the consequences of evil when it strikes them, then I’m sorry, that’s a very cynical perception of reality. Wanting to do good can be propelled by wanting to SEE good in the world, and not wanting your powers or whatever it is you do to fight crime to not go to waste. Characters do not have to be defined by tragedy to be compelling: they can be defined by how they define themselves. What disciplines they set for themselves, what their code of honor is and how it conflicts with others. Personally I think it’d be really refreshing to see a character who didn’t learn the hard way that crime sucks and that’s what convinces them to take responsibility for once, because that’s just really selfish when you think about it. You don’t give a shit about what goes wrong in the world unless it effects you. I can’t assert this enough: I understand that writing characters in such a way can instill more drama, but I disagree that they have to be written in such a way every time.

4: Dark and gritty is more realistic.

No, it’s not. dark and gritty =/= more realistic. Matter of fact it’s just as much a fantasy as a light and upbeat world. Goodness and kindness is just as much a part of life as cruelty and sadness. It is not “realistic” to highlight either extreme. It shouldn’t be necessary for entertainment to be “realistic” anyway. If you wanted realism you wouldn’t devolve into fantasy; you’d just go outside. Fantasy is about escaping realism and fulfilling a need to feel certain emotions by indulging in a particular genre. Every genre is valid for that reason. We watch comedies to laugh. tragedies to cry, romances to gush and horrors to scream. If you like your dark and grittiness more then other themes then by all means go for it; but it’s unfair to say lightheartedness and peppiness is any less valid of fantasy fulfillment, especially under the fallacy that it’s “less realistic”.

Conclusion:

So I’m hoping this article broadened the readers horizons a bit about what it means to be an interesting character, and in particular I’m hoping they’ll be more open minded about “boyscouts” and “goody-two-shoes”. A good character is not always defined by tragedy and is not always defined by things they can’t control. A good character is defined by what motivates them, what actions they take, what disciplines they hold for themselves and what they do with their capacity for either good or evil. A likable character is one clearly defined and adds to the stakes, and in that regard good guys are no less valid.

#DC comics #Marvel Comics #Film Review #film #editorial #superhero #superheros #goodguys #superman #batman #captain america #fantasy #fiction #literature

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ecotone99 · 4 years

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[RF] The Consulting Economist : A short story of a brilliant woman who solves problems for different countries.... (Based on a real life problem)

Everyone has heard about Sherlock Holmes, the crime solving consulting detective. But until recently, very few knew about the Consulting Economist, Anushka. She just goes by her first name, like Madonna. But things were changing dramatically as every newspaper were writing about her work and called her the ‘Beacon of Hope’. She was being called for interviews and events and this had completely overwhelmed her. She was used to being recognised by a few people here and there but this was huge and she was flabbergasted.

Let me back up a tad bit. So, in 2020 about fifteen or so years ago, Anushka was reading about a small island called Nauru and it’s history of being super rich. And they didn’t even produce oil or colonisers! They had large reservoirs of phosphate mines which is a much sort after mineral. They earned hell lot of money selling it to foreign nations.

Nauru is a phosphate-rock island with rich deposits near the surface, which allowed easy strip mining operations. But over time, their natural resources started to run out. And, it’s remaining phosphate resources were not economically viable for extraction. When the phosphate reserves were exhausted, and the island’s environment had been seriously harmed by mining, the trust that had been established to manage the island’s wealth diminished in value. And the island fell deep into poverty. To earn income, Nauru briefly became a tax haven and illegal money laundering centre.

Sure there’s World Bank and stuff like that, but they give out loans. Which might be good for short-term but for an island like Nauru, it’s not that easy to earn it back. And some countries help them out financially only to take them under their control. So Anushka sat there thinking, how could she help a small community to build a sustainable economy to depend on. Until, it hit her while watching the Benedict Cumberbatch starring Sherlock, that like him she can take the case of Nauru. With her major in Mathematics and minors in Economics. She thought of taking along her friend Mrittunjoy if he wanted to come, who was an excellent Mechanical Engineer.

