#I'd turn to Moses content... ... ...IF HE HAD ANY

[goldentigerfestival]

Project update for anyone who is curious!

The stageplay is finished, and all we have to do is decide how we're uploading it and planning out the post for it. Kana's been very busy which is why it's taken a little bit, but we discuss details when we can! Debating posting a preview video in the meantime. As mentioned previously, we'll be working on the other parts of the DVD eventually, too.

Mangas as usual. Finishing GotC and doing the short special chapter after chapter 6. The PS3 manga (already started) and the rest of the Flynn manga are in line.

Working on some Vesp drama CDs. Translation for one is in progress. I don't think the drama CDs will take too long when I work on them, but I'm still deciding where I want to upload those. There are... a lot of them, too, so I'm not sure if I'm doing them all yet.

As a side project, I've started working on a skit from TalesFes 2016 (not the whole thing, but most of it, because the performances are very long and I really just wanted to get to my favorite parts lol), but I'm not sure when it'll be done. I'm not going to be doing TF stuff regularly, that particular skit in that particular year is just my favorite one bc Toriumi had adorable giggle fits and couldn't get through his lines without laughing. 😌 I might work on some of 2013 at some point.

May or may not get around to some 30th anni book stuff. Need to wait until my scanner cord replacement comes in if I decide on anything.

Though not a translation project, I'm slowly going through the differences between the 360 and PS3/DE versions of Vesp and documenting them. This is for both camera angles and dialogue.

Rays content will happen when I feel like it. I haven't worked on it in a while, but I didn't abandon it. Basically, I had a proofreader for my work who got too busy to commit to proofreading, so I was waiting to work on Rays further. Those videos go up on YT, and once they go up, I can't make any fixes to anything without completely reuploading, so I wanted to make sure I had a second set of eyes looking over the tls before they went up on YT (because normally if I have something like a typo or I messed up a line or just needed to fix literally anything, I can fix it, but I can't do that with YT uploads). At this point I'm just gonna work on Rays stuff when I feel like it without worrying about that. I haven't gotten back to it recently because of all my other projects, but it's in mind!

Asteria arc 4 content (Claw stuff only, at the moment) whenever I feel like/get around to it. I still really want to work on that, I've just been dedicated to other projects first.

Translation patches for some Tales spinoff games are on the table. Not current for a few reasons, but they're in line.

Stuff I don't have on my list is of course subject to being added, but right now this is just what's active.

[stumpyjoepete]

Thinking a bit more about Megalopolis (see prev post). It's not really the case that the script is as disjointed or schizophrenic as my post makes it out to be. The central plot is pretty simple: an egotistical city planner has an ambitious and futuristic vision for redeveloping the city, and he butts heads with the Mayor and others who oppose him in this. He ultimately succeeds in building his utopian "megalopolis". Everyone is happy, the end.

And yet.

There's this... intense centrifugal force that prevents everything from cohering into a unified whole. It's like a puzzle where all the pieces are cut from the same picture, but upon closer inspection, no two pieces quite fit together. Or like that collection of nonsensical objects. A fork where the tines and the handle are connected by a chain. A watering can with the spout facing the wrong way. A quick glance leaves you confused, and that confusion is only deepened by further contemplation.

I think this is especially clear in the pseudo-intellectualism of the title cards, narration, monologues, and quotations/references:

Laurence Fishburne does this heavy-handed narration at the beginning and end of the movie (and several random points in between). And there are these associated title cards that look like they were made by applying an "Ancient Rome" theme to some PowerPoint slides. "Or will we too fall victim, like old Rome, to the insatiable appetite for power of a few men?" My brother in Christ, you are making a movie where the hero is named Cesar, and the happy ending is when he successfully pulls a Robert Moses. This is not a story about power corrupting or good intentions going awry. What are you doing???

