#Priority review

[agentravensong]

if any fellow r&g are dead fans have links to recordings of productions of the show that are good/fun/interesting, would you consider perhaps sending them my way? pretty please?

[animehouse-moe]

Jujutsu Kaisen X Souta Yamazaki

This man, hardly what you could call an industry veteran, is carrying my favorite JJK S2 cuts on his back. So I though I'd talk about him a little.

So, what'd Yamazaki do in this episode? Oh, just all the incredibly cool looking Nanami shots.

Yes, I do know and acknowledge the fact that these drawings are pretty far away from Nanami character's design, and that they sorta basterdize his whole sequence. But man, they're so cool? I'm alright with uber angry Nanami rather than cold and deadly Nanami considering what we got from Yamazaki, but I do really wish the other pieces of the fight could have been somewhat better animated.

Anyways, Yamazaki isn't a one hit wonder, he actually did a really great cut on episode 9 as well: Gojo ripping Jogo's arm off. Between those two you can really see the style that Yamazaki has been carving out for themselves as of late, and while with their older work they didn't have quite the same style, the most certainly had the same quality.

Yamazaki would get their start on anime with doing inbetweens on movies, namely Ride Your Wave and Weathering With You. From there they quickly migrated to Cloverworks to do some second key animation on Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia.

It was then that the first of their two home studios was found, followed up by the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen not long after. Since then, Yamazaki has been putting out some really crazy cuts.

Just look at the work they did for Wonder Egg Priority.

Or what they've done with My Dress Up Darling.

It's crazy, but Souta Yamazaki is only 4 years into the industry at this point. But they're delivering cuts like it's been 20, such an insane talent. I can count the number of series they've worked on with my own hands. This is 100% an animator people should be looking for on future projects. Maybe not for their ability to provide incredible adaptations, but to provide insane style and detail in their cuts.

[bookwyrminspiration]

you must pass my trials three before I will take anything you say about Fitz Vacker seriously

[mixelation]

there are many fics out there with the plot of "character finds written documentation of the Truth behind uchiha massacre," but i've never read one where it.... made sense why records were kept? or documentation was even made at all?? this is something you would never, ever want anyone to find. why have anything to find at all?

like i can see a scenario where detailed documentation on intel of the planned coup and subsequent moves by konoha to mitigate the situation exist. you'd want that to keep track of yourself, and to pass on in the case of change of command or looping in new people, and it might suddenly become relevant again years down the line even if you solve it. so i can see that sitting in a sealed box somewhere, or if it was destroyed, maybe something was missed somewhere

but i don't see why you'd have a piece of paper just like GUESS WHAT ITACHI WAS ACTING ON ORDERS sitting in the archives or in danzo's desk or something??? you don't write down secrets that bad

ways someone could solve the mystery via snooping in paperwork (non-exhaustive, obviously):

danzo DID keep documentation out of some weird arrogance about the matter, or because he personally wanted to make the coup public. i don't spend a lot of time thinking about danzo so i can't decide if this is IC or not, but at least it's a reason

hiruzen keeps documentation, either out of guilt/regret or because he knows he's getting replaced soon and he thinks his successor should know (or, fuck, he thinks future generations should know)

there's no documentation about the massacre itself, but someone gets their hands on that misplaced file about the coup and Makes Connections, or there's a little annotation about someone suggesting extreme force

there's FAKE documentation of itachi's mental health or something along those lines to help conceptualize the massacre with the cover story, and someone recognizes forgeries/why details don't add up

the complete lack of documentation is ITSELF the clue. like please give me a scene of a character finally breaking into the hokage's personal archives and all the files labeled for the uchiha massacre are literally filled with blank paper

[newlacesleeves]

gotta love how miss anne will spend pages describing one painting, but five sentences to describe armand's first kill



[datshitrandom]

Darren Criss | 2022

[theinnermeyoullneverknow]

I fucking hate "wealth management" companies.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

After took two weeks of ADHD self-sabbotage, I finally wrote the massive article I've been agonizing over for work (I wrote the entire thing in one sitting). I'm actually really happy with it, and it will never cease to amaze me how good of a writer I am when my brain actually cooperates with me.

[lexkent]

cried at the auto shop and on the uber ride home and continued crying as I walked through my front door and Libby and Cody ran to greet me but aren't used to me crying and did this and forced me to giggle

[wuxian-vs-wangji]

I keep thinkking you wandered off and then another post appears lol

lol

I'm using LITA to break up the tedium of some of the pre-production stuff I have for my show, so I keep dipping out of it for a bit.

