#ReView

[thesoftboiledegg]

"The Last Temptation of Jerry" was the biggest gross-out fest the show's had in a while. Gore, vomit, nudity, body horror, on-screen sex, toilet humor, a writhing mountain of orgy participants--honestly, it's pretty gutsy if you're into the show embracing its nasty side.

Unfortunately, I'm not. I hate body horror and shock/cringe humor in particular--and OK, I know what show I'm watching, but even Rick and Morty usually has a lighter touch than that. It reminds me of early season one episodes where the jokes were literally just "Haha, old man running around naked! Haha, Rick and Morty dressed as rappers! Haha, anal flaps!!"

This episode was fairly chaotic, too. I was getting season five vibes with the zany mashup of concepts, although at least this episode had decent pacing and a satisfying conclusion. Season five episodes are infamous for throwing scenes at you at a rapid-fire pace, then abruptly ending before you have time to breathe.

I won't say this episode was objectively bad, and I guess we need the occasional reminder that Rick and Morty isn't a quiet, understated show for people who prefer a sensible chuckle, but it's definitely not going down as a personal favorite. I'm not sure if it's the best episode for Jerry fans, either, since he spends half the episode as a sex-crazed rabbit beast. (Then again, that's probably part of the appeal for some people.)

Still, I'll credit the writers for trying to do something creative with this underrated holiday. Most shows have Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween episodes and skip Easter entirely. This episode has its flaws, but you can't say it's unoriginal.

When this episode wasn't trying to gross everyone out, it gave us some of the most stunning artwork that we've seen in the series. Switzerland was so detailed and vibrant, down to the individual fruits and flowers. That's Rick and Morty for you: one second, you're watching a guy puke; the next, you're blown away by the art and animation.

Rick's characterization was decent, too. I loved that he gave Summer a fun activity instead of just waltzing off with Morty and leaving her alone, which is pretty much what happened in earlier episodes. (But then the family forgot about her in their quest to ruin all holidays...whoops.) Her scene at the end showed that she's still important and not somebody you can write off altogether.

Plus, getting Rick and Morty alone for a few scenes was nice. The show loses sight of the core dynamic sometimes, but I enjoyed checking in and seeing how they're changing. At this point, they're less like an old man terrorizing his grandson and more like a couple of idiots getting in trouble together.

To start, Morty happily agrees to their mission instead of groaning while Rick grabs his arm and drags him through a portal. They bicker, but it's nothing serious. Rick rambles about old movies. Morty shrieks "Rick!" when an alien grabs him and places a gun to his head, and Rick immediately springs into action.

I'm not sure where this is headed, but I'm glad that the writers are continuing their development instead of throwing it in the trash in favor of "classic Rick and Morty adventures." Honestly, this show is more serialized than people realize.

This could've been a bad episode, but the characterization, pacing and original concepts place it in the "acquired taste" category. If you miss season one's craziness, you'll probably love it. But if not, you might spend about a third of this episode averting your eyes.

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Dear Hongrang: A Review

I expected this drama to be zero logic and 100% vibes and it was! But those vibes, they were very fun and very pretty. It was very mood. The blood got on the camera sometimes. There were swords. There were three different factions fighting over who got to kill a guy and either kill or kidnap a girl. Everyone evil got their just desserts. The music was perfect.

Don't ask too many questions, just go with it.

[ultraericthered]

^ It was a caricature in a picture book about an African folk tale, and to my good fortune it's in the one scene I skip over watching.

But damn, didn't know someone could really grasp Star Driver and talk at length about it other than me! This is some good stuff!

Did a whole Star Driver rewatch and commentary back in 2023. You can read it starting from here.

After a run of mecha anime shows that, quite frankly, took themselves way too seriously, it is an indescribable relief to watch something that's going out of its way to be fun.

Star Driver is 80% froth and 20% soul-searingly poignant and no, you cannot pull those two things apart. It works by being at once both unrepentant exaggeration and quiet understatement, such that the most impactful moments are frequently those that occur outside the action sequences, when character motivations finally click together. Above all, it is unabashedly about performance, treating mecha fights as theatre, complete with an audience, and in doing so it successfully swallows the formulaic 'monster of the week' structure of a lot of 'super robot' media with a feral smile on its face.

Well, mostly successfully.

I'm going to start with the reasons you might not like Star Driver, because think they are important to understand going in. It *is* formulaic and uses a lot of stock footage for its episodic fights, of which there are probably a few too many. I'm curious how the movie adaptation compresses things: it certainly reanimates the battles gorgeously, but I would think you'd lose a lot of the character drama beats by focusing on the action more. Because the thing is, in terms of the story, the mecha battles are often very much structure rather than content. They are there because the conceit is that they are, and everything else revolves around them. It is therefore impactful when we finally get an episode without a fight, and when the formula eventually breaks entirely.

But I won't lie and tell you that you aren't going to find them predictable. In many ways, that's the point, yet the pay off for it only comes very late in the game. I can see people getting frustrated by this aspect pretty easily.

The other big turn-off is, as I said when I was watching it, this is a high-school sex comedy from 2010, with all that entails. To be clear, I don't mean it is ever explicitly pornographic. But it is full of busty girls, lovingly rendered, whose sex-appeal is absolutely foregrounded for the sake of a male audience. There's a lot of boobs and butts, a lot of suggestions of sex, and everyone is moderately obsessed with who is dating whom.

By and large, that's the kind of thing I just roll my eyes at, because it's essentially a genre indicator. Star Driver is the kind of show where there is going to be titillation aimed at teenage boys on tap. You either accept that and focus on measuring it by what it does within those trappings, or you bounce off. It certainly doesn't manage to break my personal bar of 'if objectification, ideally equal-opportunities objectification': main character Takuto is frequently in situations where he is stark naked and/or objectified by other characters, but he is really the only boy treated in that manner.

Irrespective of whether the sex-appeal is to your specific taste, this is an *extremely* horny series and that horniness is a general feature of the characters. The whole underlying point is that the mecha ('Cybodies') are fuelled by the pilot's libido, here equated not just to sex drive but to ambition and zest for life as well. The central premise is kind of that bit in Power Rangers were Zordon says they have to recruit teenagers for the correct emotional boost, only turned into an underlying philosophical point about the explosive potential of young people. This naturally leads to a lot of obvious jokes and the aforementioned titillation, which includes, rather notably, the control rig used by the bad guys being a bondage chair that shackles pilots (boys and girls alike) into place and snaps a collar around their neck, complete with a 'stimulating' cascade of electricity.

For the most part, this is all fairly good-natured. The jokes seldom reduce a character down to just being horny - most are given depth and history to make sense of their current actions and desires. The single example that made me go 'ick' is the school nurse lusting after male students. This treats something very unpleasant as a gag and mean-spiritedly takes aim at a certain type of (assumed female) manga/anime fan into the bargain. It also stands as broadly plot irrelevant in comparison to pretty much every other enemy of the week (to be clear, the school nurse is part of the 'evil' secret society and nominally a 'bad guy', but the concept of an adult feeling desire for teenagers under their professional care is not given much moral weight).

Again, whether you can stomach this sort of thing is something you'll have to judge for yourself. At the level of actual story-telling, my main criticism would be that its fairly brisk pace leaves little room to follow up on characters after they've played their part. Even if they hang around in the opening credits, some of them leave the narrative and several outright disappear once things build up momentum towards the finale. I think it works, more or less, regardless of this but it's another thing you have to accept, that some of the players leave the stage for good once their part is done.

[I would also be remiss not to mention the extremely racist caricature of a black kid that appears for about ten seconds in one episode, which is part of a depiction of a child's picture-book, so might in fact be a reproduction of a pre-existing extremely racist caricature? Either way, it's in there and shouldn't be.]

To move on to the good stuff, theatricality is the watch-word. Partly I mean that to describe the style, which I feel is best conveyed by some appropriate gifs. Here is Takuto 'Galactic Pretty Boy' Tsunashi's power-up sequence:

Yeah. When I call Star Driver 'camp', that's a very deliberate choice of words. It embraces excess and being as over the top as possible.

But it's also a story concerned with theatrics. The heroes are the school drama club and their enemies, a secret society formed largely from their classmates who dress up in masks and costumes to go plot in the abandoned mine next door. The club's yearly production is a recurring plot point. Nobody is exactly what they appear; everyone has a part they play in public vs what they are underneath. The overall story boils down to two characters doing long-cons on everybody around them. It is extremely important that so much of the action, while meaningful on one level, is also an exercise in play-acting - a game that does not matter as much as how the participants treat one another off the stage.

