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beneaththebrim · 4 years

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Hoo boy.

Man, I wish I could just link to a twitter post that lays it out, but unfortunately twitter isn’t the best archival website, and it might just be easier to talk about it here.

Disclaimer: I friggin love TGCF, don’t get me wrong when I criticize it. I’m not trying to cancel MXTX or Starember or whatever, I am merely prompting people to read critically, to pick up on when nationalistic propaganda and racial/ethnic stereotypes are interwoven into a narrative. If we really want to support our Muslim siblings, we should make sure they are welcome in our own communities, protest in solidarity against racist/Islamophobic policies, and donate to organizations that assist refugees if we have the means. For others like me who live in the US, we should especially support politicians/measures that would reduce military budget. But no matter what, as someone who is not the intended audience, attempting to confront artists and writers (on a platform that those artists and writers are not even on!!) will do literally zilch.

TWs before digging in: racism, Islamophobia, genocide

Right, so let’s start with the location of Banyue: it’s an oasis in the Gobi desert, which puts it in the real life modern day Chinese province of Xinjiang. You may have heard of this province, as the Chinese government is currently conducting a genocide of Uyghur Muslims there. [Source] [Source] [Source]

But, you might think, well, TGCF is set in an ancient fantasy time, right? Even if it were set in the real world, it would probably be before the Prophet Muhammad would have even been born, right? And that portion of land has seen a great deal of migration by various pastoral peoples over time, so maybe whoever the Banyue people are based on would be totally unrelated to the people who are currently the victims of genocide in that area?

But, here’s the thing. TGCF is a fantasy written in the present. Although they are not actually Muslim (in Ch.26 it’s mentioned that they believe in reincarnation, and they don’t bat their eyes at the Daoist heavenly officials) there are many ways the Banyuese are coded as both racially othered and Muslim, which the manhua has doubled-down on.

Let’s start with their portrayal in the novel (all novel translations are from @/yummysuika):

Xie Lian shook his head, “Not necessarily. Don’t underestimate the people of Banyue, Nan Feng. Even if their population wasn’t more than ten thousand, they kept the number of soldiers at an average of four thousand. There were more men than women; aside from the sick and old, and the farmers, most men joined the army. Besides, most of those soldiers were over nine feet tall, each more violent than the next. With a mace in hand, they would keep fighting even with swords through their chests. They’re very hard to fight.” (Ch.22)

So, even Xie Lian, who saved Banyuese civilians as General Hua, views them as both physically and emotionally different than Central Plains people. In particular, he describes them as stronger and more violent.

Later, when we’re introduced to Ke Mo and the other ghost soldiers, we see them described in an even more monstrous way:

His face was as grim as steel, his expression ferocious and turbulent, like the face of a beast. A thin layer of armor draped from his shoulders and reached down at least nine feet. Rather than a man, one could say he was more like a walking wolf. Behind him, more and more similar forms appeared. One, two, three... over ten of these ‘men’ jumped off the roofs of the palace and surrounded them.

Each one of these ‘men’ were large like horses, built like beasts, and carried a sharp tooth-filled mace on their shoulders. They might as well have been werewolves. When they encircled the intruders in the garden, it was as if a large steel cage had fallen upon them.

[...]

However, when those Banyue soldiers saw them they didn’t rush to kill. Instead they raised their heads and roared in crazed laughter, and howled in a foreign language. The sound of their words were ghastly, guttural, and heavy in tongue-rolling. It was the language of Banyue. (Ch.24)

Now, it’s arguable that the soldiers’ monstrousness is a result of being resentful ghosts trapped in their demolished home for 150 years--after all, the fertilizer man grew a long tongue and became a skeleton below his chin after only 56 years. Nevertheless, it is notable that an entire group of racially othered ghosts are described as inhuman, both in form and in language.

Now let’s look at the manhua’s portrayal (all scanlations are from @/TGCFMissy on twitter)

(Ch.30)

As you can see, the manhua is portraying Banyue with Islamic architecture. In addition, the Banyuese hold up flags with crescent moons, which conjures up the star-and-crescent imagery which tends to be associated with Islam nowadays. I won’t comment on the clothing, because I don’t know very much about fashion history in the areas along the Silk Road/the Islamic world.

Alright, so on the one hand, the manhua is definitely not shying away from Islamic imagery when portraying the Banyuese. However, it does shy away from portraying the warrior ghosts as especially monstrous (which makes sense, given the optics):

(Ch.41)

Well, mostly...

(Ch.43)

It, um... got worse. As the manhua chapters have progressed, Ke Mo has looked more and more like a bloodthirsty caricature. Especially notable that Ke Mo is getting this treatment while airing out his grievances about his people being massacred.

Anyways, up until here, this treatment feels kinda par for the course when it comes to pulpy wuxia/xianxia (at least from what I’ve read)--it’s kinda racist when it comes to foreigners to the northwest, but with some plausible deniability (in the novel) due to the fantasy setting. For me, the biggest issue comes in when we hear the reason Pei Su slaughtered the entire city:

Pei Su answered, “On the night before the invasion, many of the leaders of Banyue’s major families gathered for a meeting, and decided on a secret plot.”

“What plot?”

“The people of Banyue are violent in nature, and hated Yong An to the bone,” Pei Su said. “Even knowing they were about to be defeated, they wouldn’t submit to it. So the entire population of the kingdom, the young, the old, the women and the men, all banded together to assemble this thing.”

“What thing?” Xie Lian could guess but he wasn’t sure, and the word that came out of Pei Su’s mouth confirmed his suspicions.

“Explosives.” Pei Su slowly enunciated each word. “They had decided that if the kingdom was to fall, then the citizens would each carry explosives on their bodies, escape to Yong An, mix into large crowded areas, and suicide bomb to cause riots. Meaning: if they must die, then they would drag as many Yong An people down as they can with them. If the kingdom should fall, then they shall terrorize the country that brought their downfall!”

Which was why they had to be annihilated before those civilians had the time to flee.

Xie Lian instantly turned to Ke Mo, roughly summarized for him in the Banyue language, and asked, “Is this true?”

Ke Mo looked dauntless without any intention to conceal the facts. “It’s true!”

San Lang raised his brows and commented, “How vile.” (Ch.29)

This is where the Banyue arc becomes undeniably Islamophobic: the genocide of the Banyuese people is justified by the fact that every single citizen of Banyue would have gone on to suicide bomb the Central Plains.

Sound familiar?

If you clicked on the first source above about the Uyghur genocide, you’d see that this is the exact same reasoning that CCP propaganda (along with their international trade partners) gives for why they must conduct ‘re-education’ of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. ‘Preventing terrorism’.

And it’s not even disputed by the text! Xie Lian suspects it before Pei Su and Ke Mo confirm it. Hua Cheng makes the comment “How vile,” implying he also believes that civilians would go out and do such a thing. Later on, the only thing Pei Su is viewed as blameworthy for is luring innocent travelers to Banyue to appease the resentful ghosts--the genocide is viewed as totally justified (well, Ban Yue feels guilt, but I mean she’s still willing to date Pei Su, so...). Pei Su himself is punished a bit by the narrative--he’s banished, and then gets food poisoning for several chapters in Book 3--but it doesn’t really seem like he learns anything?

Of course, in the real world, civilians would not willingly become suicide bombers en masse--it’s really troubling that TGCF, a novel that is largely all about challenging official narratives and overthrowing authority, would take this road. It’s disappointing.

But there’s no perfectly unproblematic piece of media out there, and this novel wasn’t written for me. I’m not sure precisely what effect this arc had on the intended audience. While answering this ask I actually did look up jjwxc comments on TGCF Ch.29, but jjwxc thought my activity was out of the ordinary (I don’t usually look at comments...) and kept kicking me off--from the 5 out of 579 pages of comments I looked at, I wasn’t able to find any that seriously addressed the Islamophobia, but if anyone else is interested, they could try their own luck.

In any case, TGCF is a piece of media which, for the most part, encourages readers to question authority and hearsay. It slips up in the Banyue arc.

#ask #ask brim #anon #tian guan ci fu #tgcf meta #tw: racism #tw: Islamophobia #tw: genocide #please don't clown on this post

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5uptic · 3 years

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Hi! I moved here cause I can’t get a lick of sense from the people on bird app. Idk how to feel about this shitshow that I just witnessed. I just remembered there were more reasons as to why that person was banned. That person initially harassed a member of 5up’s community in which the mod defended. So the group disliked the mod too and continued to shit on them privately and publicly.

Next, thirst tweets can be funny to some. But others find it really uncomfortable which is understandable. They have made suggestive remarks about the pink man and even steve before (that peeps overlooked) but it’s not like the cc themselves are bothered (?). So idk even anymore.

I’m don’t know if I’m making any sense. I’m sorry for the spam ;( This is just the first time I just felt genuinely anxious seeing all the things said about 5up so I word vomited here.

oh my god. i had an entire response done and tumblr just GLITCHED in my face WHY

hey anon, don’t worry about it!!! tbf, i feel pretty much the same. i think the situation as a whole is pretty frustrating to see, especially with how it blew out of proportion in every way possible. honestly, feel free to vent in my inbox whenever you want!

with that said, though,

(because this will be kinda long, i guess)

overnight, it became clear that the nsfw part of the issue is not really an issue, besides being the recurrent meme for this situation. i read from various people that 5up explicitly said that he didn’t have a problem with the nsfw tweets when discussing this with the mods, but that he took that decision based on the harassment, which. ok another can of worms. to me, the thing is... smart fandom behavior is to always push away the things that you don’t wanna see. so nsfw jokes/tweets might be not of your liking. what should you do? the correct answer is, unfollow/mute/block the people that make them, and in general every person that you wouldn’t wanna share the fandom with. that’s to me the only way you can genuinely enjoy fandom as intended lol. but there are cases in which we do not take the smartest option. and we somehow make this our problem, which is the most typical case of twitter entitlement, that reads like “you’ve posted something i don’t like. Prepare To Die.”

