#IP Rotation

[http-proxies]

HTTP Proxies

HTTP is widely recognized as a go-to protocol for proxy services. These type of proxies blend smoothly with the current web structure, so they are a good choice for both personal and corporate users.

Whether for balancing load of web traffic, managing content or even just enhancing privacy, an HTTP proxy can serve to limitlessly access the web.

This article will explain the HTTP proxy meaning, how it works and what are the most common use cases, so you'll know if it is the best solution for you.

Understanding HTTP

HTTP is an acronym for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol," which designates the basic technology system by which files can be shared through the World Wide Web. All web addresses starting with HTTP point out the use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Designed to make the Internet faster and more efficient, it sits atop the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack and is also compatible with Google's QUIC protocol to serve better for very fast online communication.

This protocol is quite important for the way web browsers and servers communicate in order to issue web requests and receive back web pages. HTTP appeared in the year 1989 as a kind of concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the World Wide Web. First introduced as HTTP/1.0, every version treats the user's requests independently and, at the same time, closes the connection after the particular task gets finished. HTTP has been rapidly changing, upgrading towards better features, and the latest edition is HTTP/3 that included the QUIC protocol for better performance.

Notably, HTTP does not offer encryption for the data in transit, and in about 2010, there was an awakening for a higher level of security; this was a turning point to go towards HTTPS (HTTP Secure). It includes the layer of secure sockets (SSL) with HTTP, which adds an encrypted layer over HTTP to exchange the data between browsers and servers, so you're gonna be secure from eavesdropping and tampering.

What Is The Meaning of An HTTP Proxy?

Let's take a little step back in time and explain to you, in a few words, what HTTP really is. We could say that it's something like the mother tongue of the browsers (like Chrome or Microsoft Edge) and the web servers (places where sites are located) in the communication process.

HTTP is a communication protocol used for the interchange and communication of different kinds of resources, including text, images, videos, and documents.

The HTTP proxy, therefore, is the one that operates just like a gateway on behalf of the web traffic that uses the HTTP protocol. It is a kind of server designed for connections regarding HTTP between a client device and a web server, etc.

Basically, when you use an HTTP server, you are taking advantage of an intermediary to connect to the desired website or page, hence remaining anonymous.

How does an HTTP proxy work?

Because of the online threats that keep haunting every business, all companies working in this domain need to know how an HTTP proxy works. Here is where the HTTP proxy server shines, known for its ability to isolate everything that is suspicious over your network traffic. It will be your vigilant guard, intercepting any outside threats that try to attack your system, scanning the system continuously for malware before they penetrate into the system.

An HTTP proxy server, however, does not stop at the filtering of traffic. It actually checks the source of incoming data before allowing them to be delivered into the internal network. With this protection, your network will be much less at risk of compromise by the content carrying harmful effects or buffer overflow attempts.

Moreover, businesses are able to customize the features of the HTTP proxy server software to fit their needs perfectly. A company can then operationalize the proxy to help with a variety of security and operational objectives that are achieved by tuning the ruleset.

Use Cases

HTTP proxies serve a variety of key functions and come in handy for several practical reasons. Here are some of the primary uses:

Enhancing Anonymity on the Web: HTTP Proxies are the way to go for someone interested in cruising the internet without leaving a trace. HTTP Proxies will hide your real IP and, also, all your online activities will look like they are coming from a different location. This added layer of anonymity makes it tough for anyone to pinpoint your real-world location or identify you.

Crossing Geographical Boundaries: An HTTP proxy could easily be your free ticket to unlimited coverage of the internet, where content or sites are blocked in your geographical area. You just need to route your connection through a proxy server in the geographical area where content is being accessible and you're gonna seamlessly enjoy global internet freedom.

Managing Digital Content: HTTP proxies come in handy in ensuring that the internet usage by institutions and businesses, is within the required guidelines. Most importantly, this helps in blocking out malicious sites, while, at the same time, providing restrictions of accessibility to content that does not relate to their work or studies.

Navigating Around Restrictions: Whether it’s website filters or social media platform limitations, HTTP proxies provide a way to sidestep these hurdles. Using HTTP proxies, users have at their disposal countless IP addresses, so managing numerous accounts or bypassing site restrictions becomes pretty easy, keeping detection and bans at distance.

Balancing web traffic: HTTP proxies are champions in balancing web traffic. They distribute, in a very effective manner, user requests among a number of servers in a way that no individual server gets overwhelmed. This increases the performance and availability of the webs, but also provides a more reliable and faster user experience.

Wrapping Up

And there we wrap up our comprehensive overview of HTTP proxy servers and their operational mechanics.

Employing an HTTP proxy server offers a multitude of advantages for your enterprise, from safeguarding your network against external threats, concealing your IP address, filtering out irrelevant or harmful content, to facilitating your web scraping endeavors. Dive into our curated list of HTTP proxies and start integrating these tools into your projects without any complications

[spreens]

does qspreen dox people

[breitzbachbea]

This AU has ruined my life.

[mikkouille]

THEY FINALLY PROCESSED MY SHIT FOR UNEMP MONEY‼️

[thedopesmm]

SMTP Server With IP rotation in Denmark: Send ubegrænset e-mails med SMTP Server IP-rotation

[ipcearn]

So close to triple crowning my first character

[4giorno]

shoutout to this bitch for single handedly saving the name hifumi

[haroldsean12]

Proxy Service

It may interest you to know that a proxy service is a particular kind of service providing a process bridging a gap between the dedicated computer system and the software that helps you manage the client requests on a website for multiple websites in one go. It requires a system or routing process to manage gateways.

[louisacarly74]

ISP Proxies

Change your perspective about dealing with the multiple proxy types and how you manage to work on its core strength. This is likely to hinder your way of dealing with the multiple proxies for a particular website type. Make sure you have taken good care of ISP proxies and other permissions required for a set of aspects. 

[rogerkeith76]

IP Rotation Proxy

There are a lot of websites available online which are supposed to be accessed online worldwide. For this, you are required to have a good number of secret keys and an IP rotation proxy that helps you login to the website in no time and give you a full-fledged view of how you should look into the website in a detailed manner.