Nowhere does this come together better than in the concept of the Cybodies. In the real world, these appear as giant 'puppets' hidden under the island where the story takes place, at the bottom of that abandoned mine. These puppets are plain and static, incapable of actually manifesting as working mecha. This is because they have been magically sealed such that they can only operate in an alternate dimension known as 'Zero Time', accessible by people who have been 'marked' with symbols of power. These marks (glowing letters embedded in the chest) allow one to enter Zero Time where, as the name implies, time is stopped, and to operate a Cybody, which will reconfigure into a functional mecha. This is where the fights take place, in the space between ticks of the clock, isolated from normal reality. Moreover, at least to begin with, only Takuto operates his mecha, Tauburn, from the inside. His enemies use a 'cyber casket' (the bondage chair) to remote control their Cybodies, meaning he can slice them to bits without fear of harming a soul. When destroyed in Zero Time, a Cybody's puppet form darkens from white to grey, put beyond use, and the corresponding mark becomes inactive, removing the owner from the game.

So at first, there are no physical stakes to the combat. Takuto, the only person at risk of being killed, is a league above any of the people trying to take him down. There's no sense of him personally being in any danger.

Now here's the clever part: the secret society, Glittering Star, has the ultimate aim of releasing the seals that keep the Cybodies trapped in Zero Time. Their goal is to bring them into reality and use their power to conquer the world - financially if not literally, since the technology of these machines would net them a fortune even if they refrained from going wild with a bunch of giant, unstoppable robots. The seal is maintained by four 'maidens', a particular kind of Cybody. By destroying each of these in turn and thus neutralising their pilots' marks, Glittering Star bring all the rest closer to the point where they can emerge.

Thus, while each individual fight might have low stakes and a predictable outcome, they're all in the name of working up to breaking the seals and releasing these things into a place where they can do actual harm. It's a fascinating gimmick that works to make diegetic the kind of reset button seen in many a similarly formulaic show while ensuring there is a real, genuine threat looming ever closer over events. A lot of what Glittering Star are doing, as they fail over and over to beat Takuto's defence of the maidens, is mapping the extent of the Cybodies' powers. They are also, whether they realise it or not, is putting on a show to distract everyone from the actual villain's actual plan. Hence why it is important for this to be framed by theatre. I was hit early on by the nagging sense that what I was watching wasn't the actual point, and was delighted by how accurate this assessment turned out to be.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, the mecha designs in Star Driver are *beautiful*. The Cybodies are wonderful, impossibly exaggerated devices that defy physics in order to look spectacular. They're utterly gorgeous.

Anyway, this show's entire premise is shouting 'polyamory!' with its whole chest.

Belated cut for spoilers on the actual plot.

So the three main characters are Takuto, the lively, somewhat dim, completely good-natured protagonist who swims to the island (the ferry would have taken too long) in order to find and punch the deadbeat dad who abandoned his mum years previously; Wako, one of the maiden pilots maintaining the seal on the Cybodies; and Sugata, heir apparent to the mark controlling the most powerful Cybody, King Samekh.

They meet when Sugata and Wako find Takuto half-drowned on the shore and he rapidly becomes a fixture in their lives, upending an existing, rather stifling environment. You see, as the South Maiden (each corresponds to a compass point), Wako cannot ever leave the island. We find out later exactly how this works, as another girl, previously ignorant of what it meant to be the West Maiden, attempts to board a departing boat only to be time-looped back to the start of the day over and over again. This is depicted as a deeply traumatising experience and while we never see this happen to Wako, we are told it did and that left her with a lot of oppressive feelings about being trapped.

Sugata is similarly compelled to remain: his attendants (two pretty girls his age who (in)explicably dress as maids wearing fake animal ears) are on standing orders to kill him if he tries to leave, since Samekh is so ungodly powerful, nobody is willing to risk its pilot loose in the wild. On top of this, if he attempts to use the peripheral powers granted by his mark, it comes with the nigh-on certainty that he will shortly thereafter fall into a perpetual coma (the show plays with this, having it happen, having him revive, and only later revealing the mechanism by which he is able to subsequently use his power without apparent consequence).

He and Wako share a great deal of sympathy for one another's plight, as well as contending with the additional fact that tradition expects them to marry, since sons from Sugata's family have always taken one of the maiden pilots as their bride. Their bond is very close and very deep and, to outside observers, disrupted by Takuto as another potential love-interest for Wako.

Except, right from the start, it is made clear this isn't necessarily how Sugata and Wako see things. For one thing, Wako is quickly having fantasies about Sugata and Takuto making out together, which receive enthusiastic thumbs up from other characters who can - for reasons never entirely explained - see what she's thinking. For another, more plot-relevant thing, Sugata starts prompting Takuto about his feelings towards Wako, very strongly hinting that he is all for them pairing off irrespective of the assumed engagement. Plus, as things develop and Takuto seemingly becomes the only thing standing between Wako and Glittering Star's machinations, Sugata takes it upon himself to train Takuto for the task.

All three are more than they appear. Takuto's naive and affable persona distracts from his having come to this place with full knowledge of the Cybodies and the intention of disrupting Glittering Star's plans. Wako is positioned as the damsel in distress, the prize being sought by the bad guys who needs her knights to defend her, but when the chips are down, she displays reserves of strength in keeping with the importance of her role, going so far as to threaten to slit Takuto's throat when he is possessed by one of their enemies. And Sugata's relationship with both Samekh and Glittering Star turns out to be a lot deeper and more complicated than the enmity originally presented.

But what is not in doubt is that the feelings shared between them are much more in accord than competition. Their being referred to as a trio proves to be an entirely accurate assessment: the show makes it clear that the endgame is the three of them staying together and the drama stems from how they navigate their feelings in order to reach that conclusion.

The two main obstacles are Glittering Star and Sugata's own plans. The secret society turns out to be controlled by the remnants of a previous trio who failed to effectively communicate or commit to their shared desires and were consequently pulled apart by jealousy. This sets up the villain's overall gambit, which I shan't spoil because it's too good a pay-off to the repeated emphasis placed on enjoying the transient intensity of being a teenager.

Meanwhile Sugata is playing the long-game in order to solve the situation through self-sacrifice. He figures that if he can seal himself away alongside Samekh (thus taking his mark with them and meaning Samekh can never be summoned again), it will stop a potential apocalypse and free Wako, with Takuto positioned as Sugata's replacement in their relationship. Which he nearly manages, but fortunately the other two are having none of it.

The very last battle of the series is Takuto tearing Samekh to pieces so the three of them can stay together. I don't mind telling you that he succeeds because there's really never any doubt he will. It's a triumphant moment of shared love conquering all via the power of bisexuality.

Or, well, that's how I'd read it. The show doesn't quite commit to there being attraction between Takuto and Sugata as well as their reciprocal attraction to Wako. It does gives us bisexual characters, as well as gay and lesbian ones, but actual boy-on-boy kissing is reserved for Wako's fantasies. Given where this show seems to be pitched, that's not a surprise. Still, the poly relationship isn't in question and the tension is thick enough to cut with the knife Sugata habitually carries for Wako's protection, so I don't have much doubt what the creators' intentions were.

Indeed much of what Star Driver does well is rooted in an expectation that you are following what it is showing you on top of what it states outright. In some places, this didn't quite work for me - it's never made clear how certain aspects of the main villain's appearance came about, symbolically appropriate as they are. However, overall, I think it's obliqueness is a strength. We are provided the exact shape of the Cybodies' backstory, for example, but it is left to our imagination as to what precise details to fill in. Those are not as important as understanding the kind of history that could repeat if things go wrong. And the finale hinges on the realisation that far this being a clash between an evil force and a noble hero, almost everyone involved is a teenager with fairly comprehensible desires that only come out as villainous because of the magnified scale. Thus what would be a weakness in another plot - the paper-thin facade between Glittering Star's machinations and everyday school life - becomes pivotal to the resolution.

Ultimately, I know this isn't a show I can recommend to everyone. As explained above, a lot of criticisms can rightly be levelled at the way it is presented and its very gendered content. It's definitely not an especially deep work. I doubt very much it would ever be considered life-changing fiction. But it is undoubtedly well-executed and delightfully clever when it didn't necessarily need to be, which I always appreciate. The animation is superb, the music, great, and it's *fun*. Really, really fun! Daft and mad and knowingly OTT, while never losing track of why things matter to the characters at the centre of events.

It's a story about love and enjoying life, about why playing dress-up is no substitute for human connection, and about how you can absolutely chose both the other points in the love triangle, if you aren't a coward.

[artist-issues]

That’s It.

I’m tired of seeing everyone repeat the same four points: “1) Nani gives Lilo to the state! 2) Hawaii has a better marine biology program than San Fransisco! 3) Jumba doesn’t get redeemed! 4) Pleakley’s not wearing a dress!”

Those are not the only things that were bad about this remake. You could easily tell it was going to be all that and more beforehand, but most people’s reaction to the trailer was “it’s surprisingly good!” and now they’re acting all surprised. If you didn’t see this coming, enough to purchase a ticket, you’re part of the problem and you don’t get the original movie any more than the people who made this remake did.

So I’m done being quiet, this is the Lilo & Stitch 2025 Takedown Post.

And as usual the only good thing about an attempted-remake is that it gives people a reason to think about what made the original so good.

Let’s go in order. But just scroll down to the Heading you Care About if you don’t want to read all this.

1. Cobra Bubbles

In this movie, Cobra Bubbles is a secret agent hunting for aliens and they have a new character take his place as the state social worker.