when i saw the tweet pictured above in the thread, i was like ooooooooooh so this is just. typical twitter drama. which already highlights the entire issue with this... this is just twitter drama. why is twitch involved? how did the person get banned in both of 5up’s channels? if it were for twitter drama, or this person tweeted something i don’t like!, i’m sure hundreds of people would be arbitrarily banned. so that’s why it’s handled differently on twitch. now, i don’t know jasfer, like i’ve never talked to the guy, but i’m familiar with him. as someone who’s been a fan of 5up for like a year now, i know he’s been here from the start and he’s also a beloved chat member and person in the twitter portion of the fandom. it feels like insult to injury because it wasn’t that jasfer had a bad reputation in 5up’s chat or a bad relationship with most people in it. it’s just... such shitty luck on their part tbh lol

imagine if it were anybody else, like, two randoms on twitter. the best outcome to that would probably be an eventual block on both sides so they just stop talking about it all the time, right? except that this didn’t happen here because one of them happened to be a mod for a chat that the other person frequented. i think by now you know i don’t agree with the decision at all, then.

thing is, i can understand everyone’s sides and empathize with everyone. i understand why 5up stood up by his mods, i understand why the mod was anxious/felt targeted and resorted to this option, i understand jasfer’s anger/sadness from the outcome of the situation. but i’d still side with jasfer, nonetheless, because he’s the only one with no power here. the most that he can do is bring attention to what happened, but he can’t unban himself, or return in other account and expect everything to go well, etc. and it’s like, urgh. like if i was on their place i would be genuinely devastated lol.

now, i could be talking completely out of my ass, right? because i don’t know what really happened. maybe jasfer genuinely did incredibly shitty things and corralled the mod team and 5up into taking that drastic decision. but that’s just another part of the whole twitter drama of it all, isn’t it? see, when i was more active in twitter (in another fandom), if you didn’t like someone/something you’d talk shit about them in your rant. that’s how it went, and everybody did the same. in that part, i can understand how things grew out of proportion, but again, does anyone know what really happened besides the mods and jasfer? not really. and it’s hard to take a real stance because the whole thing happened on private twitter accounts. which yet again highlights how bad of a decision banning jasfer from both 5up twitch channels was, because, how are we ever gonna know if it was deserved? jasfer didn’t do anything wrong in chat, which is what should matter. and if the so called harassment (that we have to take 5up’s word for it!) happened in private rant accounts... is. is it really harassment? or like, was it just a case of people being (understandably) reactionary and doing what everyone else usually does in twitter dot com?

and the fact that the mod liked this tweet afterwards... isn’t that just incredibly petty? celebrating a personal victory after banning someone that has no say in the matter? jasfer said they tried contacting 5up through discord, and only made the thread days later because they never got a response. so it’s clear that 5up (understandably!) took their mods’ side and was loyal to them, but it came at the cost of what could’ve been a smarter, better decision for everyone involved. but now, because jasfer was left with no tools other than bring attention to his side of the story, twitter blew it out of proportion and everyone is very kindly sending dead threats to everybody involved.

sigh. it’s just... a big mix of terrible luck and bad choices. i usually agree with 5up when it comes to twitter stuff, but making it seem like he’s going against everyone is ignoring the fact that some twitter drama should’ve never made it to his twitch channel(s) anyways, and that a better decision should’ve been taken. now it’s just the worst of both worlds and no one got anything good out of it. like, arguably, the mod got what they wanted, but also got multiple death threats too. i doubt there’s any chance of jasfer ever coming back to 5up’s chat, at least not in the way it was before. because of the twitter thread including sapnap and this being a bad decision in general, a bigger audience now regards 5up badly and this will probably be a passing mention in the eventual cancelling 5up thread when twitter gets boring enough. like, meh. it’s just a mess to watch and it’s just depressing from every angle.

#answered #5up #getting banned from 5up's chat though... don't threaten me with a good time #(i keep dropping hints i hate 5up's chat)#don't show in the tag.... that's fine...... :(

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rubyjcat · 3 years

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[Behind-the-Scenes] HELIOS Rising Heroes: Animation Showcase

“HELIOS Rising Heroes: Animation Showcase” is an English voice fan project I worked on all by myself (barring voice actors) that took five months to make.

The original plan was to make just one video, but it ended up being eighteen of them!

Link to YouTube playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0UbdFyWSx0n_ewcd-t0iAB0adGe5lghH

In this write-up, I’ll be discussing details about the response to the project, recording all the footage, video editing, voice acting + audio processing, script translations + rewriting, which fonts were used, and even the emulator used. I’ve organized it into sections to make it easier to find certain things. Also, this is directed to English-speaking readers since I’m not gonna bother translating the entire thing to Japanese.

THE DREAM

I wanted to make this fandub ever since the game was released (in Aug 2020). I just knew that English voices would be extremely fitting to the world of HELIOS with a setting inspired by America and characters, places, and terms mostly in English. I was disappointed to hear that the studio behind the game, Cacalia Studio of Happy Elements K.K., had no interest to localize their games outside of Asia, which meant the chances of an English dub, let alone a global release were close to zero.

I was able to understand how to play the game thanks to the fan translators, some of which came from other Cacalia Studio games, and got inspired to continue learning Japanese (there was a previous attempt to translate Japanese lyrics years back).

What I thought was just the silly dream of one overseas player’s became something much more!

THE TIMELINE (BRIEF OVERVIEW)

I played the game for about two months prior to working on the project. Before starting the project, I had to sort out graphical and technical issues on my end first as I was unable to play the game smoothly until November.

November 2020

Finding all the in-game battle lines

Writing transliterations (romaji) of lines by ear

Learning and translating lines to Japanese

Started recording footage

December 2020

Further translation revisions

Held a casting call

Script rewriting and finalizing

January 2021

Completed casting

Started video editing (learning process)

Started audio processing

Recorded more footage

February 2021

Recorded more footage

Japanese script revisions

Finished working with VAs

Finished audio processing

Continued video editing

Published Preview video

March 2021

Recorded the last of the footage

Japanese subtitle revisions

Finished Showcase video

Finished Individual battle clips

Gave recommendations to VAs

The exact start and end dates were Nov 1st, 2020 to March 31st, 2021. Pretty neat.

RESPONSE TO THE PROJECT

I was absolutely shocked with the response to the preview video, which at the time of writing has just hit 10K views and almost 600 likes on Twitter and YouTube combined. Not bad for an unpaid hobby fandub (a joke only I find funny...) of an otherwise “niche” Japanese-only mobile game.

As of Apr 4th, 2021 - Thank you so much. This is more than I could’ve asked for.

The preview video blew up way more than anticipated, setting up for a bit of disappointment when the Showcase video was released.

The amount of views I expected for this project within its prime were a couple hundred views, so I’m content that the Showcase video reached that amount (it had ~500 by the end of March).

The expectations for the battle clips were an average of 100 views and a handful of likes - and each one got roughly that amount (or more) - so I’m also content with that, especially for something that’s just “bonus material”.

I tried my best to promote this project on Twitter with three main tweets. My one regret with promoting the project was making the second tweet after publishing the Showcase because the Japanese I wrote there was pretty terrible (as I was all worn out from editing and was in a haste to tweet about it). I tried to make up for it in a follow-up reply the next day, but it was too late. I was satisfied with how my third and final tweet and thread of battle clips turned out, but it sadly didn’t garner much attention. A reason for this was probably due to bad timing. I knew that the timing of the last tweet was awful as HeliosR did something special for April Fools’ day, plus the Easter event was being hyped around the same time, but I really wanted to finish up the project within March (my timezone, at least. It was already April 1st in Japan).

It was important to also make the videos accessible to the Japanese audience as they were a large portion of the viewers. This proved to be a challenge as my knowledge of Japanese is limited - at least for me, it’s easier to translate grammar-correct Japanese than it is to write my own sentences.

I ultimately decided against posting any of the videos on NicoNico because I wasn’t sure about Japan’s laws regarding copyrighted material. I knew it was already risky enough posting on social media and didn’t want to take any additional risks.

ABOUT THE FOOTAGE (1) – HEROES & ATTACK ORDER

HeliosR uses a gacha system, so to be able to even make something like this, you’d first need access to all 16 ★4 OG Heroes in the game.

I had them spread across five different accounts, four of which were reroll accounts. Asakou from the Cacalia RPG server gave me two of those accounts, and I rerolled myself for Keith and Ren during their Birthday Orders (one free 10-pull per account). Every account is also given a free ★4 selector ticket which I made good use of.

3,000 rubies (in-game currency) were sacrificed to pity the ★4 OG Dino when he was released in December just for the sake of the fandub!

Besides covering all of the Heroes, I also needed to play through each account to unlock certain story chapters, event stages, and evolve the Heroes for their shiny evolved CG art. Some of the Expert event stages (that had the Nighttime backgrounds) proved difficult to clear with a new account.

When using skills, the order of the Heroes were edited such that everyone was able to have the majority of their lines used at least once. All Heroes had two “receiving support” lines, two or three “supporting” lines, and two or three “skills against the enemy” lines. Some of the extra lines didn’t make it into the Showcase, so they were used for the individual clips instead.

I should’ve used Gray instead of Marion for the account that had Billy because you can see Marion’s sprite in Billy’s image. xD

In the Showcase, you may notice that the "Union Attacks" consist of all the ★4 CG images. These were spliced together; I never had all four Heroes of the same sector on the same account. For example, I would have Gray, Asch, and Jay on one account and Billy on another account, recorded their ★4 Bursts separately using the same background (from unlocking the Expert stages on both accounts), and then edited all the footage together.

Jay’s Burst was later re-recorded with a different attacking order so that he wouldn’t link to Billy.

It was also important to keep the same order of Bursts as well as use all four Bursts in the same turn. The ★4 Burst order was usually determined by who didn’t link skill with one another (with the exception of East sector as I was still figuring things out) because I didn’t want the link skill activation getting in the way of the animations.

As a little bonus, I also showed off the exclusive damaging skills of the Chapter 6 and 7 ★4 frames that I was lucky enough to pull from the gacha: Marion’s "Invitation To The Dance“ (roses), Faith’s “Synthetic Vibes” (beats), and Dino’s “Crow Mark Dead End” (claw marks).

ABOUT THE FOOTAGE (2) - BACKGROUNDS

Since I didn’t want to use the same battle music and backgrounds for all of the videos, I decided to use some of the themes from the limited-time events which went as far back as Nov 2020.

Each background has three variants (Daytime, Afternoon, Nighttime) and so I carefully picked them based on the colours. I ended up using mostly Expert stages - or Nighttime backgrounds, since Daytime versions were only used for Normal difficulty stages (which are too easy to clear).

The backgrounds used for the Showcase, all from limited-time events.