[sivavakkiyar]

one thing I think of as a visceral example when thinking of music sampling/“plagiarizing”

the head melody to Zappa’s Invocation & Ritual Dance is the melody to Holst’s Jupiter (at about 1:40 on that recording). He doesn’t credit him but he referenced him in the liners to the first album; he wants you to recognize it, but also one is hardly a ‘replacement’ for the other (in IP speak non competitive). Nevertheless people frequently regard this as essentially plagiarism

the track Cold World off GZA’s Liquid Swords samples Zappa’s ‘Plastic People’ off the same album as the above—-and interpolates a Stevie Wonder chorus. Also something entirely new, non-competitive. In fact there was definitel a time in HS where I had this album, the Zappa and the Wonder in the same rotation, and I *never* caught the sample, it’s that subtle—-RZA is always very proud of it when it comes up, like ‘hell yeah I listen to everything and can sample it too, fuck you.’ Sampling is of course the constantly denigrated form of composition accused of plagiarism—-but you couldn’t get a result like this otherwise (and plenty of people take this for granted when they talk ‘plagiarism’, even tho realistically we simply cannot get something like this again, let alone Tribe’s first album or Paul’s Boutique)

[magellanicclouds]

Halo - An Essay: regarding waste management systems and devices for MJOLNIR armoured Spartans It has been a hectic sort of few weeks. Between work and getting sick again (for the fourth time already this year thanks to my crewmates who can't remember it's their duty to stay home when they're ill) I've been on the outs. I haven't had the energy for much, but I'm usually a pretty active person, so this has kind of made me loopy? Which feels like as good a time as any to talk at length about the concept of catheterizing Spartans for waste management in MJOLNIR.

Let me explain.

This Silly Post crossed my dash recently and I fully understand it is meant as lighthearted fun - we have fun here. But it also dragged out some strong thoughts I've had haunting in the back of my mind about this for years because I'm super normal about Halo, and have time on my hands and the right amount of sleep deprivation and medication on board. So I wrote 3500 words about it. And about Karen Traviss, who is pretty knotted up in this conversation, since she's the one who decided to start it back in 2011.

To preface, I'm not an expert, but I have worked in emergency medicine for 25 years, and been a fan of Halo for almost as long. I've had more of a lukewarm relationship with it the last decade or so if I'm being honest, but it will always have a home in my heart; I just think letting it under my skin like that in the first place may have made me feral and prone to biting. Thankfully, I can always happily rotate Fred in my mind until the heat-death of the universe, so that's nice. Anyway, full disclosure: the essay below contains discussion about medical devices, physical trauma, and I am sharing quite a lot of personal negativity about the Kilo-5 trilogy and Karen Traviss. That said, if you'd like to sit in on the length of what I'm about to yell into the sky about all this, you can find it under the cut. I love you.

Welcome to my dissertation.

Section 1 - The Relevant Background:

Equipping Spartans with urinary catheters weeded itself into the Halo universe in the 2011 book Halo: Glasslands, during a conversation between Spartan II Naomi-010 and ODST Mal Geffen. Glasslands was the first in Karen Traviss's Kilo-5 trilogy, and she is both the originator of this, and the only official Halo author or source to have used catheters specifically since. Some context: I don't personally like these books, or their author, or even her reasoning for why she chose to add this. My personal preference doesn't make something 'bad', and I'm not out to hurt any feelings. Kilo-5 isn't a total wash for me, there are some characters and ideas that I'd of otherwise loved to have seen explored through the lens of a different author, but these books felt smothered under Traviss's habit of always injecting her very loud personal voice into the narrative fabric. I think this is something that's fine to do in an original series, but doesn't really belong in an established third party IP. She bangs on about so much of her own narrow worldview and self-assured prejudices across the trilogy that still discussing them today creates division in the fandom, and sadly did a lot of lasting damage to a couple characters. But for the topic here, the dialogue that started all this cath chat came from Naomi-010, having idle conversation with Mal who asks her about bathroom breaks. “I’m catheterized. Another reason why that machine has to be so precisely calibrated. This suit plugs into me in a lot of places.” 'The Machine' she's referring to is a Brokkr assembly, which was introduced to the lore as a large mechanical armature used to get Spartans in and out of MJOLNIR. You can see them in action in cinematics from Halo 4 (+Spartan Ops) and 5.

One single mention, and it was big news. Traviss was naturally interviewed about it because of course she was - people can't help themselves but forget an entire novel and tunnel vision on 'but how pee pee?', and her answer has always irritated me. It's not in what she says, so much as what 'what she says' means in her voice. Traviss didn't answer it directly, but instead talked about how she likes to get into character's heads by addressing the mundane necessity of things that often go overlooked to expand a sense of familiarity with the character and their world. Sounds super reasonable, I know, but don't give her too much credit - that's not a quote. It's just me paraphrasing and honestly I was pretty generous in my wording. Probably because I agree! What bugs me about it, is if you've ever read literally any interview with her, or her personal musings about her writing process, you know there's a bit of an 'honesty' issue there. She's somebody who feels perfectly comfortable ignoring established character voices, traits, or histories to satisfy whatever roles she's reinvented for them, and too many others wind up as mouthpieces. How much are you really challenging yourself in finding characters' voices when most of them are just yours? And the part about familiarity with their world? I giggled a little. She doesn't care about their world, or their aesthetics, or their technology, or their medicine. Because she didn't care about Halo while writing these, and she's not vague about admitting that. It's a matter of pride for her to purposefully refuse to research those things, in the same way she disregarded Star Wars and Gears of War - she doesn't consider the effort to be a valuable part of her process. So instead she'll skim the foundation, gather some recognizable names, pick her targets, and trusts that her personal experiences combined with an outsider perspective will generate better content to seamlessly overwrite what existed. Cool, Karen. Annoying, but why bring all that up? We're here to talk about catheters, right? Well, the fandom for the most part begin and end their assessment of the dialogue at urinary catheters, but the whole quote implies so much more than that - "This suit plugs into me in a lot of places." We're not just dealing with a cath, but apparently with multiple additional external-to-invasive connections. Reader, this dialogue is a plinth to Traviss's bizarre refusal to research not only the franchises she's contracted to write in, but also just into the basic function and hazards of existing concepts that she wants to introduce, and all because she's convinced herself she's done learning about the world. Choosing to ignore the creative freedom of limitless potential in a future of technology that would be basically magic to us today, and instead degrade 529 years of advancement is certainly a take, but it's even more ridiculous to do it with a subject (The Spartan Programme) that is considered to be the peak of advancement in that future's setting. That's clownery, just like her alleged commitment to adjusting her perspective to suit a universe's world.

