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floatingcatacombs · 6 months

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Bandai Taketh Away

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 1

Last year I wrote a post extolling the virtues of Birdie Wing, 2022’s breakthrough “how the fuck did this get made” mafia golf campfest. It’s the little show that could, animated on a shoestring budget to an audience of maybe two dozen extremely online yuri fans who tried their hardest to get literally anyone else to watch it.

It was almost certainly a financial failure for Bandai Namco, whose hopes for kicking off a VR-focused franchise fizzled in real time during season 1. But the resulting anime was a blast, a shoujo sports melodrama where literally anything could happen.

Birdie Wing took a few seasons off between its cours, during which Bandai Namco’s second lesbian anime of the year began airing: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. My jaw dropped as I watched the first episode recreate Utena’s setup beat for beat, including the female main character taking another girl as her fiancé. It’s a gutsy move which set my expectations high. G-Witch was my introduction to Gundam, and the highs of the first season were amazing. Even if I had some occasional complaints with the pacing, the cliffhanger ending and narrative ambition left me very excited for more.

Season 2 of Birdie Wing was set to fill the gap between cours of G-Witch, but ~something~ happened behind the scenes. It ended up being delayed to Spring 2023, where the two shows would air together. Great! That means double the lesbians. Or…zero?

Fair warning: From here on out I will be both a hater, and a spoiler.

Both seasons start without a hitch. G-Witch finally pops the safety bubble of its setting, with a terrorist attack on the academy followed up by an episode from the viewpoint of Dawn of Fold soldiers trying to survive a retaliatory crackdown from the Spacians. It pulled no punches with its violence and war orphans and trauma, a good sign for the struggles that awaited the main cast. Meanwhile, Birdie Wing continued to pay tribute to old-school Class S after its boarding school arc by involving its cast in a nightmare incest soap opera concerning Eve and Aoi’s parentage and the sins of the previous generation. Both are great developments for their respective shows, suggesting plenty of good stuff ahead.

Unfortunately, this is when both of these shows begin to fall apart. Eve and Aoi manage to beat the incest allegations, but afterwards their relationship just…stops. Their chemistry all but dissipates, the homoerotic rivalry giving way to their personal relationships with golf instead of with each other. The plot keeps the two of them apart as much as possible, devoid of the angsty longing from season 1, as the girls each succumb to a different form of golf cancer (even without the gay-baiting, at least Birdie Wing is still insane).

For G-Witch, a much more ambitious anime, this decline manifests as a creeping realization that they’re simply going to drop most of the open plot threads. The show takes its sweet time, even as it becomes clear that it’s barreling towards a finale at 24 episodes. The long-awaited plot twists are handled fine, I guess. But any sense that the show is aiming for greatness fades away, as it simply tries to drag itself to the finish line, buckling under its own weight. What we see on screen is what we get, and you’ll have to fill in the blanks yourself to really be happy. The Earthian-Spacian conflict ends up as mere set-dressing, and characters who clearly had intertwined backstories never even get the chance to interact. The obvious examples are the man who killed Suletta’s dad in the prologue resurfacing and that never really coming up, and everything to do with Chuchu and Nika’s backstories. I’m not here to nitpick, but it’s a shame that everyone’s characterization is left so thin. G-Witch really feels like it was meant to be a full 50-episode series, and I’m led to believe that this trimming down happened during production, as there’s just no other reason to set so much up without resolving it.

At last we reach each show's conclusion. Birdie Wing is saddled with a final arc full of professional tournaments, which is always going to be weaker than the dirty mafia golf on a conceptual level. The timeline begins to rapidly accelerate and suddenly we’re skipping ahead months, and then entire years. We don’t get to see most of Eve and Aoi’s final game, or even the period of time where they reconcile. An enduring friendship and rivalry is implied at the end, but it’s nowhere near the mutual obsession that the prior season depicted. Not an ounce of queerbait remains, even for the terminally yurigoggled such as myself.

Meanwhile, G-Witch dedicates some of its precious final minutes to a fight with Lauda (Jesus Christ is the Schwartzette is wasted on him), and just like Birdie Wing the two girls at the heart of the show barely get any time together as the end draws near. They ultimately opt for a Macross-Symphogear ending in which Suletta pilots a Gundam that shoots gay rainbow lasers and defeats her mom with the power of love and friendship. That’s fine! But that’s the ending for a show that didn’t happen! In its last act G-Witch retreats into its shell, unable to commit to the moral weight of the world it had built up. Laughably, the epilogue time-skips to a neoliberal utopia where Miorine solves the earth-space conflict through her sheer girlboss acumen. Suletta and Miorine��s gay wedding is implied at best, and an after-credits message states that this is the conclusion of The Witch from Mercury as a story, prematurely killing any potential follow-up.