Just like old-school DC or Marvel films, she thought to make a team of individuals with varied and important skill sets. She convinced three of her friends, an Engineer, a Physics major and a friend with BA in Chemistry and minors in International studies. They were just out of college and were planning to start their jobs soon. Anushka convinced them to spend a summer in Nauru before their job starts and if they think there can be some way to help, they can stay or else go with their original plans.

So they packed their stuff and off they went to Brisbane from where flights to Nauru were pretty regular.

“I am pretty excited, I hope we can help atleast some way or another” said Mrittunjoy.

“Yes, this is not an easy feat, but we will give it our best. I have corresponded with the a member of parliament who has obtained permission from the President, who has agreed to let us give a tour and brief us up with their current situation” said Anushka.

“That’s a good start, but I just hope the food is good. What do you think they eat?” said the Physicist, Maya.

“Once host to lush forests, Nauru is now stripped almost bare with poor soil. The majority of the food in Nauru is shipped in every six weeks. If you ask the average person, their diet consists of grilled or fried fish, french fries, hamburgers, pizza, and Chinese food (including the ever popular twist of spam fried rice). Unfortunately, there’s hardly anything green to be found in a Nauruan meal. Nauruans are one of the world’s most obese people” said Neil.

“Perfection!” said Maya and smiled.

They reached Nauru two days later. After settling in their rooms, they couldn’t help but admire the beauty of the island. Even though it was a ghost of its much glorious past, it was still breathtaking.

Then they set off to meet with the state officials and locals to discuss in detail about the present status of their assets and their weakness; other than what they already knew beforehand. The natural forests and mining grounds were pretty ruined and their current source of income was primarily from a few mines left. There are no personal taxes in Nauru. The unemployment rate is estimated to be 23 percent, and of those who have jobs, the government employs 95 per cent. A large part of money comes from Asian Fund and a minor part from tourism. They made some bad investments from their profits of selling phosphate.

Anushka lead the team to take a survey of all the individuals of the island. They found that the literacy rate is pretty high. Anushka began to scout for good investments. She assigned Neil, Maya and Mrittunjoy to scan the island and see what could be made, a power plant or grow some actual plants and trees that could sell good.

They came up with some really good solutions but in order to implement them, I would take them much more than a summer. The government of Nauru decided to pay them a good salary and give them housing.

Anushka summed up their plan to the members of Parliament. She said “We have learnt that almost everyone here speaks English and have had good schooling, so why not make this a tech hub in between the lush green jungles, like Wakanda!”

“Also”, Mrittunjoy continued, “We have identified some really good investments for the island which can be profitable in the future, we propose to invest in. Also we plan to teach everyone how to code and build simple machines”

“Upon searching the Island and running many tests, the ruins of exploited phosphate mines can be brought back by building a biolab to grow certain useful crops” said Maya.

“And finally, the waters in the shores in certain part of island can be used to can be used in an interesting new tech that we were planning to execute that will not only generate electricity but also make the island much more appealing. So we can increase tourism, promote things like honeymoon destination, if you catch my drift Anushka.”

They officials were pretty pleased with what they have come up with within such a short span of half a year. The team lead by Anushka began to execute their plans with much finesse. It took that five years to achieve all that they set out for.

They were heroes among the locals who gave them a huge parade and the government of Nauru were also extremely grateful for their help and awarded them with many titles and honours. The word reached out to places and soon the Consulting Economist and her team were starting to be recognised for their hard work and efforts.

Many such small countries looking to improve their economic conditions, contacted the Consulting Economist and her team. They travelled from country to country for the next ten years; expanded their team significantly adding many more accomplished experts in Biology, Linguistics, Teachers, Engineers, Marketing experts, Farmers and many more and improved their conditions as much as they can, many were hits but some were misses due to the political situations. It’s about this time that Anushka gained worldwide popularity.

Sitting in her home sipping a cold coffee late at night, while watching Bojack Horseman with Mrittunjoy; Anushka got a call from a top agent of Iran. And that’s how their next chapter began, off to middle-east.