I want to close out this section with a question: Why is it that writers in the Halo space - both fan and official - cling so tightly to current-day modern concepts as if they'd still be perfectly relevant in 500+ years? Music, for example, apparently suffered a multi-century stagnation in lots of published and fanmade Halo media. Though my partner made a strong counterpoint about this to be fair: we still listen to music composed by Mozart. So there's an argument to be made there. Medicine though. There is way less latitude to embrace the classics there. It's been shown across several games, novels, and films to be sufficiently advanced well beyond anything we're currently capable of or even understand, so why undermine that and choose to drag it centuries backward? For clarity, I am not talking about what might be standard in the public or private sectors, nor the enduring things that'd be used by the public and military alike, like sterile dressings, syringes, supplemental oxygen equipment. Those are the Basics and they will be relevant to us indefinitely. But I'm talking about the UNSC. I'm talking about ONI R&D. I'm talking about Section Three. Retrograding tech and failing to address a necessity that applies to every living person in the Super Soldier Wizardry department makes my mouth flatten into a tight little line.

Section Two - Caths, and why this whole thing got written:

Indwelling urinary catheters, both urethral and suprapubic. There's a laundry list of problems here, but I've distilled it down to the three biggest when suggesting they'd have any safe practical application in Spartans: Care. Activity. Damage. There is unreasonable expectations of care and maintenance for caths with regards to people who can be on operations isolated for months at a time with no support of any kind and are often limited to carrying only what can be kept on their person. The level of extreme physical activity Spartans engage in on any perfectly normal day whether deployed or not is unfit for the stability and safety of a cath. And damage; obvious enough, but with this one I'll be taking a huge emphasis on concussive forces - explosions. Something Spartans are subjected to a lot. I'll be using the height of modern-day catheter quality as a baseline for this, since that's what Traviss felt was sufficient. Regarding Urethral vs Suprapubic, Traviss doesn't specify by name, but Naomi's comment in full reads to me that she's only catheterized temporarily while armoured, hence the assembly needing to be so finely calibrated. Foley caths are temporary urethral caths that would only supplement the urinary process while a person was armoured. Suprapubic caths however are surgically placed devices. They do need routine tube replacement to keep them clean, but unlike the Foley that just serves as an aide measure for an otherwise fully functioning bladder, suprapubic caths are usually placed in people with congenital bladder disfunction, or who've suffered injury or disease that left the bladder in poor health or failure. This type of access will always require a tube in place and this would be the exclusive method of urination - in or out of armour. My Big Three Concerns fit both types similarly, though there is some additional risks associated with urethral caths that I'll cover.

Care: Caring for an invasive cath is a not insignificant effort. They're prone to blockage, kinking, and bacterial growth. They're so frequently responsible for UTIs and kidney stones that these complications are just considered the Standard Fair for having a cath. Their need to be frequently replaced because of their penchant for bacterial growth is the kicker here - whole floral colonies sprout up in caths and can eek their way out into the body through compromised tissue and wreck havoc. They have no self-cleaning mechanism, and steadily deteriorate. Changing and replacing an indwelling cath is a procedure that requires additional supplies that'd have to be carried, and needs to be done in a practiced and clean setting; preferably medical. Granted, there are people who manage the removal and insertion of their own caths at home, but they still need to ensure a clean and safe environment while they do this. A Spartan could never be guaranteed that, nor would it even be wise to consider the vulnerability of removing so much armour to handle it. Modern day caths are recommended to be replaced every 30 days or so, with some models able to be in place for a few months at a time, but that's with constant daily care and cleaning; something that'd be unreasonable for a Spartan to maintain while entrenched who knows where for who knows how long, and without access to replacement medical supplies. Those endurance times between replacements are geared for the average public person who leads an average public life and care for their cath as directed and don't get into fist fights with Sangheili. Needless to say, the endurance time for the same device in a Spartan who leads a wildly different lifestyle probably cuts those times down to a third.

Activity: Modern day caths are designed to offer people the most utility and versatility possible. Both models are available for people who are bed-bound or have extremely limited mobility, as well as for those who are mobile, independent, and live out average lives. With regards to the latter, suprapubics are somewhat more common, if for no other reason than to reduce the Foley's higher risks of induction injury, but modern urethral caths also allow for regular movement and activity with a more reduced chance of becoming dislodged or damaged than they would have had a couple decades ago. But when I say regular activity, I mean going on a walk. Shopping for groceries. Doing basic house chores. Even light exercise and sexual activity can be managed with physician advisement and the appropriate precautions taken. Anytime a Spartan was fielded they'd have to be all the more overly-cautious about Movements Outside of Their Control during confrontations, maneuvers, ambush, environmental or vehicular incidents. Even when things go well there'd be too much risk involved. That said, traumatic decatheterizations happen more frequently than anyone would like, and I'm talking about regular old Joe Everybody. I respond to no less than a dozen of these incidents a year. Both types of catheter are held in place by a bulb balloon that's inflated from a port with around 10-30ccs of saline after the tube enters the bladder (30ccs would be more appropriate for better security of the line). Before removing a cath, the saline is removed to deflate the balloon and the tube is guided out - with a Foley cath, that means being guided out of the urethra. When a Foley cath is traumatically removed, the saline filled balloon - which is like five times wider in diameter than the average 6mm urethra - does a pretty devastating amount of damage on it's way out, penis or vagina; though a penile urethra has significantly more length to damage, and the penile meatus very typically is torn. These incidents run high risk of bladder hematoma as well, which requires urgent surgical intervention. The very worst traumatic decatheterizations I've responded to were all penile and had trauma to external tissue. Ever microwaved a hotdog a little too long?