The rest is history. Kadokawa redacts an interview to remove references to Suletta and Miorine being married, Bandai releases a statement that their status at the end of the show should be left up to interpretation, and everyone is mad forever.

What happened? Both of these shows fell apart at the same time, and both in a manner that defused their implicit queerness. Birdie Wing was always a bit of a trainwreck even at its best, so in a vacuum I would have just concluded that the production ran out of steam, unable to live up to its earlier writing. But the timing of Season 2’s delay, combined with the corporate meddling that affected G-Witch, makes me downright conspiratorial. Something went down at Bandai Namco, and it led to them ordering their productions be revised halfway through to scrub out all the gay shit and play things safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if this occurred at the same time as G-Witch was trimmed down from its initial 50 to 24 episodes with no chance of a continuation. It’s also not too much of a stretch to imagine Birdie Wing receiving a “stick to sports" mandate and Yosuke Kuroda subsequently phoning it in. I don't know how else to say it: there's no reason to do an incest fakeout if you're not even going to follow up on it afterwards once you've gone through the difficult work of exonerating them.

Witch from Mercury was a commercial success (it sold a shitton of gunpla, at least!) so it seems like a surprise that Bandai Namco would clamp down creatively in such a destructive way. Or maybe not. This may be the first female-led Gundam, but in a lot of other ways it’s fairly restrained as far as Gundams go. Perhaps BN decided that G-Witch had to be a balancing act to please everyone, preventing the creative staff from truly swinging for the fences in the end. Of course, that backfired horribly and they ended up pissing off himejoshis and regular mecha fans alike. I know it’s something of a fool’s errand to expect undeniable LGBT representation from anime, but when you begin with an explicit Utena homage, I expect better.

This has all been a bit of a downer, so I wanted to end things by sharing the anime I watched this year that actually gave me what I wanted out of those two shows.

Watching through the original Mobile Suit Gundam made me realize just how conservative G-Witch is in a lot of its storytelling. 0079 is a deeply radical show for its time, and still would be if you made it today. The unhesitating depiction of war and death through the aesthetics of a 70’s children’s show is particularly bold, and even the parts of the anime notorious for being overlong successfully reinforce the overall mood of the work. Amuro’s transformation from innocent child to unrelenting psychic soldier is as inevitable and upsetting as it should be, and even with all the “filler” the script feels much tighter than the G-Witch, which ambles around with side stories that don’t resolve and characters that don’t go anywhere. Imminently watchable. I love that the mommy issues in Gundam go all the way back, and I'm also starting to understand why you fuckers have been arguing about Char Aznable for 40 years.

you.

I also watched Kakegurui this year, which served as a great alternative to Birdie Wing. It doubles down on the best parts of that show – mostly-female cast, high stakes gambling, dubious lesbian rep – with an all-consuming sleaze to it. Grab some friends who aren't easily scandalized and try not to worry too hard about gaze or the intended audience, and it will be a hoot. The production values are great, even if most of it inevitably goes to girls making upsetting faces. The first opening in particular is an animation highlight. Of course, this is a MAPPA production, so they’re far too busy flaying their workers alive in the pits of hell to ever get around to another season. May their company unionize or perish.

#12 days of anime #gundam #birdie wing #gundam the witch from mercury #kakegurui

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chernobog13 · 4 months

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The villainous Arnim Zola by Steve Rude.

I don't know about anyone else, but I much prefer this version of Zola than the one we got in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014 - good lawd, was that really ten years ago?). These outrageous characters are part of the charm of superhero comics that keep me reading them.

One of my problems with most of the Marvel films, and all superhero films lately, is the filmmakers eschewing the zany and goofy concepts from the original comics, all for the sake of making the project more "realistic" and "believable."

Hello!!??? You're making a movie about people who can fly or shoot lasers out various body parts! How realistic is that?

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for "serious" superhero films, where the source material is treated respectfully (i.e. Superman the Movie, The Dark Knight Trilogy). I understand that the restraints of filmmaking may require some changes. And I do not want a campfest, where the filmmakers are winking at the audience every minute as if to say "look at how silly this is" (i.e. the Batman TV series and its film spin-off).

Nor do I want the grim, gritty, dark, color drained out of everything, let's not have any fun at all, depressing type of films like we got with the Snyderverse. Dark, grim and gritty is okay for a solo Batman film (or similar character), however superhero stories at their core should be fun and entertaining.