I decided to mix up some of the Heroes from other sectors in the individual clips for fun, basing it off of their relationships with each other. Using South sector’s background for Gast’s clip was a purposeful choice because I already used the North sector’s background for the other three North sector Heroes. I made sure to include Akira and Will of the South sector in Gast’s clip so it didn’t feel too random!

The only default background I didn’t use was Chapter 2’s because I already made use of the Casino theme for OG West sector’s individual clips. (...Plus I didn’t really like that background :p)

Here’s a list of all the backgrounds I used:

Escape the Prison (Nov 2020) - used for Showcase [EAST]

Mission of CASINO (Nov 2020) - used for Junior, Faith, & Keith clips

HAPPY NEW YEAR SHOW! (Jan 2021) - used for Showcase [SOUTH]

Help! Cooking Hero! (Jan 2021) - used for Will and Oscar clips

A Sweet Spell Garnished With Chocolate (Feb 2021) - used for Showcase [WEST]

Grandiose Chinoiserie (Mar 2021) - used for Showcase [NORTH]

The Hero Is A Detective!? (Mar 2021) - used for Billy and Jay clips

Default backgrounds: Chapters 1, 3, 4 (shared with 7), 5 (shared with 6) - used for all other clips

The Christmas event was the only event that went unused during the Nov 2020 - Mar 2021 period.

I didn’t record the East sector event (Christmas) in Dec 2020 because I was actually too busy with the casting call! I also didn’t think I would make use of it after already recording the Prison event intended for East sector. The project ended up taking so long that it actually benefited from having a wider selection of events over the months, which also showcased the beauty of the game.

ABOUT THE WORK & VIDEO EDITING

Hardware:

A decent computer.

A pair of no-name earbuds I found while cleaning out some junk.

Software:

All FREE!

*There’s a catch

NoxPlayer* emulator (debloated, read more about in its own section) and Open Broadcast Studio were used to record game footage and sounds.

Davinci Resolve was the main tool I used to edit the videos. A very demanding program that I only recommend using if you have a mid to high end computer.

MediBang was used to edit some of the art like the logos, but I ended up using Resolve for the majority of the graphics, including the thumbnails.

Audacity and Cakewalk were used to edit audio.

Many aspects for this project took longer than I had hoped because there was a learning process with using Resolve for the first time. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, re-exporting videos tons of times just to fix small mistakes. Lastly, the time it took to make all the fancy effects was longer than I’d estimated. As the project dragged on, there was pressure to not delay the release of the videos any longer than I had to. A lot of this was self-imposed though.

There were days where I just did something else other than work on the project, which helped re-fuel my motivation when I decided to pick it up again.

Pretty much everything in the videos were taken from the game itself. The only graphics that were taken from the official website instead were the Substance symbols (the pictures with HERO at the bottom).

Additional overlay graphics were custom-made. It took two whole days to make the 3-second long sector intros and another two days to create and animate the arrow graphics for the credits. These were made using Resolve’s fusion and colour features. Much of the edit was inspired by the official HeliosR designs.

Left: Official in-game graphics // Right: My fanmade video (sector intros)

Sector intros were inspired by the four Heroes version of Union Attacks in-game.

Left: Official HeliosR video // Right: My fanmade video

The Preview video took after the ★4 Burst mini-previews as part of HeliosR’s promotional campaign, uploaded before the game was released.

Left: Official HeliosR video // Right: My fanmade video

The credits at the end of the Showcase were inspired by a different video, this time being the Half-Anniversary video.

The Showcase - which had a duration of 29:07 - was 11.5GB large in size. It took almost three hours to render (which I re-rendered to fix things) and two DAYS to upload to YouTube because I experienced multiple uploading interruptions. It’s a good thing you can re-upload the same video to continue where you left off without having to restart the entire process.

The individual hero clips didn’t take as long to make (but they took a while anyway as I re-uploaded some of them to fix minor mistakes). The recommendations for the VAs that were given alongside the publishing of each clip also spanned over another five days as I wanted to personalize and think about each one carefully.

A pretty frustrating part of the project was the prevalent lag when recording footage, which may have been due to the emulator and/or some technical things on my end. The Prison event used for the Showcase was the very first one I recorded when I wasn’t as aware about the lag, and so it suffered a bit as a result. The Union Attacks were the worst offender. I re-recorded the same battle scenes several times each just in case, then went through the footage frame-by-frame in Resolve and chose the ones with the least amount of lag. If all of the recorded footage suffered lag at different parts, I would even compare and splice together parts of them that didn’t lag. There was also audio lag (a known issue of NoxPlayer) so I had to move all of the audio forward by 1/3 of a second.

By the end of the project I had over 200 videos of game footage with a total size of over 24GB and a total duration exceeding 9 hours, not even counting all the ones that went unused.

The Heroes weren’t the only ones who evolved. MS Paint not recommended for thumbnails.

Overall, (despite the few mistakes here and there that nobody other than me would notice) I was happy with how everything turned out, down to the gorgeous thumbnails! I am an artist, after all~ :^)

I also have much more respect for video editors. They should be called VIDEO ANIMATORS!

ABOUT THE VOICES & AUDIO PROCESSING

When making a dub, it doesn’t mean we want to replace or best the original language, we just want to give it a new interpretation. In fact, the characters’ voice descriptions and direction provided in the scripts were heavily inspired by the seiyuu (Japanese VAs) and how they performed their lines.

Honestly, this was THE dream cast!! Some of the VAs had comparably similar voices to the Japanese ones which was an amazing coincidence. The ones that may not have sounded as similar had unique interpretations that I felt still suited their characters well. I also chose actors based on their performance, and everyone delivered!

Voice actors were not expected to imitate the Japanese voices and lines. They were provided direction and reference videos to help time their lines, but were otherwise given liberty when it came to their own interpretations.

You shouldn’t hear any jarring differences between the voice actors’ microphones and setups. That’s because I took the time to process the audio. Faith’s audio was submitted to me post-processed so it was used as a guideline for what the audio quality should sound like. Some of the others had comparable quality to Faith’s, so I only added compression to balance their volumes. Most of them benefited from equalization of various levels - this took some experimenting back and forth with the frequency spectrum. Lastly, a couple more benefited from clip fixing, noise gate, de-essing and/or click removal. It was very important for VAs to have at least decent room treatment; while small differences between mic frequencies can always be altered, echoes are difficult if not impossible to remove completely.

I feel that audio engineering is highly underrated and more important than ever as voice actors continue to record from home studios.

And in case it wasn’t already clear, this was purely voluntary work. No VAs or myself were paid to contribute anything for the project. Though, the experience alone was worth more than any amount of money.

ABOUT THE SCRIPT & TRANSLATIONS

HELIOS Rising Heroes「エリオスR」English Translation - Battle Lines

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ImWrAfvS_hgp6qr5qt30vCP63uHEk2o79uqY0h-3wL4/edit?usp=sharing

This spreadsheet consists of the literal translations for all the battle lines I could find in the game (it still isn’t done -yet-, plan to finish it when I get the chance). These are only fanmade and are not guaranteed to be accurate, especially as I wasn’t able to find another translator to help or proofread it.

After translating the lines, I made many additional revisions from the literal meanings such as changing the intention of the line slightly to flow better, having extra words added in to provide more context, or changing them completely. Thus, the lines used in the video are NOT literal TLs!

Another thing of note that may not seem apparent, but is what I feel an important aspect of character writing, is to remain completely unbiased towards all the characters. Personal favourites aside, I ensured that every Hero had their own spotlight as well as lines written in a way that remained faithful to their personality, no matter how unlikeable they were (looking at you, Asch Albright).

Even after giving voice actors their scripts, I made another revision in February after the release of the aforementioned Half-Anniversary video with the transcriptions for the ★4 Bursts, which is when I discovered a couple of mistakes with my transcriptions. This resulted in me having to edit out a part of one of the voice actors’ lines (Billy’s “String Show” line in his ★4 Burst) because of a translation mistake! I’m really glad I was able to double-check the correct lines before releasing the Preview video, or it would’ve looked pretty silly to Japanese viewers.

The last set of revisions were just minor edits to the subtitles (such as using kanji instead of kana) while I was working on subtitling all the videos.

Notable changes included:

WILL SPROUT

During attacking combo

Original line:

tanonda zo... ike! / “Counting on you... Reach!”

Rewritten line:

“I’ll become stronger... For everyone!”

The rewritten line is a condensed version of one of Will’s ★4 Evolved CG lines (“For everyone... I’ll become more and more stronger!”). He had “Reach!” in both his attacking combo and regular Burst, so I gave him an extra unique line.

★4 Burst

Original line:

warui kedo... kore de oshimai da! / “Sorry, but... it ends with this!”

Rewritten line:

“I’m sorry, but... it’s over for you! HAAAH!”

There were a couple of oversights I made with the script, and this was one of them that didn’t fit the animation properly. Props to Ryan for coming up with the extra shout at the end! So yeah, we kinda winged this line.

OSCAR BALE

When using skills against the enemy, during attacking combo, and in the ★4 Burst (repeat line)

Original line:

osoi! / “Slow!”

Rewritten lines:

“Too slow!” / “You’re slow!” / “Over here!”

Rewritten simply because I wanted to minimize repeated lines and change things up.

GAST ADLER

When supporting an ally, and during attacking combo

Original lines:

tetsudau ze / “I’ll help (you).”

itchouagari / “All done.”

Rewritten lines:

“I’ve got your six.”

“Target eliminated.”

I wanted to add in a few military terms to reflect Gast’s background.

FAITH BEAMS

★4 CG line (for the credits)

Original line (literal TL):

“It’s not terrible or evil, right? Surely this isn’t punishing... I guess?”

Rewritten line (with “mistake”):

“I’m not doing anything horrible or evil, alright? This is just business as usual... I suppose?”

Faith’s CG line had a mistake when I first translated and handed it off to his actor. I accidentally wrote “oshigoto” (work/business) instead of “oshioki” (punishment). The original has him pretty much saying the same thing twice anyway, so I would say the intention was still retained.

KEITH MAX

When supporting an ally

Original line:

gambare yo~ / “Do your best~.” or “Hang in there~.”

Rewritten line:

“Stay alive, would ya~?”

I know Keith’s meant to say “serious” things in a sarcastic or snarky way, but I just had to add in this fun line!

DINO ALBANI

Using skills against the enemy

Original lines:

haa! / “Haah!”

hei! / “Hey!”

Rewritten lines:

“I can do this!”

“Leave it to me!”