Damage: How often are Spartans subjected to explosive and other concussive forces? Silly question - answer: a lot and often and unavoidable. And we know they still feel the powerful feedback. Despite shields and dampeners and a self-moderating gel layer, strong inertial forces are still felt through the suits. Across multiple novels we're given details about near misses and blasts, accelerated or uncontrolled falls, rattling their teeth, hampering their vision, hearing, or balance; they've been rendered unconscious and suffered internal injuries. The fact that most of these events don't flat out kill them is a credit to their armour and augmentations. For reference - when a person experiences explosive or concussive force from a distance enough to avoid separation of limbs, bisection, etc, the totality of their injuries can't and won't be seen externally. How they present on the outside is just the tippy tip of the iceburg - it's what's happened to them internally that you need to be concerned about. Cracked or fractured bones, torn musculature, arterial shearing, hollow organ rupture, cardiac and brain tissue bleed, to name some common ones, and this kind of trauma extends to all implanted devices as well. For example, rods and nails and other structural aids or replacements are much more resilient than your organic tissues, and can dislodge when tissues tear or rupture, damaging anything in their way like shrapnel. The fragile little balloon of a catheter will shatter when subjected to even relatively minor explosive force, so to even consider for a moment that this would be a viable piece of equipment for people intended to routinely be involved in explosive environments is beyond willful negligence. That there wouldn't be a better solution to the question of waste management - a necessity for literally all human people who make up the entirety of the Spartan branch, with the infinite funding of ONI R&D seems so stupid to me that I… well, that I wrote this. Because, friends - participating in active warfare is not cath-safe. The kinds of physical demands and forces on Spartan bodies are not cath-safe. The risks will never outweigh the benefits to this. Even while sealed in powered armour and a skinsuit tech layer, the very thought of Section Three engineers or Halsey or anyone involved in the development of MJOLNIR dismissing the glaring obvious failure of Spartans having any kind of externalized invasive devices is so unreasonably negligent that it could only be the brainchild of an author who's convinced that these characters are all actually just psuedo-intelligent government boogiemen who aren't as capable as they claim to be. But No. They are that capable, and they are that intelligent and the fact that they have a bottomless budget and deeply flexible ethics is literally what makes them so dangerous.

So if we have to address this, how do we do it? Apparently there was always an official answer for this. Former Franchise Development Director, creator of the Master Chief, and extremely racist asshole Frank O'Connor weighed in on this in the same interview, where he almost immediate rejected and denied Traviss's catheterization claim and says that 'this sort of stuff' was the kind of thing he and the other creative heads at Bungie/343i talked and planned about all the time. So how does this work then, because we're invested now. According to 'ol Frankie's elegant input: they just pee freely into the suit. That's it. For clarity, he's talking about the skinsuit and not the MJOLNIR interior proper. He goes on to say that connectivity between body and MJOLNIR at all levels is fully noninvasive, but precise, and that it doesn't matter what kind of body output a Spartan introduces into the suit interior, because a hygienic valve system (??) will scrub it continually and collect all matter for recycling and reintroduction via capillary action powered by movement. It's not clear in what layers or intermediaries these mechanisms occupy, he doesn't break it down more than that. But that's the answer, and it did exist back when Traviss was penning Kilo-5.

Is this answer better than haphazardly plugging extension cords from actual organ systems into MJOLNIR interior? Yes. Like, leagues better by comparison, but also I still think it sucks. To me anyway. It's flat out gross as hell, which definitely fits the personal brand of a man who proudly overfed his cat and called himself "Stinkles", but also it just doesn't strike me as the kind of design strategy ONI would pursue for any of their assets. Beside it just being 100% torn from Dune's stillsuits, it's also missing that special brand of proprietary Section Three je ne sais quoi. There's layers upon layers of too-specialized equipment installed into these people for everything else, why skip this? A body function that should have been Point 3 on a 50 point list of 'stuff to manage'. Also though? It's a lot of freedom. This is just another easy opportunity to add yet another layer of dependence. Spartans are expensive equipment. It doesn't do to give them any fewer reasons to think they can ever walk away.

So anyway, I figured I'd take a crack at it. I came up with this while editing the last two paragraphs: [Waste management] - a fully internalized collection and processing device - lets say a cybernetic implantation - that entirely replaces the bladder. It has bio-organic lumens that interconnect it to the GI and Hepatic organs. The implant assists in accelerating the processing of gathering and refining waste materials with the help of nanobots that identify and redirect waste along the lumens of each system, plus they keep the implant clean and free of bad flora. All twice-processed waste gets refined a lot quicker and any water by-product of the process is refined and redistributed back to the organs along the lumens. None of the refined water is removed from the body for drinking, because that's an unnecessary step; it's already inside. (Drinking water would be the responsibility of a suit system more likely - like, sweat leeching in the skinsuit; refine, filtrate, purify, collect into a reservoir, and jettison the excess sodium. ) There is no 'extraction of other viable nutrient' from the remainder, it's been twice identified as waste. It gets catabolized and consumed by the nanobots as a fuel source, and no externalized waste is created at all while the Spartan is geared up. The implant doesn't always run like this - it only engages this way when the Spartan is wearing MJOLNIR, and when they're not, it just works like an out-of-the-box bladder. The intermittence of usage lets the organic organs truck along as usual, preventing risk of atrophy, and the Spartan can just use a bathroom like everyone else. I'm not a bioengineer, but I do like sci fi and I think all that sounds like something that'd be possible in this sandbox. And that's the real fun of it, isn't it? There's no way anyone today can anticipate what sort of gadgetry might be available 500+ years from now, especially in a fictional universe that includes military tech hybridized with reverse engineered alien tech.

I think it's fascinating when writers and artists shake loose and really grab the reins, and I love seeing the fruit of that labour in this particular tumblr community so often. We're not a huge Halo circle, but we're a passionate one, and if this essay leaves you with nothing else, I hope it will at least remind you to Go For It when you're writing your next fic or drawing your next piece, or composing, or sewing, or printing, or anything!

In Conclusion: Rest easy, friends.

Despite Traviss's word and even books that went to print, the official canon is that Spartans are not catheterized. If that's a bummer for anyone, canon can't stop you from writing whatever you want, but I do hope maybe you'll remember my reasoning for why it might not be the best idea? At least not for armoured Spartans. A Spartan, but they're laid up in hospital? Any non-Spartan personnel? Maybe you're writing in the public sector, a colony world or vessel? Sure - I'll bet caths are still plenty widely used. Why not? They're a blissfully simple and useful effective piece of equipment. It's just all about adjusting and adapting for practicality. Medical science, like any technology, adapts and evolves infinitely as we learn and discover new things. Treatments or drug algorithms I'd of used just last year have already undergone changes, and protocols are amended constantly. It's why a person 'practices' medicine; why a scientist is always a student. If questions like this or similar really need answering in your next work, remember: Give yourself the credit you deserve, and embrace the spirit of invention. Let my Cyber Bladder, by Sparklets be the candle in the window for you!

You may all retrieve your keys from the bowl and unsilence your phones. Stay safe and please text me when you get home. Thank you. ' u '

[artbyblastweave]

Hi! I've been reading a lot of your thoughts on superheroes, and wanted to ask you a question if that's okay.