The Quirky Penguins Blog

submitted by /u/sdytpasvj [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2BKcHf7

#Blogger #Story

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elidecarteretfutureworks-blog · 6 years

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DD2000 Assignment 2 Research blog

Introduction

The job role which I would like to go into post Futureworks is a Level Designer role. In order to create my presentation, I had to do a lot of research into different companies I could work at and what the role of a Level Designer actually involves. I also had to look into different studios and key designers who have influenced my decision to become a Level Designer.

Sections to discuss

I had a list of different sections which I wanted to talk about. Due to this, I have ordered this research blog in the same way as the presentation.

Inspirations

There were a number of games which inspired me growing up to become a Level/ Game Designer. Some of these games include:

Black

Far Cry 3

Pokémon Ruby Red

Sea Dogs

Spyro

Before Futureworks

Here I will be discussing the different games and things which I created when I was at college and just after college.

During Futureworks

This section will be discussing what I have learned in my time at Futureworks.

• Modelling in Maya- I have vastly improved my Maya skills, having gone from never used Maya before I came to Futureworks to now having the ability to build semi realistic worlds in a few weeks.

• Blueprinting- Before I joined Futureworks, I had never used Unreal Engine before. Now I am creating working Multiplayer games using Steam integration and building fully working levels with a number of mechanics involved.

• Level Designing in UE4- My level designing skills have improved massively since starting at Futureworks

• Tell successful narratives- First year taught me a lot about narrative design and how to tell narratives in both games and in Twine.

• Gather feedback- I learned that feedback is vital in this industry and any piece of feedback could change the dynamics of an entire game or improve it dramatically.

• Work to deadlines- Although I had to work to deadlines at college, I feel that the deadlines at university are a lot tighter and stricter, as of which, I have had to learn to deal with them more professionally.

• Work both individually and in a team- I have learned how to work more efficiently as both an individual and a team for different projects and getting them finished efficiently and on time.

Self reflection

Main area of interest?

Level Design

Most enjoyable creative disciplines?

Level/ world building

Narrative writing

Blueprinting in UE4

Strongest skills?

Creating fun games

Perfectionist

Meeting deadlines

Working in a team

Self motivation

Technically: Designing worlds/ Blueprinting

‘Get a bit of freedom with your designs. Sure, the Game Designer and the Art Lead will tell you the theme and the art direction of the game, but you’ll have wiggle room to create within that framework.’

Level designers and editors can also be tasked with developing the gameplay of a level. In a genre like platformers, you’ll be designing a large part of the challenges that players of the game will face.

Kind of environment enjoy working in?

Enjoy working in a team if ethos is right

Enjoy solo tasks

Long term ambitions

Ship a game people want to play

Work for a company I am happy at

Challenging but fun projects

Working with charismatic and hard working people

What required to achieve them?

Keep working hard

Apply to places who make games I enjoy playing

Apply to places who make games similarly to what I enjoy making

Keep honing skills

Ethos: Everyone wants to work

Everyone working towards same goal

The beliefs of the game creating are similar to mine

Considerations

Location

Would like to be close to family

Prefer to be near countryside to city

Other commitments

Friends and relationship

Particular studios

Double Eleven

Ubisoft

Sumo Digital

Other avenues (networking/ competition)

Game events such as EGX, Manchester Gamer Unite or Tranzfuser

Research: How can you get to the job want?

• Begin as Junior Level Designer

• Move to Level Designer

• QA

• Graduate programs

• Indie companies

• Mods

Is it achievable?

These are the most common ways into this position.

Gabe Newell- “Traditional credentialing" has little "predictive value" to how successful someone will be or what they can do with their skillset.

Valve have hired people based on their mods (Team Fortress 2)

Gabe Newell- What he is saying here is that you could have the best qualification in the world, but if you cannot do the required work, not going to fit.

Do the work, more likely to get the job.

Pretty much every studio requires a level Designer

Rob Kay (19 years in the industry)

Lead Designer of Guitar Hero & Rock Band.

• The best training is definitely to make your own game/s, ideally small ones.

• Being capable of actually making (and not just designing) games.

• Getting your first break in the industry can be tough, but also totally doable.

• Everyone has a story of persistence towards their first break.

