#but only indirectly mostly because me no good at video games

[stardusteyes]

Library of Ruina was so based for making the Wizard of Oz a lady

[detectivenyx]

this goes out to kokichi fans;

Im literally so disappointed with kokichis character and writing its kinda sad, considering the fact that hes my comfort character, but his writing is absolutely terrible, i wont just sit here and say that hes the best character just because hes my favorite, most kokichi fans dont like the idea of liking characters that are TERRIBLY written, its absolutely okay to admit that kokichi is not a great character, that being said, hes only my comfort, simply because i think hes adorable. Im glad I found your acc aeris/nyx, youre speaking your truth and i like that alot, its sad to see other kokichi fans bring you down for an opinion

i actually don't get a lot of kokichi fans screaming at me (not in any serious capacity)? even i'll admit, a lot of kokichi's reputation among fans had been mostly an extremely vocal minority and the vast majority of his fans are chill. honestly, im glad that he brings comfort to people - i still don't think he's great on a traditional writing sense, but things that aren't good still have more value than the critique designating them so.

additionally, the offhanded 'he only works in this very specific circumstance' comment i made is something i've been reconsidering, given those all-important themes i won't stop screaming about. he's not a 'human' character, and i think you could still pull off what he does with a human character, but i understand him a bit better these days as a direct obstacle trying to pull everyone out of the experience and shatter immersion. it still makes no sense that he's aware of it, but he's intended to show just how stale 53 danganronpa games would be, and how sticking to a formula would exacerbate this staleness. he is designed to work towards the ultimate reveal - that in-universe, danganronpa had been going on for longer than the fucking simpsons. i don't like him still with him indirectly or directly getting 4-6 people killed (25-33% of the participants) and yet being supposedly redeemed post-mortem, but i can recognise the idea they were trying to present and i think that that was actually executed pretty well.

if i can give one last thing - you don't need to be apologetic for liking him. if people give you genuine shit and grief for liking him to the point where you need to feel apologetic and go 'don't worry, im not like those kokichi fans, i think he's awful'? those people are assholes. i recognise the irony in that statement since because i'm a big youtuber in the DR sphere, i am largely That Asshole, and i've made that bed and i'll lay in it. i think im more willing to hear from the other side of the pond these days (likely since im tired of 'criticism' that sounds like it's from a cinemasins video, lol), but bear in mind im not your friend and you do not need to do things to impress me - do what makes you happy.

[madegeeky]

Yeah it’s bizarre there’s so much fanservice but they changed the story so radically that it’s not like fans were happy either. Harry is sweet but I will admit he’s rather bland, since the first game has less story and characterization than later entries (which makes it worse how much they messed up when it’s the most straightforward the games get). It’s meat is on video game things, the exploring, the atmosphere and it shines there . The story is told mostly indirectly in the background.

I definitely think there were moments in the movie where you could see the atmosphere they were going for and it was quite good. But they just couldn't keep it up. And, yeah, any game that's meant to be told through exploration is going to suffer heavily when moved to movie format unless the writer is willing to make massive tweaks to basically every element of the story they're trying to tell. Games and movies, although now very similar, are not the same medium (especially games made 10 or more years ago) and treating them the same is asking for failure from the very beginning.

Anyway, re: later entries. The only two other things I know about the Silent Hill games (besides the fact that PT was the best horror game to ever exist and whoever stopped us from getting that Silent Hill should be taken out back and thrown in a pit of those giant cockroaches) is that

1) A friend of mine who liked story- and character-rich games as much as I do, really loved the second one and they thought that I would like it if I played it. (Which I didn't because I can do horror movies all day but I'm an absolutely baby when it comes to playing horror.)

2) Via them trying to sell me on the game, it's apparently very much to do with a man who lost his wife and the game is more psychological than it looks because the monsters and everything are all directly related to his guilt over his wife's death?

[paintedlight]

Supernatural Season 15 & Sufjan Stevens' “The Ascension”

Teaser: there’s a song on this album called "Die Happy” where the lyrics are just “I want to die happy” for 5 minutes and 45 seconds. yeah. yeah.

Disclaimer: yes it’s all a stretch and I’m overthinking it but also… am I? (yes) 

long post time! know that reading ahead may hurt you and yes it does get worse the further down the track list you get 💕 have fun kids

So just to start off, I think it’s funny that something Sufjan’s discography & Supernatural have in common is the 15+ years of the internet arguing if it’s gay or not, and the answer ending up being yes. PLUS there’s the obvious connection of American mythos + mythology + calvinist themes (I am hissing) + religious trauma prevalent in both. 

If you’re a fan of both like I am, it’s easy to connect them— notable connections being songs like “John My Beloved” and “The Owl and the Tanager” or even “John Wayne Gacy Jr.”, but I’m going to focus on Sufjan's 2020 album, “The Ascension” since even the arc itself seems so connected to season 15 of Supernatural, specifically. 

At least in my head it does <3 enjoy 

MAKE ME AN OFFER I CANNOT REFUSE

When interviewed about the meaning of this track, Sufjan explains that this song is about asking God, “what do you have to say for humanity?” That it’s about desperation, creation, and devastation. It’s about frustration with divinity. Also the vibes are 10/10. Need I say more 

RUN AWAY WITH ME

This song is beautiful, it makes me want to sit in some grass and stare at the sky. 

Some lines that make me Dean/Cas crazy are the two lines in verse 1 and verse 2 that mirror each other by being in the same place melodically:

Verse 1: they will terrorize us / with new confusion / with the fear of life that seeks to bring despair within

Verse 2: I will bring you life / a new communion / with a paradise that brings the truth to light within

Yeahhh so the words “Despair” and “The Truth” were mirrored in this song yes it was coincidental yes I’m clinging to it. It fascinates me 

But this song is about begging someone to stay with you.

sweet falling remedy / come run away with me / you’re all I ever need

VIDEO GAME

My first thought when I heard this song was about how it was such a song for enneagram 4s. If you don’t know what that means, I think Dean is a 4 and wrote a post about it here. 

AND @trapperjohnmcintyre also made the connection between these lyrics and Dean in this post, and honestly I don’t need to say much more than that??

The song is about feeling paranoid and angry that God is controlling your every move and you can’t escape it (aka hating the doctrine of predestination). Of course it’s also about not wanting to follow societal scripts. 

You just want to have an easier life instead of the weight of good and evil resting on your back!!!

I don’t want to put the devil on a pedestal / I don’t want put the saints in chains / I just want to make my life a little easier / I don’t want to play your video game

Also these painful lines, as a treat: 

I don’t want to love you if you don’t receive it / I don’t want to save the world that way

Oh, I almost forgot, also. At the end, the narrator gives up. He’s like well I guess I can’t escape. Gotta follow the procedure. Gotta be a puppet.

I don’t want it to go down that way / but in a way you gotta follow the procedure / so go ahead and play your video game

  LAMENTATIONS

I don’t have much to say about this one but this line always makes my heart ache idk:

I was only thinking of human kindness

TELL ME YOU LOVE ME

Here we gooooooo. Y’all aren’t ready.

Thesis: Tell me you love me despite the primordial darkness about to overtake me. And even if you don’t, I’m going to love you. 

15x18 Despair anyone?? 

I want to just paste the whole song but, here—

DIE HAPPY

Yep, "Die Happy" immediately follows "Tell Me You Love Me." Yes, the lyrics are just “I want to die happy” over and over for almost 6 minutes. 

First of all, the repetition mirrors the end of the song Fourth of July, from Sufjan’s previous album Carrie & Lowell, where Sufjan sings “we’re all gonna die” over and over.

Parallels, baby.

But I noticed something else about this recently though— in Die Happy, if you are listening to it in your headphones, there’s this weird sound that sounds like a wasp flying around your head (it made me uncomfortable which is why I noticed it, haha). After I felt unnerved for a moment, I had a realization— that this could be referencing one of Sufjan’s most beloved songs, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us!!” (yes that’s a real song title lol)

The Predatory Wasp is about how Sufjan fell in love with his best friend at the Bible Camp he went to as a teenager. The wasp is a metaphor for internalized homophobia and also his love and how he fears his love will hurt the boy he’s in love with. 

So, Die Happy references an iconic song from Illinois (2005) with these notable lines:

Tl;dr: 

I want to die happy vs. I can’t explain the state that I’m in / the state of my heart / he was my best friend

Here’s an Despair photoset with Predatory Wasp lyrics via @toneelspeelster. 

ATIVAN

So your best friend has just died happy by being in love with you. You feel like the primordial darkness is on YOU now:

I woke up in stereo—I spent the day in vertigo / I could not get the spirit off my back

You’re once again tossed in the waves of thinking that God is fucking with you. But either way you just want to be tranquilized at this point. 

Is it all for something? Is it all part of a plan / tranquilize me, sanitize me, Ativan

Is it all for nothing? Is it all part of a plan? / make my death wish, mind my business / do the best I can with what I am

Ativan asks, was the true leading woman all this time… substance abuse?? 

Ativan / my leading woman

Long story short, you’re drunk on communion wine, asking the shadows to come back.

fill me with the blood of Jesus / clean my plate 'til he receives us / separate the colors from the black / ... / tell the shadows near us to come back

 URSA MAJOR & LANDSLIDE

Not a lot to say about this (even though I love these songs) so I’m gonna skip mostly, but the narrator has decided he wants to love you, he can’t help it <3 

GILGAMESH

Oh boy. 

I mean you kinda know what’s coming because of the title. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest piece of epic world literature, and Gilgamesh was “the first hero of human history.” 

In the world’s oldest story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are “very close friends” (their relationship is very homoerotic and this is barely disputed). Gilgamesh calls Enkidu his brother, and they are mutually selfless towards each other but when Enkidu dies, indirectly because of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh has a breakdown and mourns him like that of a spouse and then has to come to terms with his own mortality. 

The meta level of this is so obvious I’m not even going to go into it. Anyways… here are lyrics that make me want to scream! 

the repetition of “my heart”... the concept of singing a eulogy.... saying your heart is chained to Your Angel............ it hurts

DEATH STAR

Star Wars reference my beloved. Like many of these songs this has Fuck You God energy.

what you call the human race / expedite the judgement day / it’s your own damn head on that plate

vandalize what you create / ... / witness me resist your fate / it’s your own damn head on that plate

 GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

This song is a bop honestly 

When the lyrics were released a bunch of Sufjan fans contrasted Goodbye To All That’s here I am alone in my car / hopelessly infatuted / and I’m driving to wherever you are to Sufjan & Moses Sumney’s song, “Make Out in My Car”.

Yeah, I know, we’re all thinking of this:

Make Out in My Car is basically where Moses gave Sufjan a horny car guy chorus and told him to write the verses, and Sufjan proceeded to write the most liturgical shit ever (and we love him for it). ANYWAYS… Goodbye To All That also reminds me of Dean’s depression and the weirdness that started in 15x19 and goes into 15x20. For some reason he makes it seem more upbeat and happy than it is...

Despite this song being a bop, the lyrics are depressing. He’s alone in his car. He’s hopeless. He realizes it’s too late to have died a young man. 

He’s going to try to move on, even though nothing is left of him, he’s begging someone to turn around and show me his shadow.

He also references substance abuse again—

love me / and leave me / intoxicated

  SUGAR

The music video? Iconic. The mom of a family is making a pie, or she’s trying to. She ends up rubbing the filling all over her face, crushing the fruits, the oven catches on fire. 

But she does it! She makes the pie. 

Meanwhile the other family members are in their rooms, overindulging in sugar in all its forms. And then as she and her family eat around a dining table, occassionally being seemingly marrioetted by some unseen force, she looks angrily over her family, they all seem to kind of lose it, then the house starts to come apart until the chandelier falls on the dinner table. 

It’s the making pie + overindulgence in sugar + marionetted family metaphors for me ❤️ 

Ultimately, the song is about begging for affection, being desperate for domesticity, but you feel doomed, you feel like your defeat is predestined, that you can’t escape it.

You just don’t want to be heartbroken & you don’t want to be angry anymore!!!!

  THE ASCENSION

So you may be asking… does this guy get the domesticity he’s longing for?? Does he get his love back?? 

No. He dies. :/

The Ascension begins with just that. He’s dying.

THEN Sufjan decides to rhyme “confess” with “confess”, in two lines that mean almost opposite things:

When I am dead / and the light leaves my breast / nothing to be told / nothing to confess / let the record show / what I couldn’t quite confess

So does this guy have something to confess or not??? 👀

Moving on… 

He goes back to thinking about how his life was predestined all along, and now after all that, he’s dying. So he thinks about all the times he was kind of like this Mythological Icon. That he always had to be the one to show what was right, to lead by example. That that had been his entire identity. 

And he realizes he needs to answer for himself. 

Then he is frightened— realizing he was always asking what everything meant, what it all was for, but that all along he was just angry and depressed.

But even though he feels a like he should have just resigned himself to meaninglessness, that he only thought he could change the world for the better… it strengthened him to know the truth.

And even through the absolute shit of it all, and even though God & others did things from a place of so-called holiness and hopelessness...

He did everything out of love ❤️

So then he dies 🙃

AMERICA

So, as the end of The Ascension asked, what now? 

The album ends on this long track, which Sufjan describes as a protest against all that America has been and has become. 

It’s a protest against capitalism, of destroying humanity for the sake of some cold machinery. 

I have worshipped / I believed / I have broke your bread / for a splendor of machinery

And in true Sufjan fashion, he makes this song about protesting somehow both horny and religious, god bless

I have loved you / like a dream / I have kissed your lips / like a Judas in heat

I have worshipped / I have cried / I have put my hands in the wounds on your side / I have tasted of your blood / I have choked on the waters / I abated the flood / I am broken / I am beat / but I will find my way / like a Judas in heat

I am fortune / I am free / I’m like a fever of light / in the land of opportunity / don’t do to me / what you did to America / don’t do to me / what you do to yourself

  to finish out, here’s a DeanCas post by @eggcessive with lyrics from America ❤️ I HOPE YOU ENJOYED MY WEBWEAVING :)

[lovee-infected]

hello, i'm a big admirer of your theories and watching a movie based on the disney park i thought of a connection between the haunted mansion and the disorganized dormitory, was that a reference about the school's past or if there is a chance to have but a ghost that has a connection with the foundation of the school? it would be very interesting to know how the school came about or in whom the disorganized dormitory hurts inspired, maybe it's just a random idea but I kept thinking about it💓

Hi there and thank you very much darling !😄💕💕💕💕💕💕 Well first of all , I'm greatly sorry for my awfully late response - This ask came when my url was still @/geodraconia (Oof-long ago) and I was mainly a twst theory-only blog...

And now , this isn't a random idea at all my dear and thank you very much for leading me to it ! I'd previously written theories for the Ramshackle dorm but the haunted mansion..? I watched lots of streams and videos for this and I can't believe how much I've been missing all this time omg-

Well then ! Let's go for it !

Twisted Wonderland theories part 4 : Haunted mansion and Eliza's background :

First of all let us quickly review what we previously found about Ramshackle dorm's possible inspirations :

The designs are clearly based off Disney's thro the mirror and there's no argue on it - But the same design was used in the video game epic Mickey as well

The other point was with the ghosts . I was pretty sure that they're designed after disney's famous lonesome ghosts for both designs and the house they lived in which did share similarities with Ramshackle dorm

Full theory here

Well I totally missed the biggest hint amd that would be the haunted mansion ; a direct and strong source for not only our beloved ghosts but also the main reason and reference of our latest and so far , greatest event which would be the ghost marriage

Before I start talking about what and why leaded to Eliza's story ; let me have a small update on the haunted mansion:

With some YouTube videos and documentaries on the haunted mansion's establishment , you may now understand the high similarities between the Ramshackle dorm and the well-known haunted mansion better :

You can check the videos out for full explanation but let me just bring some of the interesting hints out here :

1) The three men and the ghosts : Pretty similar to Ramshackle's ghosts , aren't they ?? I still can't relate to the third ghost or...corpse with that beard but take a look at the other two : From the form of the skull...to the shape of the hat . Familiar , right ?