I've always been interested in the genre, but lately I've gotten frustrated with how "safe" the entries play it. No matter what, there's always a Justice League, a world built on superscience, and most "importantly" of all, a Superman. I wanted to ask if all of these things a required for a superhero story, and if so, how far can they be stretched while remaining within the genre?

My conjecture is that from a bunch of directions, it’s a legibility issue. 

Long swaths of rumination under the cut.

The superhero genre, out of all genres, is one of the most self-referential; it’s subject to an exaggerated, snowballing and self-reinforcing instance of the Mount Fuji Problem, as laid out by Terry Pratchett:

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

Superman is Mt. Fuji. 

Superman is enormously popular. The first modern superhero, the one the rest of them are patterned on or in conversation with. In the early days, a lot of superheroes were just naked attempts to cash in on Superman, to the point of IP slapfights (This is how DC acquired the rights to Shazam/Captain Marvel.) In the interregnum period caused by the Wertham Scare, he was one of the only superheroes that survived and saw continuous publication. As a result of this bottleneck, superheroism is a genre monoculture; all characters conceived of as “superheroes” are only a couple of creative generations removed from Superman. All of this gives him- and characters patterned directly on him- an outsized influence in both the public and authorial perception of what a “superhero” looks like. 

So fifty years down the line, when you’ve got creatives crawling out of the foxholes to try and make some superhero things that are new and innovative or parodic, a few things start happening:

Number 1. Superman is Very Legibly a Superhero. Superheroes, up until the MCU boom, were pretty niche in the mass market; a lot of pre-MCU films (and actually a lot of MCU films, this is my perennial beef) are structured in a way that makes it seem like they’re apologizing for daring to be superhero properties. Note the aversion to code names, the costuming choices made in the X-Men films, the irony poisoning. Superman was one of the exceptions to this, (Others being Batman and Spider-Man;) he’s too iconic. He’s one of a handful of characters who’s clearly a superhero and nothing else. (I’m going to return to this point later.) So if you wanted to invoke superhero at a glance in a mass-market property, making them have costumes and/or powers like Superman (sometimes with hints of Batman) was a fast way to communicate this. As the number of works that do this increase, the gravity of the bias swells because of the pool of precedent- the likelihood that your audience has seen not just Superman, but numerous parodies of Superman. (I was friends with a woman once who knew almost nothing about Superman beyond the fact he existed, but upon being told the broad strokes of his backstory, said, “oh, like in Megamind!”)

Number 2. Superman attracts the interest of Creatives and Iconoclasts. This is the non-cynical take on the above; Superman’s outsized presence in popular culture means that inevitably, a lot of really competent writers are exposed to him, grow up with him as one of their blorbos, and rotate him in their head non-stop for years until they’re finally in a position to write something. The Superman pastiches in Astro City and Irredeemable and Supreme Power and Invincible and Jupiter’s Legacy and The Authority and BNHA and Powers and on and on and on- they’re in there because the writers wanted to tell a story about superheroes, sure, but more specifically they want to yell their hot takes about Superman, who they love, out to the world. And many of these stories are thoughtful and reflective of the human condition or whatever, and so the canon of “Oh my god you have to read this” superhero works, inevitably start to contain tons and tons of Supermen pastiches. (And Batman pastiches; he’s subject to a similar dynamic.) The effect is reinforced.

Number 3. Even in niche or fan-oriented superhero works that don’t suffer from the above-described marketing pressures, familiar character archetypes are useful shorthand that lets you get to whatever novel point you’re trying to make faster. This applies to Superman, who I’ve focused on up until this point, but this is also a good point to start talking about one of the other things you mentioned, the Justice League. 

In Invincible, the Guardians Of The Globe, world’s premier superhero team, are 1-to-1 pastiches of the classic Justice League Lineup. I own the ultimate collection in which Kirkman explained that choice; beyond the fact that they were very powerful heroes, and that it was very very bad for the world that they were dead, the actual nature of the Guardians was immaterial to the story. All things being equal, it therefore made the most sense to him to just piggyback off pre-existing comic book fan affection and reverence for the JLA, because his editor was breathing down his neck to get the actual story moving after the six issues of relatively low-stakes adventure that Kirkman had insisted on in order to make the reveal hurt more.

Strong Female Protagonist is (was?) a webcomic about the world’s most powerful superheroine sliding into semi-retirement after neutralizing all the superheroic threats and realizing that her actual toolbox with which to enact lasting societal change is pretty limited. There are a lot of powersets you could give to the most powerful hero in your setting; a lot of aesthetics you could give her; actually, by making her a woman at all you’re already breaking the mold. But there’s utility in starting somewhere bog-standard so that everyone’s on the same page when you start doing the social commentary.  

Black Summer is a story about John Horus, the most powerful hero in the world, deciding that the only way to stay consistent with his commitment to evenly applied justice is to execute George Bush for War Crimes, explain why he did so, present the evidence, and ride off into the sunset; his five surviving teammates are then left holding the bag as a pissed off military closes in. The most powerful hero in this case is pointedly designed to look more like Magneto than Superman, but the seven-person team dynamic is clearly meant to broadly invoke that of the Justice League; this gives the readers somewhere to start when picturing what the team dynamic looked like before it collapsed, and it makes the ways in which the group is really obviously not at all like the Justice League pop.

Superhero story which are about someone needing to replace the world’s greatest superhero? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (BNHA, Dreadnought, a couple others.) Stories in which the most powerful hero died as part of the backstory and left an imperfect world for the survivors? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (Welcome to Tranquility, Renegades, etc.) Stories about the kid of the world’s most powerful hero trying to live up to their expectations? Often make use of this fan-legible shorthand (Sky High, Hero, etc.)

Extend it to other individual superheroes. You want to critique the economic injustice implied by superheroism, or the ways in which it would physically and socially destroy you? It’s efficient to invoke Batman or Iron Man, quintessential billionaire powerless capes, and go from there. You want to examine the hellish existence of the working-class teen superhero? Efficient to invoke Spider-Man and go from there. You want to examine the uphill battle of the female superhero in a male-dominated field? Efficient to invoke Wonder Woman and then go from there.

When you can simultaneously save time and creative energy AND demonstrate to your audience that you know the genre canon, the shared referents, the in-jokes- why reinvent the wheel? 

The effect is reinforced.

Number four. In works that are about a more unconventional or unique superhero, A tertiary Superman-figure can be a useful genre signifier.