• Don't take rejections personally, stay positive, and be persistent.

• A University degree makes it easier to get first break.

• Starting in QA is the classic route into the industry due to "cultural fit“.

• Another route is to offer your dev services for free - i.e. intern.

• Game design is as much craft as theory

• Small games- You can make more faster and learn faster as a result. As almost every studio these day's uses Unity or Unreal, so I'd recommend focusing on one of them (probably Unity given it's the most popular and you've already got started on that learning curve). It's good that you're doing some scripting - I'd recommend doing that in Unity. If C# or JS are too much, look at Playmaker - a visual scripting plug-in for Unity (I've used this on 3 games now, and recommend it highly).

• Making games as well as designing also wins you huge kudos from skilled artists and coders.

• Spend time honing craft

• Learn crafts through practice.

• Even seasoned professionals have to deal with rejection

• They do this because there is usually a far higher demand for each entry level job position than the hiring manager can deal with, so they have to add requirements like "University degree" just to filter weaker candidates out and get a smaller pool of candidates. This is tough on people who have strong skills but no university degree of course, but it's the reality. By all means apply for positions asking for a university degree (it's so low cost you may as well) but don't rely on this path. Typically a recruiter will filter you out of the running for not meeting requirements before a hiring manager even has chance to see your resume.

• I know many many developers (inc game designers, producers, and programmers) who got their break at a game studio in the QA department. It's a great way to get to know people in the company / industry, and usually hiring managers at the company find it safer to promote someone internally from QA, than take a risk on someone entirely new to them, even if the outsider is more qualified on paper.

• So if they can show some design / dev skills, they're seen as a good bet and will get onto hiring managers radars. From what I can glean from your email, I'd recommend applying for QA positions - with the career strategy of transitioning into game design once you're in

• I knew a self trained 3D artist who got his break this way. He basically pestered his way into an interview, by visiting our studio at Infogrames Manchester with his portfolio everyday and offering to work for free. My manager at the time, said no several days in a row, but this guy kept coming back and politely offering to work for nothing. Eventually my boss asked the rest of us artists to check out his portfolio, and asked if we felt he could do anything for us. His portfolio was only average, but he seemed so willing and capable of some jobs and we had a lot on our plates, so we said yes. He's now been in the industry for 16 years (here's his LinkedIn). Persistence and a willingness to learn may be your biggest assets.

Key designer

Max Herngren (Level Designer)

• Student of game and level design at Futuregames, Stockholm

• Worked at Right Nice Games (Indie studio) as a Level Designer.

• Level Design intern at Mojang

• Level Designer at Mojang in Sweden

• Skylar & Plux: Adventure on Clover Island – Game made

• The Solus Project, a survival exploration game where I helped out at the end of the game’s development along with some other students in my class.

• Key Designers

Fundementals

• Have great sense of pacing and player experience

• Understand what a player wants at any given time

• Understand how they’re affected by the pacing curve

• Master composition

• Have an artistic eye

• Analyse games

• Flexibility

• Be able to do background work

• Use mechanics and space wisely

• What does it take to secure role of choice?

• Composition to guide a player through the space

• Won’t be able to make a level look appealing

• Guiding players arguably the most important thing to do

• Take it from me, you don’t have to be able to draw or make 3D models but you have to have an eye for it. Building a good structure can give environment artist more idea of what you’re wanting to achieve.

• You have to intuitively be able to look at a space and have an idea of if it looks good or not and how you can make it better

• Analysing these games can give better idea of space and improve own levels

• If waiting for mechanics to be built, possibly become a tester or help the artists or scripters if required or keep building to the space and tweaking until feels right.

• Try to understand why they put that rock just there and why that cave is laid out in this or that specific way, and how would I have done it differently and what would that mean for the player?

• Coders and scripters working on grey whiteboxed level, as soon as events begin happening in the background, becomes a lot more alive which can inspire people.

• Learning how to make a set of mechanics work for 20 hours without the player getting bored etc. Keeping it fresh and interesting for the players.

