It's so funny to me how we all remember this iconic line mostly for its delivery, while German and French even try to avoid using the word, meanwhile English just gets straight to the point, like
German: .....the lust......
French: .....the desire......
English: SEX. I'm talking about SEX.
And while we're at it, do you think that line was also on his mind when he was smiling at that poor guy who was tied to Celene's bed? lol
"Ah yes, just like the good old days..."
You know, now that I think about it, Solas had no right to kinkshame the Inquisitor like that. lmaoo
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the view that sexual predation is based on 'brain development' rather than life experience and social power is, like the common view that incest is bad because of 'inbreeding' rather than the control granted by the family structure, one where the issues of social power imbalance are replaced by an unhelpful bioessentialism - one that both makes permissions for these abuses (whether it's in the cases of non-blood relatives, or of an 18 year old being exploited by a 50 year old), and targets non-abusive relationships (if the reason for incest's immorality is that it might produce a disabled child, how does that logic continue towards people with inherited illnesses?). working within this essentialist logic, it's impossible to rectify these issues - neither extending the supposed 'undeveloped brain' to greater ages, nor simply deciding that there exists no real power a middle-aged man has over a new graduate, can fix the errors generated.
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alright look i know my following is not the target audience for this kind of post but i wanna at least point something out about a scene in the Fallout show that i haven't actually heard a single person point out or comment on.
spoilers ahead.
in the scene where the ghoul is rewatching his old movie, specifically the scene where he originally protested about killing the villain.
the first layer is the obvious one: he is talking directly to himself. "you were strong, ugly, and you had dignity. i'll give you two out of those three." he remembers what happened at that shoot just as clearly as we did, and after he literally tells himself to his face "you're strong, ugly, and have no dignity" followed by him killing the man he originally wanted his character to save. this, of course, coming DIRECTLY after the person he sold into slavery earlier that day sparing him with life saving medicine while he's on the ground and telling him to his face that he only lives on because someone stuck to their humanity. very heavy! i bet he feels like shit, which he probably should because he's kind of a jerkoff! (but in a cool way that i like to watch)
the SECOND layer is the one i find way more interesting. the phrasing of his final line we didn't hear before was so dripping with importance that it felt like i was reading RPG dialogue and story relevant words were highlighted. "i hope you like the taste of lead you commie son of a bitch". as we'd already seen in episode 3, he despises vault-tec for everything he knows they are responsible for while he was their face. moreover, it's made clear that he doesn't just resent himself for being used for their image, but he resents the fact that he was the face of the propaganda which drove the war fever that caused the end of the world. the wild west ideal caricature of masculine wisdom from the movies as the spokesperson of the company who stood to profit from the purposeful decimation of the human race. he became The Ultimate Jingo.
and i really enjoyed how brief yet informative that detail was! i really enjoyed how the directors tell you what the characters are thinking intuitively and effectively through the camerawork and those little details make the whole thing a lot more fun to mull over and consider as a part of the whole of Fallout! i think it's neat.
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breaking my silence on chess the musical to say that i would literally not give a fuck about this show if i thought it was good or fully successful at what it is saying. SORRY! i love how messy she is. i love how since 1984 and continuing to this very day people with entirely different perceptions of and opinions on the musical have attempted in their own ways to "make it good" by creating all these different versions with like notably different plots, characterization, and song order, and i love how fucking bad the vast majority of these are despite it all. i hope people keep trying to fix chess the musical forever and until the end of time. i hope no one ever figures it out. i want every currently living theatre director in existence to make their own version and for all these versions to come out on broadway at the same time, making that year's musical season entirely comprised of various different versions of the cold war chess musical by tim rice and half of abba. i want not only our greatest minds but also our middlest-of-the-road and worst minds to come up with their own conclusions as to why chess does not entirely work in its original form or any subsequent forms like to really think about it and yes i do want someone to dedicate their entire life to perfecting chess by releasing version after version after version until they die peacefully but still, as always, in the grips of obsession. i want marriages to be broken up. i want mental states to be shattered. i dream of this world
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Okay. I've been playing Tokyo Debunker today, since the release happened to catch me on a day when all I'd planned to do was write fanfiction. I just finished reading the game story prologue (it was longer than expected!), so here's a review type post. If you're reading this post not having seen a single thing about this game: it's a story-based joseimuke gacha mobile game that just released globally today. It's about a girl who suddenly finds herself attending a magic school and mingling with elite, superhuman students known as ghouls. If you look in the tumblr tag for the game you'll see what appears to be a completely different game from 2019 or so: they retooled it completely midway through development, changing just about everything about it due to "escalating competition within the gaming industry."
