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vocaloidfactoftheday · 8 months

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Have You Seen This Lost GUMI Anime Pilot?

This is a bit of an unusual post for this blog, but I think I may have come across a case of lost media involving an anime pilot starring GUMI. It's possible that it exists on the Internet, and I hesitate to declare this as "lost media," but I cannot find it anywhere, and I figured that a post on this blog was the best way to see if anyone has any leads or extra info.

The anime is titled "Koisuru Dessan Ningyo," with an English title of "Do Drawing Dolls Dream of Love?" I don't know the runtime of the pilot, but I think it was most likely around 5-7 minutes. I believe this could have been the first instance of a Vocaloid being cast in a main voice acting role (perhaps, the first one cast in any voice acting role). I'm not completely sure if they actually used the Megpoid voicebank, or had Megumi Nakajima voice act as GUMI, but the way AnimeAnime (Japanese anime news site) describes it, it seems like it may have been the former. In either case, the character that GUMI portrays in the anime is a character that is clearly made to resemble her.

(These are the only screenshots I could find that come from the pilot, but more may exist.)

The main character is a doll (who I'm not sure is named), who models for a girl's drawings before eventually falling in love with her. I don't believe GUMI's character has a name, but she plays a main role as the girl the doll falls in love with.

Where It Was Seen

The pilot aired on NHK TV on January 9, 2014, during late night (possibly just after midnight?). It aired alongside another pilot as part of the program Aoyama 1seg Kaihatsu. This was a sort of tournament, where two pilots were broadcast once a month for three months, and viewers would vote for which pilot they liked best. Then, the three winners would go against each other in a final round, where the pilot with the most votes would get picked up to become a series. (I think they held this tournament once a year from 2010 to 2014 or 2015, though I don't know if it was the exact same every time.) The broadcast was 25 minutes long for each of the first three rounds, with the first half dedicated to showing both pilots and the second half dedicated to presentations about each pilot. (This is why I think this pilot was around 5-7 minutes, though I'm not sure exactly how much time commercial breaks would take up.) For a few years, including 2014, the program was hosted by the now-disbanded Japanese girl group E-girls (no relation to what you and I know as "e-girls." in their case the E stands for "exile.")

According to the official Tumblr account, karappo-heart, this pilot won the first round of the competition! It probably didn't make it out of the finals, though, since it didn't get picked up for a series. It's also possible that it did win, but some other issues prevented its production. In any case, the Tumblr account hasn't been updated since the first round ended. While this contest was going on, three shorts were apparently available to watch on NHK's website, but they have since been removed. I think at least one of the shorts was web-exclusive. I haven't been able to find info on who actually won the finals, or even what GUMI's short won against.

People Involved

The doll is portrayed by a masked dancer refererred to as Hitori de Dekiru Mon. I can't find much info about him online, but I think his real name is Takemura Ryohei. (I'm not sure because that part on his Japanese Wikipedia article has a "citation needed" label.) AnimeAnime specifically refers to his role as being the doll's "human form," though it's possible he provided voice acting too. AnimeAnime points out the unusual nature of having a human portray a doll, and having a Vocaloid portray a human.

Masanori Okamoto (who also wrote the screenplay and produced the pilot) animated the pilot with the pixilation technique, using time-lapse pictures to show movement of objects and people (this may have included live-action photos of the doll's actor portraying a "human form" of the doll). It seems like it may have blended stop motion/puppetry and live action stills with traditional animation? This is an example of Okamoto's work from around the same time, which seems like it might have been made in a similar style:

youtube

The third known person to have worked on this is none other than Vocaloid producer sasakure.UK. He composed the theme song, which of course features GUMI, and a few other songs to be used in potential future episodes. If you're a big fan of his, the anime title may sound familiar to you, as he released 3 of these songs (though both news sites I looked at, AnimeAnime and Anime News Network, say he made 4 total) plus their instrumentals as an EP under the same title. You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube!

I think this EP uses GUMI's VOCALOID3 voicebanks (the first sounds like either Native or Sweet, the second one sounds like Adult or Power (if it even is GUMI--it sounds more like IA to me, but sasakure.UK labeled it as a GUMI song so I kinda have to take his word for it) and the third sounds like Sweet). If that's the case, her V3 voicebanks would have probably been used for the voice acting, too.

Places I've Looked

After some Internet searches only garnered me a few screenshots, I decided to see if there was a way I could ask sasakure.UK himself about the short. I believe he has a contact form on his website, which I used to send a message in both Japanese and English (in case Google Translate was more helpful to him than my incoherent Japanese). This was back in May of this year and I never received a response. (Since I used a website contact form and not a direct email, I don't have the message I sent him anymore. I guess that's lost media now too.)

It occured to me while writing this post that I never contacted the animator himself, Masanori Okamoto. While his Vimeo and YouTube pages don't have the pilot, and his Twitter and Tumblr links haven't been updated in several years, he does have an email address listed. I sent him a message (in English because I was too sick and tired to try to write a coherent email in Japanese and I don't like waiting to do these things). I'm not sure he still checks his email since his social media that I've found has all been inactive for years, but I will post an update if he responds.

I know that this pilot is not on the NHK website, or, again, on the animator's YouTube or Vimeo pages. I also could not find it on the Internet Archive.

Now, I don't expect anyone reading this to have saved this on their computer and kept it there since 2014. But with this post, my goal is simply to make more people aware that this exists at all, and I'd also like to learn more about it myself (such as whether or not the pilot won in the finals after all, how much animation actually exists for it, if any more screenshots are out there, etc.)

Thank you for reading such a long post! Please feel free to correct any info I got wrong, or add on to this post with any knowledge you might have about this lost pilot!

(also sorry for any typos :()

#vocaloid #lost media #sasakure.uk #gumi #japanese vocaloid #vocaloid2 #vocaloid3 #internet co #lost content

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kerubimcrepin · 2 months

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Random Joris Lore Titbits Nobody Except Me Should Care About

+ AKA random bullshit that won't fit in any other post.

>Joris might literally be legally adopted.

(source: Dofus MMO site, "The Case of the Butcher of Brakmar")

And they may have still had the paperwork to prove it 200 years later, since this was noted down in an official case file investigating temporal anomalies. Cute.

>Joris has known his surname is "Jurgen" way before the events of the movie.

>Joris and Kerubim have distinct handwriting.

Kerubim writes in quick, but at times indecipherable, cursive.

Baby Joris writes in very messy cursive, while adult Joris writes in plain, blocky letters.

(source for all of this: the 20th anniversary map, scans not available online. I'll make a post trying to write down as much lore as I can from using YouTube unboxing videos later)

>Joris birthday and Zodiac lore

As is known thanks to the studio timeline, Joris was born on December 32nd. This makes sense, considering the year changes when Jiva defeats Djaul every year.

This also means that, unlike the rest of the series, the final episode of Aux Tresors takes place in the spring of 398, and Joris is 8 years old.

He was pretty much born on the Krosmoz equivalent of a leap year. Poor guy.

In real life, it would make his zodiac sign "Capricorn".

But in Krosmoz's in-universe zodiac system his sign is "Seadragon".

One interesting aside is that, it is entirely possible to triangulate Joris's Chinese (pandawa?) zodiac sign, since we know 1. what year he was born in, and 2. That 654 was the year of Dragon.

This is dubious lore based literally on a single post on the Dofus site, announcing a holiday event. I am only including it because I'm insane.

Anyway, here's some math:

Because Joris was born in 390, we know that 264 years had passed since his birth, and to the already mentioned year of dragon, 654.

In real life, 264 years ago, it was 1760, (which really puts Joris's age into a perspective, and a scary one at that,) and it was...

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

Here is some info on the Dragon sign of the Chinese zodiac:

And to be specific, 1760 (and by that logic, 390) was a "Metal/Gold Dragon" year...

I hate how well it fits, with his, uh... [gestures vaguely] his everything? Especially considering it was completely unplanned by Ankama.

I will go into a river now, never to be seen again, or something. This is too much.

#randominfopost #joris jurgen #dofus #wakfu #krosmoz #ro liveblogs dofus

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matan4il · 4 months

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Daily update post:

One of the worst, most disgusting anti-Israel lies about Oct 7, is that the IDF is responsible for the civilian deaths on that day, not Hamas. One version took one article, that mentioned some civilians at the Nova music festival might have been shot by a battle helicopter. This was used to claim all or most of the victims were killed by the IDF. Things to note about this, which I've mentioned before, are that currently, 367 civilian victims have been identified at this scene. "Some" is not how you would refer to all or most of 367 people. You'd use a stronger term. Another thing is the question mark mentioned in the article, which the anti-Israel crowd ignored. At the time, I also mentioned the various states of undress in which the female victims were found, piles of naked and half-naked women, something no battle helicopter can be responsible for. Now I can add two things to the debunking.