2) The mirror : No extra words I guess , the picture has it all ( Not much different from our dark mirror , is it?)

Well if you guys watch the YouTube video you'll get to see plenty of more details in a better explanation there , but for now let's get to my favorite part :

The ghost bride :

Well then before having a look at where Eliza did exactly come from , let's review the mostly mentioned thoughts on her

1) Eliza does have a Hamilton reference : I personally agree on this one . Since Disney had hosted a Hamilton remake in the late years and because both stories have a bride who is blinded b love and doesn't see the incomplete parts of their crush (Alexander Hamilton vs Idia Shroud lol-) that's pretty possible to be ( I actually had a doubt whether the ghost bride's name is pronounced as El-ee-za or El-ai-zaa and so @poisonepel helped me with it )

2) Eliza is based off the corpse bride : Well this one seemed a bit too good to be true since Tim Burton's Corpse Bride isn't a Disney original , but due to what I found on the bride's background , it wasn't that wrong

Well recently @vaudedrome-dorm too shared pics of the latest ghost bride from Tokyo's 2019 event and the similarities are just too obvious . But the story is far greater than just a cute 2019 parade ; let's return to The haunted mansion's first days

When the haunted mansion was finally open to the public , a ghost named hatbox ghost was one of the strongest-spookiest hints there to frighten visitors ; but due to some reasons , this ghost was immediately replaced with a newer figure named : Ghost bride which hasn't ever been even close to getting removed so far

The first design is believed to be this painting which was inspired by this mysterious photography , (close enough huh..?)

Then through later designs , the ghost bride was given plenty of changes . Each one creepier after another ...

Well well , as you can see , the first designs weren't much pleasant amd the main design was a corpse with a beating heart on chest , which later grow famous with the nickname of Beating heart bride was the longest design our bride has been through. Designs did change a lot during it's time , but the heart remained the same

2) Well years later after having the heart beating bride for too long , they decided to give it an all new design : They removed the heart and instead , came up with a fully digital blue-ish phantom of the bride , which seemed more suitable for the haunted mansion

The bride is stcuk next to the mirror and pics in the middle of the ride , but the most interesting part are the portraits . They show a woman dressed as a bride stepping next to a man , as you move through the ride , the man's head disappears as if his head gets cut of or better to say : they proves that the groom had died

Another amazing design at the haunted mansion is how a ghost marriage is supposed to be taking place there . Portraits and designs are another aspect of it :

Due to having different designs over the time ; plenty of different stories have bee spreaded about the ghost bride's possible back ground , but let's look at the two of the most famous ones of them :

1) Constance, also known as the Black Widow Bride, who was unveiled in the 2006/2007 upgrades having replaced the original beating heart bride tells the story of a bride who murders her husbands and takes their riches for herself, hence the name Black Widow Bride. Constance does not however tell us all of her secrets and we are left to imagine the worst. While it is nice to leave the audience wanting more…

Well well that's all that was explained so far about the beating heart bride which was the first and almost the most famous design of the ghost bride

2) Now Melanie, who is in DLRP, is a completely different story…she was a young bride in love but whose father was completely against her marriage and was devoted to stopping it no matter what…but her parents died in an accident so happy ever after right? No…her groom was then killed by the Phantom of the Manor (I’m not sure who this is or WHY he wanted to kill the groom) and so she kept waiting for him to show up at the alter even in death. And again you’re left with questions, or at least I am…who is the Phantom in this Manor and why did he kill Melanie’s groom? Was he her father hell-bent on stopping her marrying this young man? Was he a jealous suitor?

I believe most of you are well-familiar with Tim Burton's Corpse Bride which is actually based off this story . So to everyone who assumed Eliza to be based off Corpse bride : You were indirectly right ! Because the bride we now are talking about is most likely based off the same thing Burton was inspired by

Okay , now let's get to our best part of the bride's history , something that is indubitably Yana's main and direct reference for Eliza's design : TADA !

Let's take a look at Tokyo's 2019 Spooky "Boo!" Parade where this version of the bride showed up ; a special tokyo event featuring the haunted Mansion but his time , with all alive and human cast :

Spooky "Boo!" Parade :

I leave reading the full info to you but let me bring the important parts out ; the bride

In 2019, the Bride was added to the parade. She walked in front of the float with Mickey and the knights. Her appearance differed from previous Bride costume characters - her hair is done up in a bun, and her dress and veil are more stylized and cartoony - but her dress is designed with a red heart in the center of her chest. This was the first time that the original bride appeared in the parks as a live character.

The bride was accompanied by five men dressed in matching suits and top hats. They acted as admirers to her. They proposed to her and she playfully pushed them away, as they made their way down the parade route.

I wanna focus on this part again

You see!?? Yana didn't come up with that story out of thin air ! The bride , the haunted Ramshackle dorm , the marriage , the slapped proposers!!!! They were are designed based on canon Disney events along with her knowledge and research ; just , impressive

omg...I mean I know that Yana always does her research but this...this was waaaaay greater than what I was expecting...

Upcoming is the Wish upon a star event and many already are expecting it to be a Pinocchio reference , but who knows ? What surprises is Yana willing to give us this time ? Let's see

[nahte123456]

Fire Emblem and “Moral Grey”

Just me complaining here, a very old complaint, a complaint from when FE Awakening came out.

FE fans don’t know what Moral Grey is and need to stop being idiots.

I love the Fire Emblem series, I’ve between almost every game, most on higher difficulties, I’ve watched video’s about them, and read articles about them, I LOVE this series. But my number 1 annoyance is EASILY people complaining about how some games are “moral grey” and how other games(mostly the 3ds games) need more “moral grey” and so much of it is stupid.

Now I am not counting Geneology in this because when I played that game I wasn’t in the best place in my life, so I forgot a lot and need to reply. But beyond that the ONLY games with true moral grey are 3 Houses and Fates.

Let me use Path Of Radiance as my example here. You are Ike, through out the story you do not hurt a single innocent unless provoked, give supplies to people that hate you, and go for the least casualties in a war. End of discussion.  Some people are racist, that is not grey because that NEVER effects what decisions you make. You have to kill some people that are generally good, well that’s war, it’s either kill these few hundred probably good people that are actively perpetuating a war or let BILLIONS die, including many children and non-combatants, many in horrible ways. That is not gray that is simple math.

This is true for every FE games, sometimes the choices you need to make suck, sometimes good people must die, that is NOT moral grey, there is nothing “grey” about it, they are either attacking or stopping you, if you do not MANY more innocent people will die, that is it.

Fates for all of it’s many, many, MANY, flaws does have Grey here, Norh is literally starving to death while Hoshido does nothing. If you help Norh it’s to stop innocent children and parents from starving and having horrible, painful deaths. If you side with Hoshido then you are protecting innocent people that literally didn’t even know people were starving and only crimes were ignorance. Both sides have a fair point and neither is truly correct, do you side with the people suffering or the people that are being attacked for not knowing people were suffering. And Three Houses goes even further, as the Emperor is right the Church is just straight trash that has, indirectly or not, doomed almost every named character to at least minor pain if not total anguish. But the Alliance is right that the Emperor is just murdering people to get what they want. AND the Kingdom is right that people need punishment when they do bad things enough needs to eventually be enough. Every side has a fair and legitimate point.

What was Gharnef‘s understandable point? How did Zephiel make logical and moral sense? What about Ashnard’s philosophy did you find agreeable? At which point did you stop and think The Demon King who’s name is stupid should be sided with?

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #287

“keep him tied - it makes him well / he’s getting better, can’t you tell?”

What are you favorite things to watch on YouTube? I like a pretty big variety now. I’d say I’ve been mostly into pet YouTubers lately, especially reptile ones. Oh, and WoW stuff. Can you pick out any constellations in the sky without looking them up online? Besides the Little or Big Dipper (idk which is which), nope. Are you religious? If so, what influenced you to start believing God? If you’re not religious, what convinces you there is no God? I wouldn’t call myself religious, no. I do believe there’s some kind of ultimate power, but hell if I know what it is, and I don’t actually worship it. I don’t believe any “good” god would demand kissing its feet in order for you to end at peace, among a billion other reasons. I believe there is something though because the odds of life and everything is just… too perfect. Plus I believe in the paranormal, so to me, there is obviously something beyond the mortal form. Is there any animal out there that genuinely terrifies you? Is this an animal you’re worried about coming across in daily life? I am terrified of ticks and parasites in general. They’re fucking disgusting. Maggots will also make me scream. Oh, and then there’s whale sharks. In my daily life, I wouldn’t say there’s any that I actively worry about crossing paths with. When was the last time you wore make-up? Around Halloween when Summer, me, and another of her friends did a witch-themed photoshoot. It really fucking sucks that it was so dark by the time we were done that the pictures came out absolutely awful. You can’t see shit, and of course on camera, I look absolutely awful. Have you ever worn colored contacts? No, but I’m totally not opposed for a cool photoshoot. Have you seen any of the Disney re-makes (eg. Aladdin or The Lion King)? What do you think of them? I’ve seen a good number, and I really like them. I think The Jungle Book remake was the best of them. How long did it take you to pass your driving test once you started learning how to drive? Ha, I still haven’t tried. When was the last time you went out for a formal occasion or event? Do you remember what you wore? Uhhhh… I have zero clue. Well, does my last job interview count? I just wore black sweatpants and some kind of formal top. How often do you have the TV on? is it more background noise or are you actually watching things? Y’all know by now that I don’t watch TV. Do you like any songs by Elvis Presley? Well of course. “Devil In Disguise” is my favorite. Do you ever answer the phone to unknown numbers? Nope. Do you eat anything special for breakfast on Christmas Day? Nah. When you go to theme parks, what’s your favorite type of ride? I haven’t been to a theme park in beyond forever, so idk. Are you afraid of falling in love? Ohhhhh yes. Expecting something to change in the next month? No. e_e What is your biggest worry in life right now? That Mom’s cancer will come back. Well, it IS going to eventually flare somewhere else, but no one can estimate when. Could be tomorrow. Could be years. Do you give up easily? It depends. With a lot of things, honestly, yes, because I get upset with my incompetence. What are you listening to? "Going To Hell" by The Pretty Reckless just came on. Is anything bothering you right now? Always. Were you ever made fun of? Yes. Are you currently jealous? I’ve been having episodes of it. Do you find piercings attractive on the opposite sex? I find them attractive on almost all people. Who was the last person you yelled at? I don’t know. Probably Mom. What do you say a lot? “Mood,” “lmao,” “can’t relate,” “same,” “oof,” “yikes,” shit like that, haha. What is your favorite place you have traveled? Chicago. Do you like ice cream? Yeah, that’s my comfort food. Do you like bananas? Yeah, but I don’t dare to eat one if I haven’t had my heartburn medication, because otherwise I get it BADLY. Do you like Paramore? A handful of their songs, yeah. I don’t know a lot though, honestly. Do you plan on getting married? It’d be nice. Ever been given a promise ring? No. Sexual orientation? Bi. Who do you text the most? Definitely Sara. Do you still talk to the person who hurt you most in life? Why or why not? No, because he wants nothing to do with me. I don’t blame him. Have you ever given your number to a complete stranger? Um, no. Well, besides in like, job applications. What color is your keyboard? Black. Your mouse? Mostly black, but it does have this crackled pattern that can glow blue or red. Desktop or laptop? I prefer laptops for mobility’s sake. Do you like sweet tea? I hate tea. How much sugar do you put in your tea? ^ Have you ever called someone useless? Wow, no. Do you have a wood or glass dining room table? Wood. Do you tend to get attached easily? HOLY GOD OF FUCK, YES. Is Joe Jonas really hotter than Nick? I haven’t seen either in god knows how long, but I remember I thought Nick was very cute. Favorite flavor pudding? Chocolate is the only kind I’ve enjoyed. Not that I’ve tried a lot. What are three words used in your area/dialect that many other areas/dialects wouldn't be familiar with? Oh, there are most certainly some, but I can’t think of any right now. How do you feel when your partner is talking to an ex? This would depend on a lot of things. What is the most expensive gift you have ever given? Received? Given, I’m really unsure. I answer enough questions sharing that I don’t have my own source of income, so a lot of times, my mom lets me use her money, but there is obviously a ceiling to how much I can use. Received, definitely my Sager laptop Jason got me one year. Do children like you? I’m always surprised that kids seem to… I don’t know how the hell to interact with kids, but parents tend to tell me that they do like me. If you found your child's diary would you read it? What if you found the diary of one of your parents? Hell no would I read that shit. Both deserve privacy. Have you ever stalked or killed a wild animal? Fuck no. Name something you are now prepared to reveal about yourself that you weren't ready to talk about in the past? The state of my virginity. Name a talent someone has of which you are jealous: I am soooo envious of talented and actually successful photographers. What would you most likely complain about in a hotel? Probably if the bed sheets seemed dirty. Is it possible to be in love with more than one person at the same time? Probably. I’m monogamous though, so I really can’t say because I haven’t experienced this. Do you often feel pressured by others? Society, yes. Should couples live together before marriage? I feel that it’s the better decision, yes. You may not blend well actually sharing the same house. You learn things about your partner. How would you feel attending the wedding of an ex? It would depend on the person. Girt or Sara? I would love to. As a matter of fact, I better be invited lmao. Jason? I couldn’t in ten trillion years. Fiction or nonfiction. I strongly prefer fiction. Can you can lie with a straight face? Yes, if it’s something little. Name three things you have experienced that would shock your parents: Probably just sexual stuff. Do you believe in using the silent treatment? No. I’ve sure done it before, but I’d like to think I’ve grown out of this. Communication is where it’s at. Your most embarrassing thought: *shrug* Your most prejudiced thought: I don’t know. I don’t think I’m very prejudiced. A shameful moment for you: The situation w/ Joel. The biggest gamble of your life: Deciding to drop out of college the last time. Who knows if that was a good choice or not… It’s too early to tell. What is your greatest weakness as a friend? Idk off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s something. Do you feel better when you have a tan? Nah, I like being pale. I did go through a period in HS of using tanning lotion on my legs though because I was self-conscious of JUST how pale they were. Do you sometimes enjoy being mean? ”I don’t think so. Maybe like... in certain contexts. Like being mean in video games can be really fun sometimes, haha. And being a little mean in a kink setting can be fun too.” <<<< This. Are you high maintenance? Definitely not. Has anybody ever told you that you’re too young to be in love? I think my dad has, just indirectly. Did you learn anything from the last BIG mistake you made? Yes. Do you have a favorite brand of shoes? Yeah, Converse. Do you like rollercoasters with big drops? I’m afraid of rollercoasters so have never been on one. Do you have any inside jokes with your parents? Not really. Have you ever thrown a surprise party for somebody? I don’t think so? Do you know who your mom’s favorite singer is? Oh, she’s totally obsessed with James Hetfield/Metallica. What year were you born in? 1996. What is your favorite card game? Magic: The Gathering, even though I was never great at it or totally understood all the rules. I just adore the artwork, and I like the detailed tactics behind it. Have you ever tried to surf? Nah. Do you want to learn? Nah. Have you ever had a song dedicated to you? What was it? Let’s not with this. What color eyes does your best friend have? Brown. Have you ever been on a blind date? Nah. Which one of your family members do you wish you could see more often? My brother and his son. I got really close to my nephew the last time they visited for a few days. What room in your house is the messiest? Right now, the extra bedroom that I want to make my dayroom. A lot of our “extra” stuff is just shoved into there. Have you ever requested a song on the radio? No. Are you proud of your parents? Yes. Have you ever (accidentally or not) set off a car alarm? I think I accidentally have before. Do you have dimples when you smile? Yes, way more prominently on my left cheek though. Do you find graveyards scary? No. They’re peaceful to me. Have you ever carved anything into a tree? I don’t think so. Do you read those celebrity gossip magazines? Ew, no. Celebs deserve privacy. Do you give or get advice more often? Well considering I’m in therapy, probably get. Did the last type of shoes you wore have laces? No. Do you like the picture on your license/I.D. card? FUCK no. When was the last time somebody hit on you? Idr. Which one of your friends do you feel most comfortable around? Sara. What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food? Just pass me the rolls lmao. Who did you last spoon with? My cat lmao. What was the last video game you played? I don’t recall the last console game I played, so does World of Warcraft count, even tho it’s a computer game? When you’re in trouble, do your parents ever “middle name” you? Ha, my mom will sometimes. Does getting sweaty or dirty bother you at all? If so, has it ever put you off doing exercise? Very much so. I suffer (and I DO mean “suffer”) from insane hyperhidrosis, so I sweat my ass off if I so much as twitch, if even that. I just hate feeling gross. Have you ever thought about how you want to spend your retirement? No, honestly. It’s hard for me to imagine even *getting* to retirement. Would you describe yourself as healthy? Why or why not? No. I’m physically and even more mentally not okay. Do you miss anything about being a teenager? If you are a teenager, what’s your favorite thing about it? Yeah, some things. Though I really don’t even want to think about it. I look back on me being a teen with both wistfulness as well as bitterness. I don’t know which is stronger.