Cesar Catilina interrupts Mayor Cicero's speech (where he is introducing a plan to build a casino) in order to lay out an early plan for "megalopolis", which is an ambitious and long-term alternative to the (short-term) casino plan. He prefaces his megalopolis pitch by reciting the Hamlet soliloquy. What exactly does Coppola think "To Be Or Not To Be" is about? He must thinks it means, "I am a dark and brooding bad-boy intellectual", since it's hard to see how "I'd like to kill myself, but I fear death" fits into an argument about the importance of long-term thinking in urban planning.

Cesar says several negative things about "civilization". "[Imagine] humanity as an old tree with one misguided branch called civilization... going nowhere." (Shot of notebook shows an illustration with 'war' and 'cruelty' offshoots from said branch.) "Emerson said the end of the human race will be that we'll eventually die of civilization." (Note: unsourced, probably fake quote.) "Civilization itself remains the great enemy of mankind." Umm... you're an urban planner! You're doing a high modernism. What exactly does it mean for you to call civilization the enemy? Is "megalopolis" somehow anti-civilization because it looks like a Georgia O'Keefe painting instead of a bunch of straight lines and right angles? Will the "war" and "cruelty" branches wither and die when buildings have labia?

Also, there's this amazing line read that completely inverts the meaning of a fake Marcus Aurelius quote (the quote was attributed to him by Tolstoy but is not actually something he said). "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape... finding yourself in the ranks of the insane." Why did you put in that pause??? Fake Marcus Aurelius is turning in his grave! You're supposed to be fleeing FROM the ranks of the insane! I suppose this isn't really inconsistent with the characterization of Cesar, it's just such a fucking batshit thing to say.

All of the cargo-cult intellectualism listed above could perhaps be excused if the vision that the film is supposedly about had any content whatsoever. Or, alternatively, if the movie was about something more substantive, and the vacuous megalopolis vision took place off-screen in an epilogue, like the "happily ever after" of a children's story. But no! The movie repeatedly interrupts the plot to grab you by the shoulders and scream in your face: "I have a vision! For the future!". And then--now that it has your undivided attention--it shits the bed like a man who has just polished off an entire bag of sugar-free gummy bears and washed them down with a fistful of Ambien:

"Conversation isn't enough. It's the questions that lead it to the next step. But initially, you have to have a conversation. The city itself is immaterial, but they're talking about it for the first time. And it's not just about us talking about it. It's the need to talk about it. It's as urgent to us as air and water."

"Mr. Catalina, you said that as we jump into the future, we should do so unafraid. But what if when we do jump into the future, there is something to be afraid of?" "Well, there's nothing to be afraid of if you love, or have loved. It's an unstoppable force. It's unbreakable. It has no limits. It's within us. It's around us. And it's stretched throughout time. It's nothing you can touch. Yet it guides every decision that we make. But we do have the obligation to each other to ask questions of one another. What can we do? Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that's available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia."

After the revolution, we won't have conflicts anymore; we'll have dialogue instead. We won't have a need for the "jobs" and "sanitation" of "now"; we'll have the "imperishable" "dreams" of "forever". We won't have problems that need solving; we'll all be too busy asking each other questions. Now, if everyone could just shut up and get the hell out of the way and let Cesar implement his vision, then "everyone" will soon be "creating together, learning together, perfecting body and mind." A chorus of children's voices gradually morphing into Laurence Fishburne's, chanting, "One Earth, indivisible, with long life, education and justice for all." It's eschatological anti-politics made entirely from cotton candy. Please, for the love of God, stop making Adam Driver monologue at me! Let's get back to Aubrey Plaza stepping on horny fascist Shia LaBeouf!

The incoherence of Megalopolis's vision is compounded by how anachronistic its depiction of our fallen world is. There are some half-hearted (and ham-fisted) gestures in the Clodio sub-plot towards the dangers of Trumpian populism, but the script was first written in the 80's, and it's extremely obvious that Coppola is writing about New York City in the preceding several decades. The city's finances are in dire straights. (There's literally a "Ford Tells City: Drop Dead" reference!) The city is full of slums, the streets are full of crime, and the elites are all decadent. (For Coppola, decadence means that ladies are doing cocaine and smooching each other in the cluh-ub.) The main character is Neo-Roman Robert Moses, and the conflict of the film is about urban renewal. In case you, like Mr. Coppola, have not been made aware, slum clearance is not a major political issue in 2020's Manhattan.