One is an official police statement about this, which is relevant, since the article the anti-Israel crowd used, was supposedly quoting a police source. The police made it clear that their investigation of the Nova music festival, was an appraisal of their own activity, while the battle helicopter is an army one, therefore their report didn't actually look into that.

The second thing is that on Oct 7, Israel only had two (!) battle helicopters ready to launch, and they were stationed at the Ramat David air base, which is in the north, while Hamas' massacre was in the south. The two helicopters were roughly 212 kilometers away from the site of the music festival slaughter. Under the best circumstances, it would take the helicopters about an hour to get from their base to the massacre site. And things don't work optimally, when the Hamas terrorists destroyed Israel's cameras, and took over the command base, which could direct forces effectively. In fact, in the above link (sorry, again a piece only available in Hebrew), they also interview the officer who was directing the helicopters on Oct 7, and he said that helicopters are only efficient when someone from the ground directs their activity, but there was no one on the ground that could do that. In other words, by the time the helicopters showed up, and tried to react to over 3,000 terrorists having invaded Israel, through more than 30 points along the border, and spreading out across numerous massacre sites, there is no way these two helicopters could explain away the majority of the civilian victims.

Remember the terror tunnels in Gaza? Remember the underground headquarters? The IDF now has enough control in Gaza City, to be able to expose the network that connects all of these together, which terror tunnel is hidden inside which civilian building. An entire underground city, completely dedicated to carrying out terrorist activity, and not a single bomb shelter, to protect the civilians in Gaza. THAT is how you hold 2 million Palestinians as human shields. There's even a tunnel building workshop, exposed by the IDF:

youtube

These are Iris Cahim, and her son Yotam:

He was one of the three hostages accidentally killed by the IDF. Iris had a message for the soldiers, that Yotam's family doesn't blame them, that she knows it's not their fault, and that at that moment they did the best they could, and that she and the family are waiting for their visit if they want to come, because she wants them to know how supported they are.

The girls in the pic below were observers at the Nachal Oz army base.

The role of the observers was to watch the live camera footage from the border fence, and alert the army of any attempts to breach the border. No one thought that over 3,000 terrorists would blind the cameras and invade Israel, and the Nachal Oz base, without any alarm going off. Which is also why they had no combat training, and their base didn't have any protection from a terrorist breach, only from rockets. On Oct 7, with the start of the biggest barrage of rockets ever fired into Israel at 6:30 in the morning, most of these girls were asleep. They woke up and went into the bomb shelter, which became a death trap under the terrorist attack. The terrorists first used poison on the girls inside the bomb shelter, and then threw in hand grendaes, and lastly, they opened fire at everyone inside. These girls, whose service was mandatory, who didn't have any weapons, who didn't know how to fight, who were still in their pyjamas, were not civilians, but they were just as vulnerable and defenseless as so many of the civilians were on Oct 7, and what happened to them was just as much a slaughter, rather than a battle.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #israelunderattack #terrorism #anti terrorism #antisemitism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #Youtube

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santiagonex · 1 year

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hello besties january is coming to an end so i’m just going to introduce you to all my gay tv discoveries of the month and all of you gonna sit and listen and like and reblog this... see how i didnt use ‘or’ between those words so you better do all of that otherwise you’re not getting anything out of me ever again remember that

1. Jack & Rayane on ‘Demain nous appartient’ - at this point everyone must know what’s up with this, it’s been trending on tiktok everybody’s living for them and you can watch their storyline translated on twitter @jackxrayane so get to it asap

2. Fred & Yuri on ‘Vai na fé’ - rivals to lovers? we’ll see... there’s this telenovela which has just started and multiple publications reported on gay storyline between them starting soon so we’re seated... oomfie is translating their storyline here on telegram go check it out

3. Antonis & Spyros on ‘Maestro’ - already promoted them here, greek gays, will show up on internation Netflix in February, if you can’t wait go to the comments of this video

4. Phillip & Bruno on ‘Blutige Anfänger’ - if you just watched their 10-minute cut on youtube and called it a day you’re an absolute loser IDGAF... important stuff was cut OUT... the whole season is so much fun to watch given out of the 5 main rookies, 2 of them are queer, and there are also other two main gay characters, if you can I really advise you to watch the whole season, it’s available for free on official ZDF site

5. Preston & Kai on ‘Waterloo Road’ - another slay, the show is fun, talks about important issues, if you liked Ackley Bridge and Cory/Naveed, you’re gonna enjoy it as well... this storyline in particular has been a surprise in a sense that being with a guy is not an issue for Preston, but he’s been dealing with something tough and it’s handled amazingly well, don’t want to spoil so be sure to check it out on BBC iPlayer (you can watch with VPN if you’re not in UK)

6. Harlan & Cyrus on ‘Wolf Pack’ - yeah the show has just started, yeah it’s created by Jeff Davis, but episode 1 was actually fun, it has Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jeff actually promised prominent gay representation... Harlan is a main character, he is part of the core four and Cyrus has yet to make an appearance, so we’ll see

7. Paddy & Eoin on 'SAS Rogue Heroes' - this was already a thing last summer I think, but I only discovered it now... heartbreaking story between those two and if you also want to see Jack O'Connell playing an amigiously gay soldier, there you go

8. Deivid & Kevin on ‘Rensga Hits!’ - this is also from last year but I’ve NEVER seen anyone talking about this gem and I’ve only found out about it recently... it’s such a serve, their scenes are equally passionate to the ones they show with straight couples just woah... I don’t want to spoil anything so I’m just going to say that the actors are kings and even kissed on a stage at an event irl yuuup

#lgbtedit #lgbtcinema

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lulu2992 · 2 months

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Exploration of the now-offline Far Cry 5 official websites

Part 5: The Cult

Recovered content

On or before July 13th, 2017, information about Eden’s Gate appeared on the American site:

THE CULT THE PROJECT AT EDEN’S GATE The Project at Eden’s Gate believes The Collapse is imminent, and only their merciless and manipulative leader, The Father, can save them.

THE CULT THE PROJECT AT EDEN’S GATE Led by The Father and commanded by The Heralds, Eden’s Gate preys on those hopeless folks who have fallen into economical and psychological despair. They believe the cult will provide them with salvation, and in return they must devote their souls.

Then, on or before February 9th, 2018, until at least February 7th, 2020, the descriptions were modified, and this is what we could find about the Seed family and their followers instead:

THE CULT KIN BY BLOOD, BOUND BY BLISS The Heralds are The Father's beloved siblings, each of whom control one of three major regions in Hope County. As de-facto leaders of the Project at Eden's Gate, they only answer to The Father and exact his will through psychological and physical methods.

THE CULT THE PROJECT AT EDEN’S GATE The Project at Eden’s Gate believe that they have been given a mandate from God: Save as many souls as they can, thus ensuring humanity’s survival after The Collapse. Those who seek to hinder The Project must be dealt with severely. According to The Father, The Project is humanity’s only hope to survive “The Collapse.”

Commentary

So, in 2017, Eden’s Gate was “the biggest and most ruthless baddest enemy Far Cry has ever seen” (see previous posts), and they “[preyed] on those hopeless folks who have fallen into economical and psychological despair.” As for The Father, he was described as a “merciless and manipulative leader”. Joseph, backed by his Heralds, would tell his followers that the end of the world was imminent, and they would believe him because they were scared, but was it what he also believed, or was he just trying to use and abuse vulnerable people for his own profit? What the phrasing implies, I think, is that “early Joseph” had become a cult leader not because he truly thought he could or even wanted to help anyone, but simply because he was a disingenuous predator.

In the description written in 2018, we finally learned about what truly motivates him and his followers: their belief that they are on a mission from God and that they need to save souls from the Collapse. The only people who “must be dealt with severely” now are “those who seek to hinder The Project”. There is no mention of the Seeds taking advantage of vulnerable people anymore. In the most recent version of the text, it’s not really about their followers acting out of fear while their leaders’ beliefs and intentions are dubious, it’s about Eden’s Gate, as a group, having faith in something and working towards a common goal... albeit still in the worst way possible.

In 2018, we also got more information about the Heralds (I will detail their individual descriptions in the next posts) and learned that they “exact [Joseph’s] will through psychological and physical methods”. Maybe it’s because I know the story, but I like that the sentence suggests that, while the Heralds all obey Joseph, they each have their own way of doing it; he told them what he wanted them to do, but they chose how they would do it.