[obeymematches]

Hello, I’d like a matchup please~ I’m very curious who I’d fit with! Here’s who I am and what I’d offer, flaws (I’m pretty bad about being objective about that though, haha) and all: Personality: INTP. Quiet, relaxed, positive and self-assured normally. I’m not very insecure and almost never stressed, my friendangry. When bad things happen it won’t effect me much. I’m not very emotional and find it easy to be the optimist, or put things into perspective and move on. I’m introverted and private.

I just really like having myself, to myself? I almost never offer information about myself. I feel the need to socialise rarely, and I need a lot of alone time to recharge - I’d be horrible with someone needy, I’d feel so guilty. I show affection more through acts of service and gifts rather than quality time. I make an effort to be honest and sincere about those boundaries, what I want, and how I feel because that’s how I want people to be with me :) Strong believer of “treat others how you’d like to be treated.” Trust and honestly are dearly important to me, more than anything else. Promises are a grave thing >:( I’m uncomfortable with attention and responsibility and don’t like being the leader, I’d much rather be a follower. I’m more loyal than moral, I’d follow my friends through hell even if they lead the charge. It might be a conflict aversion thing too?. I don’t think I have problems voicing my disagreements with them though. I’d just rather go with the flow. I’m a “nothing matters :D” nihilist and don’t take a lot of things seriously, I joke a lot and my sense of humour is absurdist and honestly, pretty stupid. I’m caught up in my head a lot. Very fanciful! I’m a perpetual daydreamer, and I have the worst memory out of everyone I know. Lack of stress bites me in the butt often, I don’t feel a sense of urgency to get my work done and as a result I’m a very lazy procrastinator. I have a hard time settling on an opinion, I’ll play devil’s advocate to myself and always feel the need to for more info before I commit (but I’m too lazy to research so I don’t have many opinions ugh), but I honestly do enjoy talking in circles about topics more than getting an answer. I’m a perpetual fence-sitter. Interests: Recently I’ve been into alternative/street fashion and clothes shopping :D I have the tendency to obsess over things (mostly books) for one or two weeks and then move on. but I’ve maintained a steady obsession with fantasy, writing and world-building! Thinking about systems like societies, species biology, classification, and magic systems is the fun of it. I also like to do art, but really only because it helps to solidify characters and worlds in my head :D A trend I’ve noticed in myself is an interest in internet subcultures. I scour YouTube for the 1 hour documentary-esque videos compiling info about old bygone fandoms and internet groups. I also love classification systems. I adore the mess that is biological taxonomy and personality classification, it’s so fascinating! What I’m looking for: Someone who’s comfortable being their own person and gets that I need to be alone for a couple of days sometimes, and isn’t bothered by that. I’d like them to be upfront about feelings, no guessing games. And who’s also not very serious, or is at least won’t mind that I’m not going to be :D I do think I need someone more practical than I am just to balance me out, haha. Oh gosh, that was long, but describing yourself is surprisingly hard! Have a wonderful day! :D

Hello ! 

Thank you for sending in a request, i hope you didn’t have to wait for too long! 

Okay so I think by far the perfect match for you is Simeon! 

Your quiet nature doesn’t bother him at all, Simeon can start a conversation with pretty much anyone. 

Your positive attitude is something that catches the eyes of many, and you’d be a good balance to many of the characters. The way I see him, I think Simeon is more of a realist as he is definitely very observant and just like Satan, Simeon can read situations and people well. (probably thats why he is an author) However, that doesn’t mean your positivity is a turn-off for him. It just gives some balance. 

Just like you, he is also introverted, which means he also likes his space and alone time. So thats something the two of you can respect. He is not clingy at all, so you don’t have to worry about recharging often. 

I think a helping hand here and there, and a gift whenever you two meet or go on a date is a way to steal his heart! I think he would really be fascinated by human culture, you know? like it’s so nice of you that you think of him so much that you always get/make him something. As I said before, he is a spectacular judge of character, meaning he understand that you show affection differently than him. We don’t really know much about his love languages unfortunately, as he is still non-dateable (as far as i know but don’t cite me on this one i’m not keeping up with the fandom and i’m only at chapter 23 fghjk). 

 But ou mention that you also communicate clearly and sincerely, similar to him, so I don’t think there should be many conflicts at all in this relationship. 

However, a relationship should not be based on communication skills alone now, should it? so here is more of what it’d be like: 

You also value trust and honesty, and as an angel he can get behind that really well. It’s much better if the values and expectations of both people are met. 

So you rather being a follower narrows down the circle quite a bit. But! Simeon is known to be a responsible character, I mean we can see how he guides both Luke and the brothers in some situations. He also has his way of indirectly helping character development of characters, so don’t worry about your flaws - he is not going to judge, in fact, he will figure out the best way for your own character development! 

By that I mean he isn’t judging you even in your not-so-serious moments, though he takes notes and as I said will indirectly guide you on your path so you don’t make a decision that would cost a lot. 

Similar with your tendencies of being a lazy procastinator. This just also gives a balance to the relationship. 

I think he is not as much into shopping as some of the demons, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to him abou tit! He would be interested in his partners hobbies, be that whatever. He might not indulge all the time but a healthy relationship can take that. 

I think your liking of reading is again, a very nice balance for his fancy of writing. If he trust you enough, you’ll be able to read one of his next bestseller series before anyone else!!! imagine how jealous you’d make Satan and Levi! time to flex on those demon bros

Theres no one better to talk about your interests than him, trust me!! just think about it!!

He is the more practical one int he relationship, and that is not a bad thing. I think you two started off as friends for quite a while, until you managed to open up a bit to him about your interests and hobbies. Then he just couldn’t help falling in love with someone with a heart like yours.  

[i-am-masterkittens]

You better prepare yourself cause these are Quite A Few Questions 👀👀 3, 4, 11, 12, 15, 21, 23, 31, 33, 39 and lastly 40. Wow. 11 questions lmao

Thank you so much 😭😭❤

3. rant. just do it (I am going to put my whole ass rant under the cut because BOY IS IT LENGTHY. Also tw child abuse, pedophilia, self-harm and I think that’s it.)

4. do you think its ok to separate the artist from the art? No? Like I guess if you want to, that’s fine, I’m not gonna hate you for it, but for me personally I’m gonna try to avoid it as much as possible. If a bad person creates a masterpiece, I’m still not gonna support them.

11. what unusual talent do you have? Uhh mild body contortion? Like I can’t touch my toes for the life of me but I can twist my body really weirdly and bend all my fingertips backwards by a lot. I love freaking people out by doing that.

12. what’s the most interesting schools gossip you’ve ever heard? I have audio-based problems meaning I have trouble understanding someone when they speak and also remembering what they said, so I can eavesdrop on the juiciest gossip and forget the next day. However, I do remember this one thing about some kid named Evan being a vampire, which I distinctly remember because Jake talked about it, but I don’t remember how it came up.

15. what’s a question do you constantly get asked? One would think it would be “omg are you left handed?” Or something similar, but I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me about it. One question I do get a lot is from my boyfriend, “why are you so cute?” It makes me shy and I have to hide my face.

21. what’s a conspiracy you believe in? That there are Warrior cats living somewhere in the world (from the warrior series). Which I guess isn’t a conspiracy, but I believe in it!

23. if you could break one of your bad habits which would you choose? The inability to take care of myself. I mean, if someone wasn’t there to remind me every day, I would never remember to take my medicine, or brush my teeth before bed, or even get dressed half the days. I wouldn’t call it lazy, it’s more of a “I’m too tired to take care of myself”. That’s mental illness for you babey!!

31. you can change one thing in your life right now. what are you changing? OH. I would totally delete every disease in the world. This whole quarantine thing is making me sick physically, emotionally, and mentally, because I am not allowed outside at all and the lack of fresh air, meeting people, and vitamin D is stressing me out and well I feel bad almost all the time now. Not to mention all the cool stuff I was gonna do for my 2020 graduation. 😔

33. what do you think about a lot I sometimes wonder if my best friend would let me call him Jakey or Jakie as a nickname but I’m too shy to ask because I am baby.

39. describe your asthetic Okay so I call it “Pretty-Cryptid, Baby-Softcore.” Because I am baby AND a cryptid. I’ll be eating baby carrots from the bag and staring out the window one minute then I’ll want to be snuggled under lots of blankets the next. I also really love pretty things and colors. Pastel purples and blues? Hell yeah! Pats on the head? I love you. A demon with ethereal vibes and pretty jewelry is standing next to me in bed and telling me everything’s going to be okay? OGHOHOHHHHGH ❤❤❤❤ Anyway I want a pretty monster dad, please?

40. answer with one of your ‘school memes’ (inside jokes you have with your class/grade) with no explanation Mr. Wise.

Here’s my rant:

The basis of it all is just that I would probably sleep forever if I could.

I guess that isn’t all quite a rant, so I’ll start of on a mild note. What the fuck is happening to my dreams? I’ve been having these weird ass dreams about people taking care of me and genuinely wanting to become a parental figure to me. They all wear masks, two of which look exactly like SCP-035 and SCP-049, but there’s this one dude, I don’t know him, but he wears this mask with holes in it. Apparently his name is Jason? This isn’t the first time I’ve had a dream about someone who I didn’t know existed, I’ve also had dreams about Monika from DDLC before I knew who she was, and even about how she died. It was creepy as fuck, and I sure hope my dreams don’t come true because I’ve had dreams of the future more than once.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the heavy stuff, starting with my parents.I know I’m not the only person to have shitty parents, but that doesn’t stop them from being shitty. And before I get into anything, please please, please don’t report them to anyone. It’s probably weird to hear considering all they’ve done, but the guilt will probably kill me literally, and I still kinda love them, I mean they’re my parents and they took care of me. I don’t want anything to happen to them, and I don’t want to have to hurt myself because I did something to them, even if it was indirectly.

It used to be physical abuse, but it’s evolved into verbal as I grew up. Whenever I used to get in trouble, I would get so fucking terrified of what was going to happen to me. My dad, who was mostly absent from my life, (hence my constant wishing for a fictional character to be my dad, and probably a HUGE factor for what’s happening to my dreams lately) was also the most heavy handed with the hitting. He would spank me so hard that I would be crying and my butt would be red for hours. And it was so SO obvious that he liked my sister more than me, because it was always me who ended up with the red butts, and she’d get away with a loud yelling at. Meanwhile my mom would just hit me wherever she could with whatever she could, including a wire coat hanger when she was doing laundry.

And I recognize that I was a problem child, both physically and mentally because of my internal deformities that cause a lot of health problems, but also my weird boyish mentality and energy (I was into roughhousing a lot). But even then, just yelling would be enough to make me stop. Hitting me the way they did only made me learn how to lie to them and hide when I did something wrong.

This sort of stuff went on until about middle school, where it turned into more verbal threats about kicking me out of the house, as well as calling me names and making comments that dropped my self esteem very low, including stupid cow, bitch, and even telling me to hide my body and never wear bikinis or short shorts or crop tops (which I was already sensitive enough about because of my scars and the bump in my abdomen because of my knotted intestines, which gives me digestive issues if I eat too much). Dad almost completely dropped off the disciplinary train, only yelling at me extremely loudly when he got angry, but other than that I did pretty much nothing with him.

Because of them I’ve become extremely paranoid when it comes to touches that aren’t meant to be 100% comforting, and I’ve never been able to fully trust anyone for fear of getting hurt, (I’m sorry Jake :( if it makes you feel better though I trust you the most out of anyone else) and I get nervous when speaking up because I always got shot down by my parents.

It’ll be okay though because I have my boyfriend who I’ll get to live with soon, even if it’s just for the summer.

This isn’t everything that they’ve done, but it’s the majority of it, and even though they do good stuff with me sometimes, like my dad cooks breakfast or takes us out to eat, or we all go on nice vacations together, and it makes me feel guilty that I’m making them look bad, and worry that I’m oversharing or being too sensitive, but then I remember what they do and have done, and remind myself that I’ll only visit during holidays.

When I was 13, I came into contact with a pedophile. My first one out of at least 2 that I remember. I’m going to spare the details, but he tried to roleplay sexual situations with him, and convince me to undress in front of him, and that’s when I cut contact with him, and faked my death. I’m so, SO fucking sick of pedos, and pedo apologists, saying there’s nothing wrong with the age difference, when pedophilia has done nothing good to or for children. It gave me severe PTSD, to the point that I can’t say any words relating to reproduction, and visual-based sexual content will cause me to have flashbacks and panic attacks and cause me to scratch myself. Thanks pedos! Fucking hate you all! Please die.

And before people say I am overreacting, I’ve had this huge trigger since I was 13 and that is not something a kid should go through. And the reason why not a lot of people know about what happened, it’s because of the fear that I harbored, that people would laugh at me, and might use my triggers against me, which made things even worse, and it wasn’t until my boyfriend triggered me (accidentally) that I finally told someone, and it made me feel better that I could rely on him.

Other than that, another rant is about my boyfriend. I mean, he’s a good boyfriend, and he’s nice, but sometimes he comes off as insensitive and it makes me upset. That’s most of the reasons why we fight. Another big thing is lack of affection/attention, which might seems strange since we’re always hanging out, it seems, and cuddling, but sometimes he falls asleep on me and I get bored and don’t know what to do, or sometimes he ignores me to play video games or talk to other people. I am very touch starved so I need constant attention and contact or else I get worried, and I don’t know if he knows this or not, but he definitely comes off as ignorant sometimes. 

He makes up for a lot of stuff he does, but it doesn’t make what he did go away, and I wish he’d realize that and change because he keeps making the same mistakes.

My last rant is going to be about myself, and that I feel like a shit person! I feel like I always make things worse! I feel bad for every decision I make! I feel like I’m too clingy to my boyfriend and that I ask too much of him sometimes, and it makes me feel like shit because what I want and how I feel afterwards are different things and wow! Time for scratches! Also I want to have the power to always know what to do and say to make everyone happier and feel better! But then I get scared I’m gonna make a mistake and instead of trying to help I ignore them and go wow! I am a very shit person for ignoring them! And now my heart hurts because I got another heart palpitation by panicking! Wow I have a shit body! My heart deformities might kill me in my sleep! Wow! I am so insecure about everything I do and every way I look. I just want to become small and disappear sometimes. I miss you Jake. It’s hard for me to tell you I love you because it’s such an intimate phrase and my boyfriend was the first to hear it from me. But I’m glad you’re the second, even though we were so close to it. Somewhere in an alternate universe we’re together, and that makes me happy. I hope I we can become platonically intimate again, I remember holding your hand at night and it made me feel a little bit better at that camp.