The Problem They Were Trying to Solve With this Change: “We shouldn’t have a black man or a government worker feel like an insensitive antagonist to Lilo’s family.”

That’s a stupid surface-level one-dimensional misread of the character from the original…and it wouldn’t have been hard, at all, for a child to explain to the 2025 filmmakers that Cobra is not an insensitive antagonist in the original.

Cobra Bubbles is not insensitive and he is not in any way portrayed as a bad guy in the original. Nani sees him that way, Nani sees him as antagonistic, because he’s the representation of Lilo being taken away.

But Nani is wrong about him and learns that she is wrong about him by the end of the movie.

Can we please make a list?

Cobra’s first interaction with the caretaker of the child he was being sent to protect was that she ran out into the road, yelled at a complete stranger, and dented his car.

Then he found her locked out of the home and threatening the child inside with a hammer in her hand.

Then he found out the stove was on while she was out, and she’d left a 7 year-old alone.

The 7 year-old made comments about being disciplined with bricks and a pillow case.

The 7 year-old looks like she might be more than a little emotionally unbalanced because she’s figuring out how to put voodoo spells on her friends to punish them.

He still gave that pair of sisters three days to straighten the ship. When in actuality, in 2002, under HRS §587-73, (don’t play with me) the social worker would’ve been well within his rights to remove the child from the home right then. But instead he gives her three days to fix it. THEN

The 18 year-old loses her job.

The family gets a “dog” who he is implied to know is an alien, right off the bat.

The alien is violent and wreaks havoc across town.

The 7 year-old almost drowns while they surf instead of find a job.

He lets the child and caretaker have one more night together to say goodbye, but when he’s on the way to get her he gets a call that she’s being attacked by aliens, hears a chainsaw, and finds the house on fire.

Do you understand what I’m saying.

Cobra Bubbles had NO BUSINESS being as BIG A SOFTIE AS HE WAS for all of the original movie. He was not only well within his legal rights to take Lilo away from Nani immediately, but he was actually required by law, it was his DUTY, to remove her immediately. But he didn’t do that. Why?

Now listen to me very carefully.

Lilo and Stitch is a movie about how “Family chooses to love and commit to one another selflessly, no matter what the other person can do for them or how hard they make it.” The fancy way they say it is just “Ohana means family: family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”

Did you catch that? “No matter how hard they make it.”

Cobra Bubbles was a CIA agent before this. A CIA agent who saved the planet, by doing what? Convincing an alien race to leave them alone. Oh, he didn’t fight them off? No. How? He “convinced” them? He talked it out? Sounds like a pretty compassionate guy, for all his tough exterior. How did he do that?

He could’ve picked any animal that’s actually endangered. The filmmakers chose to make him the guy who convinced aliens to value mosquitos.

MOSQUITOS. Creatures that give nothing, only take. Ugly little bloodsucking monsters. That’s the creature he convinced them to care about enough to save the planet.

NOW do you have any trouble understanding why this is the specific social worker who would give an alien-infested dumpster fire of a dangerous home a chance when two sisters are about to be torn apart?

Do you see that Cobra is just another example of the grace that the movie is always talking about? The love that transforms someone from bad to good simply because it refuses to give up even when it gets nothing out of it? I’m repeating myself because I want you to see why he was a well-done character who NEEDED NO CHANGE.

Cobra Bubbles’ character is not an insensitive monster who doesn’t care who his actions hurt as long as he gets the job done. But you know who that does sound like?

2. Gantu

Gantu is not in the remake at all.

The Problem They Were Trying to Solve With This Change: “It’s going to cost us upwards of 1.5 millions of dollars to design, sculpt, rig, animate, and render a character this big in addition to finding a suitable voice actor to play the part.”

This is a really dumb choice for several reasons. A. Without Gantu, there is no “stakes-raiser” to Lilo and Nani’s story. The movie has no climax without him. For the first and second acts of the movie, it’s about a grieving pair of girls trying to prove themselves to a social worker while the story-equivalent of Beethoven the Destructive St. Bernard wacky Jumba & Pleakley antics get in their way. But when a 40-foot tall alien stomps into their lives and abducts Lilo & Stitch in a spaceship that careens around the island during an explosive sky-chase scene, now you have a high-octane, somebody-could-die climax.

B. Without Gantu, Stitch looks weaker. The climax gave Stitch a reason to come out of the wackadoo puppy he’s been posing as and suddenly remind everybody that he’s a lethal weapon who can survive thousand-foot drops, lava, and astronomic explosions—and a giant alien’s Thanos-dwarfing fist. Take him out and who do we have as a match for Stitch to go up against, even for a moment, and prove how much he’s changed to be willing to risk his freedom and fight?

C. Without Gantu you have no villain to reflect that STITCH is no longer a villain. (So they substituted Jumba.)

But the reason this character is really worth millions is, again, the theme.

I told you Cobra Bubbles was a character who did not put “duty” or even “convenience” or “position” over the real lives of Lilo and Nani. He saw that there was love there, and in his own way, he gave it a chance. And even when he chose to take Lilo away, he did it carefully; he gave them time to say goodbye.

GANTU IS THE OPPOSITE OF COBRA BUBBLES.

Gantu is the insensitive, uncaring, unyielding Captain whose commitment to duty turns into rage and cruelty. Not Cobra.

Nani thinks Cobra is walking in a threatening to tear apart their family in a display of government judgement. But that’s what Gantu literally does.

His first reaction to Stitch is to call for his destruction. Without even waiting to see if “it can be reasoned with” like the Grand Councilwoman suggests. He’s merciless. He mocks Stitch when Stitch is captive. And he knows that he caught Lilo, a human, along with him. He doesn’t care. He even suggests that Stitch eat her as a snack.

There are only two other characters who laugh at others’ misfortune in the movie. One is Stitch, the original villain. Then love changes him. The other is Jumba, who made Stitch. Then love changes him. But Gantu never gets changed. He’s only concerned with his job, and with personally annihilating the flaws he sees in Stitch.

Gantu is unyielding, ungracious, and cruel. And he’s big and powerful enough to be a test for Stitch to prove he’s changed. For the benefits he brings to the story, he’s worth 1.5 million and more. But they cut him anyway.

3. Jumba

In the new movie, Jumba is a villain through-and-through with designs on overthrowing the Galactic Council using Stitch, and instead of being redeemed, he’s sentenced to prison.

The Problem They Were Trying to Solve With This Change: “We can’t spend money on our real villain so we’ll just keep Jumba evil.”

The reason this is dumb is obvious. They created their own problem, and the ‘fix’ makes the movie weaker, not stronger. But here’s how.

In the original, Jumba is introduced as trying to self-protect. He’s on trial, and he lies. But when Stitch is revealed, he’s genuinely passionate about the thing he’s created. And he cares about image. He prefers to be called “evil genius,” and he hates the headlines labelling him “idiot scientist.”

You have to remember he’s part of “Galaxy Defense Industries.” They had him making weapons of destruction anyway. He just got too into it with his genetic Experiments, went a little insane.

I’m not downplaying the fact that Jumba is evil at the start of the movie. He is. It is evil to be outcasted from society and then respond to that with, “well, if they’re going to treat me like an idiot, I’LL SHOW THEM, I won’t care about anything except my passion for mad science!” That’s evil.

But it also explains a lot.

I said it in another post. Jumba’s whole utility as a character is that he knows who and what Stitch really is, better than anyone. He made him to be a monster who can’t belong and wreaks havoc on everybody else’s ‘place of belonging.’ Jumba is the audience’s insider’s perspective on what is going on in Stitch’s head, at first.

But when he’s redeemed, it happens fast. And why? Because that’s how plain and simple Stitch is, as a character. Jumba knows Stitch is a disgusting little monster with nothing inherently loveable about him, and no “greater purpose.” So when his disgusting monster is loved by someone? When his disgusting monster is willing to ask him, Jumba, for help? Something totally outside his programming, totally not what Jumba thought he’d ever be capable of?

That proves to Jumba, in an instant, that there’s love out there that transforms. And creates a place of belonging.

There were already germs of that, a desire to belong, a compassion, in Jumba after he reached earth.

He doesn’t try to get Nani fired, he offers an explanation for Pleakley’s swollen head.

He claims he won’t hit Lilo (why would he care about collateral damage?)

He sounds sorry for Nani when she’s upset about losing Lilo, and tries to keep Stitch from bothering her.

My point is, Jumba’s redemption isn’t important because it’s cute or because we need to set up the big happy found-family trope everybody loves.

Jumba’s redemption is important because it is just one more PROOF that what’s happened to Stitch is so incredible. The love Jumba finds transforming his monster is enough to transform Jumba, too.

But sure, fine, whatever, make him a soulless one-dimensional talking head. Whatever.

4. Stitch’s Design

In this movie, Stitch is cuter than he is ugly, and he’s half Lilo’s size.

The Problem They Were Trying to Solve With This Change: “Ugly-cute doesn’t come across as well in ‘live action’ animation. And all the Wal-Mart moms remember Stitch as ‘cute.’ Plus we’ll save about 15% in rendering the animation.”