Under the cut are all the available source files, saved directly from the website, of the images you see in the screenshots:

I could only find the small and non-transparent picture of the family, so here it is:

#far cry 5 #eden’s gate #joseph seed #jacob seed #faith seed #john seed

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prince-kallisto · 1 year

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Medali being Suspicious and Larry’s Purpose There

Medali is really suspicious! My cryptic takes on Larry are more of speculation, plus he really is just a normal guy despite how weird he is. But I KNOW there’s something off about Medali. I hope y’all aren’t tired of my constant Overthinking posts haha

First of all- why is Medali so hard to reach? There are deserts and cliffs surrounding the town, like a natural blockade. Despite this, this town gets many people passing by. An NPC says Medali sounds like ‘medley,’ a fitting name because the town is compromised of different people and things. Another NPC mentions how Medali is an important hub in Paldea. He doesn’t specify what kind of hub it is though, but I suspect it’s a trading hub.

The NPC says people “come through” the town, as if they’re just passing by. It makes sense with the restaurant district. Since so many types of people go through, there’s a wide variety to cater to every taste, instead of having a traditional food. Medali attracting so many foreigners makes sense if it’s a trade hub for Tera Orbs. Medali is the closest to Area Zero, where the Tera Orbs are made by the Professors.

I may be mistaken, but there’s no clear origin of where the Tera Orbs come from? We know they’re made by the Professors, but there’s no clear location of where they are traded/sold. Nemona gives the player character one, not the school. It seems like a specialized item, because we just get it without any explanation where it came from. If I’m wrong about this, please let me know!

Additional side note, but I think this building could have something to do with the storage of Tera Orbs?? The closed off garage environment intrigues me, and I don’t know what this is. There’s a Delibird sign, so it could also be a food storage area, but I don’t know if this sign is somewhere else in game too. I looked through the other towns and cities, and didn’t find a building resembling this one. It could be something insignificant, but the big garage doors just have me thinking haha.

Edit: This has the same logo as the Delibird Presents shops, which are only available in Mesagoza, Levincia, and Cascarrafa. Each branch sells their own exclusive (and expensive) battle items. Odd how this has the same logo, but isn’t accessible and looks like a storage container instead of a shop. More proof for Tera Orb storage, perhaps? Thank you for the comment mentioning this!!

Anyway, with this assumption, people all over Paldea and beyond come to Medali for the trade of Tera Orbs and Tera Crystals. Since the Academy doesn’t officially endorse them (eg hand them out to everybody), I believe they can only be accessed in Medali. They’re so valuable and sought-after, that people far away go to Medali to get them.

The locals talk a lot about rumors too. I thought that staircase area was really odd, but this NPC confirms it, saying that it USED to be for concerts and plays. Now it’s abandoned. I find this odd because of how many people pass through Medali- you’d think concerts and plays would be popular for visiting travelers. It feels like Medali’s sole purpose is trade-and-leave, not to attract people longer than they have to.

Medali’s gym is unknown to average people- almost like a deliberate protection despite being a commercial town. A gym area out in the open like the other gyms would draw too much attention from competitive players. But isn’t this odd considering it is a gym site? It almost feels like they’re using the lack of an open-gym to draw attention away from something else. Without the apparent gym floor, less people would be there to idle around town. Plus, the plethora of restaurants distract as entertainment sites.

Instead, there’s an extremely impractical mechanism hidden inside a restaurant. I’m sure the Treasure Eatery wouldn’t have been THAT popular if all the customers sitting in the arena get thrown into the Backrooms- or at least have to leave in the middle of eating. Haha pretty much every person I’ve seen has asked what happened to the customers. Why is the gym floor so hidden anyway? I could understand if Medali just didn’t want to install a gym, but hiding it beneath the floorboards seems a lot more complicated. Ridding the customers, moving all the tables and chairs, etc.

Also, this NPC states that he was shooed away by the Treasure Eatery chef when he asked about the ability to change Tera Types. This restaurant is the ONLY place in the game where you can change Tera Types. I don’t know why it’s in the restaurant of all places, but my guess is because that Larry’s a gym leader and a regular, he’s able to oversee this process. Since the NPC from before was rejected, I’m assuming that the only ones allowed are ones approved by Larry. His way of approval is making it through the Gym Test and beating him in battle.

The Gym Test is so weird when you think about it! The player character gets one clue, and there were three other trainers with a clue before the player arrives. The Secret Dish requires all four clues to order, and it’s a string of riddles hidden all across the town. So there has to be FOUR challengers at once just for one or maybe ZERO trainers to make it to Gym Leader Larry? Since the loser of the battle has to give up their clue to the winner, it’s very likely that no one can get all four clues.

This challenge definitely a puzzle, but also a test of raw strength. Unlike most gyms with battlers that work for the gym, challengers have to go against other challengers. There are no regulations on their teams, so any typing or level is fair game. Theres a lot of depth to this Gym Test, despite its impracticality. Perhaps that’s why Medali Gym’s floor is so weird- they rarely have to reveal the gym floor anyway because so few challengers make it. Maybe it’s purposefully obtuse to discourage challengers?

Random thought- but the name for the Treasure Eatery? It’s a cute name for sure, but considering how this game puts emphasis on Treasure due to the Treasure Hunt, it’s feels…sus. The Treasure Hunt is meant for the students to find their own “treasure” in their personalized journey. It fits with Terastallization appearing gem-like. Medali is the closest area to Area Zero, the place where the terastallization phenomenon was discovered.

Going through Medali is the only way to get to Area Zero. The town- or rather, Larry, serves as a secondary gate for Area Zero. Some of my previous theories have hovered around this idea, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Larry was stationed at Medali to prevent Pokémon, especially Paradox Pokémon, from escaping Area Zero. As Professor Turo/Sada say, these Pokémon are an extreme threat to the present ecosystem. And depending on your stance on the lore, Larry could also be a look-out for people near Area Zero.

Geeta has some suspicious stuff going on, which I’ll be making a theory post about. It’s likely she’s knowledgeable about how dangerous the Paradox Pokémon are, and knew there had to be a ‘gatekeeper’ to prevent havoc. Due to Larry’s strength and flexibility in battle, he was assigned there while also serving as a gym leader.

What do y’all think? I feel pretty solid about this theory, because there’s a lot we just don’t know about the lore. There’s more to Medali than what it appears. The game is hiding a lot, which gives me great hope and anticipation for the DLC!!

#pokemon scarvi #pokemon scarlet and violet #pokemon spoilers #pokemon larry #gym leader larry #elite four larry #pokemon medali #professor sada #professor turo #medali is so sus and I love it #kallistopost #theory post

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vikenticomeshome · 1 month

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Cyberchase Character Discussion (for your local Cyberchase trivia quiz) - #1: Inez

Since I have been archiving data from the Cyberchase section of the old pbskids.org website for the FlashPoint Archive Project lately, I thought should share some content I have dug up, particularly information that was provided on the different characters. Much of the information is no longer on the site. While much of it is available in the FlashPoint Archive Project now, and I would consider the project easy to look into and setup, not everyone will take the time to do so. #1: Inez I figure the best place to start is with her official "Meet the Cybersquad" character bio from back in the day. This was placed on the pbskids.org website way back in 2001, before the series initially started airing in 2002. This is no longer on the pbskids.org site, so I can't promise that it is still canon.

So, we start off learning that Inez is the youngest of the group, at nine years old. We never see the kids in school together, but I would not be surprised if Inez jumped forward a grade or two. The page emphasizes her curiosity. Now, would you call the parkway vs. driveway thing pedantic? For me: no comment.

The second page tells us that her favorite color is purple, her favorite food are popcorn and mangoes, and her favorite book in "By the Shores of Silver Lake", by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That is part of Wilder's autobiographical "Little House on the Prarie" series, with this particular book being published in 1939. I know its a classic that has been republished numerous times, but I do find it interesting that she went for such an old book. Her favorite music is by Mac Anthony. The page doesn't mention specific genres, and Marc Anthony has done several different genres over the years. I don't know his discography very well, but it looks like he was best known for Latin Salsa in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so that's probably her favorite music genre overall.

The third page tells us that her favorite move is "Harry Potter", as she loves Hermione Granger. Because this bio came out in 2001, only Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone would have been released as a movie at the time.

Her pet peeves are listed as heights, bad sportsmanship, and whenever Matt calls her "Nezzie". According to TVTropes, she did conquer her fear of heights by the time The Cyberchase Movie came out. She has one pet, her cat, Gatito. We do see Gatito in a few episodes of the show.

Now, there's something odd about Inez's design on the "Meet the Cybersquad" page. The star on her shirt is purple, as opposed to the yellow we got in the show. I'm not sure how this happened, as Inez had the yellow star as far back as the 1999 pilot.

This reminds me of another piece of trivia. During Season 4 Episode 2 "The Icky Factor", the kids get wetsuits for the first time, as they need to swim around Aquari-yum. They had already been to Aquari-yum twice by this point. However, they stayed in the sub the whole time during Season 1 Episode 16 "Codename Icky". Then, during Season 3 Episode 6 "The Grapes of Plath", they just wore their regular clothes with a bubble helmet to walk around the bottom of the bowl.