[quilleth]

*velociraptor screeching* if I never have to organize and schedule another conference again it will still be too soon

[quiisquiliae]

Not an expert but I'm pretty sure work kicked my ass this week. My brain is mush, and I wish for death. I am here and lurking for the night, might post a lil banter call later on cuz I wanna write but UGH brain cells, they're nowhere to be found.

[threewaysdivided]

awwww 😭😭😭😭

Did you write a review on the legendary teen Titans series? (Aka what young Justice could have become if they weren't overly ambitious)

What's your opinion on Paul Dini as a writer?

(Follow up to these two previous asks)

Sorry nonnie! 😅

It seems that we both tripped down a rabbit hole of doughnuts.

I assume you’re talking about the Teen Titans 2003 Animated TV Series?  In that case, you might be thinking of another user – I haven’t personally written any reviews for it.  I do have a lot of fond feelings towards the show, though; it was my first real introduction to DC Comics alongside the Justice League/ JLU animated series.  My Tumblr has a Teen Titans tag where I share art, meta etc. and I do have some thoughts about specific plots or narrative elements – you might also see me make occasional reference to it as an example on some posts in the writing advice tag.

Just for the sake of expectation management, I should explain that my Tumblr isn’t really a traditional “review blog”.  And yes, I know that probably sounds a bit crazy considering the frankly unhinged amount of YJ analysis I’ve written, especially since I’ve been blogging less about other stories in the last year. Burnout, what can you do? 

Really I’m more of a writing/ story-analysis blog.  Sometimes I might write a semi-review style post where I try to break down and articulate a particular technique/ element/ execution/ implication of a narrative in order to understand what it’s doing well or why something isn’t working.  As I said in the very first Frustrations with YJ essay, I think storytelling is fundamentally about communication and understanding.  I got into fandom as a fan-reader turned fan-writer (AO3 wink wink), and before that I worked as a casual English tutor.  I want to learn from the ways different narratives succeeded or failed at communicating their stories within the restrictions of their medium(s) so that I can better find, discuss and even tell stories myself. 

Because of that, I’m also a big proponent of the Death of the Author approach to media analysis.  Let me copy the definition over from that first essay real quick:

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR This theory posits that, because commercial art is created to be consumed, not just created, the audience’s interpretations of a work should be considered as just valid as the creator’s.  The work must stand on its own and creators cannot micro-manage their audience’s response to it. 1.  A creator’s intentions and biographical facts (political stances, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining the validity of an interpretation. 2.  Save for re-releases/reboots or new entries, the creator cannot and should not attempt to retroactively insert information or interpretations that were not present in the original text.

I generally don’t look too deeply into or follow the specific people behind (non-fan) works.  This isn’t always the case – if I like a specific author’s style I might look up their body of work to read more; some stories are clearly rooted in their creators’ specific opinions or experiences, which makes for interesting context; and sometimes I like to learn about the behind-the-scenes methods/techniques/production woes of a bringing a specific story to life – but mostly I put the priority on what I can learn from the final product.

As I’ve said before, commercial storytelling is the result of more than just one person.  Under the right conditions I think a rank amateur or complete hack could produce something amazing and, if faced with enough production headaches, a usually-excellent creator could end up outputting utter drek although I expect that drek would at least be creatively interesting.

The questions that interest me more are: what was this narrative trying to communicate?  what techniques were used/ creative choices were made?  how well did it succeed?  could a different approach have been used? and, what restrictions/limitations/priorities could have led to the final creative decisions?  To me, information on a creator’s circumstances provide context for narrative analysis.  Since I generally don’t know them I try not to postulate their actual intent too much, only the potential intent suggested by the story.

SO WHAT THE HECK WAS I DOING WITH YJ, THEN? What happened with Young Justice is actually an outlier for me in both regards because of how baffling flawed the series ended up being.  Back in the pre-revival days I paid a lot of attention to the textual canon of Season 1 because I had started writing a fanfic based on it and wanted to do the story justice (heh).  The result was I went into the later seasons with a lot more awareness of the canonical details and storytelling techniques – and (like I said in the final Invasion case-study) I ended up being blindsided by how instinctively bored and annoyed I became just a short way into an attempted Season 2 rewatch, despite the fact that I was actively trying to study it. 