Two thirds of the way through the movie, a falling Soviet satellite provides a deus ex machina, blowing up the financial district and clearing space for megalopolis to take its place. Ironically, a previous attempt to produce the film came to its abrupt end when two planes flew into some buildings in the financial district. Perhaps you heard about it. The financial backers of the film at the time considered Megalopolis's plot a bit too close to current events for comfort and withdrew their support.

But Coppola's depiction of Manhattan was already decades out of date by then. Moses stepped down in '60. Jacobs' book railing against urban renewal came out in '61. The Power Broker came out in '74. One presumes popular opinion of Robert Moses soured in the following years. The crisis of the city's finances that peaked in '75 was over by '81 when NYC balanced its budget and reentered the bond market. The crime wave of the 70's and 80's had receded by the year 2000. The demand for housing in NYC proper is as high as it ever has been, and it's only getting higher. Megalopolis imagines America as an incoherent mishmash of several decades of mid-century NYC, dressed up in the toga of the late Roman Republic, calling out for (Robert) Moses to part the slums and take us into a promised land that is literally beyond any description, and whose only concrete feature seems to be glowing people-movers.

A Robert Moses with the power to stop time, at that!

Oh, did I forget to mention that part? Cesar discovers he has the power to stop time in the opening scene of the film. I forgot because it's literally irrelevant to the plot. Time stops a few times, and then it starts back up again, and the events of the film just plod inexorably forward. For a movie as temporally dislocated as Metropolis, perhaps that's just as well.

[olderthannetfic]

Something that's always stuck with me is Stitch's followers dogpiling me for writing a Jewish Star Wars AU. Basically it was an AU where Finn was space Moses, the last of a noble Force-sensitive family who made sure he survived the destruction of their planet, and when his Force abilities awakened he went on to fight to free the other Stormtroopers. Stitch didn't like that I went in a Finn/Hux direction wherein Hux was a double agent embedded deep in the First Order, sabotaging it from the inside.

I was called a Nazi. I'm Jewish. I was called anti-black. I'm Beta Israeli, black and Ethiopian-American and proud. I was called a Pick Me POC, I was sent pictures of starving Ethiopian children, I was sent Holocaust pictures, people flooded my comments on AO3 - this was before it had a block feature - and even after I deleted my tumblr the hate bled over onto my other social media accounts. I was called slurs, I was told I should've starved to death, people told me my "Jew money" wouldn't buy off people this time, and I got hit by enough people calling me a monster, a bad person, etc. that I took the story down just to escape them.

Stitch only mentioned me once. Just once.

I think the real issue they have with AO3 is that at any point you can be blocked, comments can be turned off, people can find themselves unable to keep clawing at you again and again. You can make it so they have to be logged in to send their threats and then you can report them. They can dogpile "bad" fans all they want, but there are consequences for their actions. I was 14 then and easily intimidated. Many people on AO3 are not either of those things. You can't harass them off their own platform. And when you try, you end up being booted off of it instead.

The real reason Stitch doesn't like AO3 is that it's designed to protect authors, including "Pick Me POC" and "POC TOO" (get it, it's funny because it's like #MeToo, Stitch is oh so hilarious). It protects those of us who are neither white nor onboard with all of Stitch's opinions and, more broadly, not onboard with purity culture, respectability politics and people's demands that you change your content to match their idea of what a respectable fictional story looks like.

This is not about racism. It's about kicking people who are "wrong" aka write anything they don't like off of AO3 for pure, morally good, self-righteous reasons that they tell themselves make them not the bullies here. It's about control. They want you to do what they want or leave.

I've been rewriting my old fic and I'm planning on putting it back up sometime this year.

No, antis, you don't get to bully black people off of AO3 and call yourselves anti-racist and act like you're moral guardians. To be a moral guardian, you'd need some morals. If you don't like the site's policies, get off of it. I am entitled to my space on AO3 just as much as anyone else. I am not Less Than, and the fact that my own people were the ones telling me I was has permanently made me suspicious of alleged anti-racism campaigns in fandom. I know who these people are when they know there won't be consequences for their actions and they're not people I'd trust to run a bake sale, let alone a fandom archive.