Look at their wetsuits. Matt gets plain blue wetsuit, Jackie gets a plain yellow wetsuit, and Digit gets a plain orange wetsuit. Inez gets a green wetsuit with a yellow star on the front and a purple vest. I like this detail. It's about as close to matching her color scheme as they could get without making the top half of the wetsuit pink, which would have just been weird. Maybe a full pink wetsuit would have been a little better? I don't know. If they did that, she would be missing out on the green from her shorts

Anyway, the next piece to look at is this page from Cyberchase: How It All Started: Webisode 3. This was an official prequel web comic that come out before the show started airing, so its a little off. I promise that this is the original image without any edits.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080610025304/http://pbskids.org/cyberchase/webisode_3/7.html

They got her skin-tone and hair color very wrong, as they showed her as white with red hair. The lenses on her glasses aren't as opaque. They did get the yellow star right this time, but I would consider her skin tone to be far more important. I would love to hear the story of how this mix-up happened. You know what? I'll add my attempt at fixing their mistake below, based on skin, hair, and glasses colors picked from "Meet the Cybersquad". I don't have much GIMP experience, but I think I did a pretty good job.

Anyway, the main reason I brought this image up was that she is noted as being a computer whiz who loves to go on the Internet. As far as I remember, she never uses her computer skills in the show, probably because they played it so fast and loose with the terminology.

So, that first image only showed her from the waist-up, but we do get a shot of her riding her bike to the library to meet her new friends and start the first episode. They did it again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080607121655/http://pbskids.org/cyberchase/webisode_3/8.html

I honestly wouldn't care if it was just the shirt, vest, or shorts being the wrong color. Alright, I have added a color-corrected version below.

The second page gives us "Oh no, this is not good at all!" That is the prototype for her iconic phrase: "This is not good! This is not good at all!".

Did you know that on her way to the library, Inez road her bike all over town to run other errands? She went to Betty's House, the Post Office, and the Video (VHS) store before arriving at the library just in time to make some new friends and upload her mind into the Internet.

As far as character trivia goes, Cyberchase did have official printable trading cards. Here's the one for Nezzie. I love this card. One of her favorite things is E-mail. Her other favorite things include experiments and big words, but we all knew that already. They picked a more optimistic, but less iconic, favorite line for her with, "Hey, I've got an idea!" rather than "This is not good! This is not good at all!". She is great at basketball, which may be surprising to some, given her height. We'll come back to that. She is also great at reading, standing up for herself, and singing. We do get to hear her sing "Brahm's Lullaby" in Spanish for Chewcrocca's baby during Season 3 Episode 1 "EcoHaven CSE".

I can think of two pieces of official Cyberchase media related to Basketball. There was Season 6 Episode 7 "Jimaya Jam", which had a sport of the same name, except it took away dribbling. However, Inez was actually separated from the group at the time, with Creech taking over her role during the Jimaya Jam game. Presumably, Inez was just too powerful.

The second piece is from the singular Cyberchae chapter book, "The Search for the Power Orb". The story actually starts with Inez playing basketball against Matt. She is frustrated that he is able to block her shots due to his clear height advantage, and his teasing about her height doesn't help. Towards the end of the story, they retrieve the titular Power Orb, which is roughly the size of a basketball. It needs to go back into its basket to save Cybersite Serentia from complete deletion. Inez is able to use her short stature to run between The Hacker's legs, get a boost from Izzy, and slam dunk the Power Orb.

What else? I found this early concept art on the Cyberchase wiki. It seems like the biggest change was the style for her boots.

There is also this write-up from a "Who's Who" document. I don't know whether this was always available to the public, or if this was an internal document when they were developing and pitching the show. It doesn't add too much information to what I already posted, but it does state their intent to make her a tomboy, and it talks about her tendency to giggle, give inspirational quotes and stand on her head.

I figure no Inez compilation is complete without her standing on her head at some point. Here she is in Season 2 Episode 12 "The Guilty Party" flinging herself out of a handstand, twisting around, and landing on her feet.

#cyberchase #inez #cartoon #2000s #2000s childhood #she slam dunks the fucking thing #it's incredible #longpost #archived web content

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punchdrunkdoc · 2 months

Text

Part 3, Chapter 12

Summary: After the events of S3, Matt Murdock is trying to once again balance life as a lawyer and a vigilante. But he’s been scarred by loss and betrayal - will a mysterious new neighbour help him heal? Or will her secrets drag him back into the darkness?

Notes: This is a slow burn romance with an original female character, told in 3 (maybe 4??) parts. There is mystery, intrigue, action/violence and angst - all the good stuff!

Also available on AO3 and Wattpad

Masterlist

Reference pics

————–

PART 3

Chapter 12 (*smut alert!*)

Calina dug her blunt nails into the skin of her neck, right over the site of Matt’s kiss. Then she dropped her hand and prepared to face the music.

Italy was the last remaining secret between them. Or, at least, the last one that had any bearing on their relationship. Matt still didn’t know the extent of her actions as a mind-controlled Black Widow - but as he and Katya kept telling her, she wasn’t responsible for those sins.

Her actions as Calina - the free and culpable woman - were the only ones that mattered. Matt had a right to know about those - especially now that he’d given her a second chance.

As she’d stared out of the windows just now, thinking about that last remaining secret, Matt had kissed her. Almost in the exact spot Ranieri had contaminated with his lips. As if he’d somehow known what she was thinking - and what she was keeping from him.

It had solidified in an instant what she needed to do:

Come clean.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What happened in Italy? When were you in Italy?”

Calina took his hand and led him over to the couch. They sat and faced each other, an identical tableau to the one from early today.

It seemed this couch was quickly becoming the official designated spot for difficult conversations.

Calina held Matt’s hand in both of hers and stared down at their intertwined fingers as she told him the story. “About six weeks ago. We, um, found one of Volkov’s associates - a man called Salvatore Ranieri. He was actually the financial backer of the whole operation - and he lived in Italy. He lives in Italy.” Calina frowned as she tripped over her words.

Matt used his free hand to stroke her cheek. “Hey, its okay. Take your time.”

Calina leaned into the contact for a brief moment, then continued. “We needed the information on his laptop to help us locate Volkov. So I volunteered to get it. I was best suited of all the Widows to infiltrate Ranieri’s home and get close enough to him to steal the data.”

She felt Matt tense up. “By ‘close enough’, you mean…”

“He was holding a party in his mansion. So we faked an invite and I attended under a false identity. I made sure to catch his eye, then convinced him to take me up to his room.”

“Okay,” Matt said slowly.

There was still tension in his frame - she could feel it in the way his hand was locked around hers - so she hurried to explain. “When we got upstairs I drugged him, then cloned his devices. But before I managed to knock him out, he- he…”

“What?”

“He touched me,” Calina admitted.

“Where?” he grated out. “Where did he touch you?”

Calina spared a quick glance at his face, and could see his jaw was clenched and a deep frown marred his forehead. “You’re angry,” she said. “I knew you would be. I’m so sorry, Matt. Please forgive me. I know I don’t deserve it - you’ve already given me this second chance, and now I’m asking for another. I wouldn’t blame you-”

“Shut up, Calina.”

Calina snapped her mouth closed, cutting off her rambling apology.

Matt cradled her cheeks with both hands and tilted her face up, pressing a kiss to her forehead. The gentle action was at odds with the irritation in his voice. “I am angry,” he said. “But I’m not angry at you.”

Calina frowned in confusion. “Why not?”

“Because you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I- I seduced another man.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“God, no!”

“Did you kiss him?”

“No.”

“Did you want to be with him?”

“No.”

“Do you want to be with anyone else?”

“No. How could you ask that? I only want to be with you.”

“That’s why I’m not angry at you.” He stroked his thumbs across her cheeks. “I’m angry that you were put in that position again. I’m angry about how upset it made you.”

When she frowned in confusion, he shook his head at her. “Do you think I can’t put two and two together, sweetheart? That was the night you called me, wasn’t it? On the burner phone?”

Calina dropped her eyes and nodded. “I- I didn’t want to go through with it. I hated being back in that role again, so I gave in and called you. I needed to hear your voice, to remember why it was necessary. To remember that everything I did…was to get back to you.”

Matt pulled her forward and kissed her, the move sudden and desperate. His hands slid from her cheeks into her hair, where he gathered the silky strands in two fistfuls. His tongue swept into her mouth, as if claiming her.

And she wanted him to claim her. She wanted to feel like she was his again. And she wanted him to know that he was hers. That she wanted no one else but him.