My body just always hurts. I have to take a lot of medicine, and between all my heart, lung, and intestinal issues, on top of all my mental issues, majority of which have gone undiagnosed because my mom is in denial and refuses to get me to any sort of therapy; all of that combined makes me tired constantly, and I just always have stress, and a little headache in the back of my head.

I’m still hurting a lot, but I hope to get better. I have lots of ideas for the future, and I want to complete them before I go. I hope I make it past 2020, with many of you in tow.

I’m so tired.

I’m sorry if I made you sad.

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 4.1

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time, as chapter 3 concluded, Kiyo was the worst and I yelled a lot, Kokichi accidentally did something nice for once in the process of deflecting his own issues, Himiko had emotions and so did everyone else, and the out-universe writers quite rightly decided that Kaito’s character arc was important enough to be the focus of the chapter-end stinger.

Now that we’re done with the weakest chapter of the game, we can move on to one of the best chapters of the game! Yay. I hope you’ve been looking forward to this, because I sure have.

This opening stinger with Rantaro’s video message to himself is even more obviously a thing for the out-universe audience’s eyes only. The in-universe audience already knows exactly what Rantaro’s deal is, so this wouldn’t be interesting for them at all.

Rantaro:  “You wanted this killing game, so you have to win no matter what.”

This is super misleading. I imagine the writers worded it this way for the sense of mystery it brings to seeing the scene here without context – making people think maybe Rantaro was the mastermind or otherwise a bad person who was only out for himself. But since that’s not the case, this really isn’t how you’d think he’d actually phrase things from his point of view. He didn’t want this killing game – he volunteered to sacrifice himself so two of his friends from season 52 could survive and escape, and at the time he presumably expected his “punishment” to be death rather than having to do it all over again. And he certainly didn’t want to “win” in the sense of “become blackened and get away with it” that this seems to be implying. He presumably wanted to end the killing game, especially upon having learned that this is an endless cycle, which isn’t something most people would describe as “winning”.

Live and Let the Languid World Live

I think I sort of get what this title’s relevance is, but maybe the Japanese title, “Living in a Lazy Parallel World”, gets it across a little better. It gives the sense of there being a separate world in which one can remain blissfully oblivious to the horrible reality of the situation, which fits in multiple ways. There’s their life in the academy versus the supposedly-ruined outside world, there’s Miu’s claim that the Virtual World is a peaceful world with no killing game, and then there’s the way that Gonta loses his memories as he leaves the Virtual World and remains oblivious to what he did in there.

At breakfast in the morning, one of the few people managing to stay upbeat is Kaito. Naturally he’s completely fine and definitely didn’t realise he was dying last night.

Himiko:  “Heeey! You guys have no energy! You need to look alive! You’re all still teenagers!”

Himiko is also managing to be upbeat! She’s even taking a leaf out of Kaito’s book and trying to boost everyone else’s spirits too!

Maki:  “…Weird. I thought you’d be the most depressed out of all of us.”

Himiko:  “Of course… I’m depressed. This is the most depressed I’ve been in all my 200 million years. […] But… being depressed won’t help those who died rest in peace…”

And I appreciate that acknowledgement that she is still horribly depressed. That’s not going to magically go away just because she’s been inspired by Tenko. She’s just trying as hard as she can to fight it now, which is really admirable.

Himiko:  “S-So anyway… Please… t-take care of the… new me…”

Kaito:  “You’re out of breath already. You’re going full speed right out of the gate!”

Like you wouldn’t do the same, Kaito? Like you aren’t doing that right now, considering what’s going on with you?

Kokichi:  “Ughhh… but now that there’s less people, I might… be the next victim… Woooow, so exciting! But I definitely don’t wanna die!”

Kokichi’s doing his usual shtick of pretending this game is totally fun for him. Since this is still before he sees the outside world, I don’t think this has any greater meaning to it than usual.

Then again, he’s also added more to the graffiti, meaning the “claim to be the mastermind” part of his plan is already in progress. So really, seeing the outside world isn’t going to change his intentions that significantly at all.

(I have a lot to say about Kokichi’s intentions in this chapter, but I’ll wait until we get to the part where he actually has seen the outside world.)

Tsumugi:  “Wh-What about this world? What does it mean? Is there some crazy story going on?”

This is Tsumugi’s response to the graffiti possibly saying “this world”. It sure is telling that she’d think of what’s going on outside as a story, because that’s all it is to her.

Maki has started using her catchphrase at Shuichi in front of everyone else, by the way! She’s opening up more and starting to feel like the others aren’t going to think she really wants to kill anyone either. Progress.

Kokichi:  “But Gonta stumbled onto the writing by coincidence, right? If it was a prank, they would’ve done it in a more obvious spot, not in the grass.”

Kokichi’s saying this to try and support the idea that the writing isn’t him, but this is misleading. The original message wasn’t his, and it’s only after Gonta found that and pointed it out to everyone that he started adding to it, since he knew at that point that people would definitely pay attention and notice his additions.

Kokichi:  “There’s nothing more depressing than an unnoticed prank.”

This says a lot about Kokichi’s approach to things in general. He doesn’t just want to mess with people – he likes it best when they know they’ve been messed with and that it was him who messed with them. Keep this in mind in chapter 5 when I’ll be talking about the reasons his plan fails, because this is at the root of another one of them.

Kaito:  “Well, I don’t really get it, but… Maybe it’s some kinda clue. Thanks for the report, Gonta.”

Another interesting observation about Kaito: he very rarely directly thanks anyone. Which might seem strange when he’s all about encouraging people and letting them know how much good they’ve been doing. But it makes sense when you consider that specifically thanking someone is a bit more personal to Kaito himself and comes with the implication that he needed their help, which is of course something Kaito does not like to admit to. This instance here is an exception to that probably mostly because he’s just thanking Gonta on behalf of everyone, so it doesn’t come across as if he specifically needed anything.

Gonta:  “…Gonta just glad to help. Gonta want to help, even little. Tell Gonta if you need help with something, okay?”

But it’s also likely because Kaito knows how much Gonta needs to hear that and to feel useful and like he’s helped someone out right now, more than ever before.

(And Gonta’s not the only one. Which might be why Kaito is so aware of that.)

Kokichi:  “O-kay, got it! I’ll let you know if I want you to punch someone.”

Himiko:  “No! You don’t get to tell Gonta what to do anymore!”

Gonta:  “Y-Yeah… Gonta learn lesson after Insect Meet and Greet…”

Yeah, Gonta’s definitely never going to get manipulated into doing something bad by Kokichi ever again, right? Hnnnngh.

Monophanie:  “…a card key! Which just so happens to be the motive, too!”

So, uh. Let’s talk about this card key. First of all, it being a card key is super misleading, because the immediate thing I assumed when I first saw it was that it’s the key to the hidden door in the library. That’s the only door we know of with a card reader, so that’s the obvious assumption to make. But none of the characters comment on this at all, not even Shuichi, who found the hidden door and indirectly got Kaede killed because of it. You’d think it would have come to mind for him at least. Clearly the writers don’t have anyone comment on it because they don’t want the players to think it’s connected to the library door (since it isn’t), but if that’s the case then they really should have just made it a different kind of key so it wouldn’t bring that to mind.

Second, we never see the place in the school that the card key actually opens. It would have helped immersion to at least show some kind of mysterious locked door that could plausibly be what Kokichi unlocks with this. As it is, from the players’ perspective, that hidden route Kokichi finds simply doesn’t exist, so we just have to use our imaginations to pretend that it totally is somewhere that we just don’t get access to while playing the game, which is a little awkward. It’s also pretty unclear how this card leads to a place from where one can see the outside world. Does it lead to the same place that the Death Road to Despair does? Is it like, a shortcut through that tunnel so that Kokichi can reach the end of it without worrying about the traps? Or is there another totally different place in the school that also shows the outside world, meaning Team Danganronpa would have had to double-up on the special effects? It’s annoyingly unclear.

But what’s most annoyingly unclear is how seeing the outside world is supposed to be a motive. Presumably Monokuma expected everyone to use the card key and view the outside world, right? That would have been the very opposite of a motive! Everyone would have fallen into despair and realised there was no point killing each other to escape at all, which is exactly what happens when Kokichi shows them all the outside in chapter 5 and which really annoys and bores the audience when it does happen! The only reason it functions as a motive in this chapter is because Kokichi steals the card key and keeps it to himself, and then later decides to show the motive only to Gonta to convince him to try and mercy-kill everyone, since the mercy kill plan would be meaningless if everybody had already seen outside. The part where Kokichi shares the motive with Gonta explicitly isn’t Monokuma’s intended plan right now, since he has that conversation with Kokichi later where he agrees to go along with it. And I doubt he would have known Kokichi would steal the card key before anyone else could use it in the first place. Even if he predicted that as a possibility, he couldn’t know for sure that Kokichi would be fast enough to swipe it and run off without getting caught, and if that didn’t happen and everyone used the card key then that would have been the worst possible outcome from Monokuma’s perspective. It shouldn’t be worth the risk.

Like, I love this chapter a lot for most everything that happens in it. But this initial decision of Monokuma/Tsumugi’s that sets off all of the fun stuff that happens in this chapter feels kind of contrived and illogical, and it’s a shame.

Keebo:  “Right now, we need your skills as a detective, Shuichi.”

Shuichi:  “Right… in that case, let me hold onto that. I’ll look around again.”

Himiko:  “Nyeeeh, Shuichi’s grown up! He’s become so reliable!”

Again – the job of using the objects on the mysterious items to open up new areas really does not require a detective. Kaito only gave that job to Shuichi back in chapter 2 to help make him feel useful when he was feeling down. But now that’s just become how things are done to the point that everyone’s forgotten they don’t really need Shuichi for this, and they’ve been relying on him so much in trials (where his skills really do make a difference) that it’s just kind of extended to outside the trials as well even when it’s a lot less necessary.

(Kaito isn’t here at this point, since he’s already run off after Kokichi, which is kind of a shame because I would have been interested to see how he’d respond to this.)

Gonta:  “Shuichi is so amazing. Gonta wanna be useful to everyone too.”

Aww, Gonta looks up to Shuichi and desperately wants to be as helpful as him. And he’s being so open and honest about feeling this way. (Unlike someone else.)

(Again: it is a shame that Kaito has already left the room.)

Maki:  “Don’t worry. When the time comes, we’ll use your body as a meat shield.”

Gonta:  “Okay! Gonta hope time come soon!”

Maki is probably joking (she’s at that point in her development where she’s starting to make jokes that still don’t really sound like jokes because her delivery is too deadpan), but still, gaaah. It’s admirable that Gonta’s willing to risk himself to protect everyone, but he should still hope that it never has to come to that, so the fact that he’s actively hoping it will is pretty fucked up. He doesn’t just want to help if he’s needed, but he wants to be needed, even if that means he’ll need to get himself hurt.

Opening up the new areas, I’m starting in the courtyard with Keebo’s lab.

Keebo:  “Anyway, Shuichi… That black object over there looks suspicious, doesn’t it?”

This goes to show that they don’t actually need Shuichi’s skills as a detective at all to open up these new places and Keebo would have been able to do it himself if he’d had the mysterious items.

Since there was nothing else to examine inside Keebo’s lab, I decided to examine the monitor (which I usually never remember to do), and…

Shuichi:  (These monitors are everywhere, but I don’t see any cameras. How is the mastermind behind this killing game monitoring us? Or… are we not really being watched at all?)

An important question to ask, Shuichi! Even if he hasn’t figured out like Kokichi has that this is clearly being shown to people for entertainment, there still absolutely must be cameras in order for Monokuma to know who the blackened is in each case. Unfortunately Shuichi never quite thinks this through far enough until halfway through the fifth trial.

Shuichi:  “But I imagine that a lot of things in here would really help you out. You should take a look.”

Keebo:  “No… I do not want to be assisted by sci-fi technology.”

Congratulations, Keebo, you’ve just become partially responsible for every death that happens from this point onwards. The things in his lab include a jetpack and a laser gun, which make him an equal match for all five Exisals in a fight and are able to blow a hole in the wall to let everyone escape. (Well, apparently only after Keebo modifies them to be more powerful, but since he’s the one who’s capable of doing that, the point still stands.) If Keebo decided to use them right now, the killing game would be over in a matter of hours. The fact that he’s refusing to do so because he’s uncomfortable with sci-fi technology is not a remotely valid excuse in this situation when people’s lives are at stake. He should be willing to make temporary sacrifices like that for the sake of saving everyone! It’s not like he’d have to ever use those weapons again if he didn’t want to once they’re out of here!

What the out-universe writers really should have done here to justify Keebo not using these yet is make it clear that it’s because his inner voice doesn’t want him to. The only meaningful difference between now and chapter 6 is the lack of his inner voice, not any kind of character development to have become more okay with being sci-fi. The audience obviously wouldn’t want him to use his weapons to bust everyone out of here in chapter 4 – they want an exciting killing game.

Shuichi:  (It doesn’t seem like Keebo is going to use this lab. Well, he’s free to do as he pleases. Nothing I can do about that.)

I mean, you could try arguing to him that he could save everybody’s lives if he used it, Shuichi. You’re still too passive sometimes.

Back up to the fourth floor, Tsumugi and Maki are there, which for some reason only happens if you’ve already been to Keebo’s lab first, hence me doing things in this order.

Tsumugi:  “I still don’t get that stuff with his sister or why he killed Angie and Tenko…”

THEN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU WRITE KIYO THAT WAY.

Maki has also figured out exactly where to use the mysterious item, proving that splitting up into two groups with one item each would have been much faster than mindlessly assuming Shuichi’s the only one who can do it.

Shuichi:  (Maki has never been this cooperative with investigations before… She must have been serious about what she said after the trial.)

Maki:  “…What? Why are you making that gross face?”

Shuichi:  “Wh-What!? It’s not *gross* …is it? I’m just happy… It’s, ah, really nice that you’re working with us like this.”

It’s really heartbreaking that Maki considers expressions like the one Shuichi’s making – expressions of caring about her as a person and considering her feelings – to be “gross”. Gah.

Maki:  “Well, unlike Kaito, I’m not just all talk. I always follow through with my decisions.”

Maki still doesn’t quite properly understand Kaito. Kaito always means to follow through on his words, even if he’s not always as good at it as he wishes he was. She’s probably still annoyed at him skipping training last chapter because of the ghost thing.

I’m ignoring Tsumugi’s lab for now even though it’s closer and heading to Shuichi’s first.

Shuichi:  (This also looks like an Ultimate lab. But whose lab is it?)

Even if you can’t see the icon for it on the map, it’s still clearly yours, Shuichi. None of the others left without a lab would have a door like this (except maybe Rantaro I guess). But of course Shuichi still kind of hates his talent and hasn’t been remotely thinking about what a lab based around it might look like, so it’s a nice little detail that this doesn’t even occur to him.

Maki:  “But this place doesn’t match you at all. I think this lab is too good for someone like you.”

Ouch, Maki again being bluntly realistic about Shuichi’s detective skills still having room for improvement.

Shuichi:  “There are a bunch of files lined up. It looks like about 50 of them.”

Not just “about fifty”. To be precise:

…there’s exactly fifty-two of them.

Maki:  “The newer files have photographs, but the older ones have illustrations?”

Shuichi:  “But why? Are the old ones just fictional?”

That’s exactly what they are. Almost as if something involving murder cases which has happened fifty-two times up until now used to be fictional at the beginning and then became real.

Each one of these files contains the cases from a single season of Danganronpa.

I didn’t pick up on this for the longest time – I assumed that it just included some random fictional murders in among with some real ones because why not? I didn’t quite register the fact that it was specifically all of the earliest files that were fictional, nor the fact that there were exactly fifty-two. But given both of those facts, this is so, so clearly what the out-universe writers intend for this to be, and it blew my mind when I figured this out. Have I mentioned how much I love it when there’s details like this that are deliberately hinted at but never made explicitly clear because they don’t need to be as it doesn’t stop them being true.