The Japanese lines for Dino’s offensive skills were rather basic, with the third and unchanged line “Here goes!” being a repeat line Dino also says when attacking. I wanted to give him some more lines - as standard as they are - to show his personality a bit more, along with having an additional fun West sector interaction. The changes fit the animations better too. (I actually had his VA say the "Haah!" line, but ended up using a different take of “Here goes!” in place of it.)

ABOUT THE FONTS

Fonts were taken from various sources and were either FREE for personal use or had an open font license. I didn’t have access to the commercial fonts (such as Futura) used in-game, so these were the following fonts I made use of:

Techna Sans looked similar enough to Futura when capitalized, and still looked decent in lowercase.

Jost* is a font that was derived from Futura. Some of its uppercase letters are sharper than Futura's, but it worked pretty well for the text in the credits.

Gau Font Over Drive was used for the ANIMATION SHOWCASE text.

Gen Jyuu Gothic LP was used for the majority of the Japanese text and its English letters were also used for the battle clip subtitles on Twitter.

Meiryo UI (default font) was used for the Preview videos’ subtitles.

Noto Serif JP (default Google font) was used for the serif Japanese text in the credits.

ABOUT NOXPLAYER ANDROID EMULATOR

ETA: AS OF VERSION 1.1.18 (04/23/21), EMULATORS NO LONGER WORK WITH HELIOSR (AS WELL AS OTHER CACALIA STUDIO GAMES). THE BELOW INFORMATION IS OUTDATED.

If, for whatever reason you’re interested in using NoxPlayer, you should take caution when installing it onto your machine. I don’t advocate for or recommend installing Nox. I had to resort to emulation so that I could record the footage and sounds directly from my computer using OBS. The reason why I used Nox specifically is because Cacalia Studio doesn’t like emulators, blocking most of them from running their games. I found further instructions on how to run the game in Nox from the Cacalia RPG Discord (via Twitter @HeliosR_en).

First, not all Nox versions are safe. It should only be installed from the official website, Bignox. More recent versions (I believe from 6.3.0.6 and up) may contain malware such as Segurazo and Chromium packaged with the installer which can be annoying to remove. The version of Nox I used was 6.3.0.0 (you can install older versions, then just don’t update it), which has Android 7 and doesn’t contain packaged malware (AFAIK).

Second, NoxPlayer may be “free” to use, but it comes with bloatware and profits off of its users’ data by collecting and sending it to many different servers. The below guide is what I used to debloat Nox and minimize communication to these servers. Scroll down the comments for additional domains to add to the hosts file.

Debloating & Optimizing Nox:

https://gist.github.com/Log1x/12d330ef7685d6fbc611d1d57efb5c29

This is another good guide that makes use of command prompt to remove additional bloatware from the emulator.

How to Remove Bloatware on Nox and LDPlayer Emulator:

https://codefaq.org/emulator/how-to-remove-bloatware-on-nox-and-ldplayer-emulator/

ENDING NOTES (TL;DR)

Images of the first and last video for the HeliosR project. We’ve come full circle!

One very tired and average person decided to translate, script, cast, direct, and edit an ambitious project all by herself using only FREE tools, and ended up taking too long to finish it. But at least she finished it, right?

Translators = RESPECT

Voice actors = RESPECT

Video editors = RESPECT

Audio engineers = R E S P E C T (their work is especially behind-the-scenes)

Hell, I even like Asch now.

During my time working on this, there was one question I always had in mind: “What would the fans want?”

I hope this follow-up has given you a bit of insight into the makings of the HeliosR project. Thank you for reading!

~RubyJCat

#heliosr #helios rising heroes #animation showcase #english #fandub #dub #voice #voices #voice acting #fanmade #fan #behind the scenes #my projects #english translation

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starberry-cupcake · 5 years

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It’s the end of Aro Week and I decided to throw caution to the wind and talk about something that can potentially be a polarizing topic. I’m putting it on read-more not only because of length but also because in 2020 this blog turns 10 years of age and I’ve learned to leave a window open for retreat when it comes to Opinions, so I don’t know how long I’ll dare to have this up.

This is going to be about the aroace experience, fandom, ships, representation, fanservice, amatonormativity, allosexual normativity and transformative fanwork.

So, basically, a minefield, so tread with care.

Since the dawn of fandom time, there has been an aspect of it that is known (nowadays) as transformative. There are studies, dissertations and essays about this, and most if not all agree on the fact that the portion of fandom that is transformative tends to belong to the less represented portion of it in the media they consume.

It’s mostly people whose identities are rarely represented those who tend to transform, making a space in their favorite pieces of media for themselves and others. That has, in tow, created a scene in which authors and content creators are born within fandom and get exposed to these types of content and reproduce them as well.

The cornerstone of transformative fandom, to the point of being one of the main organizational elements in fandom-driven platforms, are ships. And when someone mentions the word “ship”, it most often comes with the added non-said descriptive of “romantic” and “sexual” attached to it.

Now, like I said, a lot of those who are involved in transformative fandom tend to go for less represented types of identities, and heteronormativity tends to be questioned often. Sometimes, it is legitimately for representation purposes, sometimes it’s for objectifying reasons.

On the other hand, in the media-creating sphere, there is a thing known as “baiting”. This word is used when pieces of media hint towards non het relationships that end up not coming to fruition.

This issue has reached paragons of shamelessness with creators using fandom for their own purposes, like making a series win an award, getting renewed or gathering numbers in cons, to then turn against the same portion of fandom by banning transformative fandom from cons, meet and greets and having actors and crew members publicly shame fanfiction or fanart. It became serious shit.

This, in tow, brought another problem. Baiting (and what used to be considered “queer-coding”) started becoming an immediate red flag for people, a warning to whether getting engaged or not with a piece of media.

In the mostly legitimate pitchfork and torches march against baiting, canonically aroace characters were caught in the fire, and queerplatonic relationships suffered the price of not fitting in the amatonormative and allosexual normative space fandom created.

It’s a standard for fandom that one of the most necessary reasons for transformative work, for fanfiction mostly, is to make characters confess the love they never did confess on screen/page and, most often than not, fuck each other senseless as a sort of “necessary guarantee of their bond”. Consummation, if you will.

Statistically speaking, explicit fics tend to be much more popular than non explicit ones and romantic relationships are what move the main search engines of fanfic platforms.

Headcanon-wise, anyone can do what they want. If a character is interpreted one way or another, that’s not for anyone to police.

With aroace characters, though, it’s a bit tricky, because it’s incredibly rare the amount of times a character is explicitly in the spectrum, and any evidence you can gather, which isn’t outright hearing it, is a lack of something.

A lack that fandom interprets in another way.

You can have a character be sexually attracted and romantically attracted to another and have that be enough for an audience to understand their orientation, to an extent, but an aroace character seems to have to explicitly state it because the lack of romance or sex in their narratives will be interpreted by fandom as “incomplete”.

It’s more frequent for fandom to interpret a character who is not in a romantic or sexual relationship as “lacking” it and “fix” it in fic than for it to be headcanoned as aroace.

An adjacent issue happens with this and the old notion of “queer-coding”. Audiences tend to sometimes interpret that lack as the incapacity for a media creator to explicitly state that the character is homosexual.

The unintended consequence of years of coding, baiting and censorship of non het relationships in media was the invisibilization of relationships canonically in the aroace spectrum.

For example, the first reaction to Elsa from Frozen not having a romantic relationship in the movie was that she was an amatonormative and allosexual lesbian rather than somewhere in the aroace spectrum. Not that there aren’t a myriad of overlaying possibilities between the two things, but you get my point.

The lacking, the incompleteness that fandom most often sees in characters is filled in, most often than not, with gay romantic and sexual relationships, as a result of the years of queer-coding in media. You know, the good ol’ “if she doesn’t have a boyfriend, she must be a lesbian” stance. Fandom is, sometimes, like a family dinner with a 60+ year old uncle.

This is a problem because it creates, within fandom, instances of tug of war between two under-represented factions who both deserve the due representation and which sometimes, very often, overlay in the same people, who fall in both spectrums. It creates arguments and fights for one or other character between the two, as if they were mutually exclusive at all times.

I recently came across different levels of discourse and comments on two pieces of media for this reason, in two different sides.

One concerned Mackenzi Lee’s A Lady’s Guide To Petticoats & Piracy, in which the lead is aroace and there is a girl who is romantically attracted to her and there is a hint of a potential qp relationship. After reading it I found in some review spaces opinions that considered the author hadn’t “gone all the way” with it, as if it was “cop out” for a potential lesbian romance, taking into account that the first volume of the series was centered on an mlm relationship, which gave people certain expectations.

The opposite happened in the webcomic Go Get A Roomie, in which a female lead character who seemed to be aroace for years ended up in a romantic and sexual relationship with the protagonist and there isn’t so far much of a descriptive of where her identity lied to begin with, but with some meaningful conversations that seemed to imply the spectrum after having suffered trauma. And this can be perceived as a sort of “deception” and to the problematic notion of aroace-ness as a “treatable phase”.

Both stories are valid. Both roads towards self-discovery are valid. There isn’t an immediate denial of the spectrum for one or other possibility and both narratives are experiences that happen to people, even maybe the same people at different times in their lives.

But the two happen to include female relationships and boy are those underrepresented. Like I said, it isn’t that both things can’t overlay in a myriad of places, Lillian could be a demisexual demiromantic, for all I know, Sim could be homoromantic and asexual, we don’t know the specifics.

It’s likely and valid to have a gut reaction when you think you’re being represented and then you’re not entirely. And that’s understandable. But it’s a pity that we have tugs of war for scraps of representation.

So, on the one hand, with headcanons, we tend to get fandom fights, most often than not between underrepresented identities, because we’re fighting for the little there is, when in reality we should be uplifting each other...but anyway, moving on.

That’s all in the realm of interpretation, up until the moment the author makes the characters explicitly make choices and take action. That’s someone having a headcanon because of things the piece of media was doing and then having it proven right or wrong, or never having it proved at all.

The other thing, where it gets nasty, is when fandom “fixes” canonically aroace characters. This is also incredibly frequent, most often than not with mlm ships, or what fandom considers mlm ships.

One of the nastiest last year was the Good Omens debacle.

Neil stated that Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t “homosexual men” because they weren’t “men” and they weren’t sexual beings (the whole “making an effort” thing that explicit fic writers like to latch onto). Neil also said they love each other, however that wants to be interpreted, opening it up enough for it to be platonic or romantic or anything you want.