This is crippling to the characterization of Stitch.

Stitch is supposed to be an echo of who Lilo could become now that she’s lost her parents and may be losing Nani. This scene:

Where Jumba points out that Stitch has nothing, and destruction is his only purpose, is the evidence for that. But Chris Sanders, who made this whole story, also point-blank said it. Stitch is a future Lilo, if she loses her family.

So that’s reason number 1 that he should be her same height. But also, practically, no iconic pair of best friends, yin and yang, have visuals where one is smaller than the other. Especially not if one of them is supposed to be disguised as a pet.

The point is, Stitch is not LILO’s pet. He is her best friend, her other half. But between the muzzle-muscles they worked into his upper lip and the darkened dog nose and the butt-scooting across the floor, the remake is trying to make him more pet-like in relation to Lilo.

That’s not what he is.

I said this in another post. But Stitch is supposed to throw food to the back of his head like a gator—his lips are not designed for forming words. His gums and teeth are supposed to look like a shark’s. His nose is supposed to be too big, stamped into his face. His ears are supposed to be like bat ears, not bunny ears. He hunches forward, instead of bending at the waist like a toddler. His eyes can narrow to lizard slits.

He has to look like he can believably be a disgusting monster. Yes, he can also be cute. But he has to first look like a monster. Because that’s what he really is, in the story. If he isn’t, then LILO’s love for him doesn’t look as powerful.

It is easy to love a cat even if it scratches you, because it’s cute. It’s harder to love a life-sized spider that keeps knocking you down and eating your prized possessions and laughing when you get hurt. Stitch is supposed to be closer to the second one, so that Lilo’s love shines brighter.

But also, practically:

She can’t look him in the eye for emotional shots when he’s that short. He’ll always have to awkwardly be standing on a box or a chair or a bed.

How is he going to scoop her up, hero-style, and leap off of an exploding spaceship with her in his arms, when he’s half her size? He could do it: it’ll look stupid, though. So they just don’t have that part in the movie.

She can pick him up. That alone is demeaning and again, the visuals are silly. Not what we’re going for.

5. Lilo’s Personality

In this movie, Lilo doesn’t like weird stuff, and she screams when she first meets Stitch. There’s no problem that this solves. It’s just laziness and a lack of care about the characters.

I would like to remind you that the original Lilo:

Made her own doll that looks like a shrunken head and pretended a bug laid eggs in her ears.

Makes up stories about a fish that controls the weather and actively deep-sea dives to bring it peanut butter sandwiches.

Has a knee-jerk reaction of using practical voodoo spells on friends who wrong her.

Listens exclusively to Elvis Presley.

Fills baby bottles with coffee.

Believes Nani’s manager is a vampire.

Has fishing nets and seashells in her room for decoration.

takes safari pictures of overweight bleached tourists.

meets a social worker and her first impulse is to ask if he’s killed someone.

Nails the door shut when she’s mad at her big sister.

She’s not friends with pound dogs in that original movie; when they first get there she acts like she’s never been in the kennel before, and originally wants a pet lobster.

I know that we all love that little girl they got to play Lilo, but if you were really being objective, you’d acknowledge that she’s a little girl. She’s not Lilo. She’s a cute little girl.

They did not write Lilo into the 2025 movie. They wrote any old little girl.

You should have known, from the moment she first sees Stitch and her reaction is to scream in the trailer, that THAT IS NOT LILO.

Lilo had a very specific set of characterizations. She was a character with a personality that exploded out of the screen. Every other character in the movie meets Stitch and reacts with disgust.

But not. LILO. She’s the only one to react to him like THIS:

She is literally not like anyone else. She’s doesn’t care that he’s ugly. Or weird. Or blue. Or even bat an eye when he can talk with all those shark teeth.

From Moment One, Lilo chooses Stitch. She chooses to love him. Regardless of what he can do for her. Regardless of how many times he pushes her over or rips up her house or makes her relationship with Nani harder. That is the number one thing about Lilo.

She is desperate for people to stay, but she chooses to love Stitch even though he’s a monster. And she tries to make him better. And her love succeeds in transforming him when nothing else could.

Lilo’s personality traits all mean something in the story. (I.e. she likes Elvis because she’s clinging to the past, she snaps pictures of tourists like they’re safari animals because they’re inherently people who LEAVE and she has issues with LEAVING, etc.) But the thing I think that was so obvious that the moviemakers missed for 2025 is she has to be weird. If she’s not weird, there’s no reason for her not to have friends. And if she has friends, what does she need Stitch for?

But also, Lilo’s personality in the new movie is just boring. Cute. But boring. Cute’s not that great of an accomplishment; any 7 year-old is cute.

6. Nani

I don’t think you guys need to know this. It’s not just that Nani leaves. It’s that “take care of yourself” is the exact opposite of the selfless message of the movie.

In the beginning, Lilo literally argues with Nani after being told she’s “such a pain,” and goes, “why don’t you SELL ME and buy a RABBIT INSTEAD?”

And then breaks down and cries at the thought of Nani wishing she had a rabbit instead of Lilo, later.

Because Lilo is afraid of people leaving. But Nani won’t leave her. Nani loses her job, her own life, because of Lilo. But she’s desperate to keep Lilo anyway, because she loves her. Don’t you understand? The message of the movie was about self-sacrificial love. A love that doesn't care what I get out of the relationship.

Nani starts it. But you know what, David loves her like that, too. And then Lilo transfers it to Stitch, who shows it off to Jumba. It’s a chain reaction, but Nani is spearheading it.

You realize that when their parents died, Nani already would’ve been in high school? With a whole life of her own? Her own friends, her own potential boyfriend, a job she went to, surf competitions (the trophies are in her room.) Lilo would’ve been well aware that that was the status-quo: Nani has her own life. And even a seven year-old can see that that life is being put on hold, but maybe the big sister wants to go back to it, at every turn.

The fact that Nani never does that, never expresses a desire for that, only ever expresses a desire to keep Lilo with her, is huge. It’s the core of the movie.

I don’t think that needs any more explaining.

We could talk more. Like about how Lilo needs to see that Stitch is an alien, because that’s the ultimate test: he’s one of the monsters who destroyed her house, he’s been lying to her and using her as a human shield, he’s a criminal—but she still winds up giving everything up to protect him.

Anyway. My neck hurts and I don’t want to type anymore. But we could talk about the music, the social worker, the grand councilwoman—it just doesn’t matter.

Ya’ll had more than enough details in the trailer to be able to not go see this movie because it was obviously going to ruin everything. But instead you chose to make this twisted corpse “the highest-grossing movie of any Memorial Day.” You bought tickets because they ruined a perfect movie and slapped together an uglier package for you.

Whatever. It was my favorite movie today, it’ll be your Treasure Planet or Tangled tomorrow. Keep riiiight on giving them your money, and keep letting influencers regurgitate the same four obvious facts to you over and over, because they paid Disney to make a talking-point for their content benefit. Whatever.

[memientom0ri]

Similarities between Inhun/457 and Hannigram; personal analysis of the attitudes that connect these characters 💭

Starting with actor Lee Byung Hun's face. I don't even need to go into details...

• Villain disguised as a hero;

Inho/001 x Hannibal Lecter

Both wear a good guy disguise to get close to and mentally and psychologically manipulate their "target" of obsession, taking actions to impress and defend the target that sometimes make us question their villainy towards the good guy.

Both Inho and Hannibal seem to be desperately searching for a trace of understanding and similarity in someone towards themselves. Hannibal became obsessed with Will when he saw this similarity in him (both characters misunderstood by society, mentally broken and with difficulties in expressing and understanding their own emotions), and just like the cannibal, Inho saw something similar in Gihun, therefore, feeling the need to, somehow, get close to him to keep him under his control.

"But Inho and Gihun are completely different", yes, just like Hannibal and Will; that doesn't stop the characters from identifying with each other psychologically.

In my opinion, Inho saw in Gihun an ambition and confidence that piqued his interest. "But Gihun is not ambitious or self-centered" No, he is not, not materially speaking. Gihun's ambition comes from the will he has over the things he sets out to do. He is ambitious about what he wants and this ambition is accompanied by a hyper-empathy bordering on masochism, considering that Gihun returned to the game not only because of his desire to end it, but because of the guilt of having survived when people died, because of the desire to prevent other deaths. This hyper-empathy also shows up in other scenes, and this is where Will comes in.

• The hyper-empathetic good guy;

Will Graham × Seong Gihun

Unlike Will's hyper-empathy, which manifests itself through his ability to put himself in the Assassin's shoes and mentally experience the murders, Gihun's empathy is blatant, making us feel a little angry and uncomfortable with the situations in which 456 puts himself by thinking more about others than about himself. A scene that left me in agony was in season 2, in the first game, where he runs from the safe area to pick up a man who was shot in the leg. The man would have been killed anyway, but he insisted on picking him up with less than 30 seconds to go.