Maki:  “Then this would make a good guideline for anyone who wants to commit murder.”

I’m not so sure about that, since these are all murder cases where the blackened got caught. If we’re to believe chapter 6, every single game ended with hope winning, which means no blackened has ever succeeded in getting away with it. They’d make a good guideline of what not to do, maybe.

Shuichi:  (The first few files have only illustrations, but the others have photographs… Is there a reason for that?)

Oh, Shuichi, if only you’d sit down and spend longer thinking about what that reason might be.

I have to assume they kept the precise details of the overall context the murders happened in pretty vague so as to not make it obvious they all took place in a killing game just like this one. I imagine they edited the illustrated ones to make the blood red rather than pink, too, because that might have got Shuichi’s brain ticking.

We also have to assume, then, that nobody ever happened to look at file number 1. Otherwise, when they all see the Flashback Light about Hope’s Peak in chapter 5, that would definitely raise some fucking questions.

If this weren’t a killing game, I’d be very sceptical about why an Ultimate Detective’s lab would need actual poisons in it. Facts about poisons, sure, and antidotes, maybe, but there’s no need to have a whole cupboard full of the means to actually kill someone.

Shuichi:  (…I suppose that’s right. There’s a fine line between criminal and detective.)

All it serves to do is make Shuichi feel awful about his talent again.

Shuichi:  “The only time I can use my detective talent is after someone dies… A detective… can’t save anyone. I’m only useful after it’s already too late.”

Maybe in the real world, detectives don’t usually save lives, but giving loved ones closure is still worthwhile, Shuichi! But of course he still thinks of everything in the context of that one murder case where the culprit had a sympathetic reason for doing it and hated him for figuring out the truth.

More to the point, though, in this killing game, Shuichi is absolutely explicitly saving the lives of everyone except the victim and the culprit. Sure, it’d be better if the murders didn’t happen at all, but given that the murders do happen and nobody is able to stop that part, Shuichi’s talent makes him the biggest hero out of anyone here.

Maki:  “Why are you so upset all of a sudden? Do you want to die?”

Shuichi:  “You’d kill me just for that!?”

Kaito:  “Nah, I understand why Maki Roll would say that. Your face looked pretty gloomy.”

Thankfully, both Maki and Kaito realise how ridiculous it is for Shuichi to think that he’s not saving anyone in this situation and call him out on it appropriately.

(I also really like that this is the point in the conversation at which Kaito happens to show up.)

Kaito:  “With a face as gloomy as that, I can’t believe you’re my sidekick. Be more proud of yourself, Shuichi! Everything you’ve done up until now has been amazing!”

Of course it has! Of course Kaito thinks that! And he can hardly believe that Shuichi could still be self-deprecating even now when it’s so clear from where Kaito’s standing that Shuichi has been the real hero all along.

Shuichi:  “Ah… thanks.”

Shuichi’s response is somewhat lukewarm, like he still mostly thinks Kaito is just saying this to encourage him and doesn’t quite fully believe it. No, Shuichi – Kaito absolutely means it.

Maki:  “Because of how well you did in the class trials, people are keeping their eyes on you, Shuichi… The next culprit might come after you.”

So I’ve seen some people complaining that it’s unrealistic that nobody ever does try to murder Shuichi, since this is a very valid point. But it makes perfectly good sense in the context of the actual people who attempt murder. Obviously Kaede believed he wasn’t the mastermind. Kirumi probably should have targeted Shuichi, but her thing was that even though she was desperate to escape, she still couldn’t bring herself to directly kill anyone who actively wanted to live, which is why she targeted Ryoma. Kiyo only targets girls. Miu is an idiot who might have never had the issue of Shuichi’s prowess in trials occur to her, and even if it did, she falsely believed that Kokichi trusted her, which is why she goes for him.

Honestly, this argument about how the culprits should go for Shuichi because he’s so good in class trials is most relevant to the question of why doesn’t Kokichi choose Shuichi to be his accomplice in chapter 5? I’ll talk more about that later when we get there, but suffice to say that’s probably the biggest reason his plan is really not as clever as he thinks.

Kaito:  “Heh, you don’t need to worry about that! I won’t let anyone mess with my sidekick! I’m gonna protect both of you! It’s a hero’s job to protect his sidekicks!”

Kaito, meanwhile, is probably quite unnerved at the realisation that Shuichi is an even more likely target than anyone else now. Naturally, he’s going to do something about that – because, you know, it’s totally possible to make absolutely 100% sure that a particular person will not get killed. Short of designating himself Shuichi’s personal bodyguard, which he’s obviously not going to do because that’d come across as ridiculously paranoid, there’s… really no way to come close to guaranteeing that at all. But even though he has no way of knowing for sure that he can back up these words, that doesn’t diminish the intent behind them one bit. Of course he wants to protect Shuichi! Of course he doesn’t want to stand back and let Shuichi get killed if there’s anything he can do about it!

Also, consider: Kaito almost certainly feels that he in particular should have been able to prevent each of the murders that have happened so far. Rantaro left Kaito’s meeting to “go to the bathroom” just before getting killed, which Kaito should have realised was suspicious and at least offered to go with him for safety. I’ve made it very clear that Kaito could and should have saved Ryoma just by reaching out to him, and I’m pretty sure he realised that himself in the end. And if he’d just been able to be his usual self last chapter, then surely he’d have done something to stop the resurrection ritual, or noticed Kiyo acting strangely, or been at the seance and noticed something off there, or something. Which is admittedly the kind of thing everyone is probably thinking in hindsight, even though really they were trying their best and couldn’t have done any more than they did – but Kaito could have done more, couldn’t he, if he just hadn’t let something as stupid as being scared of ghosts get to him?

But this time, it’ll be different! This time, he’ll definitely notice whatever’s going wrong and step in to do something about it before it’s too late, especially if the person lined up to be the next victim is Shuichi!

…Right?

I also enjoy how he promises to protect Maki too even though she is clearly the person least in need of protection from being murdered. Kaito is trying really hard to seem like he’s being a good hero to his sidekicks.

Maki:  “…What if I end up as a future culprit?”

Kaito:  “Are you stupid? That’s impossible.”

And guess what Kaito actually will end up protecting Maki from? Becoming a future culprit! He will manage to keep this promise that he’s making here! More or less. It’s not like he directly promises that he’ll prevent Maki from becoming a culprit, since he believes in her so much that he doesn’t think he’ll need to (I love the way says it’s impossible for her to become a culprit like it’s just obvious), but that’s absolutely something he feels just as strongly about as preventing her from becoming a victim.

(Also, Maki still not believing in herself enough to assume that she wouldn’t ever kill anyone any more. Which she’s unfortunately right about, but still. Gah.)

Maki:  “How… can you believe in people so easily?”

Because he’s Kaito, of course!

Other than still questioning why he believes in a murderer like her, I think part of Maki might be asking this for the same reason Shuichi also asked Kaito this back in chapter 2 – because she’s starting to wish that she could also believe in people more and wants to know how it comes so easily to him.

Kaito:  “Huh? Didn’t I tell you before? I believe in people I wanna believe in. And if they betray me, it just means I made a bad call believing in them. Of course, you’re one of the people I want to believe in, Maki Roll!”

Maki:  “…”

I think she’s finally starting to accept that Kaito really is just like this – and that it is possible to be like this in general. Also, she’s given up on protesting the nickname, so that’s progress! Sort of.

(Also this is literally the fourth time Kaito has explained his principles about believing in people and acknowledged that he could be wrong but chooses to believe anyway; this shouldn’t remotely be something that is easy to miss about him.)

Anyway, Kaito couldn’t catch up to Kokichi, but he found the Flashback Light instead.

Kaito:  “So let’s all gather in the dining hall!”

Maki:  “Huh? Me too?”

Of course you too, Maki! You said yourself that you want to start working together with everyone and getting them to trust you, so of course you should be at important gatherings like this!

The reason I did this lab before Tsumugi’s is that you miss out on some dialogue here if Shuichi doesn’t still need to check any more places and they can just head straight to the dining hall.

Maki:  “…You’re not going to check this place?”

Kaito:  “I’ll let Shuichi handle it! You got this. Right, Shuichi!?”

Kaito’s still being so encouraging! I guess he really is okay with Shuichi continuing to be the one solely responsible for opening new areas even though it really doesn’t need to be him any more. Kaito gave him that job in the first place to boost his confidence, which Shuichi doesn’t need anywhere near as badly by now, but Kaito’s still continuing to use it to boost his confidence anyway.

Maki:  “…You didn’t even complain. You seriously *are* his sidekick now.”

Shuichi:  (…I can’t even argue with that.)

Aww, look at Shuichi becoming more used to the idea of being Kaito’s sidekick (not that he ever actively protested it in the first place). And Maki still thinking the word means “someone who does whatever Kaito tells them to”, when that’s not it at all. Kaito only tells Shuichi what to do as a way of encouraging him to do things he might otherwise be hesitant to try, even if that’s not really as necessary now as it used to be.

Tsumugi:  “Yeah, I think it’s just plain fun to become fictional characters. To become a completely different person and feel like you’re part of a different world.”

Yeah, it really must be fun to become someone who doesn’t enjoy watching real people kill each other and immerse yourself in a world where the idea of real people killing each other is barbaric rather than everyone’s idea of a good night’s entertainment, huh.

Tsumugi:  “Doesn’t that sound interesting? Don’t you want to live in a fictional world?”

Why are you asking Shuichi this? You already think he does.

Tsumugi’s lab is way bigger than it really needs to be. Someone just wanted to give herself the biggest lab, now, didn’t she.

Also, in the thing at the back that keeps putting up and taking down different backdrops, one of the possible backdrops is very much a Hope’s Peak classroom complete with Monokuma graffiti on the blackboard. Like it’s just a place she’d want to do cosplay photoshoots in or something.

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So, I'm writing this because I'm trying to understand psychological horror, focusing on two animes from last year: Angels of Death and Happy Sugar Life. I wanted to write this because I got inspired by discussions on the Netflix's Ted Bundy show, Explanation Point's video on HSL (which made me watch it), and because I made the mistake of reading AoD's prequel manga Episode 0. Spoilers abound.

Due to way I was raised, I have difficulty in understanding stories that villains are the protagonists. Why would anyone cheer for them? Sure, there are many logical arguments, like the attempt to understand how his mind works and the cathartic feeling of being able to do feelings you know you'd be wrong. I have a RP blog and I once talked to with a friend on trying to understand how musing an utterly despicable muse could be so cathartic and she wondered if it's because it allows her to vent her stress and negative feelings on fictional characters, instead of real people. Logically, it makes sense, but I still feel odd about it.

I first watched Angels of Death because I really enjoyed the portrayal one of my best friends in the RPC had of the protagonist, Rachel Gardner. I honestly think it was a well-written anime, Rachel telling Zack that they weren't tools and the climax with the building on fire were my favorite moments. AoD also had a great advantage because it was self-aware, the banter between Rachel and Zack was pretty hilarious, and Cathy and Danny were also evilly funny. I always wondered how AoD managed to get to be an anime and Ib not...

Also, another thing that AoD makes sure to show is that every single named member of the cast is a murderer, and the man behind everything judges himself God for the sake of an experiment. It shows Zack murdering people in flashbacks and enjoying every single minute of it. In fact, the biggest plot twist is that the apparently innocent Rachel is probably the most dangerous murderer of them, the moment when she tries to kill Zack in her floor was a moment that actually got me on the edge of my seat (said event was properly foreshadowed).

When I say all characters of AoD are well-written, I say this in a "technical" sense - given their backstories, they act in a way consistent to what they are. Zack had a really crappy childhood and turned into a murderer; Danny was bullied and indirectly caused his mother's suicide; Cathy is subconsciously guided by a desire to punish sinners that caused her parents' death; Eddie was rejected so hard that he saw killing what he liked as the only way to preserve; and Rachel also had a crappy childhood, but parents who hated each other and killing her father in self-defense just broke her, her emotionless insanity is what guides her death wish (funnily enough, it doesn't seem that Gray has anything but a god complex). In other words, while they might be nearly a caricature, they still show to act on motives that make sense for them.

The question that guides the series is "what does it mean to be human?" In the end, we all want to avoid loneliness, as Gray says to Danny while the building explodes. Danny had a really pathetic death - he was a "love to hate" villain, even if he had a childhood excuse, nowhere implies that we should sympathize with him, on the contrary, he's one of the creepiest waste of air type of characters - if we showed his portrait in the game, one could put a sub "Most Likely to be a Pedophile").

But then I decided to read the prequel manga. I hated it. A lot. The characters are nothing but violent dicks to each other, in a grand scheme to get the role of "angel" in Gray's experiment (I used to muse Dr. Danny in my RP blog, it was fun to protray him as a pathetic peepermaniac, but I lost my drive after it). It doesn't try to be nuanced or anything else, but I guess if the objective was to remind us that the characters were murderous scum, it succeeded. The effect was so bad on me, that made me question the entire point of AoD itself.

I thought about this for a while. In Aod, we're basically siding with two murderers and Zack's popularity is immense, he's a Chad of murderers. The question is why?

It would be easy to dismiss his popularity as an example of the "bad boy fantasy", mostly associated with women who latches on a "bad boy" type in hopes of "fixing him", but that alone is insufficient to explain (and although it's usually recognized as a 'feminine fantasy', I want to avoid any implication of sexism, even though I don’t doubt this has been discussed in woman’s studies).

At point a friend of mine linked me Explanation Point's video on Happy Sugar Life. Why is Satou, a murderer and near pedophile (near pedophile because she doesn't engage in actual sexual activities with Shio, but it's not less disturbing), a sympathetic character? I won't recap the entire video here, but Satou is sympathetic because of many factors, such as the fact almost everyone around her is worse (arrogant rapist manager, sadomasochist actual ebebophile Danny's long lost brother, lolicon, an actual succubus in human form, obssessed copycat stalker, mad artist - the only developed characters that save themselves are Shoko and Asahi (and not 100% in his case, his determination was his downfall) - I honestly dislike Shio because she's annoying), had a crappy childhood, and that she seems sincere in her feelings for Shio.

The issue, in the end, it's about the way it's framed. Lindsay Ellis has a pretty good video on framing, on explaining how Mikaela actually had potential to be a well-written character in the first Michael Bay’s Transformers movie, but it was ruined by the way she was framed - as mere fanservice, instead of a strong character. The same principle applies to Happy Sugar Life, just pay attention to the way Satou is framed, as a strong character, in “pure” love, flowers appears on the screen when she’s thinking of Shio.

Framing is one reason why HSL failed or, at least, lost a part of its power as a cautionary tale. In the last episode, the way her imagination exploded with images of what her happy life with Shio could be, sprinkled by sappy imagery. Even if Satou killed herself to save Shio as a way to defy her aunt, it still gives a mixed message.

If we apply EP’s argument on Satou to Zack, I think we have even better “case” for Zack. Let’s count the reasons why one should sympathize with Zack:

Antagonists (Danny and Cathy) are worse people

Strong and powerful, to the point of turning into a shonen protagonist when cutting rocks in the last episode

Has a code of honor, only kills people who are laughing

Has standards, refuses to accept godhood from Rachel

Enjoys what he does, he’s probably the most sincere character of the cast

Has a twisted sense of humor

Has a sad backstory, that offered the chance of following another path (but the old man died)

Recognizes he’s messed up

Ridiculously loyal to Ray in the end

We never get to see the PoV of his victims and when we do, the frame actually makes Zack sympathetic - for example, the woman in his flashback, we see her lying to him and him killing her for it - it’s a bad thing, but the scene is framed in a way that Zack is the offended party (it was his PoV anyway)

He’s hot - granted this only works for the anime, because in the game he was some sort of tall mummy gremlin

As another friend of mine said, when I brought this to her, in the end you’re kind of cheering for them to escape police and continue murdering others. And, in the end, they do get away - Zack (and Ray, to some extent) is never punished for his crimes, even though the ending is ambiguous most people believe they escaped anyway.