So, the obvious rebuttal you could provide to everything I’ve said so far is that the superhero genre is obviously, comically, massively more diverse than just Superman and copies of Superman. You can make a superhero based on almost anything, intersecting with almost any genre. This is, in fact, the key to the genre’s longevity; the degree to which “Superhero” is such a nebulous genre category that you can cram basically anything into it and have it work. You can remix it forever.

However, this is a double-edged sword; while a superhero universe can accommodate literally anything, many of the resultant “superheroes” are superheroes purely because they exist in the context of a superhero universe; they stop existing as such if removed from it. Blade is a superhero, but the Wesley Snipes Blade films are not really framed as superhero films. Doctor Strange, extracted from the rest of Marvel, could just be an Urban Fantasy property. Green Lantern and Nova and Captain Marvel could be yoinked out and reframed as participants in the Space Cop flavor of Space Opera. Context-scrubbed Thor could be high fantasy. Context-scrubbed Hulk could be a monster movie. Context-scrubbed Guardians of the Galaxy becomes Space Opera. Ant-Man wasn’t originally a superhero; Hank Pym debuted in a one-shot horror/adventure comic about a scientist who nearly gets killed fucking around with a shrinking formula and an anthill, and then he got retooled when Marvel realized superheroes were coming back. Logan was a fantastic film but like many X-men films it divested itself from the framing of superheroism as much as it possibly could. On the opposite side of things, you could take a property like Buffy The Vampire Slayer- generally not viewed as a cape thing- and slot it into the Marvel or DC universe without having to alter anything. If someone like Shepard from Mass Effect, with their armor and future-weapons and/or their biotic powers, crash landed on Marvel or DC Earth, they’d transmute into a superhero just by virtue of who they’re now standing next to when shit starts going down. (This is the backstory of at least three superheroes, probably more.) Superheroism is incredibly fluid. It’s incredibly modular. It’s incredibly contextual.

There are a handful of characters, though, for whom this isn’t true; as I mentioned above, they’re superheroes and nothing else. They’re the platonic implementations. Batman is one example; the most grounded and gritty version of the character ever put to film still couldn’t get around the fact it was about a vigilante in a bat costume beating up the mob. Superman is another; It’s basically impossible to make a Superman film that downplays the iconography, the power, the social position and license of the superhero.  The social position and license are huge parts of this!

So, if you’re gonna write a story about a unique superhero- a superhero with a cross-genre origin, or an unconventional aesthetic, or really esoteric powers- a way to keep your story anchored in the genre is to include a Superman-style figure or a Justice-League style organization as a tertiary presence within the worldbuilding, in order to make it 100 percent clear to your audience what lens they’re supposed to view this story through, and to emphasize the contrast posed by your esoteric cape. Worm does this, juxtaposing a protagonist who controls bugs and thus has to fight like a maniac for every victory against an all-powerful Superman-analogue who exists in the background of the setting (although he swells in narrative importance in the back half.) Another example is The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang, which is a comic about a Chinese-American vigilante in the 1930s who, due to a poorly worded pact with a spirit, becomes invulnerable to bullets and nothing else; a more traditional Superman Analogue called “The Anchor of Justice” exists in the background of the setting, only getting a couple of speaking lines, and is mainly used to demonstrate the double standard society applies to superheroism when someone other than a white guy starts doing it. Incredibles does this as a background gag, with the sheer number of heroes in Edna’s “no capes” montage who were clearly trying to fill the Superman niche but continuously couldn’t cut it.  Valiant comics did this. Wild Cards I think did this. City of Heroes I think was doing something like this by having prototypical flying-brick Statesman as an NPC while all the PC heroes were (by virtue of being PCs) significantly more diverse and outlandish in powers and presentation. There are other examples of this juxtaposition trick that I’m not thinking of.

So, what are some works that don’t do this?

Here’s a non-comprehensive sample of works that unhook themselves from the standbys;

First off, The Marvel Universe. I think I’ve talked a few times about how the Marvel superhero community is pretty heavily dysfunctional, disjointed and fractious in comparison to the DC superhero community; The Avengers are an absolute shitshow in comparison to the Justice League, as individuals and as an organization. It’s easy to forget due to their total conquest of contemporary pop culture but Marvel was churning out unconventional cape after unconventional cape for years without stepping on DC’s toes; for a long time they were the answer to this question. Any time that Marvel has played at adding a Superman analogue to the setting, it’s usually in the context of pointing out how radically different the setting would work if there was a number-one top-tier hero like that running around.

Heroes, the first season at least, is heavily in conversation with traditional superheroism without actually featuring any of the aesthetic markers within the show itself; no costumes (because supers are simply too new as a widespread phenomena to have the institutional backing for that) no obvious Superman figure (one power per person) and the handful of cast members trying to behave like superheroes are explicitly doing so because of the existing cultural referents of fictional superheroes; by the end of season one nobody has made it all the way to the finish line in terms of costumes and codenames.

Absolution, a comic miniseries by Christos Gage about a superhero who snaps and starts playing Dexter, using his versatile forcefield powers to emulate dozens of different murder weapons so that the killings can’t be traced back to him. The setting is aggressively and deliberately street level, with almost no obvious character analogues, a host of novel powers, and “superheroes” that are universally incorporated into police departments as superpowered SWAT teams. However, the books politics are noxious; it seems that the author’s objection to the police is that they don’t kill enough people. But I bring it up because it’s visually clearly a superhero work while still having a strong aesthetic aversion to all of the tropes you specifically mentioned.

No Hero by Warren Ellis, which is about a superhero team created in the 1960s by a counter-culture chemist who stumbled upon a psychedelic drug that provides superpowers. The team is, in universe, very visibly attempting to carve out an aesthetic identity independent from that of traditional superheroes, brutally fighting crime in varied combinations of gas masks, latex, and evening wear; the group is also tiny, due to the team’s founder being rightfully paranoid that the government is going to jump on his secret recipe. It’s also an incredibly visually horrific book. Body horror galore. 

Uber by Keiron Gillen is an alternate history in which World War 2 was fought by super soldiers, developed initially by the Axis and then by an increasingly-panicked America and Britain. The project of the comic was to repudiate the idea of the superhero as an individualist figure who can overcome anything through grit and moral righteousness; in the words of Gillen, it’s a comic about how Galactus is going to beat Spider-man, every single time. In keeping with this, the superhumans are fairly cookie-cutter (developed in batches down known lines of research) the outcome of superhuman fights are determined purely by which of the two superhumans were better made, and as military projects the “heroes” are named using the same conventions as battleships (USS Colossus, HMS Dunkirk, etc.) 