Unlike 456's blatant empathy, which almost makes him seem naive in several scenes (like when he gives his only extra ammunition to Inho to save himself in the future), Will's empathy is more "dark" and firm. Will doesn't trust people easily, much less Hannibal, while 456 trusts Inho/001 right away and from the first contact they are inseparable.

• Jealousy, Control and Possessiveness

I think that after their faces, these are the characteristics that Hannibal and Inho have most in common. Neither of them want their good boys to have anyone other than themselves. We can see Hannibal eliminating the people who get close to Will throughout the series, but with Inho, we follow the stages and moments of this jealousy until it reaches its peak (the final episode that resembles Mizumono). Inho observed Gihun's interactions with Jungbae (Gihun's longtime friend) in silence, just processing each moment and creating a mental bomb that would explode in the future (like when Jungbae made Gihun laugh, at night in the dorms, and the scene cuts to 001 listening under the bed in total DISGUST).

• Mizumono

Both villains analyzed here need to control their targets of obsession, manipulating them and trying to build a home in their heads, and when they realize they have been "betrayed", that's when the bomb explodes.

Hannibal felt betrayed by Will when he learned that he was helping in a plan against him behind his back (but we know that Will was so confused about his feelings and morality that he didn't even know who to go with), and then killed Abgail in front of him after a heartbreaking speech.

Inho felt betrayed by Gihun when, during a shootout in the player vs. soldier attack, Gihun said he would go inside to find the way out. Inho asked: "Shall I go with you?", and Gihun simply said that Jungbae would go with him. Later, Jungbae asks 456 why he chose him and not 001 who is more skilled with weapons, and Gihun answers that he chose him because they are friends. The next scene suggests that Inho, disappointed, listened behind the communicator, but we don't know if the communicators were on or not...

It's worth noting the expression on Inho's face when Gihun said that Jungbae was the one who would...

(POOR GUY 456 APOLOGIZE TO HIM AND TAKE HIM WITH YOU NOW

The Mizumono between 456 and 001 happens thanks to this event, when, later, after putting on his masked Boss costume, Inho goes to Gihun and Jungbae on the stairs. Just like Hannibal, he says heartbroken words (less dramatic and more angry) and eliminates Jungbae in front of Gihun.

Both killed people close and important to their targets out of possessiveness and hurt, out of a sick and incomprehensible feeling of betrayal; feelings that only they understand.

How can little sweet creatures like this be so DESTRUCTIVE.

There doesn't seem to be a need and mutual dependence in 457 like there is in Hannigram (at least not yet, there's still one season left), the obsession and interest come from Inho, but there is a notable chemistry and tension, smiles and exchanges of OBVIOUS glances.

I know that Hannigram is complex and very intense, I'm not making an extremely serious comparison, but rather recording some points that I observed and since I love both couples, I wanted to do this. The depth of the characters is obviously different, we're just making a fan observation here. ♡

[pricelessreviews]

[weaselandfriends]

Sword Art Online (anime)

Sword Art Online is a Frankenstein monster. Here is every episode of the first arc and how it was adapted:

Episode 1 is from the original web novel, published in 2002.

Episode 2 is from a more detailed rewrite of the story, Sword Art Online Progressive, published in 2012 (only a few months before the anime aired).

Episode 3 is from the second volume of the light novel, published in 2009.

Episode 4 is from a side story published shortly after the original web novel, in either 2002 or 2003.

Episodes 5 and 6 combine a side story published in 2007 and another side story from the eighth volume of the light novel, published in 2011.

Episode 7 is from a side story published shortly after the original web novel, likely in 2003.

Episodes 8, 9, and 10 are from the original web novel, published in 2002.

Episode 11 and 12 are from a side story published in 2003.

Episodes 13 and 14 are from the original web novel, published in 2002.

By stitching together stories written across an entire decade, often with wildly different purposes and goals, the anime is tonally erratic, with glaring plot and character inconsistencies. For example, Episode 3 is a tragic episode in which Kirito brings several low-level players to a high-level floor, leading to their deaths. Kirito is traumatized; he later explains that this incident is why he plays as a solo player, so nobody else will ever get hurt because of him. Episode 4, by contrast, is a lighthearted episode in which Kirito—having learned nothing, because this story was written six years before the previous one—brings a low-level player to a high-level floor as bait for dangerous player-killers. When the low-level player is comedically groped by a tentacle monster and cries out for Kirito to save her, Kirito only shrugs and says, "Come on, it's not that powerful." He's ultimately correct, and this time the player survives, but what happened to his trauma?

These inconsistencies, combined with Sword Art Online's massive popularity, made it the favorite target of the fledgling anime video essay community circa 2014 to 2017. Though it's possible to do a longform video poring over every single plot hole for almost anything, Sword Art Online made it easy; half of its "plot" was never intended to be arranged in this way, and even when there was intent, it was the intent of an amateur author writing their first-ever story. You couldn't generate a work more perfect for endless nitpicking and angry rants in a lab.

But if the show is blatantly incompetent, what made it so popular?

It's tempting to ascribe its popularity to "right place, right time." By 2012, the year Sword Art Online came out, the internet had changed the primary way people interacted socially. Rather than being bound by family, proximity, race, creed, religion, or so on, people grouped together by hobby. "Gamer" was now a community-binding identity, an attribute that distinguished a person and their niche online space from the othered outside. And the Gamers craved legitimacy. They craved the approval and recognition of mainstream culture. They craved representation, that feeling of seeing yourself reflected in the world around you.

The world refused them. The mood of the entrenched pop cultural elite was best encapsulated by Roger Ebert, famous film critic, who had been waging a years-long crusade against video games as an artistic medium. In 2005, in response to the live-action Doom movie, Ebert said, "Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized[,] and empathetic." He reiterated this claim in statements and essays in 2006 and 2010, and in March 2012, on the eve of Sword Art Online's airing, described Dark Souls—Dark Souls!—as a "soul-deadening experience." "Video games can never be art," he asserted plainly later that year.

In this milieu, it makes sense why Gamers glommed onto Sword Art Online. If nothing else, Sword Art Online takes video games seriously, more seriously than any non-video game media before it (asterisk; excepting .hack). This seriousness manifests in a consistent theme, a singular perpetually present thread that lingers even as plot, character, and tone skew wildly, stated by Kirito to Klein in Episode 1:

"This may be a virtual world, but I feel more alive here than I do in the real world."

This statement defines Asuna, who stops seeing her time trapped in the game as years stolen from her life, and instead learns to live each moment as if it were truly real. It defines Silica, mourning her dead Neopet and willing to risk her actual life to revive it. It defines Lisbeth, hurtling a million miles into the air but still for a moment enraptured by the beauty of a digital sun shining over a digital land. It defines Griselda, murdered by her husband Grimlock for motives he can only confusingly explain as related to how she "changed" in the game, how she became more confident, more self-realized, while he sank into despair (he was not a Gamer. He lacked the Gamer spirit). It defines Yui, the sentient NPC whom Kirito and Asuna adopt as part of a pantomimed marriage that the show's nauseatingly boring second arc is about protecting against an outside world that does not acknowledge it. And it defines Akihiko Kayaba, the game's creator, who when confronted at the end over why he trapped 10,000 people in this death game, can only say that he no longer remembers, before rhapsodizing about the "castle in the sky" he so achingly desired to bring to life. Unstated is that, to make it truly alive, he needed to make it—and the people inside it—capable of death. This logic is twisted, even more bizarre than Grimlock's murder confession, but neither the scene's wistfully poignant tone nor Kirito's responses reject it.

As the video essayists have done, it's pathetically easy to pick apart Kayaba's rationale. But to mire oneself in the story's logic is a mistake; Sword Art Online is not a story guided by logic. What matters is that Kayaba's illogical words are consistent with the ethos that underlies the narrative: The virtual world is as important as, or even more important than, the real world.

The anime's production values reflect this ethos, too. Sword Art Online looks strikingly cheap for its level of popularity. In almost every fight, still images with blur lines vibrate in tacky simulation of animation. There is no dynamism in the camerawork, and sword duels are often depicted in shot-reverse shot so only one participant is on screen at a time. Nobody interacts with their environment; every battle occurs on a flat, empty plane. Some of the monsters are CGI and look awful. The character designs are bland and generic. Even the music, by the otherwise-excellent Yuki Kajiura, sounds like phoned-in B-sides from her work on Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) and its sequel film, Rebellion (2013).

But what the show does expend effort on is its backgrounds, which are both visually inventive—floating islands, towering columns that hold up the sky—and depicted with glimmering post-processing effects to bathe them in sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, and starry nights. First and foremost, Sword Art Online sells its virtual world to the viewer, makes them believe in that world the way the characters in the story do.

And in having that world sold to them, in expressing its legitimacy and the legitimacy of those (hero or villain) who believe in it, the Gamers had their rallying cry, the work of media that finally said: You are seen.

But was it really Gamers that Sword Art Online saw?