In HSL we have a similar situation: even though Satou killed herself, Shio is still irreparably damaged, preferring to live her “happy sugar life” in her head than the real world. In fact, HSL’s ending is one of the most hopeless that I’ve ever seen recently, that the entire surviving cast is apparently beyond repair (as worse as Shio worse is Taiyo - it’s quite rare to portray female on male abuse on such a realistic way, any other anime would make a semi-hentai scenario on him, but here, I wouldn’t be surprise if he died starving himself to death in his room). HSL’s ending managed to be much more hopeless than AoD’s ending.

But, returning to Zack, the way his story is framed makes him a sympathetic character. However, while I argue that Zack is a well-written character, he’s not a very realistic one for one simple reason: he’s too conspicuous to be a successful serial killer, he’s too loud and messy; actual serial killers are methodic people, they plan a lot to not leave clues. Meanwhile, Zack is dumb as a rock, which might add him being an escapist character another trait of him.

And that’s where the comparison with Ted Bundy enters. It might be a stretch comparing a fictional character with a real person, but I still think it has some merit. While I haven’t seen the Netflix series, I read the debate on whether it glorifies Bundy or not. Basically the way the series frames Bundy is an argument for the glorification, but the interview with the victims who escaped him and loved ones of his victims is an argument against it. But the fact remains that both have their fans.

If we criticize Bundy’s fans for not noticing how much of a pathetic and deranged person he actually was, why can’t we do the same for Zack’s fans? Well the fact that one is real and the other fictional might be one reason, and being fictional he acts as an outlet for our own frustrations and tendencies just as I discussed with my friend above, but I feel that alone is insufficient, there must be a further reason... but I can’t think of anything else. Otherwise an argument has the danger of turning into the fallacy “videogames make kids violent” sort of thing.

One thing that has to consider is that both AoD and HSL are psychological thriller/horror series. If Zack, Ray and Satou got caught, the shows would be lesser works of art, because one function of psychological horror is to challenge our perceptions of justice.

Horror challenges our perceptions of safety and we are used to the bad guys being punished in the end, it’s a safe assumption. Instead, in horror, the bad guys get away and might be sympathetic, making us sympathetic to their getaway. It’s horror in the sense our own safe perceptions of morality and justice are twisted upside down.

I could go on and approach the thorny question of whether AoD glorifies murderers and HSL glorifies yanderes with children, but this essay is already getting too big, so I leave it for another occasion.

[republictrooper]

Because I feel like I want to get my thoughts down some place where I can kind of let it all flow, here’s where I am on what I thought of the keynote, specially why it lowered my hype overall:

GENDERLOCKED RACES

-The Genderlocked races thing speaks to toxic attitudes about gender that we, as a people, should have gotten over long ago, specifically about how so much of gender is wrapped up in wrongheaded views and fantasies of the cis hetereosexual men who still hold most of the power in most modern societies.

-Viera being kept as woman-only seems to be both a clear concession to male sexuality (Viera racial gear is clearly made with a straight male sexual gaze in mind, and Viera women are designed with supermodel bodies that appeal to a large section of stereotypical straight males) with a slight nod to gender roles (making male Viera who shared the female viera perchant for skimpy clothes and lithe sinuous bodies would make homophobic straight men uncomfortable). 

-Hrothgar very clearly fulfill stereotypical straight cismale fantasies of being big buff powerlifter types. Strength and power over any other type of depiction of men.

-Hrothgar are also suspiciously underdeveloped compared to Viera. No examples in the trailer, and their models in their preview video are very obviously not created with the same care and attention to detail as the Viera examples we’ve seen, say, in the dancer reveal video. I’m not saying the Devs chickened out on male Viera and threw together Hrothgar as a very weird peace offering/attempt to deflect criticism at the last minute, but also, very obviously putting more work and care into the fetishy male-gaze lady-only race is a little much, don’t you think?

-The lore excuse holds no water. If the lore excuse was valid, we would have no playable WHMs (because the elementals only allow a small handful of people to become WHMs, and then mostly only Padjali), no playable BLMs (because BLMs are outlawed with extreme prejudice due to their affects on the land’s aether), no playable male miqote (because lore-wise, they are born at exponentially lower birth rates than miqote women), and no playable viera at all (because lore-wise, they never leave their forests other than a small handful of rebels and misfits. certainly not in large enough numbers to justify the thousands of lady viera that will be seen on the streets of our major hub cities soon enough). I could probably go on, but I’ll stop there. Point is, lore hasn’t stopped the dev team before, and even if the lore was rock solid here... Yoshi is the head designer. He could change it. 

-The “We didn’t have time for both genders for both races” explanation doesn’t sit right with me either. It’s kind of like how in Dragon Age/Mass Effect we constantly learn that they were planning to add more gay/male-on-male romances but ran out of time. Even if that is true, what you chose to cut first says something about your values and priorities. IE, if you chose to cut a queer romance instead of a het romance, it says you got some heteronormativity issues at the least. And if, when faced with the inability to complete two new races, you keep both races, but cut the genders that least conform to standard modern gender roles instead of completing one race and cutting or delaying the other, it says you still have some pretty messed up views about gender. I would have much rather seen them cut one race and make two genders for the other, and it would make more sense to do so absent the gender issues obviously on display.

-They have already made this mistake in the past. Multiple races were genderlocked in 1.0, and they deliberately fixed that in 2.0. It was clearly a mistake. Returning to that same mistake now is a clear backslide.

LACK OF THE HEALER CLASS

Listen, the idea of a Dancer Class at its base isn’t bad. I love the idea. I like capping all battle classes on my main, so I will play Dancer, and probably cap it before multiple other classes. 

However, I am a main healer at heart. Scholar is the first class I level in new expansions, and the class I take to do new content 9 out of 10 times.

I love Scholar. Even if there was a new healer class, chances are I would still level Scholar first.

But sometimes I get tired of Scholar and I want a little variety. But I’ve played WHM and AST a lot already. What if I want to explore another possibility? It is now very possible that I will not have that chance for over 6 years.

When I get tired of my main classes in other roles, I have options.

If I get tired of my BRD (main DPS class), I can switch over to NIN for a while, and in the most recent expansion, I had RDM and SAM to offer new ways to experience the role.

If I get tired of my WAR (main Tank class), well, I WAS in the same boat as healer, but at least I get Gunbreaker this expansion, so that drought is SOMEWHAT broken.

Listen, I understand that healers are technically a little more common than tanks judging by queue time, and most people play DPS, so you feel like you’d rather just pad out either the stuff that needs the most new players or the stuff most people play anyway, but that doesn’t make it any nicer for healers to be the neglected middle child. 

Given that I already had to stop playing Overwatch because they neglected their healer chars, I’d rather not one of my other beloved games do the same. It’s also kind of disconcerting that at the same keynote we learn FFXIV made some very weird male-focused genderlock choices, they also indirectly implied that the MMO role most commonly associated with women will have a lack of classes for at likely least 5 years in a row.

I mean, I can keep my fingers crossed for a surprised reveal of a chemist or geomancer in a patch class, but at this point that is wishful thinking. We healers deserve some indication that the dev team hears us and wants us to feel wanted and appreciated as players. 

FAT MIQOTE.

I’m fat. I will probably always be fat. Call it genetics, call it social pressure, call it whatever you want, but the reasons for being fat are as many and varied as there are fat people. It is not simple for most of us to become not-fat, and we deserve care and consideration as human beings regardless of our body size, body type, or whether we are trying or even planning/wanting to become non-fat or not.

And yet, in popular culture, again and again, fat people are almost universally presented as little more than dopes or comic relief at best, and usually as gluttons and bad people. Fat people are often, or even usually bad, evil people who’s body size is either a punishment or an indication of a corrupt, greedy person who consumes and takes. Even good fat people are often small-minded and weak gluttons who talk of nothing but food, are picked on or made the butt of jokes because of their size, never get a spotlight or even a break, and are often shown as gluttonous to the point of actively endangering themselves and others in pursuit of more food.

That is not who we are. Fat people are fat for a variety of reasons. Fat people can be healthy or unhealthy. Fat people can be good or evil. And yet we always fall within a few negative stereotypes in fiction. And now FFXIV is carrying those forward, front and center on the main advertising for their new expansion. 

And like, If devs don’t want to allocate resources to creating fat models for player races because of animation concerns or whatever, that’s one thing. It’s still speaks to your priorities that you think fat people aren’t worth animating, but at least we have some sort of explanation.

But the fact that the only time fat people get paraded out is as shorthand for greed and corruption is demoralizing at best, and speaks to a lack of understanding and compassion.

Fat people deserve to see heroic fat people. They deserve to see brave fat people. They deserve to see kind fat people. They deserve to see fat people of all walks of life, not just corrupt villains and lazy comic relief. I hope at the very least FFXIV’s devs realize this and give us fat people populating other villages and cities, being as visible and varied as thin people.

IN CONCLUSION, I FEEL KINDA BAD, SORRY

Anyway, I still plan to play Shadowbringers. There’s still a lot about FFXIV I love. But I feel like the dev team made a lot of really bad missteps and unforced errors at last night’s keynote, and I hope they realize that and strive to do better and fix those errors in upcoming live letters and patches.

[tanadrin]

Olly Thorn, the guy who does Philosophy Tube, argues in his video on liberalism that, as an ideology, it’s characterized primarily by its tendency to carve out exceptions: politicians of classical liberal bent like moderate Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK promulgate a general political perspective of to-each-their-own, but place those principles in abeyance for pragmatic or situational reasons--and, of course, classically liberal documents like the U.S. Constitution talk a big game of being about freedom and self-determination generally, while having implicit and explicit glaring exceptions, like women and black slaves.

I disagree. Not because I’m a diehard classical liberal; I think liberalism is a useful starting point through which many much more incisive and useful political and social analyses have passed. It is at best the Newtonian physics of human rights, though sometimes it reeks of epicycles. But: I think liberalism is best understood as the practical application of philosophical principles discovered during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but only fully explored and coherently grappled with much later. Nonetheless, as a tendency, it does have its own internal logic, and the apparent suspension of liberal principles by self-professed liberals is less an inherent property of a liberal worldview than an inherent property of humans being shitty and clinging to, or adopting, prejudice when it’s expedient or provides some measure of personal comfort.

This is important because I think that ultimately the contradiction between the liberal perspective and the mental jiu-jitsu required to maintain those prejudices from a liberal perspective can open the floodgates to progress. Let us take the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s in the US as an example. Many different factors contributed to the successes of the CRM in the 20th century. Previous attempts to win something like civil equality for black people in the US had failed: Reconstruction was abandoned, struggles against segregation in the early 20th century came to little, and the appetite for racial discrimination on the part of the white majority, especially in the South, was not at all diminished after the end of World War 2.

What changed? Mostly, I think, the right leaders and the right strategies at the right time. But a strong contributing factor was the fact that the U.S. saw itself as an essentially liberal construct, based on rights and freedoms and equality, and no matter what racist justifications were trotted out to narrow the scope of those rights, it was increasingly apparent both in internal and external terms that something was hilariously out of kilter. Women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the relentless drive of black Americans to increase their own economic prosperity made it clear that there were brutal archaisms within the systems of American life that could no longer be sustained. On the world stage, two massive wars were fought in which the U.S. positioned itself as a defender of freedom and democracy, alongside allies that emphatically did *not* have explicit regimes of racial segregation enshrined in their laws, or the same thoroughgoing ideology of white supremacy, and one of which indeed argued (at least on paper) for a kind of radical social equality that would have had the so-called freedom-loving founders of the U.S. begging and screaming for a king to come back and rule over them again.

Like all great attempts at reform, the CRM achieved less than it set out to do. But, in a way that the labor movement and women’s suffrage had not, it did leave a powerful lasting model within American culture and within the American civil religion for What Rights-Seeking Is Supposed To Look Like. I don’t know why the CRM was unique in this respect. (I suspect that it’s because the CRM occurred when the contradictions it sought to undo were at their height, relatively-speaking: even in the 50s and 60s, the philosophical justification for racism and segregation was basically incoherent screeching, which meant that extremely uncontroversial tactics could prove highly persuasive.) It also established that *this was a process that was supposed to occur.* By giving such a process a formal presence within civil society, it directly laid the groundwork for other movements rebelling against much older, and much more deeply ingrained prejudices, against which liberalism had, heretofore, been mostly powerless. This was extremely important.

Gay and lesbian culture, and the idea that gay and lesbian people might not be demon-possessed desecrators of all that was good and decent in life, did not appear suddenly in the second half of the 20th century. But the CRM provided a new framework in which to cast the concept of gay rights, and, indirectly, language for a gay identity that wasn’t one entirely of rebellion. Let us cast ourselves back to a much earlier era, the long 18th century. In this era, before even the milquetoast concession to the humanity of homosexuals that was the reclassifying homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder instead of an immolation-worthy offense, the dominant language to talk about good and bad, ethical and unethical, right and wrong, was monopolized by religion and the religion-adjacent concept of natural law. Lacking the natural empiricism that was the legacy of scientists like Darwin, natural law was conceived of in narrow terms that were not, in fact, based on any close or careful observations of nature, but human biases projected on to the natural sphere. Therefore, for many people who found themselves inherently opposed to the dominant ethical framework, like those who fell in love with and were attracted to people of the same sex, the choice they had must have felt from the inside a lot like Huck Finn’s: to be “good,” even though it was personally and spiritually intolerable to you, or to say, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

If society refuses to make a distinction between real evils and real suffering we visit upon each other and the moralizing “evils” we conceive of only to police the behavior and opinions of our neighbors, it must not pretend to be astonished when those who, out of no actual malicious inclination, must be themselves or perish reject that general framework entirely. And you know what? I sympathize. If somebody told me that who I was, inherently, was evil, even though I desire no harm and no suffering to anyone around me, and that expressing that identity even in private was equivalent to--or worse than!--inflicting grievous harm on another human being out of pure hatred, I would be extremely suspicious of their overarching moral framework.

Out of, I suspect, an inclination to rebelliousness and an imperfect analysis of the insufficiencies those antiquated frameworks, people like Marquis de Sade embraced or appeared to embrace monstrous ethics, because these were the only other ethics available to them. Christian, and especially Catholic teachings on sexual ethics require not only a denial of truths of human nature available to casual, empirical inspection (if one is willing to conduct such an inspection dispassionately, attendant to discovery of novel goods as well as novel ills), but a monstrous indifference to the suffering such teaching inflict on those who are simply unable to conform. Then, Pikachu-like, the Catholic church looks at gays and lesbians and gender-nonconforming people and says to itself, “Why on earth did these people reject the simple truth of the teachings of Christ??”

Thankfully, the gay rights movement has a superpower that the African-American civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, and many other such movements throughout history, did not. That superpower was the closet, or, more specifically, in the act of coming out. Women, the working class, and racial minorities are not randomly distributed throughout the population. Working class children are not born at random to middle-class and wealthy families; you do not need to come out as black to your shocked segregationist parents at sixteen. There is not a pre-scripted social role for gays and lesbians to slot into, a set of norms that are foisted on one as totally and completely as gender roles with a provenance that stretches back into the misty depths of Mesopotamian time. (There could have been. In some societies there is something quite like that--just not in ours.)