So she met his intensity and desperation with her own. She kissed him back and scrambled onto this lap, needing to feel him against her. He groaned as she sank down on to his hardening cock, and she swallowed the sound with satisfaction.

“Where did he touch you?” Matt repeated, his hands raking over her back.

In answer, she grabbed one of his roaming hands and moved it lower.

“Here?” he growled.

She nodded, still grinding her lower body against his. Matt flipped up the end of her borrowed shirt and placed both hands on her ass. He kneaded and squeezed her cheeks, the rough movements hovering on the pleasurable side of pain.

Calina revelled in the harsh strokes, as Matt erased the touch of that foul Italian. She tipped her head back and moaned as Matt coupled each squeeze with a thrust of his hips against hers.

“Where else?”

She tilted her head to the side and bared the spot behind her ear.

“Here?” The word vibrated against that sensitive patch of skin as his lips hovered over it.

At her nod, he bit down.

She gasped as his teeth pressed into her flesh, the move so unexpected, and so different from their previous encounters. Those had been slow and tender and loving, and exactly what she’d wanted in those moments. But right now? Right now, she wanted this. She wanted to revel in this darker side of Matt. She wanted to be marked by him. She wanted to come out of this sore, and bruised and feeling like every inch of her had been stamped by his touch.

Matt obviously felt the same. He replaced his teeth with his lips and sucked hard on the abused patch of skin until she knew she’d be left with a visible reminder of this moment for days to come.

He eventually released the suction and bathed her skin with his tongue before dragging his mouth up to her ear. “Where else?” he whispered.

Calina could barely think. She dragged her memory back to that room in Italy and replayed the incident. Then she touched the side of her breast - the only other place on her body that Ranieri had managed to violate.

Matt replaced her hand with his, stroking the curve of her breast and cupping the mound in his hand. He placed his mouth over the peak and breathed against the material of the shirt. The focus of heat made her tight nipple ache.

Then his mouth disappeared. His hand disappeared. And her shirt disappeared.

Matt whipped the garment over her head and threw it to the floor behind her. Then his mouth was against her bare skin, and he laved her breast with the same savage, wonderful attention as he did her neck.

Calina writhed on his lap, her own hands roaming over as much of Matt’s skin as she could manage. She grabbed fistfuls of his hair, scraped her nails over his neck and dragged her fingers over the muscles of his arms.

“Where else?”

Calina shook her head. “Nowhere,” she managed to whisper.

Matt palmed her thighs, his fingers digging into the taut muscles. “He didn’t touch you here?”

Calina shook her head again.

“What about here?” He spread his hands over her abdomen, then curved his fingers around her waist, clutching at her skin. He used his grip to pull her against his cock in one sharp, all-too-fleeting movement.

Calina moaned as the insistent, impatient need between her legs began to build and build. She tried to rock against him again, but he held her back with his grasp on her waist.

“Answer me, Calina.”

“No,” she gritted out. “He didn’t touch me there.”

“What about here?” Matt shoved one hand beneath the waistband of her underwear and plunged two fingers inside her.

Calina cried out as every muscle in her body went tight. Her thighs clenched around his. She clamped down on his shoulders, her nails digging into his skin, as he brought her to the brink with that sudden move.

His clever fingers curled and pressed into that spot, then his thumb swiped over her clit…and it was all over.

She broke on a sob, her toes curling with the pleasure as it bloomed within her. Matt continued to press against her nub, prolonging the sensation, building it back up with rougher and quicker movements until she came again.

Oversensitised now, she pulled away from his hand, panting and shuddering as the aftershocks sparked through her body. She sat back on Matt’s thighs, her hands still clutching at his shoulders in a death grip.

She watched in a daze as Matt brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked on them. His tongue darted out to lick at the moisture and he closed his eyes in obvious rapture at the taste.

That sight alone caused another aftershock to rock through her.

“Stand up,” Matt rasped.

Calina doubted her legs could support her, but the command in his voice was too powerful to ignore. She scrambled off his lap and to her feet. Matt skimmed his hands down her sides, hooked his fingers in her panties and dragged them down her legs. His hair brushed her abdomen as he reached down to guide her feet out of the scrap of lace. She brushed her fingers through the soft strands and waited for his next instruction.

It came silently this time. He pressed his fingers into the back of her left knee, urging her leg up so her foot rested on the couch beside him. The movement opened her core, baring more of her, putting her at his mercy.

He dipped his head back down and breathed deeply, moaning as more of her scent filled his senses. He flicked his tongue against her skin, just above her mound, his intentions clear. But she jerked back. “I- I can’t,” she stuttered. “I can’t take any more.”

“It’s okay. I’ll be gentle,” he murmured against her skin. “I just want to taste you. I need it.”

God, she couldn’t resist him when he said things like that. And the way he looked right now - cheeks flushed and lips wet - he was too fucking hot to deny.

So she braced herself on his shoulders as he leaned down and licked between her legs. He started low, away from her oversensitive clit, lapping at the moisture over her lips and on her thighs. He bathed her skin with hot strokes and hummed with pleasure as he worked. She could almost feel the vibrations, her nerve endings so alive to his touch. He kept licking, moving closer and closer to her core, his grip on her ass tightening as he tilted her up to his mouth.

Then he was there. His agile, wonderful tongue entered her, and the sudden burst of pleasure dragged a moan out of her. She felt his smug smile against her sex as he continued to worship her with his mouth.

And her body betrayed her completely. Despite her earlier protests, she surrendered to the moment. She started grinding against him, small, tight movements that she couldn’t control, as she chased another climax.

He noticed the change, and urged her on. One hand skimmed up her body to cup her breast, and he tweaked and played with the tight nipple as his other hand stroked over her ass and down her thigh to the sensitive skin behind her knee.

And his mouth moved too. He dragged his tongue slowly, slowly up, until he reached her aching clit. He circled around the tight, throbbing nub, teasing her with feathery, barely-there touches until she groaned in frustration.

“What do you want, Calina?” He spoke the words against her, his voice bathing her in heat.

“You,” she moaned.

“You have me.”

She tried to thrust against him, seeking the pressure from his tongue, but he held her in place, both hands now clamping her hips.

“What do you want?” he asked again. He sounded maddeningly calm while she was crawling out of her skin with need.

But his body betrayed him too. The fingers pressing into her skin trembled. Sweat beaded at his hairline and his hard length tented the fabric of his sweats. He needed her as much as she needed him. But it was clear he wouldn’t give in to his own desire until he satiated hers. So she put them both out of their misery. “Make me come, Dusha moya, please.”

It was a command and a desperate plea all at once.

And it worked. Matt’s tongue went from teasing to determined in an instant as he stroked and pressed and flicked at her clit. He shoved himself off the couch and sank to the floor, his strong arms keeping her steady as she staggered back at the sudden movement. The new position gave him more leverage, and he used it to full advantage, narrowing all his focus to that tiny spot between her legs.

Within moments, she was rising to the peak for the third time. Her breath came in pants and gasps as he worked his magic. She grasped his hair between her fingers and pulled on the strands, trying to anchor herself as her body flew apart. She came on a cry, her whole body shuddering as she tipped over the edge.

Her legs turned to jelly and she collapsed down onto Matt’s lap in a boneless sprawl. He took her weight with a grunt and held her tightly. All she could hear was the rush of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, and all she could feel was her core clenching around empty nothingness as the climax pulsed through her body.

She wanted that emptiness to be filled. She wanted Matt inside her.

And she wanted to make him feel the way she felt right now.

She fumbled with the waistband of his sweats and dragged it over his erection. She took a second to admire the thick, hard length before she wrapped her hand around him, pressed up on her knees and guided him inside.

He moaned, a long, masculine sound, as she sank down. Her walls gripped him, the spasms tightening around him, and she relished the feeling of fullness. She slid up slowly, teasing him the way he’d teased her, then dropped down to the hilt, taking all of him inside. He clenched her to him, one hand on her ass, the other under the curtain of her hair, grasping the back of her neck.

She set a slow, languid pace as she rode him. He met each downward slide with a thrust of his hips, grinding his cock into her. She tipped her head back, loving the sensation of being wrapped up in him, surrounded by him.

His tongue darted out to lap at the beads of sweat gathering at the base of her throat. “I missed you,” he whispered against her heated skin. “I missed you so much, sweetheart.”

“Me too,” she breathed, rocking faster and faster. He raced with her, the grip on her ass tightening as he moved with her.

Until he inevitably needed more.

He surged up to his knees, twisted the two of them to the side, then laid her flat. The moment her back hit the hardwood floor, the pace skyrocketed. His powerful thighs drove him into her again and again, each thrust forcing a gasp of pleasure to escape her lips. She hitched her legs up and around his waist and held on as he lost control.