While Sword Art Online is invested in selling its virtual world, it is not invested in selling its virtual game. The in-universe Sword Art Online is primarily defined by its lack of gameplay mechanics, rather than those it actually has. In Episode 1, Klein explains that the game lacks a magic system, which he describes as a "bold choice." In Episode 2, members of the raid party state that the game also lacks a job or class system. There is no long-ranged weaponry; everyone uses melee weapons, usually swords. The only strategy during raids is human wave tactics, where armies of players charge in and attack at once. The only cooperative maneuver is "Switch," a mechanic that is never explicitly explained but seems to involve a player who has already charged in backing off so another player can charge in their place.

Compared to even basic single-player RPGs, these mechanics are primitive; for an MMORPG, they're antediluvian. The point isn't whether a game with these mechanics would be fun or not (in many ways, it's similar to Dark Souls, where the basic core gameplay of dodge-and-hit is rendered meaningful by the consequences for failure), but rather that the game's mechanics have little importance within the story.

They're so unimportant that it's never explained why Kirito is so good at the game, what he's doing differently from everyone else. He's not even a grinder. He spends most of the first half of the story slumming on floors far beneath his level. It's no-nonsense Asuna who grinds hard, who tries to exploit the game mechanics, like when she proposes using NPCs to lure a boss. The plan makes logical sense, but logic is absent from Sword Art Online's ethos; Kirito rejects it, not on the grounds it wouldn't work, but because the NPCs would be killed. He prioritizes respecting the game world, while Asuna—at least initially—prioritizes respecting the game mechanics. Kirito's philosophy is ultimately proven right when he and Asuna adopt an NPC daughter who turns out to be sentient.

Meanwhile, Kirito's most impressive feat involves him ignoring the game's rules entirely. The one mechanic described in detail is that if you die in the game, you die in real life; when Kirito dies, though, he wills himself back alive to defeat the final boss.

The game, the experience of gaming, being a Gamer—none of these are part of the underlying ethos that guides the narrative decisions of Sword Art Online. Kirito didn't tell Klein, "I feel more alive playing this game." He said, "I feel more alive in this virtual world." Asuna didn't find happiness by exploiting the game, but by learning to live in it as though it were her real life. Kayaba didn't design Sword Art Online because he loves games, but because he wanted to make his world real.

This isn't a story about Gamers. It's a story about a virtual world. It's a story about the internet. It's a story about online community.

In his introduction to Speaker for the Dead (1986), Orson Scott Card describes the heroes of most science fiction novels as "perpetual adolescents": "He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error […] Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger? And yet to me, at least, the most important stories are the ones that teach us how to be civilized: the stories about children and adults, about responsibility and dependency."

Card, of course, wrote Gamer fiction long before anyone craved it. Ender's Game (1985) is obsessed with the mechanical minutiae of its titular game in a way Sword Art Online is not; its protagonist is successful in the mold of Asuna, able to understand and exploit game mechanics better than anyone else. But in this quote, Card describes Kirito perfectly. Kirito is, of course, an actual adolescent, emphasized by his character design and Columbine trench coat ("Don't show up to the GameStop tomorrow," you can almost hear him say), but his character is also adolescent in terms of Card's model. He spends the first half of the story as a solo player, wandering from floor to floor, doing good (usually), moving on. He lacks—or rather, avoids—responsibility. While Asuna is second-in-command of a top guild organizing high-level raids, Kirito is off on his own reviving some girl's Neopet.

When viewed from this perspective, Sword Art Online actually does have a coherent and comprehensible character arc for its otherwise inconsistent protagonist. Kirito develops as a result of his relationship with Asuna, finding through his marriage to her the responsibility that he previously forsook. When Kirito's error causes Sachi to die in Episode 3, he moves on, immediately abandons even his own trauma by Episode 4; Sachi is never mentioned again. (Of course not, since her story was one of the last ones written.) He feels no lasting responsibility for his actions. But later, Kirito realizes he could not brush off the trauma if the same thing happened to Asuna. It is through his responsibility to her that he joins the final raid and thus bears, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, the cooperative responsibility of the entire virtual community of Sword Art Online. He has become an adult, with wife and child. He has become "more cultured, civilized[,] and empathetic," as Ebert would put it.

(And isn't that what Ebert is really saying, when he criticizes video games? That they are adolescent, childish, playthings?)

Through Kirito's character arc, and its underlying ethos about virtual worlds, Sword Art Online depicts online community via the language of marriage and responsibility that is traditionally ascribed to real-life community. This too resonated with its audience. After all, it wasn't just Gamers who craved recognition. Teenagers in 2012 had lived their entire conscious life in a world defined by the internet, and yet the "real world" considered online relationships and communities to be a joke. Sword Art Online, rather than legitimizing Gamers, legitimizes the virtual world, the internet.

But does it really even do that?

Immediately, Sword Art Online rejects the notion of online identity. Kayaba's first move upon trapping everyone inside the game is to force them all to look like their real-world selves. As per Sword Art Online's anti-logic ethos, he does not explain why he does this. Shortly afterward, Kirito looks at his real-world finger, which received a paper cut before he entered the game; he imagines it bleeding profusely, before saying, "It's not a game. It's real." By enforcing real-world identity within the game world, Kayaba possibly intends players to see the world as more real too, the way Kirito does. This fits the monomaniacal focus of Kayaba, and Sword Art Online as a story, on the importance of virtual space over any other aspect of virtual experience, and it's not surprising that Kirito tacitly agrees with Kayaba's decision when he and Klein tell each other they look better as their real selves than as their avatars. But it also alienates Sword Art Online from its connection to the reality of the internet, where personal identity is far more fluid.

Furthermore, despite his character arc, Kirito ultimately stands apart from his online community. At the end of the story, everyone lies on the ground paralyzed as he alone is given the privilege to duel the final boss, one-on-one. At this climactic moment, Kirito returns to being a solo player, while every other member of the community lacks agency, including Asuna. Especially Asuna. Shortly before the final battle, Asuna claims she'll commit suicide if Kirito dies, which is already an unhealthily adolescent view of marriage (as seen in Romeo & Juliet). Then, before the duel, when Asuna is paralyzed, Kirito demands that Kayaba "fix it so Asuna can't kill herself." Not only has Kayaba, the villain, stolen Asuna's agency over her own body, but now her husband is requesting he steal even more of it.

This, too, is part of Sword Art Online's ethos. Though the game has 10,000 people, nobody except Kirito actually matters. He is a "Solo Player" in the sense of Solo Leveling, the most popular airing anime, which has a mistranslated title; it should be "Only I Level Up." The implication of the real title is clear: Only the protagonist has agency. Kirito is the same. Only he plays the game, in any meaningful sense. The game—reality—bends to him; none of its rules, even death, constrain him.

It is total self-centeredness, a complete rejection of the responsibility to society that Card describes. This ethos pervades the show. Kirito is never wrong, even when he obviously is, like when he rejects Asuna's proposal to use NPCs as bait. The entire reason he realizes Heathcliff is Kayaba is because, during an earlier duel, Heathcliff beat him; Kirito (correctly) posits that someone who beat him must have been cheating. Everyone who likes Kirito is good, everyone who dislikes him is evil; Kuradeel, who chafes with Kirito initially over bureaucratic guild regulations, eventually unmasks himself as a sadistic serial killer. Every girl is in love with him, a harem rendered vestigial because Kirito is married to Asuna and expresses zero interest in Silica or Lisbeth or his sister or the second season's Carne Asada; but it's not about whether Kirito wants a harem, it's about the prestige of his ability to command one.

This is where the true face of Sword Art Online shows itself, what truly made it so popular, and where the core of its long-lasting influence remains.

Only the virtual world matters. Not the game, not the online community, not online identity. Only a different world, one that isn't the real world. And in this world, only Kirito matters. Sure, he'll fight to protect other people. Exactly like he'll fight to protect NPCs. In this world, real people are worth the same as NPCs, compared to Kirito. His wife is a real person; his daughter is not. But really, both his marriage and his child are a form of playacting, pretending at adulthood. When convenient, they are disregarded and trampled upon. Asuna spends the next two arcs of Sword Art Online sidelined—even viciously sexually assaulted—so Kirito can hang out with girls he doesn't even like, just because they're shiny and new; Yui is almost completely forgotten after the second arc, like a discarded toy.

This is an ethos of pure, distilled escapism. It is an escape from the real world to a false one, where every conceivable selfish fantasy is rendered real, where every desire can be granted and then disposed of when no longer wanted. It is an ethos without responsibility, without consequence.

And without shame. Sword Art Online is remarkably devoid of self-consciousness. It treats as real its virtual world, but doesn't feel the need to justify that world with logic. It doesn't feel the need to justify anything with logic; what it says is so, self-evidently.

In my Kill la Kill essay, I mentioned Sword Art Online's vast influence, and someone wrote (and sadly deleted) a well-reasoned response that explained how the aesthetics and tropes of modern isekai are much more heavily influenced by Japanese webfic that predate Sword Art Online, like GATE or Overlord or Re:Zero. That's true; I'd add that modern Gamer fiction, which is often obsessively concerned with the rules and statistics underlying game logic, is also not very similar to Sword Art Online on a superficial level. But Sword Art Online's ethos transcends genre. It can be found in isekai, Gamer lit, or even genres popular long before Sword Art Online, like battle shounen. Sword Art Online created the web fiction to light novel to anime pipeline, and in doing so popularized amateur literature and its decidedly adolescent mentality of shameless and solipsistic self-indulgence. "Only I Play the Game."