Fic writers have written more GO fics in the last year than ever probably, because of the show, and they’ve experimented with a lot of places of the spectrum. I’m not here to judge anyone because a GO fic was my favorite ace explicit fic I’ve read, so interpretations can be fascinating, I’m all here for them.

The problem arose when people (mostly cis het women) on social media (mostly twitter) started calling Neil a homophobe for not making them pretty much fuck on screen or explicitly state that they were fucking offscreen in canon.

That’s where we need to draw a line and reevaluate our life choices.

I can’t count the amount of posts, tweets and reactions I saw rejecting the possibility of Aziraphale and Crowley not being a) cis men and b) allosexual. The two things created a gutted reaction, to the point that you have to consider the nature and intended result of those comments and, in that case, who’s being an intolerant asshole.

There was a point in time in which fake woke rep discourse became the excuse for people to demand fanservice from creators, especially in the cis het women + mlm media overlay, and this is a problem. We need to separate the discourses, we need to figure out why we’re here and what we’re demanding.

Another similar example I saw recently, yet less overwhelming, was with Banana Fish and the queerplatonic relationship between Ash and Eiji in canon.

I came into BF later than most, but when I read the epilogue manga I found one of the earliest descriptions of a qp relationship I’ve seen, and there were a lot of interesting comments made by the author and other people interviewing her about why sex was never a part of their dynamic and how the bond they had was more of soulmates than romantic lovers and why it was meaningful all the same.

Still, even if the author doesn’t, Banana Fish is considered among the key “BL” animated series of the last few years, alongside stuff like Doukyuusei, Yuri On Ice, Given, etc. And fandom likes to “fix” that “lack of” situation often, apparently.

This case isn’t as feral as GO but it is, however, deceptive. Coming into BF I never would have guessed their relationship was to be qp because fandom let me believe it wasn’t.

And, in this case, the author explicitly stated that this was her intention, this was the story she wanted to tell, it wasn’t her adjusting to censorship or having to code her characters, it was, at heart, what we now can consider a qp relationship.

And, in all of these cases, in which there are aroace characters or relationships involved, or at least somewhere in the aro spectrum or the ace spectrum or both, there’s one main issue behind it: the lack of belief that relationships that aren’t romantic and sexual can be crucial.

That they can be storytelling worthy.

In media-creating and in fanwork-creating, it seems to be the norm to have an endgame romance, or at least for romance to be a key part of your content. It’s the expected box to tick for a fulfilling story, it seems, and the lack of it is the “problem” fandom likes to “fix” the most.

This is also mirrored in the platforms we use. There is a lack of possibility to tag qp relationships as something separated in ao3: the / is for romantic/sexual relationships and the & is for all-encompassing platonic relationships (described by the guidelines as family, teammates, friends, etc.). In order to write a qp relationship you have to tag it & as per guidelines but you have to add another descriptor because you’re not writing family or teammates, and in the case of fandom-polarizing ships, it can be a problem.

And all of this influences us as creators, to the point that it’s easier to write something we’ve never experienced, like romantic attraction, than it is to write without it, because we’ve heard the romantic stories all the time, we’ve grown up reading them, and we’ve learned that no kudos will come to your fic if you don’t have them in there, because it’s that / what’s gonna move the search engines towards your stuff.

Maybe, hopefully, with time and more media around us, we’ll learn different ways of exploring transformative fanwork. Maybe while knowing ourselves and others, we’ll start believing that a lack of romantic relationships doesn’t necessarily mean someone was “too much of a coward to not make these two explicitly x or y”.

Maybe we’ll learn to coexist because, after all, some of these things coexist within our own spectrums sometimes, and it’d be nice to see the capacity for us to not fight for the scraps of rep that media throws at us but be able to understand each other and ourselves enough to create the media that we need.

#long post when expanded #Opinions #aro awareness week #i'm not gonna tag the examples I'm already risking to much by mentioning them in the post #i don't know how long this will be up tbqh

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spinnerprincess · 6 years

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hmmmmm thought: the spicy combination of irresponsible creators and social media fucked with fandom and created this virulent form of anti-shipping? long post

Consider:

Show creators, comic writers, people in charge of popular content of all sorts join Twitter and other social media, making it easy for there to be cross-communication between creators and fandom. This was possible before but not common until recently

I’m going to use Voltron as an example but there are many others. Basically this show gets big and popular and, in a way that would not have been possible previously, so do its writers and artists etc. They are not only known and popular, but accessible, and talk about their work on the show in public social media spaces

Fandom has often expressed to a small degree “Gosh I hope my ship becomes canon” but that wasn’t always the focus. Prior to fandoms like this, imagining that your ship would become canon was wishful thinking for anything short of a YA love triangle, because everything else was super uncertain

But more importantly: fans had little to no influence. When say Parks and Rec was being created, sure, fandom existed, but no big director was thinking, “hmm, there seem to be a lot of Leslie/Ann shippers, maybe we should change to that”. Which they wouldn’t have anyway because no way would NBC have dared at the time (or any time soon tbh), but the point is, zero (0) big executives of shows gave a fuck about fandom and just focused on a combination of the creators’ stories and what would keep people watching

Then creators like Voltron’s come in and suddenly fandom has influence. Or the illusion of it, anyway. I mean, these creators are right here, visible, talking openly, and at any point someone can send a tweet and say “hey make my ship canon”

I don’t think up until this point things are completely terrible, but this is where you start factoring in irresponsible creators. When they start reaching out and acting like fandom plays a part in their decision making, it doesn’t even matter at that point whether or not that’s the truth. Fandom starts to believe that this is the case. Artists make ship art, creators tweet out hints about what’s to come or what relationships they like, they retweet things.

This is, to me, irresponsible behavior, when the creator gets too close to the fandom like this. It’s too easy for them to jerk around emotions by teasing about topics fans are deeply invested in. It’s too easy for them to make a mistake and say something that ruins someone’s ability to claim death of the author and enjoy the material. They can make excuses for their shows flaws and, worse, try to argue with people on the internet when they disagree with them. Those people then too easily get hate-bombed by fans of the creator. In some cases, creators will become deaf to important criticism because they’re too busy ignoring all criticism, being too used to receiving unfair hatred.

I someday imagine being a creator myself and I think I would have to restrain myself heavily, because I don’t want to fall into these same traps. I would rather engage with fandom rarely or not at all, so that I might listen more closely to the real criticism and take it into consideration and improve as a writer and a person, and keep from harming the people who most love what I can do. But, back to the main point.

When fandom believes that they have influence over canon, you get the situation we’re in now. For this portion of young fandom that has grown up in this environment, shipping can become canon at any time. They might think, “If I shout and scream loud enough about how much I love this pairing, the creator will hear me and it will happen.”

Fandom wars have become more literal, because to some extent, there really is a war going on, one for the attention of the creators. It spurs hatred towards other ships, and people search for ways to tear them down, finding the tiniest, most hint of problematic chunks as ways to disprove their validity. There’s an element of purity/problematic culture in this as well, where because ships are things people actually want to happen, and actively work to make happen, suddenly if you’re shipping a ship with even a minor age difference, there’s a certain logic of, “this person wants this an age difference ship to be portrayed on TV where kids can see it!!! they’re going to get kids hurt!!!!”

And that’s ridiculous. Sometimes people ship things that aren’t healthy, sometimes people ship things that don’t make sense. Sometimes people ship things that would be horrible in real life, but are fun for them to think of in fiction, or helping them to work through a trauma, and they appropriately tag and content warn everything so nobody who finds that content horrifying has to see it. Sometimes people ship even a minor age difference in the sense of “oh but like, not right NOW, I don’t even want them to get together until they’re both like 5-10 years older!” Sometimes I even ship things where I explicitly don’t want them to be canon! (I’ve had too many things become canon and yet the media itself disappoints me greatly...)

Shipping isn’t an aspirational thing, it’s not something that means “I think this is romantic” or “this is okay in real life” or even just “I actively want my show/book/media/canon to get these people together.” It doesn’t mean any of those, it just means, “I find this relationship interesting.”

But now, in a world where these ships can become canon (but probably not really), just by making enough art or fic (still no, but they want us to believe it can because then they get attention and sales), do you see how there’s pressure for shipping to take on that new meaning?

Hell, it’s even just true for characters now. Of course “if you like x character, you’re wrong” is going to become an outlook if you associate liking a character with thinking that character is inherently good or worth showing to people all the time. (Oh yeah - you can like a character and acknowledge that they’re bad. In fact, please do. You’re going to drive everybody up a wall if you like a character and never admit to those flaws.)

The idea that ships are INTENDED to become something real and presented to the whole audience is not only wrong, but often kind of gross. Fandom can’t exist healthily in an environment where fanworks are now participation in some kind of fandom hunger games where everybody except the media creators loses. Fanworks need to exist for themselves, for the sheer joy in saying, “I’m interested in this thing,” regardless of the material that inspired them.

So these are the take-aways for me:

Public media creators who engage heavily with the fandom, tease it and play with their hopes, are acting irresponsibly. I put more of the blame on them than on fandom in some ways, especially for younger fans just experiencing fandom for the first time. The rest of these tips are aimed at fans because I strongly doubt big media creators are reading this post, and any tips I have for them about this would be pointless.

Tagging content and putting warnings on it is, as always, vitally important. Not promoting unhealthy behavior is also important, but can live side-by-side with content that includes it. Fandom creators who fail to do this are irresponsible and/or deliberately harming people and kids especially.

Hey: don’t draw child porn! Thanks! The point above is not about that though.

Fans need to keep in mind that shipping doesn’t mean making something canon, or at least, doesn’t only mean it, and thinking that it does makes it easy for people to send hate, cause trouble, encourage bullying, etc.

Your ship can co-exist with other people’s ships. It’s okay to believe yours is the best, but you don’t have to do so by putting other ships down.

Whether or not your ship becomes canon really isn’t up to you. Please keep this in mind when creating fanworks and don’t get too invested in something that might not happen, or might happen but not in the way you want it to. Watch out for ways that media creators might be stringing you along.

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singingwordwright · 6 years

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Trying to break the cancellation issue down: Week 2

Okay, so tonight I posted an entirely-too-long tweet thread on this issue, in which I recapped a lot of what I laid out in my post last week, as well some things I mentioned in response to an ask yesterday, and also new questions, information, and supposition. I thought I would try to lay it out here in a slightly more coherent issue.