He braced one hand on the floor beside her head and hooked the other over her shoulder, keeping her in place as he pumped his hips against hers in a relentless, delirious, exhilarating rhythm. She held on, letting him use her body to seek his own release, urging him on with whispered encouragement. “That’s it, mi amor. Harder. Just let go, baby.”

With one last powerful thrust, he came.

He stayed locked within her for a few moments as he recovered, and she relished the feel of his warm, hard body covering hers. Then he rolled off her, and the two of them lay together on the hard wood floor, their hands entwined.

Calina licked her lips. Swallowed, and searched for her voice. “I like your version of taking things slow.”

Matt laughed, and she smiled at the joyous, carefree sound. She really loved making him laugh.

He tugged on her hand, pulling it towards him until he could press a kiss to the back of it. “Maybe we just give ourselves today? Then start slow tomorrow.”

Calina shook her head, still smiling widely. “That doesn’t exactly make sense.”

“Nothing about us doesn’t make sense.”

“That really doesn’t make sense,” she giggled. She felt almost drunk with joy. Giddy and silly and so, so happy.

It was such a stark contrast to the last time they were both sprawled out on this floor - not least because she was completely naked this time, and basking in afterglow. Back then they hadn’t even been friends. She’d spent weeks obsessing over him from afar, but he’d rebuffed even her mild attempts to get close to him.

Until that one fateful night…

“What are you thinking?” Matt asked softly.

Calina told him the truth. “I was thinking about the last time we were here - laid out on this floor, sweating and panting.”

“Sweetheart, we’ve never done it on the floor before. Not that I haven’t thought about it - I have, believe me. As well as the kitchen counter, the shower, that wall over there, the dining table-”

Calina swatted him with the back of her hand and laughed at his list of fantasies. “I meant the fight we had. After I was dosed with the mind control serum.”

“Oh that.”

“Did you ever think we’d go from beating each other up, to screwing each others brains out?”

“Yes.”

The answer came immediately. And with such certainty, it made Calina frown and stare at his profile. “Really?”

“Really. Why do you think I fought against us so hard? Deep down, I knew we would always end up here. Right from the start.”

She scoffed. “From the start? Are you saying it was love at first sight?”

“That would be quite the feat for a blind man,” he joked. “It was more like love at first scent.”

He brought her wrist up to his nose and breathed deep. “I fucking love the way you smell.” His voice dipped into that low register that drove her wild, and when he trailed a line of kisses down the sensitive skin of her forearm, she felt the spark of passion reignite.

For the fourth time.

God, he was going to be the death of her.

He rolled to his side and continued the trail of kissed along her collarbone, and down between her breasts. He nuzzled her belly, his stubbled jaw catching on her soft skin. The tiny scrapes and scratches only added to her growing desire.

“What are you doing down there?” she asked, her own voice sounding deep and husky with lust.

“I figure if we’re going to start slow tomorrow, we’d better make today count.”

He started inching lower, his destination and intention clear.

But it was her turn to play. She was conscious of the fact that she was completely naked, while he was pretty much fully dressed - evidence that she hadn’t had her chance to enjoy his body to the fullest.

But round 2 was going to change that.

She stopped Matt’s downward descent by tugging lightly on his hair.

He looked up and frowned at her. “You don’t agree?”

“Oh I agree. But I have something different in mind.”

The frown turned into a dirty grin. “Oh yeah? Like what?”

Calina rolled the two of them over, until he was the one on his back and she was straddling his thighs. “Well, you mentioned something about a shower. And the dining table. And that wall over there…but first, I want you naked.”

“That can be arranged,” Matt replied, whipping his t-shirt over his head.

Calina survey the expanse of skin, all the more beautiful for the marks of survival that scarred the surface. Then she hooked her fingers in the waistband of his sweats again, dragged them down his long legs and flung them aside.

She took in the full effect, wishing she was an artist and could capture his beautiful form in ink and paint for all eternity. While she looked her fill, Matt laced his fingers behind his head and relaxed under her scrutiny. The move accentuated his muscled arms and tightened the ridges of his six pack, making him look even more delectable.

Which meant he probably did it on purpose, the cocky bastard.

Calina smiled and shook her head. “Enjoying yourself?”

He shrugged. “I’d enjoy myself more if you touched instead of stared.”

Calina scooted down his legs until her mouth was even with his hardening erection. “Oh, I’m going to do more than just touch.”

She wet her lips, dipped her head, and fulfilled her promise.

————–

Chapter 13

Tag list: @hollandorks @stilldreaming666 @sio-ina-bottle @tearoseart-blog @acharliecoxedfan @freckledbabyyy

If you’d like to be added - let me know!

#daredevil #daredevil fic #tabula rasa #daredevil fanfic #daredevil fanfiction #matt murdock #daredevil x original female character #matt murdock fanfic #marvel's daredevil #matt murdock x oc #daredevil fandom

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mariacallous · 2 months

Text

On February 8, an Oklahoma transgender teen named Nex Benedict died. While an exact cause of death has yet to be determined, we know that Nex was involved in a violent altercation with three girls in a girls’ bathroom at Owasso High School. The next day, Nex died. (According to reporting from NBC News, Nex identified as transgender and preferred he/him pronouns, but also used they/them pronouns.)

We also know from Nex’s family and friends that Nex experienced routine bullying and harassment at school because of his transgender identity—as did other LGBTQ+ youth according to a number of media accounts. What’s more, this harassment is taking place in a state where anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric has proliferated in recent years. In 2022, Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law requirements that prevent trans youth from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity. (Nex’s mother said in a recent interview that the bullying Nex experienced intensified after the Oklahoma bathroom bill went into effect). What’s worse, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of education has vehemently attacked any efforts to make schools more inclusive for LGBTQ+ youth and is on the record stating his belief that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist.

On March 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it was launching an investigation into Owasso Public Schools over concerns that the district failed to adequately respond to allegations of sex-based harassment (under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex). The investigation was opened in response to a civil rights complaint filed by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

In this post, I’ll outline what happens once OCR opens a new investigation, what I’m hoping to see from this investigation in particular, and why I’m ultimately skeptical of this enforcement tool as a lever for bringing about meaningful change.

What does it mean that OCR opened an investigation?

OCR enforces Title IX and other federal civil rights laws in publicly funded educational institutions—including all K-12 public schools. The agency’s primary enforcement tool is investigations into potential civil rights violations. Most investigations are opened in response to civil rights complaints received by the agency.

The bar for OCR to investigate a civil rights complaint is low. And that’s by design. OCR’s civil rights complaint process is intended to be a low-cost avenue available to parents, families, and community advocates concerned about potential violations in public schools—one that does not require hiring legal representation to pursue. But that also means we should not read too much meaning into the fact that ED opened a new investigation. OCR opening an investigation does not mean federal officials suspect that a civil rights violation took place. It only means that a complaint alleging a form of discrimination enforceable (in this case, Title IX) by OCR was made in a timely manner.

What happens once an investigation is opened?

The goal of an OCR investigation is to determine whether an alleged civil rights violation took place and to decide what district reforms are appropriate based on what the investigation uncovered. In practice, the scope and scale of OCR investigations varies widely. Sometimes OCR conducts large-scale investigations that include multiple site visits and meetings with a wide variety of stakeholders. Other times, OCR interviews only a few stakeholders alongside a review of extant documents and data. When and why OCR deploys more investigatory resources are unknown, but that means it is difficult to predict exactly what shape this investigation into Owasso Public Schools will take.

It is also unclear how far-reaching this investigation will be. In some cases, OCR only investigates allegations related to the specific incident outlined in the complaint. In other words, were Nex’s civil rights violated by Owasso Public Schools? In others, OCR investigators interrogate whether the alleged incident is one part of a broader pattern of civil rights abuses taking place. In other words, are LGBTQ+ students’ civil rights routinely violated in Owasso Public Schools? These differences may seem subtle but are hugely consequential for the ultimate scope of the investigation and the scale of any proposed district reforms.

OCR’s letter notifying HRC that an investigation was being opened seems to imply the latter approach—stating that OCR will investigate “whether the District failed to appropriately respond to alleged harassment of students” [emphasis added]. This is critical if OCR aims to address the conditions that led to the harassment and bullying that Nex experienced, especially considering reports of numerous other instances of harassment of LGBTQ+ youth in Owasso Public Schools.

It is also important to underscore that OCR is one relatively small federal agency that has not been adequately staffed or funded for at least the last two decades. This has become an acute challenge over the last several years as OCR’s caseload has exploded and as Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon has prioritized more systemic investigations. The consequence of this reality is that investigations can take years, and still not be particularly thorough. At best, an investigation like this could take less than a year. At worst, it could be several years before it is resolved.

What should happen next?