I will always hold up Richard Donner's Superman the Movie (1978) as the example other filmmakers should follow. I admit it's not perfect, with the sudden tonal shift after Clark Kent arrives in Metropolis, and the campy performances of the three villains. Still, Donner had respect for the source material, treated it respectfully, and he - and more importantly, the audience - had fun with it along the way.

Anyway, ain't that a great drawing by Steve Rude?

#Arnim Zola #Marvel Comics #Steve Rude

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anhed-nia · 7 months

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BLOGTOBER 10/16/2023: NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 - THE DREAM MASTER

One of the best movie posters ever, let's face it.

What does your slasher movie hierarchy look like? Which guy is your favorite, and is that guy's franchise your favorite over all, or is there a different one that you think is more consistently enjoyable? I have a hard time answering this question for myself. Some comparisons are too apples v. oranges; I mean, I think it's fair to pit Jason Voorhees against Michael Myers, but Leatherface has a really different vibe even though he's still technically a pretty basic slasher, and I cannot get what I get from HELLRAISER in almost any other movie or series. The CHILD'S PLAY franchise may have started out on more standard ground despite its oddball "voodoo doll" premise, but it has since transformed itself into a committedly queer campfest, and no one else in the slasher game is really doing the same thing in the same way. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is also in a class by itself on many levels, including but not limited to the originality of its premise, its allowance for wild fantasy sequences, and the platform it provides for a wonderful character actor to strut his stuff. I mean not to slight the great Brad Dourif, but every ELM STREET installment is basically the Robert Englund show, and we like it that way. NOES is probably my favorite over-all franchise, in part because I think it probably has the highest proportion of quality movies. Even a bad ELM STREET movie is kind of good because of its star, and its open field for filmmakers to be as imaginative as they want to be. It's like that thing people (erroneously) say about how sex is like pizza: Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 was one of my first R-rated movies. I think I saw it when I was about 9, at the home of the first of of my many Bad Female Friends. Michelle was extremely controlling and a compulsive liar, and my weak ass has always been catnip to people like that. She lived with her mom who, despite her unpredictable temper, basically ran a house with no rules; most of the time I was there she was locked in her bedroom with her boyfriend, loudly watching game shows. Once in a while one of them would emerge in a bathing suit to get chips and dip and soda out of the fridge, and that's all I usually saw of them. The mom was also a den mother for the Brownies, which I was forced to participate in because my parents knew that otherwise I would just stay in my room for the rest of my life. I got out of it because Michelle's mom was always dropping her off at our house whenever she felt like getting rid of her kid, and the one time my parents wanted her to babysit me she said no arbitrarily, and they got in a huge grownup fight, and that was that. Uh anyway, where the hell was I going with this? Oh yeah, Michelle got to watch anything she wanted, which was Not Cool with my hippie media-phobic parents. I got in a huge amount of trouble for "letting" Michelle show me SLEEPAWAY CAMP 2--which, to be fair, is inappropriate for audiences of all ages (and is therefore great)--and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER.

I vaguely remember my mom just being really upset on the phone with Michelle's mom, and trying to figure out how to instill in me that I should resist at all costs the contaminating effects of horror movies; even if somebody else was putting them in front of me without supervision, it was still my responsibility not to watch them. (My mom personally enjoyed John Waters movies and FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and stuff like that, but she didn't want me to see PSYCHO until I was 18 years old--go figure!) But my dad's religion is Jungian psychoanalysis so he was intrigued by the dream-based plot, and he decided to actually watch the movie himself and come to his own conclusion about whether I might have been harmed by it. He didn't wind up liking it, but he did understand what made it interesting, and knowing that had a healing effect on me.

For my part, I liked everything about NOES4, not the least of which was that it's the ultimate '80s movie. I mean this thing was really programmed to go straight into the brain someone who was 7 in 1988 and just completely take over. The absolutely sick soundtrack, the very of-the-moment layered and over-accessorized fashions, the surreal neon-lit dream sequences, and...really just everything. Watching the movie today, it still presents as a perfect (albeit idealized) time capsule, and Renny Harlin was the perfect guy to create it. Harlin was a major league ham who knew no limits, and with a premise that is literally limitless--the whole idea is dreams made real--he did exactly what you'd want him to do, reputedly subbing in his own zany nightmare concepts when he felt the script didn't go far enough. I recently rewatched his acrophobic thriller CLIFFHANGER and read that the first stunt you see in the movie was only attempted once, and the stunt person received one million dollars to do it...which is easy to believe when you see it. That's the kind of filmmaker Renny Harlin is, and I think it shows even in an ELM STREET movie where everything is as artificial as possible.