First, however, I’m going to put it behind a cut. Because then if I have to edit any of this information, all the reblogs will link to the edited version instead of reblogging the incorrect/out-of-date version. Then I won’t have to make any future new posts on this subject.

Please keep in mind that this is all educated guessing. None of us know what’s really going on.

To recap what I laid out last week:

@freeform doesn’t own Shadowhunters. Freeform merely “leases” the domestic distribution rights from Constantin Film, who holds the adaptation rights.

(ETA 6/16/18) Freeform, however, has exclusive rights to this show indefinitely and it goes no where unless Freeform chooses to give them up. (this is a correction as I was mistaken before in believing the distribution rights would revert to Constantin after Freeform turned down Season 4)

@netflix doesn’t own Shadowhunters either. Netflix “leases” the international distribution rights from Freeform.

The money Netflix and Freeform pay Constantin for those rights funds production of the show.

Itunes, Amazon Video and Hulu all have domestic streaming of the show as well as Freeform.

Hulu likely acquires its streaming arrangement from Freeform, as the show carries the Freeform logo on Hulu. This makes sense; Disney owns part Hulu and all of Freeform.

I don’t know if Amazon and Itunes carry SH internationally, and I don’t know if they have their domestic streaming agreement from Freeform or from Constantin. I DO know they have a different streaming format than Freeform; you buy the episodes individually or the season entirely, rather than paying for a subscription service (I don’t think the show is on Amazon Prime as part of their subscription package, but I could be wrong.)

Something to keep in mind going forward:

Freeform is a business, and it’s going to be more helpful to us to regard this stance on the issue in terms of cost/benefit analysis, rather than assuming pettiness or malice or vindictiveness. I know having a villain in this scenario fires us up and keeps us raring for the fight, and we need that energy, but ultimately it’s not helpful in drilling down to the core issues and finding solutions.

Stupidity and tone-deafness are definitely sins we could probably fairly lay at their door, however. They have clearly underestimate both the passion of their audience and the importance of this show on a societal level, and those are tragic, foolish mistakes.

Shadowhunters and Freeform: A History:

As anyone who has ever looked at leasing versus buying a car or apartment will tell you, there are certain benefits to both arrangements, but usually in the long run it costs less to own something rather than to lease it. Which means that Freeform isn’t making as much money off SH as it is off the shows that are actually Freeform originals.

Why did Freeform acquire the distribution rights, then?

Well, ABC Family was intending to rebrand as Freeform and go after the millennial crowd, and it needed some new, edgier, more adult, more diverse, less family-oriented shows than The Fosters or whatever.

They also wanted to break into the streaming market instead of going with a live-airing-only model.

A show like Shadowhunters, based off a series of books their target audience enjoyed growing up, was obviously a good bet. Especially since that audience is largely comprised of binge-watching cord-cutters.

The goal, then, was to use Shadowhunters to draw the new audience in and to have it “shepherd” less established, Freeform-original franchises by hoping the SH viewers would stick around to watch whatever was in the 9pm time slot. And that worked well for them.

But once Freeform had a number of other, original shows doing somewhat well, the “benefit” side of the cost/benefit ratio began to decrease. It’s an expensive show to produce that isn’t performing well in live ratings and whatever money they’re making off it, they have to give a hefty portion of that to Constantin Film.

The cost (at least in terms of lost potential revenue) was further compounded by the fact that Shadowhunters was occupying a very coveted time-slot, 8PM, for 20 weeks of the year. That is a massive piece of prime-time real estate to give to a show that is no longer really needed to perform the functions they once required from it.

Malec_Immortal over on Twitter posted a pretty astute (if somewhat vitriolic) series of tweets about how you can identify the timeframe when Freeform made the decision to stop investing so heavily in Shadowhunters. YouTuber Trini did a side-by-side comparison of the effort the Freeform Twitter put into promoting s2 and the effort they put into promoting s3 and it couldn’t really be more blatant.) Now, maybe they might have continued with the show had season 3 performed better in the live ratings, but it’s obvious they were all about reducing their cost while trying to glean what dwindling benefit they could from it.

I think it’s clear that Freeform was still promoting the show up through August, at least, because the cast’s appearance at SDCC was an obvious investment that doesn’t appear to have been used to promote any other Freeform properties (though perhaps a few Disney ones) but by NYCC in October, it’s obvious that they had slotted SH into the role of mentor/veteran show whose primary purpose was to pull in viewers for Freeform’s other, wholly owned properties.

Perhaps if SH had performed well enough in live-airing views to justify a continued investment, Freeform wouldn’t have wanted to reduce their episode order for season 4, but that didn’t happen. At that point, the cost of continuing with a full 20-episode season outweighed the benefit. They tried to negotiate for a reduced season order, Netflix wasn’t happy with that, and now here we are.

Where does that leave us?

Freeform got the drop on everyone in terms of setting the narrative for this whole thing. They blamed it on Netflix for yanking out of their distribution deal and leaving Freeform holding the bag. In truth, however, it appears the only reason Netflix pulled out is because Freeform violated an agreement by demanding a shorter season for s4.

Which makes sense. Of course Netflix would want more and Freeform would want less; this show has always performed better on streaming and internationally than it has on live television.

I think it’s clear that somewhere along the way, Freeform (while not abandoning its streaming emphasis) has reverted to considering live-viewing ratings in its considerations. An obvious example is Beyond. Beyond performed well enough in its first season (shepherded, as it were, by Shadowhunters) to get a second season, but a large part of its success was the fact that it was dropped all at once for streaming-on-demand. For whatever reason, Freeform decided that wasn’t profitable and went to a different model for season 2, and Beyond performed abysmally and got the axe.

Unfortunately for us, they’ve been applying the Beyond-season2 model all along, which means Shadowhunters hasn’t been performing as well either by their calculations (though a great deal of that is down to reduced marketing and just using the show as a vehicle to promote other, Freeform-original properties.

For all that they claimed it wasn’t about the ratings and was “purely economical” you can’t divorce the economics of a show from the ratings if you’re using a live-air-viewing model. They needed that coveted 8pm timeslot for something that would be more profitable. They could have moved SH to a less valuable time slot, but then it wouldn’t make them enough money to earn back what they were spending on the distribution license (which funds production.)

Yeah yeah yeah, but what does this mean for the show getting picked up?

To put it frankly, our biggest obstacle here on multiple fronts is season 3b. Specifically, it’s the fact that Freeform has pushed 3b back to Spring of 2019. That is screwing our efforts over, big time.

These are episodes that are already in the can. The final cut of 3x20 has been produced, according to Todd Slavkin. And these are episodes that Freeform owns and still hasn’t aired.

No one is going to want to acquire this show until 3b has aired. (Assuming Freeform is willing to let anyone acquire it.) Which means no one is going to want to acquire it until Summer of 2019. And we probably wouldn’t get season 4 until spring of 2020 at the earliest.

I can’t think of a single other show that has been canceled with half the season still month away from being aired like this. And if it has happened, it probably wasn’t picked up by anyone else (if at all) until after the season was done.

Look at it this way. It’s obvious from their CEO’s tweets that Constantin would love to see the distribution rights pass to someone else (probably Netflix.) Netflix may even be willing to pick them up (if Freeform is willing to sell,) considering that who Constantin’s CEO tagged in his tweets.

But what happens to those 10 episodes that are in the can? Whoever picks the show up has to wait until Freeform is done airing those eps before they can begin marketing, and probably even filming.

Maybe someone would be willing to pay Freeform for those eps, but that’s highly unlikely. What new network wants to start a show mid-season like that? And would they even be willing to pay enough for Freeform to recoup their losses on production AND potential losses on advertising? A new network will want the story to be in a place where new viewers who have never seen it before will be able to tune in and quickly pick up on what is going on, and considering the cliffhanger S3a left off on, that’s...not something anyone EXCEPT Netflix (or maybe Hulu or Amazon, who already have the previous episodes in their libraries) would want to pick up. That pretty much rules out...every other network.

Furthermore, again, the show has always done best streaming. Odds are good that ONLY a streaming service is going to want the show.

Some questions we need to ask:

Will whoever acquires the show be paying Freeform to “adopt” their distribution license, or will Freeform’s distribution license lapse and a new license need to be negotiated with Constantin? (ETA 6/16/18: we appear to have an answer on that.)

Also, CAN Freeform even get out of the plan to film/air the 2-hour finale at this point? The contract has probably already been negotiated. Unless they somehow have an option to back out of it, they’re committed.

So, it may be that they HAVE to make that episode. Which probably won’t begin filming until season 4 would have begun filming, probably around August. Which probably means the earliest they could air the season/episode is in January and we would HAVE to wait until spring/summer of 2019 before anyone else can pick up this show. IF they’re willing to pick up this show. If potential buyers see interest has waned because of the long wait and general frustration and disgust, they’re not going to want the show.

Will potential buyers even be interested if the show has run out of book-based material? The 2-hour finale is supposed to wrap up the final book of the series, and while our main concern is that 2 hours won’t be enough to do all that material justice (especially with any non-book-based plotlines also needing to be resolved.) Any future seasons would, in essence, be a spin-off using the same characters. Can Constantin even do that with the adaptation rights?

So what do we do?

I’m not saying we should stop fighting, not at all, but I’m saying we need to conserve our energy because this is going to be a very long haul. It’s a situation that is messy and complicated beyond any other show that I’ve ever heard of being cancelled and picked up by another network. We very likely won’t see any fruit from our labors until after 3b and the finale air, whenever that may happen. I think with the negative publicity we’re generating, Freeform may find it useful to get us out of their hair sooner rather than later, but the time required to produce the finale ep is an issue there.

We really need more answers to know how to most effectively apply pressure to get the show renewed. Our best bet for getting those answers is the same place we’ve gotten the information we have so far; interviews and articles. Some media outlets are already latching onto this story (and largely supporting us, or reporting that we’re not going away) but we need to keep making this A STORY in order to get them to report on it (and hopefully use their access to get more answers than we have.)

HOWEVER I could be wrong about any or all of this. OUR BEST BET IS TO CONTINUE BEING LOUD. DO NOT STOP TRYING TO GET THE SHOW PICKED UP.

#shadowhunters #SaveShadowhunters

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ai-da-ice · 6 years

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[Fan Account] The Da-iCE a-i Contact Fan Meet Experience!