Most OCR investigations are not instigated by an incident as tragic as this one. It is imperative that OCR investigators handle this case with care. At minimum, that should include careful engagement with Nex’s family and friends (to the extent they wish to be involved), along with other members of the school’s LGBTQ+ community.

Hearing directly from LGBTQ+ students is also critical considering Owasso Public Schools’ initial response to news of the investigation. Per an official statement, while the district intends to cooperate with federal investigators, it “believes the complaint submitted by H.R.C. is not supported by the facts and is without merit.” Initial reporting also reflects inconsistencies between what Nex’s family and friends said took place, versus the school district and the police departments’ official accounts. Moreover, Oklahoma’s state superintendent, Ryan Walters, has publicly denied that Nex’s death had anything to do with his gender identity even as the criminal investigation into Nex’s death remains ongoing.

This context underscores how important it is that OCR works to draw its own conclusions about the bullying and harassment of Nex and other LGBTQ+ students in Owasso Public Schools rather than relying on conclusions drawn by the district and police department.

What might come of this investigation?

In theory, if a school district is found in violation of civil rights law, OCR can rescind federal funding or have the case referred to the Department of Justice for further judicial action.

In practice, findings of civil rights violations are exceedingly rare. Most investigations that lead to mandated reforms are resolved through negotiations between OCR and a district. OCR’s policies favor negotiated settlements over more forceful enforcement actions at every step of the investigation process. Thus, unless a school district is blatantly and repeatedly refusing to cooperate with OCR, the likelihood of some penalty for violating civil rights law is very small.

The agency’s preference for negotiating with districts also means that the resulting resolution agreements often include reforms that seem mild, at best, and wildly insufficient, at worst. Take, for example, a recent resolution agreement OCR entered into with Rhinelander Public Schools in Wisconsin. This case, like the Owasso investigation, involved persistent harassment of a gender non-conforming student by some teachers and students and a district’s repeated failure to adequately respond. In the negotiated settlement, the district agreed to 1) assess whether compensatory instructional time was owed to the harassed student; 2) provide trainings to both staff and high school students on what constitutes sex-based harassment under Title IX and the district’s Title IX grievance process; 3) improve how it documents accusations of sex-based harassment; 4) conduct a school climate survey “to assess the prevalence of sex-based harassment and obtain suggestions for effective ways to address harassment.”

Of these actions, only one was directly aimed at improving the school environment for LGBTQ+ students–mandatory trainings for staff and high school students. Putting aside the fact that OCR’s standard Title IX reforms seem insufficient to remedy widespread harassment of LGBTQ+ students—especially in a state where the top education official’s anti-LGBTQ+ biases are on full display, a large body of evidence indicates that these types of one-off anti-discrimination or diversity trainings are often ineffective.

Thus, unless OCR officials take a radically different approach in this case (which I hope they do given the gravity of the incident), the outcomes of this investigation are–unfortunately—unlikely to bring about significant reforms in Owasso Public Schools.

What can ED do to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ+ students?

The Biden administration’s long-awaited and much delayed updated Title IX regulations are expected to be released next month. This overhaul of Title IX is notable for several reasons, including that it codifies the Department’s interpretation that Title IX protections extend to discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The pending adoption of the new Title IX regulations is particularly important in this case because in July 2022 a federal judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked ED from enforcing its new interpretation of Title IX after 20 conservative states—including Oklahoma—filed a lawsuit to stop its enforcement. This meant that OCR’s ability to enforce this more expansive interpretation of Title IX had been severely limited until the new regulations were formally in place.

This is not to say that updated Title IX regulations alone will be sufficient, and they will undoubtedly be challenged in federal court as Republican lawmakers and attorneys general have made clear. But its delays have led to an environment where districts must choose between complying with state law or federal guidance and where the rights of LGBTQ+ students remain painfully unclear—and in lots of states, including Oklahoma, under attack.

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ghouljams · 7 months

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You collect BJDs??? Can you please tell me where you buy some? I’ve been wanting one for so long and only found design models on Etsy, 1 actual doll that cost $8000, and literally nothing else. I gave up on the search and have no clue any irl stores that could sell them 😭🙏

I wouldn't buy anything off etsy unless you're grabbing a Kabbit print, and those should only run you about $100 max for a blank doll. I'm going to put doll hobby talk under the cut, but yeah I can give you my rec-list

I bought my first BJD off of cpfairyland which is the official Minifee retailer, but if you're in the USA I would also suggest checking out Denver doll emporium! They have a few different brands and quick shipping if you buy in stock. Minifee are great starting dolls, they have a ton of different heads, they're an industry standard and you can buy a doll with their makeup already done. Which means you can put money towards clothes and wigs(which is the fun part anyway).

I am an anti-recast hobbyist, and I genuinely recommend not buying recasts if you want to make friends in the hobby. So I'm only going to be telling you legit sites, which also means dolls are going to be a little more expensive(but I'll give you some less expensive recs too).

Alice's Collective bjd(acbjd) is a great site the acts as a third party for a ton of different brands. If you want a doll that looks a little(or a lot) different from the standard fashion doll they have a lot of great options.

Jane's Dolland is another sight that acts as a third party seller. They sell blind box tiny bjds(that are great quality I have a few)(only $30 too) and a few other cheap brands. You might have to paint the face yourself, or find a repaint artist, but the dolls themselves can be as low as $50. I actually bought an Imomo doll from them to customize for my sister last Christmas and she was really great for a beginner bjd.

Withdolls has some tiny bjds that are really fucking cute. I have one and he was under $200. Their dolls are adorable, but their tiny doll sizing is a little hard to shop for.

I mentioned Kabbit dolls! Kabbit is a 3D print file available for sale on etsy super customizable and cheap if you have a 3d printer! Or a library with a 3d printer! I've done 3D prints through my local library and I have a friend that printed a Kabbit they really like. Dollightful also has a free tiny bunny bjd on thingyverse I think.

I have bought dolls off of Facebook and Instagram, but you gotta be willing to be a little mean if you buy second hand. Always make sure you get a certificate of authenticity! And know what the doll you want is worth! I collect 1/4 MSD sized dolls, the last 2 heads I bought were about $100 each but they were also harder to find heads. One of the heads was being sold with a body for $150(but I only wanted the head so I overpaid) so you can find cheap(authentic) dolls if you're looking.

I also buy a lot of artist dolls on pre-order. Which means I follow the artists on Instagram and then I am very patient, and lucky. BJD buying is a lot of hurry up and wait if you want to go the independent artist route. You can always check bjdsale on Instagram, the tag is full and people are always selling.

Depending on where you live you can check on Facebook to see if you have a local bjd group! I have one in my area and we are always excited to help new people in the hobby!! They'd have dolls for sale, but also would have more ideas on where you could buy online. Dolls are such a niche hobby everyone sort of knows everyone, and we love sharing with new folks!! If you have any other questions you can send me a dm and I'm happy to talk more ❤️

#ghoul speaks #bjd talk #do not buy off of allie express or shien or wish #artists work hard to make their dolls and deserve to be compensated for their work #penny's box dolls are really good quality and are super cute #theyre blind box but only $30

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sacredechoes · 10 months

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Valentia Side Material and Translations: Resource Masterpost

This post is to organize links to side material for Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia, much of which Sacred Echoes has drawn upon for additional story and characterization details. In the case of translated material, I will link to the main translator's site; if you worked on these translations and have a Tumblr handle you'd like to be credited under as well, please message me and I'll update the post.

Art Book, Valentia Accordion

Includes concept art, full character biographies, and an official timeline. Information here is considered a primary source.

Character bios and concept art translations are hosted on Kantopia's translations blog. Additional translators assisted with individual pages and are credited therein by their Twitter handles.

Lyrics translations of the songs with vocals are available at the above link and were contributed by @mystletainn.

The official timeline was translated by @vincentasm on Serenes Forest.

Drama CD - "Foreign Skies, Daybreak Forest"

Taking place in Act 4 soon after the Deliverance crosses the Rigel border, this drama CD features Alm, Faye, Silque, Tobin, Kliff, Lukas, Forsyth, and Python, as well as three Rigelian characters not used elsewhere. Information here is considered a primary source, and this is the only quasi-official source of information about Alm's mother.

While Clive and Mathilda return to Zofia to quell dissent among the nobility in the wake of Desaix's defeat, the Deliverance are attacked by Rigelian child soldiers armed with cursed weapons. Alm's compassion and sense of justice lead him to try and reach out to these children rather than attack them with military force, and he discovers that they are orphans marginalized by brutal Rigelian customs and being used as pawns by the Duma Faithful. Alm reckons with the reality that Rigelians are not his enemies, but the systemic oppression they face from the empire and death-cult that rules over them, and through his compassion he meets some kindred spirits. Contains some really great characterizations of the Lukas/Python/Forsyth trio as well.