The reason I kept coming back with more and more posts is that I never felt like I had successfully grasped or articulated why I had such a strong and unexpected negative reaction.  I think it’s a similar impulse to what Dan Olson cited as making the Nostalgia Critic’s Parody of The Wall so weirdly compelling: there's a confusing contradiction between the level of work required to implement the sheer amount of stuff that Young Justice tries to include, and the absolute thoughtlessness of how sloppily that stuff was actually executed. A multi-season, multimedia story like Young Justice is a long-term project: there are too many layers of production involved for the end result to be made in a brief flash of impulse or accident. It needs some sort of sustained creative motivation to drive it… but I could never find a coherent creative intent that would satisfyingly explain the decisions on display.  Never before or since have I seen such a promising launch be followed by sequels so fatally flawed as to strip away every component of the original’s creative identity.  There’s a reason I subtitled that masterpost A Massive Failure of Narrative.

This is also why I went after lead-showrunner Greg Weisman a bit, despite not usually doing that.  The choice to exclude (or consciously excise) over 70% of the critical narrative substance and sequester it away in non-textual social-media /ask-blog retcons means that you cannot escape engaging with Weisman when trying to engage with the later seasons at any level of depth.  As a Death of the Author proponent this ticked me off just on-its-face, but it also meant that he and those seasons are inseparably intertwined.  Regardless of whether it was a conscious choice arising from his sense of creative entitlement, or simply a case of narrative incompetence self-selecting for a primary audience with a high tolerance for media-illiteracy Nigerian Prince Email Scam-style, the end-result is the same: Weisman gouged holes his narrative and left it to suffocate while he sucked up all the oxygen in the room.   Then, later, as I encountered people from other fandoms whose narratives had been similarly decimated by Weisman, it became impossible to ignore how inseparable his personal flaws are from those narrative failures.  As I alluded to in the last ask, you can separate the original seven Harry Potter texts from their author: Joanne Rowling and her politics could evaporate tomorrow and it wouldn’t change people’s ability to enjoy the story as a standalone work (in fact, the absence of her modern politics might make some of the more unpalatable flaws easier to accept as honest oversights rather than ominous foreshadowing).  Meanwhile, Young Justice is such a disaster because the later seasons stop being about the original story and increasingly become about Greg: his failures at basic storytelling, his disinterested misunderstanding of his own characters, his weird fixations, his patterns of reactionary prejudice, casual double-standards, deeply disturbing attitudes about consent and power, and a self-righteous entitlement that resents being held accountable.  Unlike Harry Potter, you can’t put Young Justice S2+ in a bubble. The problem at the root of every other problem with Young Justice is that it doesn’t have an actual narrative... and in the absence of a coherent central narrative, the text itself has become the story of Greg Weisman's terrible creative choices. His self-indulgent proclivities pervade every step of the later seasons' broken theming, bad pacing, warped characterisation, contradictory lore, intra-textual hypocrisies, over-stuffed cast and weird fanservice: baked-in at a level that cannot be ignored or rationalised away.

It makes me empathise a lot with how Hbomberguy said he felt on discovering the recent James Somerton stuff: it’s not fun to stumble down a rabbit hole of learning that a prominent figure in one of your communities is sucking up air via association with work from their less-credited colleagues, then using that air to present themselves as an ally, dominate the narrative and delegitimise valid criticism, all while spreading their own prejudiced agendas, refusing to change their behaviour and continuing to profit.  That’s why I felt the need to explicitly point out some of the clearer patterns of reactionary bigotry and hypocritical non-apologies in Weisman’s work – I wanted to make sure the evidence was at least available somewhere outside of Weisman’s carefully-filtered reputation-protecting PR statements.  People put pieces of their lives into communicating something that will hopefully be worth the pieces of life their audiences invest in return -  I find the idea of someone exploiting that trust for gain to be deeply disgusting.

Now, with that exceptionally-overlong context provided: Paul Dini. 

The disappointing but predictable answer is that I don’t really have an opinion on him as a writer.  Having looked up his credits, I recognise a lot of works that I personally enjoyed (including the cancelled-after-one-season Tower Prep).

I really like Batman: The Animated Series, both for the human element it brought to heroism and the tone it set for the following DCAU (colloquially Timm-verse) generation of animated series.  Justice League was one of my first introductions to the main DC roster, so that set a lot of my core understanding of their characters.  I find Harley Quinn, especially her early B:TAS/ DCAU story-iterations, to be compelling in a way that’s equal parts fun and tragic.  There are some parts of the DCAU that I find a bit silly (a couple of background ‘ships that make me go whaa?) but I think I was really lucky to grow up during a time when the DCAU and second-order series inspired by its tone and storytelling ethos (e.g. Teen Titans 2003) was the childhood DC experience for kids my age.