Another way in which THE DREAM MASTER epitomizes its moment is that it has this perfectly motley ensemble. I feel like we don't have this anymore; a lot of films are very careful now to have a mix of ethnicities and sexual orientations in the cast, and yet in most cases this has not contributed to a feeling of having a lot of different kinds of people represented. I miss seeing movies where the friend group includes, like, a punk and a jock and a nerd and a goth and a normie and a dreamy loser. I miss movies where these two people can be best friends:

And at this point, you might have asked yourself why I didn't include SCREAM in my imaginary slasher franchise hierarchy. The answer is...I don't care about it. That first movie is fun and the series has its moments, but I'm not sure that it has much to offer once you get past the novelty of its self-awareness. That is, it doesn't have much to offer unless your main thing is seeing a bunch of cute friends hanging out together. Sure some of them are slightly nerdier or slightly more popular, but there's not a bunch of variance there; the main point seems to just be "attractive young people". And frankly, I just don't find that very interesting, and it's not that interesting to have a movie that just lists rules and then follows the rules, and it's not that interesting to have whodunnits where the main question is "which one of my cute friends is secretly mean". So there. I probably shouldn't write this down on the internet, but considering that we're probably all on some kind of list these days, I'll just say it: I'll take the undead soul-eating child molester over the homogeneous gang of fuckable friends any day of the week.

#blogtober #2023 #a nightmare on elm street #a nightmare on elm street 4: the dream master #slasher #franchise #horror #fantasy #robert englund #renny harlin

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lesbian-archives · 2 years

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Campfest, 1995

#image #lesbianism #lesbian #90s #labrys #lha #lesbian herstory archive

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jackbatchelor3 · 4 months

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This Six storyline was not the high campfest the Twitter Gays thought it was gonna be.

#EastEnders #EE LB #Twitter

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cartoonscientist · 6 months

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I’m glad people are finally coming out in defense of the original broadway production of Cats on twitter after the hbomberguy (I seriously have to check every time I type this dude’s name that his url isn’t hbomberman even though I’ve been watching his videos for years?? this is more evidence that I’m an old man in the body of a twunk with the health conditions of an old man tbh) video because it honestly doesn’t deserve the slander it gets online. it’s a beautifully costumed and designed campfest celebrating how awesome and cute and also surprisingly full of pathos cats are straight from the heart of a cat lover and the plot is about a bizarre cat religion that involves… questionably composed clouds? like this is a show for children and mentally ill queer people who are hyperfixated on cats and it does an amazing job of that.

#cw discourse

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forthegothicheroine · 2 years

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I have yet another idea for a horror host character, where the gimmick is that I completely mis-hype the movie. I’ll say “Grab your popcorn and get ready for a serial killing campfest with the original Freddy Krueger!” and then show M, or I say “Tonight’s tale of cosmic horror will make you question everything you think you know about the universe” and then show Gamera vs. Zigra. Mid-show skits have me blithely fielding calls from confused watchers.

#horror movies

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eurovision-revisited · 10 months

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1998 Birmingham - Number 7 - Sanda Ladoși, Marina Florea, Adrian Enache, Aurelian Temișan & Daniel Iordăchioaei - "E, e iubire"

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What is that synth/percussion doing during the chorus? I don't know but it's making my knees go funny. This is some prime Romanian cheese from Selecția Națională 1998. In that very Romanian way, there is no band name, but each individual singer gets full credit.

First E, e iubire (It's Love). I do not have the lyrics for this song, but I really don't think they're necessary. The choreography tells the entire story. This is pure pop with everything synthesised. There's a call and response pre-chorus, and the chorus is literally everyone singing 'Yeah, yeah, yeah'. What makes it absolute genius is that synth line that runs through everything - it's like someone's discovered the secret of making musical crack. It's the addiction that keeps me coming back to this disco campfest of pleather and baggy white undershirts.

Of the five named singers, three have other entries in Selecția Națională. Adrian Enache (on the right at the start), has had four other entries, with a best finish of, well third - with this song. Aurelian Temișan (on the left at the three men at the start) has entered three times too and he nearly won in 2003, being in a two horse race with the eventual winner.

Most importantly there's Sanda Ladoși (the woman with dark-hair). She want on to win Selecția Națională 2004 and represented Romania at Eurovision in Istanbul. Oddly, every single one of these five singers has four or five albums listed on Discogs, all through the 1990s into the 2000s, all as solo artists. I'd guess that there's something contractual about that and possibly about their appearance here in one of the most iconic displays I've witnessed in a national final so far.

#Youtube #esc #esc 1998 #eurovision #eurovision song contest #birmingham #birmingham 1998 #national finals #Romania #Selecția Națională 1998 #Sanda Ladoși #Marina Florea #Adrian Enache #Aurelian Temișan #Daniel Iordăchioaei

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