Main objective:

• Pre-production: Build a good foundation and base

• Figure out goals

• Work out an initial strategy

• Draw out ideas

• Research

• Block out with BSPs

• Replace with actual assets

• Learn engine inside out

• From which you can later build the game into a sequence of levels that are good and make sense in the context of the game.

• Work out an initial strategy of how going to reach them

Best options:

Sumo Digital

Rockstar North QA

Ubisoft Graduate Program

Rockstar North tend to have a few openings asking for game testers and QA. As Rob Kay said, may be the best way in.

The Ubisoft Graduate Program offers successful applicants the chance to spend two years working on production teams in two different Ubisoft studios in order to hone their skills in a variety of professional disciplines, essentially making them employees.

The Ubisoft Graduate Program is a two-year international program for fresh Graduates who expect a career accelerator into the games industry. Over two years, Graduates will have the opportunity to work in two different studios in different countries.

Sumo Digital

Location

Sheffield

Near Peak District National Park

Team size

Around 250

What games do they make?

Little Big Planet 3

Helped on Forza Motorsport 7, Hitman Episode 5

Mission statement

‘Sumo make games we're proud of and passionate about: everything from driving games to platformers’

Main perks

Group Life Assurance Policy, Group Income Protection Policy, Holiday Pay,

Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Pension, Flexi Time, On site free gym, Days out.

Student placements

Internship

Reviews

‘Friendly atmosphere, good people to work with’ ‘Hands-off approach can make you feel like a small fish in a big pond’.

What kind of studios offer these positions?

Sheffield- Family not far away (1 and a half hours)

Peak District- Countryside and city is not as big as Manchester etc.

Team size: Mid sized company to gain the step into the larger one later on.

Fact that they make all types of games is interesting because would give opportunity to see what really enjoy making and make what I really enjoy playing.

Enjoy all types of games and they have helped create games I have grown up playing

The benefit is payable to a designated beneficiary in the event of death by a lump sum of 4 x annual basic salary.

The company provides a Group Income Protection Policy which protects the employee and their family for long periods of illness by paying a portion of income equivalent to 75% of basic salary, for a set timescale.

All employees will receive 24 days holiday, in addition to the UK Bank holidays.

EAP is a free, completely confidential source of support for employees and their immediate families, which is provided by a professional independent body.

The Company will provide access to a Group Personal Pension Scheme, administered by Scottish Widows.

Sumo offers a flexi time scheme, because we understand just how crucial it is that staff are able to maintain their work/life balance

What is missing/ lacking:

• Need to do more player feedback

• Show more refined levels with process

• Shipped at least one AAA 3rd person action title- Sometimes add this to filter candidates out.

• Hone proposal skills in order to get teams on board.

• Keep working on building games in UE4.

• Keep learning how to blueprint.

• What kind of studios offer these positions?

• What roles actually entail- what actually do

Over summer

• Update portfolio/ CV

• Create some games similar to Sumo and Ubisoft style.

• Have playable demos on Itch

• Get social media up to date

• Use other engines, e.g. Map editor in Far Cry.

• Keep honing skills in programs

• Keep time management structured

• Network

• Ensure games are at the forefront of portfolio

Update and work on honing skills in:

Website, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook

Programs such as PhotoShop, Maya and UE4

Bibliography:

Sumo Digital placements: http://www.sumo-digital.com/placements-emma-lintvelt/

Sumo Digital reviews: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Overview/Working-at-Sumo-Digital-EI_IE765707.11,23.htm

Sumo Digital website: http://www.sumo-digital.com/

Ubisoft Graduate program: https://news.ubisoft.com/article/ubisoft-graduate-program-2018-tips-from-our-ubigrads

Gabe Newell quote: https://www.polygon.com/2014/1/3/5270182/gabe-newell-on-hiring-modders-official-credentials-have-no-predictive

Get a job in video games: https://www.gamedesigning.org/career/jobs/

Level Design article: https://80.lv/articles/who-are-level-designers/

Max Herngren website image: https://maxherngren.squarespace.com/the-solus-project

Max Herngren website: http://maxherngren.com/about-1/

Rob Kay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robkaysf

Ubisoft logo: http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/File:Ubisoft_2017.svg

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