On 6/8 I went to my very first Da-iCE fan meet, ai-contact 5 ~Fight Back~. Unlike with concerts where I had a good idea of what to expect due to watching all of Da-iCE's concert DVDs, I really had no idea what the fan meet would be like or what the group would do during the event. I was bit worried that it would be 100% talk and I wouldn't be able to follow well, but to my pleasant surprise, a lot of different things happened during the fan meet outside of just talking, and I was able to understand quite a bit of it!

The venue this time was Toyosu PIT, which is somewhat on the small side. There are no higher levels, only the ground floor. I was in the 20th row, which put me closer to the back than the front, but my view was still decent. They also had a few monitors set up, but I didn't really need to rely on those too much throughout the night.

I arrived a bit early to buy merchandise. Da-iCE's fan meets usually have some unique merch options that differ from their tour merch. This year's merch line up included a new lightstick for the group's anniversary year, which I really wanted so I could complete my lightstick collection. I also bought 3 pins for the group-- these are given randomly and you can't choose which member or design you receive. I got I LOVE TAIKI and I LOVE YUDAI pins and one Hayate design as well. Since I love all the members, I don't want to sell or trade, but I may possibly buy some Sota versions from a fan if I can find them at a good price!

For the fan meets, if you buy a copy of the new single, you can also receive a ticket for an event after talk. At the after talk, you can write a question for the members on a slip of paper which they may select to answer. You also receive a random new seating ticket for re-entering the building. I got ticket number #405, which put me around the 10th row, much closer to the stage than my original ticket!

The main event started at 7 PM with a video of the members playing rock-paper-scissors to determine who would be the event MC. Naturally, Sota lost, which meant he would not be participating in any of the games, but would be in charge of directing the members in all their challenges. The very first thing on the agenda would be to choose an event keyword. The staff would keep track of how many times each member used the word and tally it into their final score to determine the event's "winner." The keyword of the event this time was "yabai," a word used in Japanese for many different things. It usually means something like "incredible" or "cool," but it can also mean "dangerous" or even “scary” depending on how you use it. Toru-Yudai-Hayate-Taiki weren't told the key word, but us audience members were shown on a screen.

Right after the key word was selected, my question about whether or not there would be performances was answered as the music to Hayate's solo song "Sunadokei" began to play! I've never seen Hayate perform solo in person before, and let me just say: HE WAS INCREDIBLE! Hayate has said in the past that he doesn't have a lot of confidence in his voice and didn't intend to join the entertainment industry as a singer, but his level of control and stability was quite good for someone who isn't a lead singer! I was so impressed by his delivery!

Next, Sota also got to perform his solo song from Kake Hayabusa, "Owari Aru Tabi". As expected of Sota, the performance was absolutely gorgeous, and he conveyed the emotions of the song powerfully and beautifully.

With these two performances wrapped up, the group started playing games. In the first challenge, the members had to collect fans from the audience using different categories. Hayate had to collect people whose birthday was June 8th. Yudai had to collect people who still used old fashioned flip phones. Toru collected people with a specialized professional license. Taiki collected people who had dice-shaped fashion accessories. Unfortunately, I didn't fill any of the requirements, but the fans who did were taken up onstage and could talk to the members a little bit about their birthday or special items. I couldn't get an exact count, but it looked like Taiki collected the most people, and Hayate the least for this category.

After that, the group played a gesture game. The audience members were shown a word or phrase on the big screen and we would have to mime it for the members to guess. Some were song titles like "You&I" or "Tokyo Merry Go Round," but others were more complicated like the members' radio programs or special events. Toru ended up winning this game, with Yudai coming in last.

After the first two games, we were back to performances! Toru performed his solo song "hitofuyu". Even though it didn't match the summer weather since it's a winter song, he still delivered a great performance. He seemed a little nervous to be performing on his own, but I think he did a good ob overall! The group then got together to perform the 5 vocal, bossa nova version of "HELLO." They've gotten really strong at performing as 5 vocally, so I hope they continue the trend of doing 5 vocal songs in the future!

The next performance was chosen by a fan vote. We had three options: Stay, what you say, and Did You Know? Yudai had a sound level meter, and we were supposed scream "Haaaaaaaaiiiiii!" for the song we wanted them to perform. I originally voted for "what you say", but it tied with "Stay" and we had to revote, so I changed my mind to "Stay" so I could hear Sota's epic high note. "Stay" wound up winning and we received a great performance of the Fight Back era masterpiece. Unfortunately, Yudai made a little mistake in the choreography right when he was at the front of the formation, and we teased him a little for it ^^ When the performance was over, he jokingly hung his head in shame for a bit.

After, the event went live for about twenty or so minutes on SNS-- Da-iCE's Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. We were also allowed to film this portion with our cell phones if we wanted. Da-iCE played a video announcing the release of their upcoming 4th album BET (out August 8!) as well as their upcoming tour beginning in September at Makuhari Messe and ending in January was two days in Osakajo Hall. I was so excited to hear about the album release, but a little upset that I'd miss out on the tour. It's about one month after I'll have moved back to America, and I would have really loved to see it T^T While the live broadcast was still recording, the group also did a performance of new single FAKESHOW.

When the live broadcast shut off, Sota announced the event keyword to the remaining four members and the staff showed the tally of how many times each member had said it. It was a surprisingly small count: Taiki, Toru, and Hayate had each said “yabai” 3 times, while Yudai had only said it twice.

With that final game over, they tallied up the total score. Toru won by a huge margin (his score was 26 and the next highest score was Hayate with 14), and Yudai and Taiki tied for last. Toru's prize for winning was a box of specialty food, while Yudai and Taiki had to do a punishment game of spelling the word "Osakajo" with their butts. It may have been a punishment for them, but it definitely wasn't for us! While Sota was decided what word they would have to spell, they did a little bit of twerking and model posing for us >_< I wish I could have taken a video to share the visual delight, but rules are rules!

The group wrapped up with a relaxed and light hearted performance of TOKYO MERRY GO ROUND where they spent as much time laughing and trolling each other as they did performing. They also threw out signed balls to the fans, but I didn't come close to catching any. Since I was closer to the back, whenever a member threw a ball to our area, it would hit the rafters of the building and fall to the ground.

When the event was over at close to 9 PM, we had to go outside again to re-enter for the after talk. Like I mentioned, I was in row 10, about in the center. For each fan event, different members would be answering the questions, and for our event we had Yudai, Hayate, and Taiki. The after talk was very brief and the boys dug through the questions and pulled out the questions they thought were the most interesting to answer. Unfortunately I was suffering from a bit of a stomachache this point (having taken a two hour walk on a full stomach before the event, bad idea T^T) and my concentration wasn't so good. My brain wasn't very much on what they were saying, since I was just kind of staring dazedly at their faces. Forgive me! The one question I caught was about where they wanted to visit in America-- they said LA and New York, the obvious choices! The after talk went by quite quickly, but it was good to have the chance to see them again, especially since my view was much closer than the original event.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience, and I'm so glad I got to go! I really feel like there are no walls between Da-iCE and their fans. They talk to us comfortably, like friends, and aren't afraid to show off all their silly sides. Even though their popularity is increasing, they still feel like the companionable, humble guys they were back when they got started. Every chance I have to see them really makes me so happy inside :D

#da-ice #fan account

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pixelproductions · 4 years

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How to Assess the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

Learn how to assess the ROI of your marketing efforts to reduce wasted ad spend and maximize marketing investments.

As a business owner, marketing is your key to growing your audience and bringing in sales. However, you must understand how your marketing campaigns perform to ensure they’re effective and working as intended. That’s where assessing your ROI, or return on investment, comes in handy. You’ve probably heard ROI time and time again, as it’s one of the most important calculations in the business world.

To ensure your marketing efforts are proving effective, it’s important to look at how well your marketing campaigns are performing. Below, we’ll provide a detailed guide on ROI and how to measure it, along with other helpful information that can help you improve your marketing efforts.

What is ROI?

Return on investment (ROI) refers to how much money you earn on a particular investment. When it comes to marketing, it refers to how much money you generate in sales after rolling out a marketing campaign.

A simple ROI calculation goes as follows:

(Sales Growth – Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs = ROI

For example, let’s say you spend $1,000 on a social media campaign that promotes items on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You then find that sales grew by $5,000.

Using the ROI equation:

($5,000 – $1,000) / $1,000 = 400%

While this is just an overly optimistic example, it clearly shows how ROI can be calculated after rolling out a marketing campaign. However, it’s important to remember that calculating ROI is often over-optimistic, as it assumes the marketing campaign alone is the only factor that contributed to the 400% increase in sales.

Instead, for a more accurate depiction of how successful a marketing campaign was, business owners should conduct comparison analyses where sales from the business line are compared from before the marketing effort to after. This way, you can determine its true success.

Ways to assess ROI

While the simple ROI formula can tell you a lot about how well a certain investment is performing, there are additional ways you can assess marketing ROI.

A common way to measure ROI is through marketing attribution models, which assess the ways customers came into contact with your products or services. Below are the different ways to evaluate ROI through different marketing attribution models.

Single source marketing attribution

With the single source marketing attribution model, credit is assigned to one touchpoint, typically the first touch or last touch, which refers to the channel the consumer engaged with.

For example, with the first-touch attribution model, credit will be given to the first channel a lead interacts with, such as a blog she clicked on when searching for a particular item. However, this method fails to address any other interactions a lead had along the way to making a purchase.

The last-touch attribution model does the opposite—credit is given to the last channel a consumer engages with, such as an emailed newsletter that directs them to a product to purchase. Even though the single source marketing attribution model can help you assess a marketing campaign’s ROI, it’s considered outdated due to the vast amounts of marketing channels consumers have access to that can lead to a sale.

Multi-source marketing attribution

Through the multi-source marketing attribution model, credit is given to every touchpoint a consumer makes along their journey to making a purchase. The multi-source marketing attribution model will give credit to every stop a lead makes, such as a Google ad, social media post, webinar, and email newsletter. However, one of the major drawbacks of this model is that it doesn’t take into account each channel’s portion of the contribution toward a consumer’s purchase.

With that said, there are several multi-source marketing attribution models you can use to assess ROI:

Linear: Equal weight is given to each touchpoint a lead makes

Time decay: Credit is given to more recent touchpoints, as they’re believed to be more impactful than older touchpoints.

U-shaped: Credit is given to two touchpoints: 40% to the first touchpoint and 49% to the lead creation, with the extra 20% credit given to the touchpoints made between the middle.