Because literally anyone could be gay, and because creating social bubbles of like racial or political or socioeconomic attributes does not insulate one from knowing someone who has the experience of being gay, even though gay people are not a large proportion of the population (2-5%, maybe), it becomes much harder to maintain “gay” as a firmly isolated category of other. When just enough gay people have come out in a society that is just liberal enough to tolerate their existence, it rapidly incentivizes more gay people to come out, both to be able to live as themselves, and to say to their acquaintances and family, even if in the most nominal way, “yes, you too know a gay person. You must integrate your knowledge of me as a person into your understanding of the category ‘homosexual.’” And, of course, also incentivizes closer analysis of sexual identities; of the coming out of bisexual people, who otherwise might live tolerably-but-unhappily in the closet, or who simply might not understand that bisexuality is a thing and they share it; and, as we have now, the beginning of a glorious blossoming of a diverse and nuanced understanding of sexuality and sexual identity. To the reactionary mind, this looks like the gays are recruiting, and lobbying, and overturning the order of society. In fact, what is happening is that even those conservative by inclination (among them, famously, Dick Cheney) cannot maintain both their avowed liberalism and their opposition to gay rights when confronted with members of their own family who are gay. It may not lead them to a comprehensive application of the ruthless logic of liberal democracy, but it does destroy one specific contradiction. This is why, even though the U.S. as a whole is not much more socially liberal, the popular opposition to gay marriage absolutely fucking *cratered* between the end of the 90s, when the idea was first conceived of in an extremely-distant extremely-theoretical way, and Obergefell. For institutional reasons peculiar to American conservatism, there’s still a nominal opposition, but let’s be clear: the war is over. Gay marriage (which I’m using here as a proxy for ‘basic acceptability of homosexuality as a personal attribute’) won.

This not to say that all discourse over gay rights is finished, any more than racism in the US ended with the VRA in 1964, or the need for feminism ended when women got the vote. Political rights aren’t the equivalent of social equality. But how we organize ourselves politically is integral to the mythology of our society--there’s a reason that, say, in the US electing your high school student council uses first past the post voting, while in Ireland it uses IRV. Political rights are a baseline and a pivot point. If your right to marry someone of the same sex is protected by law, it is a powerful social signal that being gay is OK--just as the VRA is a powerful social signal that racism is not, and women’s suffrage that women’s role as political beings is not to be ignored.

So there’s an ongoing social struggle to dismantle illiberal-undemocratic incoherencies within smaller bubbles of society, using the overarching consensus, and to dismantle biases and prejudices which are predicated on the illegitimacy of homosexuality, because the actual implications of the legitimacy of a gay identity haven’t been fully worked out generally. Same as with race. Same as with gender equality. And because the L, the G, the B, and the T (and all the other letters in the increasingly-expanding initialism) are related, because gender and sex and sexuality are part of a huge and messy complex of human identity, transness and trans identities specifically, while constituting a distinct concept on their own, are bound up in other ongoing struggles, while also having issues all their own. If, as Dan Savage says, misogyny is homophobia’s snot-nosed sibling (and it absolutely is), so is transphobia. You cannot be a transphobe and not, at some level, be supporting the same set of memes that has for thousands of years legitimized sexism, sexual exploitation, the brutalization of gay people, etc., etc.

What are some of those unique issues? Well, for one, transness is more bound up with medicalization and looks more to medicine to legitimize itself as an identity than any other GSM. There are historical and practical reasons for that. Historical, in that sex researchers and psychiatrists newly interested in the empirical exploration of human identities were among the first people to take the experiences of trans people seriously. While we had preexisting and strong social stigmas around the idea of homosexuality, we had a society so transphobic by default that it didn’t even really understand trans people could exist, much less come up with invective against them. This didn’t mean early trans pioneers like Lili Elbe were accepted by society, really; but the cruel incomprehension of society was more like the attitude to circus freaks than to serial killers. With gay people, on the other hand, “sympathetic” psychiatrists reclassified homosexuality as a disease, then started work on various kinds of fucked-up conversion therapy. Psychiatry may be a science, but let it never be said that science is immune to human prejudice.

But the practical reason for that association is that modern medical technology offers a powerful tool for relieving the suffering of trans people. To be sure, there are specific concerns of medical care among gay, lesbian, and bi people, too, especially since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. But such is a) the complex and interlocking aspects of gender and presentation and embodiment of both in our society and b) the nature in which dysphoria is felt by trans people, that medical intervention is, purely on a pragmatic level, a powerful tool to both relieve suffering specific to the experience of being trans. That’s not really the case with gay or bi identities.

Where we run into trouble is where we rely on the interface between trans identities and medical institutions to legitimate trans identities. What this huge long screed has all been a preface to is this assertion: that it is, above all, entirely unnecessary. You do not need a comprehensive medical theory of blackness to recognize black people deserve rights. You do not need a medical theory of gayness to recognize gay people deserve rights. Ditto womanhood. Indeed, in *every one* of those cases, medical theorizing on paradigms of homosexuality, womanhood, and race have been used to prop up, rather than to dismantle prejudices, and it is only the relentless logic of liberal values, either on their own terms, or in the more sophisticated form under which they’re incorporated into other critiques of society (as leftists sometimes manage), that have ultimately pushed through the “eww, I don’t like these people” reaction to a consistently tolerant treatment of these categories as fully realized human beings--or, at least, the beginnings of that treatment.

(Irrelevant aside: I actually entirely expect that the close relationship between medical and experiential aspects of transess will be the vehicle to greater acceptability of a transhuman ethos around how we interact with our bodies. Because the morphological self-determination aspect of transhumanism is fundamentally liberal, i.e., it’s about personal autonomy and personal flourishing, and because the technologies available to facilitate that are medical, they’re bound up with the cultural aspects of medicine. Right now, that’s a disease model, based both on the inheritance of medicine as “thing which exists to make people healthy again,” and the practical limits of scarcity and wanting people to pay out of pocket for anything that is classified as purely cosmetic. But in my heart of Utopian hearts, even purely cosmetic procedures belong to the same category, mutatis mutandis 1) whether they can be shorn from the (IMO mostly unfair) presumption they’re about conforming to oppressive social norms, and 2) the fact they’re usually used to enact a preference much less acute and involving much less personal difficulty than GID. But big, big emphasis on “usually.” To put it another way, unbinding medicalization from transness wouldn’t be an argument against providing specialized medical care for trans people. It would be an argument for providing a similar set of services to everyone.)

I’m actually deeply uninterested in theorizing about what transness is or how it’s constituted. For one, I think a lot of the questions around it are simplistic and ill-defined, such as the utterly moronic search for “a gay gene.” Human identity and sexuality and sex, and cultural complexes built around those things which have their roots in, but really aren’t tied to biology in any kind of philosophically consistent way, are too multifactorial, and too fuzzy to be clearly or cleanly captured by psychiatry and neuroscience and biology as they currently stand. Maybe one day, when we have Culture-level AI able to image us down to the subatomic level and run sophisticated simulations of every metabolic pathway and every cognitive tic simultaneously we can create a sufficiently detailed model of the human being to speak on these things with some certainty. But that’s actually irrelevant to the messy business of lived experience, and to the practical business of “how do we get people to stop deliberately inflicting massive amounts of suffering on each other.”

The answer to the latter question is essentially the same as has been for homosexuality. Like gay people, trans people have the superpower of being able to come out. Unlike gay people, trans people make up an even smaller proportion of the population. And the conversation around the diversity of gender identity is even more in its infancy than the conversation around sexual identities. But as we have seen time and time again, the exact constitution of the identity is irrelevant to the identity’s legitimacy. Those hostile to that identity will always find a basis on which to rest their hostility: using medical legitimacy, or failure to conform to the gender binary, or failure to meet some arbitrary definition of dysphoria, will make it no easier to gain acceptance. Minorities under siege have been willing to throw less-mainstream members of the group under the bus to defend themselves since time immemorial: it never works. You will be accepted for precisely as long as you are useful to attack other members of the group, and then they will turn on you. Racists will use black people who look down on AAVE to say, “see! I’m not racist!” and then still refuse to hire the well-dressed black person who speaks perfectly standard GenAm, over a less qualified white person. There is no “balancing act” between a “reasonable” set of trans identities and an “unreasonable” set, because what the philosophical battle is over is not where, exactly, the line will be drawn for a minority identity, but the validity of that fundamental identity in the first place.

So I tire of people who want to endlessly split and compare forms of transness that they feel are well beyond the set of central examples of trans identity. I tire of people who want to treat some forms of gender self-identity as invalid, or of too little value to the person making them to be worth caring about. This is not just dumb, and it’s not just bad strategy (solidarity! it works, bitches). It’s actually completely missing the point. If you can convince society that “trans” is a legitimate identity, the supposed edge cases don’t matter. If you can’t, abandoning people “without” “real” “dysphoria” or w/e won’t make a difference. It’s not as if they’re the one thing standing in the way of every transphobe going “welp, guess we were wrong!” The thing standing in the way is that they refuse to accept trans identities at all. They will point to whatever they can to buttress that lack of acceptance, and if it isn’t that it will be something else. The thing that works against that, the thing that dismantles that, is the same thing that always dismantles prejudice: you be who you are. You don’t let anyone take that away from you. And if someone asks you to philosophically justify your experiences, your life, your existence, you tell them to get fucked, and you keep right on living.

[yasuda-yoshiya]

Are you going to buy a copy of Fatamoru Dreams of the Revenants Edition? I love Imeon primarily because she saved Michel and called Morgana out on her bullshit. As a counterpoint to the The Maid’s rather rushed and disappointing resolution and how to fix it, could you write down all of the positive things about her? What actually worked? The elaborate setup was definitely a factor! You seem very passionate about her, as am I. I hope I’m not annoying you with all these Maid thoughts!

Hmm, I’d really like to buy it, but I don’t own either of the systems it’s been announced for, unfortunately… I might still buy a copy just for the sake of showing support, though, especially since I’m sure I’ll end up looking at videos for the new content anyway. Novectacle definitely deserve it! I really appreciate their commitment to getting all of the games localised and brought over here, even when the sales apparently haven’t been that great. It can’t be easy to arrange such high-quality localisations for games as text-heavy as these, so I’m hugely grateful to them for managing it!

(And yes, Imeon is the best! Appreciate her!!)

Honestly, I love pretty much everything about the Maid’s characterisation prior to door 6! Indirectly characterising her through her background role as the “narrator” through the first four doors was such a unique and fascinating presentational choice; she has a really strong and simultaneously reassuring and unsettling presence as a character that grabbed me very quickly, and all the subtle ways in which she indirectly expresses things about herself through the ways she tells and presents her stories even as she positions herself as an impartial observer felt really exciting and rewarding to pick up on. I think it’s absolutely some of Fata’s best writing in terms of communicating so much through indirect implications and little cues in the ways she talks about herself, the WHG, the mansion etc, without having to resort to straightforward exposition or explicitly putting the focus on her PoV. The whole atmosphere around her is so powerful, too; her piano and affected themes evoke a really strong feeling of quiet tranquility with an underlying deep sadness behind it, which the writing also communicates really well through the descriptions of the lonely dark mansion as the Maid guides you through it. Fata really does do an incredibly good job with atmosphere, and those initial sequences with the Maid stand out as one of the strongest examples of that for me.

And in general, I just think her role in presenting the story and how it influences the way the reader takes it is really interesting and effective? I really remember how the game made me feel a sort of trust and comfort in her presence despite the obviously creepy aspects of her presentation; the game really does communicate a definite feeling of genuine warmth and concern for “you” even through the very formally detached way she expresses it, so it makes you sort of feel like you want to trust the framing of her stories and what she’s presenting to you, even with the ample avidence that’s something is wrong about it. And that’s generally the way you’d expect a game like Fata to be set up, I think; for each of the Maid’s stories to contain all the pieces to solve the mystery of “who you are”, and that then the final story will be about collecting all those pieces together and reaching the truth, even if there might be some obfuscation along the way. So I always found it really cool and impressive how Fata totally turns all those assumptions on their head in the end - most of the Maid’s stories have absolutely nothing to do with Michel, the final door that “gives all the answers” is actually the least real of them all, and the opening arc isn’t really about being helped to remember your story at all - it’s actually about the storyteller trying to push someone else’s story on to you instead, and getting to the heart of their emotional reasons for doing so. Realising that at the end of door 4 totally overturned my perception of the Maid and everything about the story up to that point in such an impactful and memorable way. I’m still sort of vaguely in awe when I think about it.

And what really gets me about that is that the Maid is so good at that role of the storyteller, too, you know? Her act as the all-knowing mentor and guide who knows and understands everything is so incredibly thorough and convincing; she really does narrate the stories and set up the mysteries about things like her unaging nature and the WHG’s reincarnations in a very deliberate and intriguing way, gradually dropping more and more hints to the “correct answers” until culminating with the fourth door that finally puts everything together. The Maid’s constructed narrative is completely and utterly airtight; the only things hinting at something being wrong are the things that you have to deliberately step out of the path the Maid sets out for you to find (the mirror scene, the talk with the painting, the door 4 backlog text), but if you cut those things out and just take the story as the Maid tells you, you could absolutely end the game at door 4 and the story would still make perfect sense. There aren’t any holes or unexplained mysteries; it really does all tie together neatly in isolation.

And letting the reader get so immersed in the Maid’s misleading presentation of that narrative and the meaning behind it just worked so well for me as a presentational choice, because it really makes clear without the game ever having to actually explicitly spell it out or say it why door 4 is so important to the Maid - it’s just so evident in the way that she frames so much of her telling of the first three doors as leading up to toward that ultimate “reveal”, that all-important part of the story that “gives all the answers” and gives a clear meaning and purpose to all that senseless and incomprehensible tragedy. The Maid needed the framework of that story because that’s the only way she could get the comfort and security of clear answers and purpose to her suffering. I really wish I could properly express just how much it shook me when I did first realise at the end of door 4 that her carefully crafted role as the “guide to the story” was a deliberate affectation; I get the impression that people mostly tend to react to the big reveal with confusion more than anything else at first, but I just remember feeling such a painfully piercing sense of clarity and understanding at how painstakingly she’d constructed that role of the storyteller around herself and why she needed it, why someone would choose to detach from themselves and push their own story on to someone else in that way. She really is such a good character with so many conscious and unconscious layers to her thought processes and her ways of expressing herself; I honestly do think she’s portrayed incredibly well in the first half of the story and that will always stick with me, however much the latter parts of the story do admittedly drop the ball on it!

[copperbadge]

Infinity War: A Review As Long As The Movie Itself

Okay, so I saw Infinity War a second time and most of my thoughts were unchanged plus I had one cool new one, and I have had a lot more sleep now than I had in the early part of the week. So I think now I’m good to talk about it. 

This is mostly a series of observations rather than a coherent review. Spoilers, very obviously, below the cut. If you are on mobile and can’t see a cut below before a massive wall of text, please scroll fast if you don’t want to be spoiled. 

1. I mentioned this before but this movie does feel like a series of video game cut scenes. Part of that is visual -- more than any other MCU movie, there are times when Infinity War is an animated film. There are a lot of moments where it’s just straight-up CGI with maybe Josh Brolin’s eyeballs. The two most noticeable ones are Thanos waking up with the soul stone and Thanos and Iron Man fighting on Titan, probably because Thanos is, uh, he’s not always very convincingly animated and the new model for Iron Man is a bit on the uncanny-valley side (the head in particular is weird). 

But also, there is so much to cram into the movie that every scene has to dump a lot of info pretty quickly. Which is not necessarily bad -- they do it very deftly -- but it means we get a series of tastes rather than a good main course. We get hints of where Steve, Sam, Wanda, and Natasha have been, but no real information, and it’s treated as if it’s basically irrelevant. We see Wanda and Vision in a secret-romance situation, but we never really see anything about why their relationship works or how they got there. The same with Peter and Gamora. There’s been bedrock laid down for these relationships in previous films, but there’s no building on that bedrock. And when you get to non-romantic relationships that gets even thinner because it’s difficult to no-homo a male friendship in the time allotted and 90% of the characters in these movies are male so there’s a shitload of relationships that fall by the wayside. 