Watchmen is an interesting situation. The one powered hero, Dr. Manhattan, is mainly used as an exploration of Superman’s geopolitical impact- the effects of the most powerful thing in the world being an American agent. But in terms of actual origin and aesthetic Manhattan is primarily in conversation with the Marvel Stable; a lab-accident origin, space-age energy powers, presence within the setting’s second wave superhero resurgence rather than having gotten in on the ground floor. That one is picking and choosing recognizable elements in order to do a bunch of different things at once.

Most of these tie back to the Mount Fuji thing; the absence of immediately recognizable figures in these works are, due to the volume of precedent, themselves a very pointed and noticeable choice. Sometimes even a choice the characters themselves are making within the story. And this presents a challenge to any capefic author who deliberately eschews familiar archetypes because they’re sick to death of them; go too far out of your way to excise Superman from your story, and you run the risk of just providing implicit commentary on his ubiquity instead. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One last note; you clarified in DMs that the “super science” you were referring to was that of the crop of pulp heroes; Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Phantom, et al et al. I think something different is going on here from everything else I’ve been going on about. When superhero settings incorporate these proto-heroes, it’s part in-joke and partly a nod to legacy; these were the characters immediately preceding Superman and Batman, the prototypes, the incubators for a lot of ideas and aesthetics that later superheroes would take and run with. Many 1930s-1940s superheroes are visually the “missing link” between the two genres; examples of this include The Spirit, The Sandman, and The Green Hornet. In superhero settings that are built “from scratch” outside of the big two, with a setting history that stretches back before the 1930s, it’s therefore common to incorporate a few figures patterned along these lines as a form of tribute. The flip side of this is that the archetype is also very easy to attack and parody; many of the pulp “men of science” were predictably tied to very yikes-inducing ideas about race, gender, and so forth, and thus if you want to criticize the basic assumptions of heroism, one way to do this is to take the archetypes at the root of the genre and then make them period-appropriate jackasses.

I’ll cop to being significantly less informed about this last bit, and thus significantly less confident in the conclusions I’m drawing about it; I’m therefore going to refer you over to @maxwell-grant, who’s very into the pulp hero side of things and can probably give you a more informed perspective both on how the science hero types informed the development genre, and the varying degrees to which they’ve hung around as both objects of tribute and parody. 

[kremlin]

after having been laid off, along with the rest of the dept, from a biiiiiig company that past kremlin thought would neeever have to do startup-style layoffs, i have been spending my time productively doing things like writing a browser extension called "(Chrome/Firefox) Core Extension Engine" that does nothing but randomly add some CSS to pages that rotate the body juuuuuust a bit

i made it a bit more dramatic to take this screenshot, its much more subtle. the best part is telling people what I did and then they remove it and then normal pages also now look fucked up to them too. it's hilarious. i also wrote a program that takes an IP address and return's that machine's root password

[mrmallard]

I've made a post about this before, but Guilty Gear Xrd's reveal might genuinely be the hypest gaming moment in my entire life.

Though most of my fandom was predicated on the back of the GBA port of Guilty Gear X, the trash-ass Wii port of vanilla Accent Core (played great, but it had next to no singleplayer content) and listening to the music on YouTube, I was HEAVILY invested in Guilty Gear. I knew there was some weird legal snafu with Sega, there was a palpable vibe that Blazblue was basically Arc System Works doing a second original IP to keep making fighting games after losing the rights to most of the Guilty Gear IP, and I feel like people had either made their peace with Blazblue or were sticking it out for a new Guilty Gear - even as the years rolled on and the prospects of a new game were looking more and more bleak. Like, these were the years where alongside Blazblue titles, ArcSys was pumping out budget shovelware for the WiiWare service. It was a bleak fucking time to be a Guilty Gear fanboy.

Before the Xrd trailer dropped, the last game of note was a weird 3D action game with two returning characters. It had a killer version of Holy Orders on the soundtrack, but the vibe was definitely off - and it didn't help that it was described as a sequel to the original Guilty Gear, as opposed to the X games kind of being their own subseries, and therefore being perceived as a new way forward for the series. People loved Guilty Gear for the expressive art, the high-octane soundtrack and the hard as nails 2D combat - Guilty Gear Overture tried its best to offer a satisfying replacement, but it couldn't really match up. And in the fanbase's minds, it was either Overture or a new fighting game that'd be in-name-only with a brand new roster of characters, Sol and Ky aside.

Then, one day, this happened.

This trailer wasn't just a triumphant return to form for the Guilty Gear series. This trailer was genuinely groundbreaking for the fighting game genre - and you need to look at this trailer through the freshest eyes possible to know why.

First of all - after Overture was this hard pivot into 3D action combat gameplay, Guilty Gear is a 2D fighter again. The second you see Sol and Ky facing each other after forty seconds of build-up, you know they're announcing a return to form. So that's one item off the bucket list.

Secondly, as a diehard Guilty Gear/ArcSys fan of the era, you know that Arc System Works makes sprite-based 2D fighting games. From the first Guilty Gear through to the most recent Blazblue game, core ArcSys games were all about those sprites. And this trailer intentionally plays on that; Sol and Ky look like remarkably high-definition sprites, even to the point of being animated in a more rigid frame-by-frame manner when you see them move. And even when they start fighting, it's these two great-looking sprites animating frame-to-frame, right?

But that shot where their swords cross, and the camera ROTATES AROUND THEM? That was GAME-CHANGING.

2.5D fighters were already very popular at the time. Mortal Kombat 9 had helped to breathe new life into this style of fighting game, and while MvC3 had a rocky launch, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 went on to have a huge, ravenous fan following. 2.5D fighters were on the rise, but everything developed in 3D explicitly looked 3D, even with cel-shading like in UMvC3 - and every game stuck fairly rigidly to the 2D plane. NOTHING was doing what Guilty Gear Xrd was doing.

The team deliberately played up the old style, making the player models look as close to the style of the true-blue ArcSys 2D sprite-based fighter as they possibly could. They deliberately set up that fade-in with Sol and Ky, they even animated Sol hopping away seamlessly to look like Xrd was a new sprite-based 2D fighter.