[katnissandpeetamellark]

More BOSAS Reviews Pt 3 ⭐

[extrafabulouscomics]

[gudgurkan]

A couple of my favourite drawings from 2024!

First off, one of the last drawings I did last year

And one of the earliest

I've worked a lot on the game Esoteric Ebb in 2024. Nessan is one of my favourites!

Another one for Esoteric Ebb I really like is Akzel!

The coolest character I drew for Esoteric Ebb is a secret one though 👀

My Kickstarter campaign for "The Cult of Dreams" was one of the biggest things happening for me in 2024. Thank you to everyone who backed!

Another one from The Cult of Dreams

Yet another!

I dabbled in sci-fi a bit too (looking to do more sci-fi in 2025)

And this!

Alternative history Sweden with airships

Thanks for enjoying what I've drawn in 2024! Let's have a great 2025 🔥

[julia-shephard]

piece i did a while ago for the Flame emperor zine!

leftover sales here!

[wiptw]

Pokémon Stadium Series

Nintendo 64 - Nintendo - 2000 to 2001

You as a Pokémon fan are absolutely fucking spoiled these days. Aside from the mainline games you have spinoffs and fangames offering different experiences, you have entire websites dedicated to documenting everything down to the internal maths of the series, there's no end to the free content you can access with an internet connection between emulators and battle sites like 'Showdown!', and it's now socially acceptable in most circles to be older than 13 and have something with Pikachu's face plastered on it (especially if you're female presenting, especially if your friend group is also infected with the Pokémon hype). Back in my day™ you had almost none of this. You had the anime on Saturday mornings, you had the early run Pokémon licensed merch which WOULD get you called a baby if you continued buying past 10-12, and you had the games. Those sweet, sweet games that indoctrinated a generation of young people into being gamers and awoke a horde of JRPG addicts.

Literally Me

So remember this when I tell you that Pokémon Stadium, both one and two, aren't great games because they do something back then that you can't get today; they're great for what they did back then. So Pokemon Stadium 1&2 were a duology of games from 2000 and 2001 respectively that allowed players to battle Pokemon in 3D, with the addition of some side content such as minigames included to prevent the game from being 100% Pokemon battles. Because otherwise, the game is in fact navigating a series of menus and completing Pokémon battles with 3D models.

Whether it's taking on the gym gauntlets, the marathon of battles in the Pokémon cups, or just free battles with friends and loved ones, 98% of the experience is either selecting Pokémon from a roster of pre-built 'rentals' or transferring them from a saved game using the Transfer Pak, then fighting them in a series of 3D environments. An experience which you can definitely do today using web apps but as I said earlier, we didn't have that.

The peak of Pokémon battles in 2000

So if you're buying Pokémon Stadium (either version really) you're already probably a Pokémon fan right? So that means you have Red/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver/Crystal, so why not just play that game and get the full experience? The fun of exploring, talking to NPCs, discovering new and exotic locations? Simple, because in those games battles looked like this

While in Stadium, battles looked like this

If you grew up watching the anime while playing the Gameboy games, there was this special kind of dissonance where you might find yourself saying "Yeah, (for the time) these graphics are RADICAL but I wish I had something closer to these cool Pokémon Battles they had in the anime." As you hide under the covers with your Gameboy Color worm light, nestled in your Ash Ketchum pajamas while you attempt for the 100th time to capture a ditto. Pokémon Stadium was the answer to this dissonance, providing you with vibrant 3D graphics unlike anything you'd ever seen before; bringing Pokémon to life in a way that would be unmatched until Colosseum came out during the Gamecube era.

So, to actual mechanics, you play both games pretty similarly; by building a team of Pokémon (either on your handheld or by using the rental mons the game provides) and take part in a series of battles to become the ultimate battle master. To use your own Pokémon, you'd need to use the aforementioned 'Transfer Pak' to plug in a copy of Red/Blue/Yellow (for 1) or Gold/Silver/Crystal (for 2) with a game saved to the cartridge; otherwise the rental Pokémon covered all released Pokémon (except for some hidden ones) allowing you to build your dream team, sans a few caveats here and there.

Evolved Pokémon have better stats but worse moves, while weaker Pokémon tend to have better moves to compensate

In terms of WHERE you can battle, there's two choices: Either in the Gym Leader Castle, or the Tournaments held in the center of the map on either game. Either way, the game will then have you battle through a series of 3v3 matches versus a set number of trainers who will also select 3 random mons from their full team of six.

A bit bare bones, but there's some spice to how things are run. For one, the rental system was a huge thing for us younger players back in the day. Even if you had the games some Pokémon were hard to catch, had evolution requirements some players couldn't complete (like the trade-mons), or were locked to a version you didn't have. The rental mons give you a list of every Pokémon (some exceptions, but not many) and then lets you build your dream team. Sure, you can't set their moves, EVs, IVs, and it's the era before abilities and natures but I CAN HAVE A MEOWTH/PERSIAN ON MY TEAM. Do you know what I had to do as a child to have this Pokémon outside of Stadium? I had to find someone in the American South who also enjoyed Pokémon, hoped they had Blue instead of Red, hoped they had a link cable, then get them to agree to a trade despite both of us being children (and therefore, objectively terrible) which likely meant giving away a rare Pokémon in exchange for what amounted to common garbage in their game because it was Version fucking Exclusivity™ and everyone seemed to know that meant you'd do anything to get that one fucking Pokémon you wanted.

In the handheld games, if you wanted to build your dream team then likely you'd have to put in some more effort than other games of the time would've required of you. With Stadium, your dreams come true, and if you already have that dream team you can just import them to fight in glorious 3D. Circumventing the fact that rental Pokémon are kinda terrible overall.

Don't feel like building? The challenge cup mode that gives you randomized team comps that has it's own charm (for masochists)

Not to say all of them were bad but construct a normal distribution of 'Good' to 'Bad' picks then that graph is gonna skew left so hard you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just a straight line. To keep every choice 'viable' Pokémon rentals were balanced around stats and moves. More powerful evolved Pokémon and Pokémon with high Base Stat Totals (BST) were given weaker moves and first form and low BST Pokémon were given generally better moves. Charizard might have better stats than Charmeleon and Charmander but his only fire type move is going to be something like Fire Spin. Conversely, Charmander might have Fire Blast but his stats are gonna make him an easy target for the computer's pokemon, which are not bound to the same builds as the rental mons you're using.

Once your team is assembled, then you're off to battle trainer after trainer after trainer with beautifully scored (for the Nintendo 64) soundtracks giving you an unearned sense of importance every step of the way. Battles themselves are conducted with a weird, but functional control layout where A and B access sub menus you then check with the R button before finalizing with the c-buttons, which on original hardware or a USB N64 controller is fine but on emulation with a more modern controller like Logitech, can be a little nerve wracking as you worry about whether your 'up' input on the control stick was up enough for the game or if you accidentally drifted right or left using an unintended move.

fun fact: the name of imported Pokémon affects their coloration in Stadium

Battles are also largely regulated by (at the time) tournament standard rules. Little and Pokecup have level restrictions, and all three non-random cups include clauses for sleep, held items, and repeat Pokémon. Additionally, in any cup if you win the round with all 3 Pokémon still in tact, you're granted a continue; meaning you can retry the battle if you lose. Additionally, there is no 'draw' outcome in these games. Use a move like Explosion or Selfdestruct and the game will register it as your loss on your final Pokémon, regardless of whether you took down the opposing fighter with you or not.

You'll be doing a LOT of back-to-back fights here against trainers with varied team comps, but even with over 246 Pokémon in the available potential lineup you'll get tired fast of fighting. This is, however, slightly mitigated by the 3v3 nature of the matches but even so be ready to here the same Pokémon noises, watch the same effects play out, and wait for the same health bars to tick down over and over as you claw your way to the spot of Pokémon Master.

The art style of non-battle scenes like the main map and minigame plaza have that nice, 90's charm to them as well.

If you do get tired of battling it out, then Stadium 1 and 2 both offer minigames for players to partake in. Either in a tournament format or by using the free-play browser, players are able to take part in a multitude of different Mario Party-esque (without the hand burning) minigames featuring the Pokémon as stars. Minigames consist of stick twirling, button mashing, and point collecting all while controlling fan favorite Pokémon such as Togepi, Eevee, Scyther, and Pichu with no real rhyme or reason behind why these game exist aside from a amusement park theming the minigame zones have for their icons and menus.

You won't get a real explanation as to why you're racing Donphans, cutting logs as Scythers and Pinsirs, or playing Simon Says with a bunch of Clefairy, but you don't really need that either. The games are fun, the models are charming, and watching Clefairy get smacked in the head for each wrong input brings me a level of joy I should probably talk about with my therapist. You won't likely spend hours in this mode, but it's a nice breather from the onslaught of battles otherwise.

fun fact: I still won't talk to some people because of the outcomes to Rampage Rollout over two decades ago. You know who you are.