W-shape: 30% credit is given to three touchpoints, including the first touchpoint, the lead creation, and opportunity creation, with the additional 10% given to touchpoints made in the middle.

Full path: Credit is given to every major milestone a consumer reaches, including the final close, with lower credit given to the smaller touchpoints in between the milestones.

Custom: Depending on your marketing efforts, you can create your own custom model to assign your own attribution weights to different touchpoints.

The multi-source marketing attribution models explained above offer a more impartial way of measuring and assessing your marketing efforts’ ROI.

Weighted multi-source attribution

The weighted multi-source attribution model is often the most accurate ROI measurement but can be extremely hard to administer correctly. Through this method, the weight given to each touchpoint a consumer makes on their journey is measured by which touchpoint carried the most weight. For example, if a social media campaign brought in the most leads that lead to purchases, this touchpoint will be given more credit than a Facebook ad that garnered only a few leads.

Wrapping up on assessing the ROI of your marketing efforts

Understanding how effective your marketing efforts are is essential as a business owner. The last thing you want is to funnel large sums of money into a marketing campaign that’s not bringing in any leads and sales.

The model you use to assess ROI ultimately depends on the type of business you run, and some trial and error. With that in mind, take time to try out each attribution model to see which one gives you the most accurate ROI numbers. Once sorted through, you’ll be able to determine which channels are performing exceptionally well and which channel might need to be reworked or omitted altogether.

Measuring ROI can be quite a challenge, especially when there are multiple touchpoints within a consumer’s journey. However, carefully analyzing each touchpoint to determine which ones are most effective can help you devise new marketing campaigns to continue growing your sales.

#ways to assess roi #calculate roi #measure roi #marketing roi

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michaelandy101-blog · 4 years

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What is TikTok For Business & Should You Use It in Your Marketing?

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/what-is-tiktok-for-business-should-you-use-it-in-your-marketing/

What is TikTok For Business & Should You Use It in Your Marketing?

Musical.ly, created in 2014, was a music sharing app whose users would share short videos of themselves lip-synching to different music snippets. The platform was among the top 100 downloaded apps for two years straight, and users posted around 13 million videos per day.

In 2018, Musical.ly was purchased by Chinese tech firm Bytedance and merged with the firm’s new app, TikTok. TikTok, like Musical.ly, is a video sharing social network where users share short clips of themselves lip-synching and dancing to trending music. It’s since expanded to house more diverse videos, like short comedy skits and how-to home improvement videos.

After the merger, TikTok’s active user base grew by almost 800%. With such sizable user activity, marketers have realized that the advertising potential on the app is high. The creators of TikTok have also realized this and recently launched a new platform called TikTok For Business.

What is TikTok For Business?

TikTok For Business is an all-in-one tool for marketers to advertise on TikTok. Instead of devising their own strategy, the platform helps marketers through the entire process of creating advertisements, setting budgets, reaching target audiences, and analyzing campaign data.

The platform’s stated goal is to help businesses unleash their creative side by teaching them how to use the app through their e-learning service and guiding them through making advertisements on the Ads Manager platform.

Marketing Options on TikTok For Business

The sole marketing format for businesses to use on TikTok is video advertisements. The TikTok For Business Ads Manager platform helps marketers create these advertisements, and they can choose from five different formats.

TopView Ads

TopView ads on TikTok are videos that appear once a day, immediately after a user opens their app for the first time. Here’s an example of a TopView ad by candy company M&M that they’ve created to advertise a virtual Halloween experience.

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TopView ads can be up to 60 seconds long, which is longer than the typical run-time for TikTok videos. Because of this, it’s perfect for businesses looking to advertise products or services that require longer periods of attention, like TV trailers.

In-Feed Ads

In-Feed ads are videos that appear on a user’s discovery page, otherwise known as a For You page. This is where users land when they open the app. The For You page features videos that the TikTok algorithm believes are of interest to the user based on their app activity.

These ads are the fourth video users see as they scroll through their feed. For reference, this type of advertisement is similar to those that appear in a user’s Instagram feed. Here’s an example of an In-Feed ad created by food delivery service GrubHub.

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In-Feed ads are especially valuable for marketers looking to use TikTok to drive sales conversions, as the videos can feature a call-to-action (CTA). Acorns, a finance business, has used the In-Feed CTA feature to prompt viewers to download their app.

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Some brands have created their own version of In-Feed ads by partnering directly with influencers. For example, Raising Cane’s Restaurant partnered with famous TikTok influencer Chase Hudson to promote their business (you can check it out in the video below).

Users who follow Hudson would see this video within their For You feed.

Branded Hashtag

Branded Hashtags are advertisements that businesses use to inspire TikTokers to create content around a brand-related hashtag of their choice. Businesses using this ad format have exclusive access to the hashtag, which is not the case on other social media sites. Its exclusivity comes along with a high price tag, and reported average costs are around $150,000 USD for six days.

For example, say you’re a sportswear company that has just launched a new athletic shirt called Blue Shirt. You may create a branded hashtag called #InMyBlueShirt, where you encourage TikTok users who have your product to post videos of them doing physical activities in the shirt.

Jennifer Lopez, a music artist, has used the Branded Hashtag feature to advertise her song, Pa Ti. The hashtag is called #PaTiChallenge, and Lopez posted a video of herself dancing where she encouraged other TikTok users to take part in the challenge by replicating her dance.

The #PaTiChallenge hashtag has garnered 2.4 Billion views.

Hashtag Challenges can be featured on TikTok’s Discover page, where users can find new creators and browse trending hashtags. The Discover page is similar to Instagram’s Explore page.

The hashtag challenge #WorldSeries, sponsored by Major League Baseball, is featured on TikTok’s Discover feed, and the hashtag encourages users to post videos showing how they’ve celebrated baseball games. Clicking on the hashtag brings users to an internal landing page that features the sponsors’ logo, challenge description, and other videos using the hashtag.

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Brand Takeovers

Brand Takeovers are an ad format that can include TopView, In-Feed, and Branded Hashtags all at once. They can also be videos, gifs, or still images. The takeover aspect of these ads is that TikTok only features one business per day, and the starting cost is around $50,000 USD per day.

Guess, a fashion company, ran a Brand Takeover on TikTok to advertise their denim jeans. Over six days, their TikTok account gained over 12 thousand new followers and generated a 14.3% total engagement rate. Their Brand Takeover included Top View, Branded Hashtag, and In-Feed ads.

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Branded Effects

Branded Effects ads use 2D, 3D, or AR to add images of your products into TikTok videos. Brands typically create stickers of their products or create filters that TikTokers can use when creating their videos. These filters and stickers increase engagement and brand awareness, as using them typically involves playing brand-specific games.

Puma, a clothing company, used the Branded Effects feature to advertise their new soccer shoes. Their 3D sticker prompted users to play a virtual reality game with a soccer ball. They paired their Branded Effects sticker with a hashtag challenged that generated over 100,000 videos of user generated content.

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Should you use TikTok For Business in your marketing strategy?

TikTok For Business comes at a time when it’s evident that businesses have had success with advertising on TikTok.

Take Dunkin’, for example. Dunkin’, also known as Dunkin’ Donuts, is an American coffee company. They’ve capitalized on the advertising abilities of TikTok and partnered with a popular influencer, Charli D’amelio, who often drinks their coffee in her videos.

At only 16-years-old, D’amelio has over 7 million followers on TikTok. While her platform is primarily centered around dancing videos, she announced her partnership with Dunkin’ in a TikTok video that has been viewed over 59 million times in less than two months. Dunkin’ reported that they saw a 45% sales boost the day after the announcement.

Ultimately, the decision to use TikTok For Business in your marketing strategy depends on your overall business goals and desired campaign outcomes. To make the decision easier, we’ve compiled a pro and cons list for marketers to use when making this decision.

TikTok For Business Pros and Cons

pros

Cons

TikTok Ads Manager will help you expose your content to new audiences.

The ‘similar audiences’ feature helps you select lookalike audiences that are similar to your target ones.

TikTok has over 600 million active monthly users and is available in 155 different countries. If your brand is smaller or less well-known, this could bring significant awareness to new audiences.

32.5% of TikTok’s user base is between 10 and 19, and 29.5% are between 20 and 29. If your target audiences are of different age groups, you could gain exposure to a new type of customer.

TikTok’s largest user base is not representative of all demographic groups.

Since its primary user base is very young, the audiences that businesses market to on the platform may be significantly younger than intended target audiences.

Advertising on the app may require you to tap into a user base that may not understand the need for your product or service.

TikTok thrives off of informal, ‘behind-the-scenes’ content.

Authenticity matters to Generation Z, and they tend to shy away from the ‘ sales-to-drive ’ leads marketing ads.

If your brand or business typically creates sales-driven formal content, utilizing the platform can help you diversify your content types and display a new, creative side of your business.

TikTok requires niche content.

The type of content that TikTok calls for may not be in-line with your brand mission.

If you’re a more serious, sales-focused business, learning to adapt to the fun and exciting content required for TikTok versus just driving sales conversions may be a difficult skill to learn.

44.81% of the world’s population owns a smartphone.

As the number of mobile users worldwide continues to grow, having a mobile-first marketing strategy is worth considering.

You can use TikTok for Business to create advertisements on your phone and essentially run a portion of your marketing strategy from your pocket.

It’s not easy to link your website to your TikTok videos.

If your website is your primary way of converting leads, you’ll need to get creative and develop additional ways to drive leads.

TikTok has higher engagement rates than Instagram and Twitter.

In 2019, TikTok’s average engagement rate at all follower levels was higher than both Instagram and Twitter. Small accounts with just 1,000 had an average engagement rate of 9.38% .

Even if you’re a smaller brand just starting on TikTok, you’re guaranteed to have an engaging audience.

TikTok For Business reporting tool can’t be integrated with other platforms.

All marketers know that data is crucial to understanding the success of marketing campaigns. At the moment, it doesn’t seem as though the platform can integrate with your preferred insights tool.

While the Ads Manager is convenient, it will require an additional step for collecting data that you can use to understand your campaign engagement and ROI.

TikTok For Business can be a valuable tool.

Should you choose to incorporate TikTok’s new service into your marketing strategy, it can be a valuable tool for growth. While the app does call for niche types of content, brands and businesses can diversify their strategy and advertise to a new audience.

Whatever your final decision is, TikTok For Business is available to those who want to harness the app’s advertising potential.

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