And then that sword-clash kind of signalled the direction of fighting games for the next ten years.

There are shots in this trailer where the swords are animated with smear frames, like they're a 2D sprite. That's because the team animated the 3D models LIKE THEY WERE 2D SPRITES. The models squash and stretch frame by frame, with each frame being modelled by hand, rather than the models animating smoothly based on an animation rig or anything like that. And NOBODY had thought to do that before. Animations before and after each round are clearly animated in a more conventional way, but the presentation during the fights is achieved by approaching the 3D style with 2D production sensibilities. It was borderline unthinkable at the time.

Then there's the stage background.

When the trailer first fades in, can you tell that the background has 3D elements? The chain is a bit conspicuous, but the house on the right and the ruined Statue of Liberty - can you tell they're modelled in 3D right off the bat? The team did a great job translating the lush, busy backgrounds of the former games into this new composite artstyle, and you only realise the scope of what the team set out to accomplish when the camera angle changes and you see background elements shift as seamlessly as the character models.

Then there's the music.

Guilty Gear has fucking VOCAL TRACKS now.

Unless I'm mistaken, the closest that Guilty Gear had gotten to vocals in the music were in Overture's version of Holy Orders (Be Just or Be Dead). But even that was relegated to vaguely religious-sounding chanting throughout the track, not having someone screaming a lead vocal over the song.

Here's the new Guilty Gear trailer. It's a 2D sprite-based fighter. Sol and Ky are there on a beautifully painted background CG, just like the old days.

Sol and Ky clash swords, and the CAMERA ROTATES AROUND THEM. These dudes are rendered in fucking 3D. Then this huge wall of rock music kicks in at full volume, punctuated by this huge metal screech, and some dude starts fucking SINGING.

Then one of them gets knocked into the air, and the PERSPECTIVE CHANGES - and the perspective of the BACKGROUND changes too! All the while, the vocalist is all like BACK TO BACK, DEATH COMES A-RIDIN' ON A MIDNIGHT TRAIN

And it's EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED FROM A NEW GUILTY GEAR, AND MORE.

And for the fans who've been writing off the prospect of a new fighting game for years due to the legal snafu between ArcSys and Sega over who owns what? The trailer ends with a tease for both Millia Rage and Zero-1, officially ending the embargo.

This is probably the closest I'm going to get to having a moment where I go from Street Fighter II being the only fighting game I ever imagined existing, only to one day discover Tekken. This trailer delivered on so many things I didn't even know were possible at the time, and it blew the competition out of the water. Again, that was mostly Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom - Skullgirls is its own special case, but those devs went all-in on sprites; I think that game has the most frame-by-frame animation in any fighting game ever produced. This game had all the charm and flair of old-school presentation, married with cutting-edge production via Unreal Engine 4.

It was a 2.5D game that was borderline indistinguishable from a 2D fighter until the game shifted perspective and made sure you knew that the characters and environments were 3D. And somehow, the stylised 2D aesthetic managed to carry over nigh-seamlessly.

People were huge on Dragon Ball FighterZ, and rightfully so - that's a gorgeous game that's a total blast to play. It preserves the aesthetic and feeling of being in a Dragon Ball Z episode in its sound design, its visuals and through its overt references to the show - kicking dudes into mountains that are miles in the background, as well as actually being able to enact instakill moves that replicate iconic moments from the franchise. That game might be one of the best licensed video games of all time.

Dragon Ball FighterZ would not exist - at least not in the iconic form it exists in today - without the ground that Guilty Gear Xrd covered first. When a great work is acknowledged to have taken prime inspiration from a foundational earlier work, it can be said that even with its success, that work is standing on the shoulders of giants. DBFZ is a giant unto itself, with its shoulders providing a solid bedrock for future fighting games to stand on - but it's a giant standing on the shoulders of TITANS.

I would argue that Guilty Gear Xrd was one of the first games to show that you could capture the spirit of a 2D property in a 3D art style without having to reinvent the wheel beforehand to shoot for realism. Maybe SF4 made that successful transition years earlier, but Xrd just went NUTS with it, with zero compromises. I also think that this game's success, and the success that later games had in faithfully recreating the appeal and aesthetic of a heavily stylised property like this, makes the janky 3D outliers like Jump Force and Marvel vs Capcom Infinite stand out even more.

It's unquestionable to me that Guilty Gear Xrd was the perfect game reveal at the perfect time. This trailer fucking slaps, especially given the context behind it. I was there the day it dropped, and ten years later it still rings as such a power move to marry modern game development via rendering the characters in 3D with the iconic, stylised 2D presentation that the fanbase loved to death after fifteen years of Guilty Gear. And just knowing that they went the extra mile and animated the characters by hand to look like they jumped straight out of a 2D game - smear frames and all - and were the first developers to even think to attempt that in Unreal Engine 4? Iconic. Unmatched.

This game trailer means everything to me. It'll only age as time goes on and the things that made it special become commonplace - again, Dragon Ball FighterZ is a far more popular refinement of what Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- started - but having been there at the time? Seeing the Guilty Gear drought getting broken in such a genuinely groundbreaking and innovative new way, stepping out of the Guilty Gear hiatus on the best foot possible? Nothing compares to how incredible that was.

They could announce a brand new Jak and Daxter game tomorrow, and I'd probably still be too burned after The Lost Frontier sucked and multiple attempts to get a new Jak game off the ground have fallen by the wayside and let me down. Guilty Gear Xrd upped the ante more than any other game reveal I've ever seen, and it did it perfectly.

Compared to what came before this trailer dropped, I honestly think Guilty Gear Xrd might be my pick for the perfect announcement trailer.

[semisolidmind]

I've had this horrible thought and it's been rotating in my mind for several days now, but...

The mascots, they're made of fluff and metal and wires and stuff, right? Did the pandemic also affect mascots that don't fall under those categories? What I mean to say is...

Did a Springtrap-esque situation ever occur? Were there any costumed humans who suddenly found themselves stuck in the body of a now alive mascot with no way out??

nah, dude. the mascots are made of meat and biofabric, they're basically just another kind of animal.

i think I said before that the murder mascots aren't the actual suits brought to life. it's more like the mascot organisms are based on mascot suits that already exist (usually, but the grand majority of the lesser mascots aren't IP). so if the murder mascot were to meet the cloth and foam version of itself, it'd probably just attack it and eat the person within (im sure suit actors at the time thought they'd get a pass cause they look like the murder mascots, but no).