Additionally there's a quiz minigame separate from the main selection of minigames with easy/normal/hard difficulty selections. Players compete to see who can be the first to get a number of questions correct before anyone else based on facts about the Pokémon (typing, size, silhouette, etc) or facts about the game (where you can find things in the game, names of routes and towns, names of figures in the game).

It's not the most challenging on easy or normal, but playing on hard the game will try to screw you with trick questions so playing with others becomes a balance of "do I let the question play out, or attempt to steal it before someone else can answer correctly?"

Sometimes even playing the game won't prepare you for how out of pocket the questions can get

The real advantage of 2 over 1 is that, in addition to minigames, the game has the trainer academy; a kind of in-depth battle tutorial to teach players not only the basics of Pokémon fighting, but also some secrets as well

You can learn about held items, a feature new to the second generation, as well as participate in mock battles to demonstrate the materials you've been reading and quizzed on. Some of this information for the time too was obscure or hidden knowledge, like the fact that using Defense Curl before using Rollout would boost the damage significantly or that using Stomp on an opponent who used minimize would double the damage.

Some type matchups just make sense, like Ground v Electric.

Overall though what really makes this game is the presentation. The soundtrack does a great job selling the feeling Nintendo wants you to experience, climbing the ladder in a tournament or the Gym Leaders Castle makes you feel powerful, and the little details on top of it all just tie it together in a nice package.

The fights, for example, are also narrated by "The Announcer". A bombastic voice shouting over every detail of a fight. When you score a crit, when you apply a status effect, even using certain moves will get the announcer loudly narrating each detail like a Pokémon prize fight. Seeing the ground rip apart when you use Earthquake is only half the charm, the other half comes from that man yelling in your ears "A DEVESTATING EARTHQUAKE ATTACK!". Clearing gyms or clearing opponents in one of the cups grants you gym badges, a dream for any child growing up on the handheld classics or watching the anime who wished they too could earn shiny bits of metal that gave them an inflated sense of importance.

I would literally kill everyone I came across if it'd get me a real life Zephyr Badge.

Stadium 1 and 2 aren't evergreen classics. They're stuck in Gens 1 and 2 respectively, the roster of Pokémon while impressive is largely useless and makes collecting trophies way harder than it has to be, and the games were made before things like abilities and double battles were introduced, leading to the Pokémon battling game missing out on the generation of Pokémon that made battling more fun (Revolution doesn't count, Revolution is dead to me and disappoints me more than I disappoint myself.)

But for the time especially, it gave fans an opportunity to experience a form of Pokémon more advanced than what the handhelds could output. It was a window into a world of potential that wouldn't be truly fulfilled until arguably the 3DS era of Pokémon released, and gave fans a fun little romp handcrafted for them at every twist and turn. Whether you were a gamer or you enjoyed the anime, there was something here for you.

Overall: 7/10 Sound: 8/10 (for the time) Graphics: 9/10 (for the time) Memorable Moments: Stadium 1: Hearing about Mewtwo, thinking he was an urban legend, then finding out he wasn't Stadium 2: Finally beating the elite 4 using only rental mons.

[dragonkid11]

Lancer Tactics, by Olive Perry, is an unofficial still in development mech tactic video game conversion of Lancer TTRPG by Massif Press, a simulationist game designed to let one play out Lancer against computer controlled opponents.

[wileycap]

So, uh, Netflix Avatar, huh? Yeah. I guess I'll make a really long post about it because ATLA brainrot has is a cornerstone of my personality at this point.

So.

It's okay. B, maybe a C+.

That's it.

Now for the spoilers:

The biggest issue with the Netflix version is the pacing. Scenes come out of nowhere and many of the episodes are disjointed. Example: Aang escaping from Zuko's ship. We see him getting the key and going "aha!", and in the next scene he's in Zuko's room. And then he just runs out, no fun acrobatics or fights, and immediately they go to the Southern Air Temple where he sees Gyatso's corpse, goes into the Avatar state, and then sees Gyatso being really cheesy, comes out of it, and resolves that conflict. Nothing seems to lead into anything. The characters don't get to breathe.

The show's worst mistake (aside from Iroh fucking murdering Zhao) is its' first one: they start in the past. Instead of immediately introducing us to our main characters and dropping us into a world where we have a perfect dynamic where Aang doesn't know the current state of the world and Katara and Sokka don't know about the past, thus allowing for seamless and organic worldbuilding and exposition, they just... tell us. "Hey, this is what happened, ok, time for Aang!" There's no mystery, no intrigue, just a stream of information being shoved down the audience's throats and then onto the next set piece.

The visuals are for the most part great, but like with most Netflix productions, they just don't have great art direction. It feels like a video game cinematic, where everything is meant to be Maximum Cool - and none of the environments get to breathe. It's like they have tight indoor sets (with some great set design) and then they have a bunch of trailer shots. It's oozing with a kind of very superficial love.

Netflix still doesn't know how to do lighting, and with how disjointed the scenes are, the locations end up feeling like a parade of sets rather than actual cities or forests or temples. As for the costumes, Netflix still doesn't know how to do costumes that look like they're meant to be actually worn, so many of the characters seem weirdly uncomfortable, like they're afraid of creasing their pristine costumes.

The acting is decent to good, for the most part. I can't tell if the weaker moments come down to the actors or the direction and editing, but if I had to guess, I'd say the latter. Iroh and Katara are the weakest, Sokka is the most consistent, Zuko hits the mark most of the time, and Aang is okay. I liked Suki (though... she was weirdly horny? Like?) but Yue just fell kind of flat.

The tight fight choreography of the original is replaced with a bunch of spinny moves and Marvel fighting, though there are some moments of good choreography, like the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko (there's a million things I could say about how bad it was thematically, but this post is overly long already.) There's an actually hilarious moment in the first episode when Zuko is shooting down Aang, and he does jazz hands to charge up his attack.

Then there's the characters. Everybody feels very static - Zuko especially gets to have very little agency. A great example of that is the scene in which Iroh tells Lieutenant Jee the story of Zuko's scar.

In the original, it's a very intimate affair, and he doesn't lead the crew into any conclusions. Here, Iroh straight up tells the crew "you are the 41st, he saved your lives" and then the crew shows Zuko some love. A nice moment, but it feels unearned, when contrasted with the perfection of The Storm. In The Storm, Zuko's words and actions directly contradict each other, and Iroh's story gives the crew (and the audience) context as to why, which makes Zuko a compelling character. We get to piece it out along with them. Here - Iroh just flat out says it. He just says it, multiple times, to hammer in the point that hey, Zuko is Good Actually.

And then there's Iroh. You remember the kindly but powerful man who you can see gently nudging Zuko to his own conclusions? No, he's a pretty insecure dude who just tells Zuko that his daddy doesn't love him a lot and then he kills Zhao. Yeah. Iroh just plain kills Zhao dead. Why?

Iroh's characterization also makes Zuko come off as dumb - not just clueless and deluded, no, actually stupid. He constantly gets told that Iroh loves him and his dad doesn't, and he doesn't have any good answers for that, so he just... keeps on keeping on, I guess? This version of Zuko isn't conflicted and willfully ignorant like the OG, he's just... kind of stupid. He's not very compelling.

In the original, Zuko is well aware of Azula's status as the golden child. It motivates him - he twists it around to mean that he, through constant struggle, can become even stronger than her, than anyone. Here, Zhao tells him that "no, ur dad likes her better tee hee" and it's presented as some kind of a revelation. And then Iroh kills Zhao. I'm sorry I keep bringing that up, but it's just such an unforgiveable thematic fuckup that I have to. In the original, Zhao falls victim to his hubris, and Zuko gets to demonstrate his underlying compassion and nobility when he offers his hand to Zhao. Then we get some ambiguity in Zhao: does he refuse Zuko's hand because of his pride, or is it his final honorable action to not drag Zuko down with him? A mix of both? It's a great ending to his character. Here, he tries to backstab Zuko and then Iroh, who just sort of stood off to the side for five minutes, goes "oh well, it's murderin' time :)"

They mess with the worldbuilding in ways that didn't really need to be messed with. The Ice Moon "brings the spirit world and the mortal world closer together"? Give me a break. That's something you made up, as opposed to the millenia of cultural relevance that the Solstice has. That's bad, guys. You replaced something real with something you just hastily made up. There's a lot of that. We DID NOT need any backstory for Koh, for one. And Katara and Sokka certainly didn't need to be captured by Koh. I could go on and on, but again, this post is already way too long.

It's, um, very disappointing. A lot of telling and not very much showing, and I feel like all of the characters just... sort of end up in the same place they started out in. I feel like we don't see any of the characters grow: they're just told over and over again how they need to grow and what they need to do.

To sum it up: Netflix Avatar is a mile wide, but an inch deep.

[memientom0ri]

I just finished watching the second part of Round 6.