I'll talk about how this looks like a blatant twst clone at the end.
Starting with the positive: The story is charming. I enjoyed it thoroughly the entire time and am excited to read more. The mix between visual novel segments and motion comics was really nice--it broke things up and added a lot of oomph to the action or atmospheric scenes that visual novels generally lack. I like the art in the comic parts a lot. the live2d in the visual novel parts is... passable. Tone-wise, I think the story was a little bit all over the place and would like to see more of the horror that it opened on, but I didn't mind the comedic direction it went in either. The translation is completely seamless. The characters so far all have unique voices and are just super fun and cute. Of the ones who've had larger roles in the story so far, there's not a single one I dislike. It's all fully voiced in Japanese and the acting is solid. (I don't recognize any voices, and can't seem to find any seiyuu credits, so it seems they're not big names, but they deliver nonetheless.) Kaito in particular I found I was laughing at his lines a ton, both the voicing and the writing.
He's looking for a girlfriend btw. Spreading the word.
The problem is like. The gameplay is the worst dark-pattern microtransaction-riddled bullshit I've ever seen. Hundred passive timers going at all times. Fifty different item-currencies. Trying to get you to spend absurd amounts of real world money at every turn. There's like five different indicators that take you to various real-money shop items that I don't know how to dismiss the indicator, I guess you just have to spend money, wtaf. Bajillion different interlocking systems mean you have zero sense of relative value of all the different item-currencies. I did over the course of the day get enough diamonds for one ten-pull, which I haven't used yet. Buying enough diamonds for a ten-pull costs a bit under $60 (presumably USD, but there's a chance the interface is automatically making that CAD for me--not gonna spend the money to check lmfao), with an SSR rate of 1%. BULLSHIIIIIT.
There's like a goddamn thousand-word essay explaining the dozen different types of character upgrades and equippables and equippables for the equippables!! Bad! Bad game design! That's just overcomplicating bullshit to trick people into thinking they're doing something other than clicking button to make number go up! That is not gameplay!
In terms of the actual gameplay, there is none. The battle system is full auto. There might be teambuilding, but from what I've seen so far, most of that consists of hoping you pull good cards from gacha and then clicking button to make number go up. There's occasional rhythm segments but there's no original music, it's just remixes of public domain classical music lmao. I'd describe the rhythm gameplay as "at least more engaging than twisted wonderland's," which is not a high bar
At least there's a cat in the rhythm bit.
And like, ok, I gotta remark on how derivative it is. Like I mentioned in my post earlier, this game is unabashedly aping twisted wonderland's setting and aesthetic. (That said, most of the stuff it steals from twst is magic school stuff that twst also basically stole from Harry Potter, so...?) However, it isn't exactly like twst: in this one, the characters say fuck a lot and bleed all over the place and do violence. Basically, the tone is a fair bit more adult than twst's kid-friendly vibe. (Not, like, adult adult, and I probably wouldn't even call it dark--it's still rated Teen lol. Just more adult than twst.)
Rather than just being students at magic school, the ghouls also go out into the mundane world to go on missions where they fight and investigate monsters and cryptids. Honestly, the magic school setting feels pretty tacked-on. The things that are enjoyable about this would've been just as enjoyable in about any other setting--you can tell this whole aspect was a late trend-chasing addition, lmao. So, yeah, it's blatantly copying twst to try to steal some players, but... Eh, I found myself not caring that much. Someone more (or less) into twst than me may find it grating.
Character-wise, eh, sure, yeah, they're a bit derivative in that aspect too, but it's a joseimuke game, the characters are always derivative. Thus far the writing & execution has been solid enough that I didn't care if they were tropey. If I were to compare it to something else, I'd say the relationship between the protagonist and the ghouls feels more like that of the sage and wizards in mahoyaku than anything from twst. There's some mystery in exactly what "ghouls" are and their place in this world that has me intrigued and wanting to know more about this setting and how each of the characters feels about it. I have a bad habit of getting my hopes up for stories that put big ideas on the table and then being disappointed when they don't follow through in a way that lives up to my expectations, though.
So, my final verdict: I kind of just hope someone uploads all the story segments right onto youtube so nobody has to deal with the dogshit predatory game to get the genuinely decent story lol. Give it a play just for the story if you have faith in your ability to resist dark patterns. Avoid at all costs if you know you're vulnerable to gacha, microtransactions, or timesinks.
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