--

Yikes! That's quite an experience for a 14-year-old!

[curemoonliite]

4 and 10 for MLP

4) Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

go back to sleep coco x mosely isn't real it only exists in your imagination

Warning: this is gonna be petty as all hell, but I'm going to have to say Sparity for one big reason--my first ex shipped it hard. He wrote Sparity fics and everything, and got fairly big in the fandom for doing so. Now, I was always a little uncomfy with Sparity due to the age gap, but was fine with it just being a cute little crush, but after we broke up, I suddenly found myself losing any love I might've had for it. I still think Spike and Rarity are very cute as friends, especially as Rarity grows to view Spike as an equal rather than just as her other friend's kid brother, but fan content of them anything other than that is an instant turn-off for me.

On a much shorter note, I've also never liked Spike and Sweetie Belle together (even when I did tolerate Sparity) for a much different, yet similar reason. Sweetie Belle is her own filly and deserves to be evaluated on her own merits, and I feel like that would be just about impossible when your BF spent a good chunk of his childhood crushing on your older sister. Obviously, Spike wouldn't mean to do that, but I feel like it'd be almost impossible to not have these types of insecurities in a situation like this, because intrusive thoughts are assholes. Plus it just reminds me of that whole thing in Great Expectations when the losing childhood friend in the love triangle gets together with the dude's brother-in-law, and as an English major, I'd really prefer not to remember that Charles Fucking Dickens wrote that kind of end-of-romance-novel plot twist crap.

in short my headcanon is that spike is a short king, a bisexual king, and that's he's in love with a...well, you get the idea

10) Most disliked arc? Why?

The OG Crystal Empire arc, hands down. While the Pony of Shadows arc also disappointed me a bit for similar reasons as I'm about to go into here, it saved itself from this fate by at least having some pieces of interesting lore, mostly with regards to Stygian. The idea of the one normal guy in a group of legendary magical people turning to dark magic to catch up to their level and having that backfire on him is heartbreaking to me, so I'm able to forgive the rest of the arc's shortcomings as a result.

However, the Crystal Empire arc...didn't really have that much lore going for it. While the show progressed a bit towards it later on, I found myself really not caring about Twilight's test during the two-parter compared to all the lore the episode could have had.

The Crystal Empire itself is a really fascinating concept--imagine a land made entirely of crystal, where even the beings themselves are made of crystal, ruled over by a dark, shadowy king with Sauron vibes. Sounds cool, right? Let's not focus on that and instead focus on the Mane Six setting up a festival! How does Cadence tie into this empire's history? Let's literally never explain that outside of expanded universe stories fans have to go out of their way to read! And nerf Shining Armor again for his second two-parter in a row! All while airing copious amounts of Gak commercials! (God, does anyone still remember that meme?)

And speaking of remembering stuff, does anyone remember that cool-ass thing Legend of Korra did where it cut to the first Avatar for a couple of episodes, allowing us to learn about the ancient stuff in the ancient world before going back and showing the implications it had on the modern world? If the Crystal Empire arc had been like that, if we'd gotten to see how the Empire worked before Twilight's test, the story we got in the S3 premiere would have been so much better as a result. And who knows, maybe that's the direction things could've gone if S3 hadn't been a lower-budget half-season due to Equestria Girls. I like to think there's a universe somewhere where we somehow got Equestria Girls, a full Crystal Empire arc, and at least 3 more Babs-focused episodes in S3, but them's the breaks. Blame Lightning Dust for glitching out and attempting to destroy the VR used to create the AI ponies, causing the programmers/writers to run out of budget for the rest of S3 (yes, this is an actual fanfic plot I wrote).

I never really realized how much of an issue I had with this arc until I sat down to put it into words and now...yeah, taken as its own story without later seasons in mind, it doesn't really have many redeeming qualities to me. At least The Success Song helps pump me up before tests, though!