I had some interesting conversations about how Peter Parker’s death scene was really dramatic and carried a ton of impact for Tony, and that’s good, but that is a scene I think Bucky and Steve should also have gotten and couldn’t because the no-homo in a very obviously parent-child relationship is much easier to convey. (Also because of a later point I’ll get to, see 10, where Tony and Peter in the Death Scene have to stand in for literally every other relationship.) 

2. A thirtysomething heterosexual white boy mad about his girlfriend doomed half the universe. Peter Quill’s lack of self-control indirectly caused the death of trillions when he punched Thanos, and that’s all I could think about during that scene. It’s so funny and so unfunny at the same time, because while it’s a (perhaps unintended) commentary on a lot of recent mass violence in America I am 100% sure that he will not suffer consequences for it. I mean, yes, he’s dead as a consequence, but LBR he’s not staying dead and when he’s back alive again he will suffer no ill will from anyone lasting longer than five minutes of Tony yelling, maybe. 

Also, I get that Thanos is big and strong but surely cutting his arm off would have been faster than pulling the glove off. I would imagine there are all kinds of arguments against it (he can still control it if his hand’s still in it, cutting his arm off would wake him, etc), but I’m pretty sure “narrative necessity” is the top one. 

3. I’m uncomfortable with all the Holocaust-y blown-to-ash imagery in the Death Scene following hard on the heels of, and then being followed itself by, a bunch of scenes that really seem to want to make us sympathize with the person who caused it, including one where he walks on water. (I can already hear people saying “It’s dust not ash” and that’s a conversation people can have if they want but in a moment that Gamora explicitly describes as a genocide in which trillions of people die because of a so-called lack of resources, which was, you know, a real Hitler talking point in the thirties, I’m not only reading it as ash, I’m reading it as a very specific kind of ash, and that’s not gonna change.) 

There is so much time spent on trying to make Thanos sympathetic in this movie. I get that they want him to come off as if he believes he’s the hero, because that’s basic good-villain writing 101. But less sympathy for the devil could have allowed room for the actual heroes to get some more character development. Thanos is so ludicrously over-powered by the time we meet him that I don’t really give a shit why he does what he does, and if the story IS a commentary on the brutality of genocide, then like, we don’t really want to be sympathizing with the guy committing it.

But because of all this, what I am hoping for in part two is a real hardcore demonstration of how evil he truly is to balance how sympathetic they tried to play him here. We see hints of his monstrosity under a veil of self-assumed virtue in this movie, occasionally. There’s the torture of Nebula, of course, and Eitri’s hands are also evidence. We have enough to see that he’s not just a crusader, he’s also able and eager to torment and maim. So I’m hopeful for more of that and less of his Purple Man’s Burden in part two. 

Related to this is a scene where Thanos says one thing that I think is really vital to his monstrosity, though I doubt this was intentional: he says it will be an objective genocide, “Rich and poor alike.” Really, we know that wealth causes excess consumption and hoarding of resources; you don’t have to kill half the population to balance its resources. You just have to kill the richest. However you feel about capitalism or wealth accumulation, whether you think killing the rich is justifiable, if you’re going to just slaughter a bunch of people in order to fix shit, you slaughter fewer for a much higher ROI if you slaughter the rich. That’s just....accounting. And the fact that Thanos doesn’t acknowledge this says to me that at the end of the day he wants the power of life and death, and he has no justification for it. But the problem is that I don’t believe the writers examined that line themselves or even thought of it, which makes me worried about whether we will get an expression of Thanos’s evil without a justification of his actions in part two. 

4. I’ve never seen Peter Dinklage in anything other than this, and after seeing the film for the first time I asked a friend, “IS he a terrible actor in everything? I didn’t think so, people seem to like him, but he’s dreadful in this.” The second time round, it was pointed out to me that they’re artificially slowing his voice, which makes him seem ludicrously overacted. Sorry, Peter Dinklage, I misjudged you, and this movie done wrong by you. 

5. Normally I don’t fully enjoy Rocket in the Guardians movies because there’s just a lot of him and the 2-3 jokes (what is he, he likes to murder, he’s a jerk) get old fast. I enjoyed him in this, because he got what I feel is the appropriate amount of screen time vis a vis the rest of the movie, and also Bucky picking him up was super funny. 

6. Bucky’s face when he sees the arm and asks where the fight is, weep loudly if you agree. Sebastian Stan can say more with his face than some actors can with a full on monologue. Also I am writing a fanfic about Bucky’s time on a Wakandan farm, working title: “My Dumb Goats.”

7. Literally nobody saw Sam Wilson die and I’m circulating a petition about it. Come on, at least give him a witness. Fuck. I think Sam’s death actually hit me the hardest because there wasn’t even anyone there to say goodbye to him. 

8. I gasped when Red Skull pulled his cowl down, oh my Jesus what a moment.

9. The first time I saw Captain America: Winter Soldier, when Bucky stood up without the mask, a woman behind me said, “Oh my god, it’s his BEST FRIEND,” with amazement in her voice. Watching Infinity War, when Gamora started going off about how Thanos doesn’t love anything, the guy in the seat next to me said, “Oh no, IT’S YOU.” I sometimes really enjoy going to movies surrounded by people who aren’t in fandom and don’t read subtext as quickly as fandom does. 

10. Here’s my new theory that is maybe not new and has been super obvious to everyone else forever. Preface: it’s not that I didn’t know Iron Man is in a shitload of the Marvel movies, or that I didn’t find that significant. We know that “I am Iron Man” is frequently considered the start of the MCU timeline even though Steve Rogers was the first avenger, and the first Iron Man film is iconic within the MCU (though they have never gone back to it for visual or thematic inspiration which is frustrating). 

But it seems really evident now, having seen part one of two and having seen Tony Stark in it, that not only is this “his” film in many ways, but the MCU to date is Tony Stark’s saga. Maybe I’m just slow to pick this up, but when he says Thanos has been in his head for six years, it was an indicator -- inadequate, see my Cut Scene theory, but still, it made me realize -- that the Avengers films and even many of the character films post-Avengers (Civil War and Homecoming, most obviously) are the story of Tony’s struggle with the shadow of Thanos up through his face-to-face confrontation with him. 

Like, we’ve seen that it’s something Tony grapples with, but I hadn’t realized that grappling was the entire point. In Age of Ultron, Ultron actually become a macguffin, he becomes a secondary indicator of Tony’s obsession with Thanos rather than a villain in his own right, which almost makes me want to watch that movie again even though I hated it. The vision of death and destruction Wanda gives Tony is Thanos-driven, and all his actions in every film post-Avengers are motivated by his fear of and antipathy for Thanos, even if he doesn’t yet know his name or face. And this is why Strange gives up the Time stone to save Tony, because that one win in fourteen million losses depends on Tony Stark. 

This is also why Peter Parker and Tony get a lot of time to bicker like family about nothing in particular throughout this film, leading up to the one true dramatic death scene in the Death Scene -- because for time’s sake they could really only pick one death to fully engage with, and it had to be the one affecting Tony, and we had to see them bonding to see WHY it affected Tony. He’s got to be the one to end Thanos, one way or another, and will likely be some form of uniting factor among the surviving heroes in the climax of part two. Which, I have a significant level of admiration for how deftly that process has taken place, even if I know that it will 99% likely lead to Tony’s permadeath in part two. 

It also makes me wonder about RDJ’s guiding hand in these films. I’m given to understand that even on movies where he’s not producer he often brings in his own script doctors to ensure he’s getting the best possible role he can get. I wonder if he and Kevin Feige had some kind of offer-you-can’t-refuse meeting once it became evident that the franchise was going to really come together as a single, if heavily branching, narrative. It also makes me wonder how much of the “RDJ is the Godfather of the Marvel Universe” we’ve seen in recent media is a talking point the actors were given in their press-interview briefing packets. 

11. Okay in the credits at one point it says “Character from Arrested Development courtesy of 20th Century Fox.” What....is up with that? What character? I don’t watch the show. 

12. SUPER EXCITED FOR CAROL DANVERS IN A GENERAL SENSE AND ALSO SEVERAL SPECIFIC SENSES. 

So those are my thoughts. Go ye and engage with them, I guess. :D

Did you enjoy this review or find it insightful? Consider buying me a buttery tub of popcorn at my Ko-Fi or via my Paypal!

[diaboluslapis]

Ryukishi07′s Q&A at Animecon in Finland

Full Q&A video:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/DBQe_zsF-tk

Part 2: https://youtu.be/WOh-MWhv4UE

Translation under the cut:

Part 1:

Interviewer: Could you start out with explaining how your career started and how the circle 07th Expansion was born?

Ryukishi07: It’s a very boring story, but I just thought about what I wanted to do with my life and simply decided to try what I wanted to do, and this is what happened!

I: Your career started in doujinshi circuits. What’s it like making games for an audience similar to Comiket?

R: I did work for an audience similar to Comiket happening in August and it’s been very stressful but also rewarding.

I: Wasn’t there another happening in December as well?

R: For the happening in August there’s a lot of time to do work to prepare, but for the happening in December there’s only 4 months to prepare which makes it harder.

I: Could you tell us how your masterpiece Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was born?

R: I got an idea from the American movie The Blair Witch Project and thought it’d be fun to make a Japanese version of the movie’s scenario.

I: Higurashi is told through many stories that raise questions about the plot, questions which are then answered in the later games. Where did the idea for constructing the plot like this come from?

R: By drinking Coca-Cola, you get a lot of ideas! *laughter*

I: Which character is your favourite in Higurashi?

R: It depends a lot on when you ask the question because it changes for me all the time, but at the moment it’s Satoko Hojo.

I: 07th Expansion’s games are described as sound novels, where the world of sound plays an important role. How does this affect the writing?

R: For example, you can hear sound in an anime. I wanted to combine anime, manga and visual novels and create my own coherent ”chain”.

I: Your games have been released for various consoles. PC, Playstation, and Nintendo DS. Do you have a favourite console?

R: At the moment it’s either Playstation 4 or Nintendo Switch.

I: The When They Cry series later became very popular and was made into manga, anime and even movie adaptions. How does this popularity feel?

R: I’m very grateful for all the support that I get from everyone.

I: Was it possible to imagine, when making the first Higurashi, that it would ever become this popular?

R: In my dreams I thought it’d be amazing to become that popular, but of course it was still a surprise.

I: Nowadays a lot of visual novels use shocking and horror elements. Do you feel like Higurashi was a ”trendsetter” in that regard?

R: I feel like works like that existed before as well, I don’t feel like a ”trendsetter”. I’m an especially big fan of Kamaitachi no Yoru, it was an inspiration for me because it was also connected to horror, so I wanted to a work with horror as well. It was presumed that sound novels were mostly based on horror, but nowadays you can find a lot of cute girls in them as well. But even these cute girls can be horrifying! *laughter*

I: After the Higurashi series, there was Umineko no Naku Koro ni. What inspired you to write it?

R: I wanted to make a more Western-based story, since I previously made a story based on Japanese country life.

I: Did you have to do any background research for writing Umineko?

R: I went to a small island where there was believed to be a ghost. Of course there was no ghost but I tried to capture the feeling from that island, but since there wasn’t actually a ghost there I had to come up with some white lies in my work. *laughter* It was challenging, since there wasn’t actually anything on that island.

I: What motivated you to show clearer answers in the Umineko manga?

R: Because as the final release, I thought it would make it special.

I: In Umineko there is a character named Yasu, whose persona and feelings are presented to the reader indirectly through the stories she has written. How was the process of creating this character?

R: From the start, I had considered a character who was a criminal, but then felt like that would be too extra, and so I ended up with a character like Yasu.

I: There are apparently plans for a new episode of Umineko, could you tell us about this?

R: There will be a new character, who will be revealed soon, so be prepared for that.

I: There is also a new When They Cry game in the works, could you tell us more about this?

 Part 2:

R: It will be more international this time, and there might even be a Finnish character!

I: Higurashi refers to cicadas, while Umineko refers to seagulls. Do you already know what the next When They Cry series will refer to?

R: I haven’t decided yet, but I want it to have the same theme, like being connected to plants and rain. It’s still in the works, please wait and be excited.

I: Do you know if the new part will be released in English?

R: If someone is ready to translate, then absolutely. My English abilities aren’t enough for this.

I: What’s your opinion on the games being translated to English and gaining an international audience?

R: I’m very thankful and appreciate that people have been able and wanted to translate my works. I see a lot of appreciation for the translators and they’ve definitely had a lot to work with.

I: You’ve previously worked with Key Studio on their game Rewrite. Rewrite’s art director Itaru Hinoue also visited Finland this year. When working on Rewrite, did the two of you get to work together?

R: Yes, it was our first time working together.

I: Who are your favourite characters from the game Trianthology?

R: There are a lot of characters, but Alice is my favourite.

I: A game called Iwaihime is also in the works. Could you tell us about this?

R: I was asked for a horror work and I decided that since there are primarily two types of horror in Japan, creepy horror and horror that focuses on monsters, I wanted to bring these two types of horror out in the finished work.

I: Video games are very popular today, perhaps more than ever before. How well do you think visual novels are surviving in the video game genre?

R: I hope that it could become as big of a thing as novels, anime and manga, and I think it has a chance, but at the moment smart phone games are more popular in Japan, which makes me a bit sad but I’m still hopeful.

I: Which work you’ve written are you most satisfied with?

R: A very hard question... *laughter* It’s always the one I’ve most recently released that I’m the most satisfied with.

I: How do you stay motivated when writing?

R: At the moment I’m very motivated simply because work is work, but previously my motivation was that I played war video games on the Xbox and when I lost, it made me so angry that I wanted to work! *laughter*

I: You said that your most recent work is always the one you’re most happy with. If you could go back and change something about an earlier work like Higurashi or Umineko, would you change anything?

R: I gave it my all, so there’s nothing I would like to change. If I changed something, that would make it an entirely different story. A lot of people ask me about going back 10 years in time, but 10 years back in time would mean that the pages would be empty, there wouldn’t be any text yet, which would probably mean playing a lot of games!

I: What other hobbies do you have beside playing war video games?

R: All kinds of killing games!

I: What’s your favourite anime?

R: Girls und Panzer.

I: What’s your favourite game?

R: Even though I like war video games, I also like zombie video games.

I: What’s the best thing about your work?

R: The state of flow, when you’re so focused on your work that you forget to eat and even to go to the bathroom.

I: When you write a story, how do you come up with the characters? Do you get any inspiration from other characters or real people?

R: I want to connect older characters to newer characters, it’s very important to me to make that connection. But sometimes when playing games I just see a character that I think is cute and it gives me inspiration.

I: Have you ever thought about adding your old characters in a new game, like for example having the characters from Higurashi in a new story?

R: Inside my head, these characters are my friends, but now that the work on that story is done, these characters are gone. But if I had to work with the same story, the characters would probably return back into my head.

I: What advice do you have to aspiring writers and visual novel creators?

R: Seriously or not seriously? It’s important to think of your own style. If you want to make it your job, it’s very important to know what your own thing is. There are three different styles: liking money, wanting praise from other people, and just liking writing. So if you like writing, but also like getting money from it, that’s very good! You should consider, even though there are people who write and write and write without making money, money is still a big motivation. And even though you like getting money, you should also want to write because you enjoy it, that’s more important.

I: What kind of stories do you like writing the most?

R: Of course it’s fun to think about women with big boobs, but it’s also fun to think about environmental issues... *laughter*

I: You’re mostly known for writing games, but would you ever want to try making an anime?

R: I don’t think I’m good enough at drawing for creating it, but if someone else would do that I would be very proud and happy.

I: Our interview is coming to a close. Is there still anything you would like to tell the audience?

R: I want to complain about how warm Finland is, I had heard about how cold Finland is and only brought long-sleeved shirts, and then I got here and it was sultry and far too warm, so I would like to say that nobody told me Finland would be warm!