That said, I don’t know enough about the story behind the works in Dini’s credits to feel confident in speaking about him as a writer.  Just looking at his resume, he certainly seems like a passionate and prolific creator who did a lot of very influential work.  At the same time, however, I don’t know how much of that was Dini himself, how much was his frequent co-creator, Bruce Timm, and how much his works may have been adulterated by the influence of other, less-visible members of the production and editorial teams who worked alongside him.  It can be convenient to elevate one or two prominent members to Great Man status as an easy shorthand for discussing works they’ve been involved with, but that can come with the risk of crediting or platforming the wrong people through mis-attribution or just plain projection. 

I’ve learned my lesson on blind-lionisation after being thoroughly let down by all the Weisman nonsense, the same way others have learned from being let down by creators they previously idolised (Supergeekmike did a really good video covering this which also includes discussions of Death of the Author and Authorial Intent).  Without doing proper research into and comparisons of Dini’s work, I wouldn’t feel confident making an assertion about his personal skills as a creator.  I greatly enjoy many of the stories he’s been credited on, and can recognise the influence those stories had in shaping a generation of DC fans (and writers)… but while I’m happy to talk about the writing of those stories, it feels a little irresponsible of me to talk to the character or intent of a real person without knowing more about them.  I’m not making that mistake again.

In the meantime though, I do want to talk more about actual writing.  I’ve been taking it easier this year lockdown and job burnouts finally caught up to me and it suuucks, man but I'm hoping to pick back up in 2024.  I want to finally get back to working on my main fanfic so I can share the companion meta without spoiling people.  I have thoughts about some possible meta-textual metaphors in Across the Spider-verse.  I might do a case-study piece exploring why the years-long timeskip in Arcane Season 1 worked really well while others haven’t.  And there’s an ask about a canon-divergent-post-Season-1 Young Justice episode premise that’s been burning a hole in my inbox for at least 5 months now.

So yeah.  More writing breakdowns to come.  In the meantime, I previously wrote a Frustrations With analysis of how My Hero Academia’s story struggled following the Hideout Raid Arc if you’d like to check that one out.  There’s also this big compilation of links to my Young Justice and Danny Phantom meta (plus recommendations for fanfics and other stories), and you can check out the writing advice tag for general storytelling discussions.

Hopefully that makes up for the drought of Teen Titans content!

[weedle-testaburger]

do you ever see a character design and go 'was this inspired by (character i know better)'s design or is it just me'

[craigtowens]

Make Your People A Priority

If you are a leader in your organization, there are a couple of often overlooked actions that are sending clear signals to your teammates. The question is: Are those signals telling them how valuable they are to you and your organization?

Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.  https://craigtowens.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/make-your-people-a-priority.mp3 If you are a leader in your organization, there are a couple of often overlooked actions that are sending clear signals to your teammates. The question is: Are those signals telling them how…

[valravn72]

The best way I can describe the later section of Wonder Egg Priority is that it reads exactly as if the main character and her best friend’s groomer somehow managed to hijack the script and take over the show so that he could blame all the results of the things him and people like him did on a tiny robot girl who seems like a shitty (and ableist) personality disorder allegory.

It’s fascinating that the story somehow took this turn but if you are there because you are genuinely excited for representation of mentally ill people and abuse victims, I don’t recommend it.

The show also claims that the main character’s best friend is somehow at fault for being groomed, a narrative that they condemn in an earlier episode.

Overall, it feels like some warped psychological horror that’s supposed to be commentary on creators using mentally ill characters to push their own agendas, and like there’s a meta narrative where the script is being rewritten and the characters are going to have to fight it once they realize that something is wrong and reality is trying to manipulate them into blaming what happened to them on people who are victims of the same things that they are, but in the end that’s not what happens and the show is actually genuine about the message of its ending.

I really hope someone gets inspiration from the things it did right and creates something out of it that does not suffer from these flaws.

TLDR; The latter section of Wonder Egg Priority feels like Sawaki, Acca and Ura-Acca censored it and then rewrote it to be propaganda and it makes me uncomfortable.

(DISCLAIMER: I’m not condemning the team that worked on that show, from what I know about them I doubt they did any of this with any malevolent intentions.)

Edit: It’s also okay to be a fan of this show, what it does do right is very impressive and groundbreaking and I think that there’s a lot of value in that.