Text translation was done by @garmmy on their translations blog. A subtitled video playlist was created using garmmy's translations with the original audio by @fudgenomnomnom.

Valentia Comic Anthology

Includes over 100 4koma (4-panel, half-page) comics, as well as longer-form one-shots of 8 or more pages. Material here is more akin to fan comics and is thus considered a secondary source.

The 4koma have all been translated and hosted by Kantopia on their blog.

The one-shots are not all in the same place, and not all have been translated yet. Four have been done by @mystletainn a few years ago, while @hypergammaspaces is picking up the remaining chapters:

As Comrades, by Itagaki Hako - TL: mystletainn. Faye resolves to do whatever she can to help carry Alm's burdens, and brings the Ram boys along. Alm proves he loves his friends as much as they love him.

Sweet Delivery, by Watarizora Tsubamemaru - TL: mystletainn. Atlas fails to guard Mae and Leon's fresh-baked cookies, so he, Saber, and Jesse agree to gather the ingredients to replace them.

Fieldwork in Zofia, by Shiroishi Kotoni - TL: mystletainn. Taking place shortly before Act 3, Kliff ventures out to survey the lands north of Zofia Castle and encounters a certain masked knight who has more in common with him than either of them expect.

Only My Big Brother, by Kirai Yuu - TL: mystletainn. Tired of being ignored by Valbar, Leon ropes Kamui into helping him find the perfect boyfriend.

Know Your Enemy and Know Yourself, by Temo Uchida - TL: hypergammaspaces. Lukas and Forsyth try to encourage Kliff to take his combat duties seriously.

Future Wife, by Reku Hayase - TL: hypergammaspaces. Mathilda navigates her thoughts about her future with Clive as she reconciles Clair's expectations of her. Lukas is there too.

Let's Go To Ram Village, by Kazuomi Mochizuki - TL: hypergammaspaces. Translation is in-progress. Clair, having just met the Deliverance, asks to see what life in Ram Village is like, and Alm agrees to show her. Faye isn't too happy about this, but finds common ground with Clair by the end.

There are at least three more chapters yet untranslated which will be linked here as they are completed.

Rise of the Deliverance DLC

This was a set of four story maps set in the year-and-a-half or so before the events of Act 1. Focused around Clive, Fernand, Mathilda, Clair, Lukas, Forsyth, and Python, this added supports and memory prisms between these characters as well as story map dialogue. Scripts, memory prisms, and additional support transcriptions were found on a Serenes Forest forum post by user godzillahomer.

Gaiden manga

One-volume manga by Masaki Sano and Kyo Watanabe, published by Asuka Comics DX. Partial scans have been found on the Fire Emblem (Fandom) Wiki, but no complete scans or translations have been found as of this post. This is the one where Desaix stabs Kliff to death (hence Kliff joking about "maybe we can all get impaled on the same lance" in SoV). Many characters are entirely absent, while both Deen and Sonya appear in Celica's party.

Gaiden novelization

A light novel with a few illustrations throughout. Based heavily on the author's personal playthrough, Silque thus features prominently as she basically hard-carried Alm's party. Neither English FE wiki has a page about this adaptation. I have an acquaintance who owns it but I'm not aware of any full scans/translations available as of this post. This is the one where Kliff and Silque are half-siblings with the same father.

#fire emblem echoes #shadows of valentia #fe15 #fe echoes

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mahounomanga · 3 months

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Kurumi-tic Miracle

In the early days of the genre, it was relatively common for magical girls to have more open-ended power sets. Rather than having one or a few set applications, their magic could do just about anything. Since the turn of the millennium, most magical girls have powers designed for a specific task, such as fighting evil, but today I want to take a look at a character from the early 2000s whose powers can do anything she puts her mind to.

Kurumi-tic Miracle is a 2003 manga by Chitose Yagami. It stars a run-of-the-mill schoolgirl named Kurumi Nanami, who lives with her grandfather in the oddities shop he owns, together with her pet hamster, Momo. One day, while helping clean the shop, Kurumi discovers a mysterious magic stone that affixes itself to her wrist in the form of a bracelet. With this magic bracelet, any wish she makes will instantaneously come true. Initially she uses this power to pursue her crush, Naoki, but as the two gets closer, it becomes clear the magic stone has a bit of a history, and the potential to cause problems.

Kurumi-tic Miracle was serialized in Ciao magazine from the February 2003 issue to the April 2003 issue: a three chapter run. These chapters were compiled into a single tankobon volume on June 21, 2003 by Shogakukan under their Flower Comics imprint, along with a couple of Yagami's older one-shots. A digital re-release, also by Shogakukan, was made available on July 10, 2015. Official translations were released in Indonesian and Chinese, but not English. However, a fan translation by the group Da Gurlz Translationz is available for all five chapters, including both one-shots, and can be found on various unofficial manga sites.

The series was created by Chitose Yagami, a shoujo manga author who debuted in 2001 with Magical Project, a one-shot which was later included in volume 1 of Manga Mitaina Koi Shitai! a.k.a. Fall in Love Like a Comic, one of her more popular works which was even officially printed in English by Viz under their Shojo Beat imprint. Much of Yagami's work contains elements of romantic comedy, middle/high school slice of life, magic and the paranormal, and working in the entertainment industry, be it modeling, music, or manga. She is still active to this day, both professionally and on social media. Her most recent manga, a BL series titled Shoujo Manga no Hero ni naritai no ni Heroine Atsukaisareru Ore., began serialization in 2021 and is still ongoing. None of her works would get career-definingly popular, but Kurumi-tic Miracle was successful enough to land her her first autograph session, so that's cool. It seems she didn't do much adapting of existing work, save for contributing to a shoujo Inazuma Eleven anthology in 2011. That same year, her manga Oresama Kingdom (Kings of My Love) got picked up for a direct to video anime adaptation, running for 14 episodes of 11 minutes apiece until 2013. This was the only manga of hers to get an anime adaptation, and it got a Nintendo DS game too, also in 2011. This was the second video game based on a Chitose Yagami manga, the first being Kiss x Kiss for the GBA in 2004.

Speaking of video games, this came up a lot in my research so I just want to point out that this series is unrelated to the 1997 Playstation game Kurumi Miracle, in which a young witch whose name is also Kurumi goes to an island to hone her magic by helping the local townsfolk.

Because Kurumi-tic Miracle is so short, it's difficult to recap the plot without giving spoilers, so if you'd like to go into the series blind, I advise you to do so before reading the rest of this post.

The manga starts off as a pretty straight forward slice-of-life romcom with magical hijinks, but the more we learn about the love interest Naoki, the clearer it becomes that something is amiss. He has a rather distinctive ring, and he seems very interested in Kurumi's bracelet. It turns out there is another magic stone, and the person who controls it wants them both to himself. The plot reveal is that this person is not Naoki, but his little brother, Satoru, who found the other stone by chance and became corrupted by its' power. He has bequeathed unto Naoki a fraction of that power for the purposes of collecting the other stone.

The magic systems in Kurumi-tic Miracle are really interesting to me. Because the scope of what they can do is so broad, the characters are limited only by their imagination, which gives us a stark contrast in how Kurumi and Satoru use their powers, despite those powers deriving from the same source. Kurumi's magic tends to be cuter, more harmless, and at times downright childish. Satoru's magic is scarier, emblematic of his ruthless attitude, and representative of a genuinely serious threat.

To pad out the tankobon release, two of Chitose Yagami's one-shots were included. The first, 2003's Dokitto Boys X Love (just Boys X Love in the fanslation), is sort of a comedy-of-errors in which a teenage girl accidentally switches bodies with her favorite male idol, and the two have to stick together as she learns his routine. It's not especially groundbreaking, but it's cute. The second is titled Otokomae!? Jajauma Musume, which I thiiink roughly translates to Boyish Selfish Girl. The fanslation uses the title I Love Tomboy. It was originally published in 2001 and according to Weblio was Yagami's second ever manga after Magical Project. It's a romantic comedy in which a tomboy attempts to become more feminine to win over her bully... which sucks. It sucks so bad. This one-shot is infuriatingly gender essentialist and sexist. A lot of effort goes into categorizing what separates girls from boys, all of it very stereotypical, and even though the resolution is that the protagonist is more comfortable being herself, the message is lost in all the steps it takes to get there. She does have some personal struggles with wondering if she's really a boy after all, and there's a plot twist that the elder sister figures who helped her throughout were actually crossdressers the whole time, so I'm sure you could read some queer subtext into this if you wanted to, but that is VERY clearly not what was intended. I hate it.

Taken on its' own, Kurumi-tic Miracle strikes me as a diamond in the rough. Most of the flaws I can point to in the main story could easily be alleviated if it were given more room to breathe. Three chapters just wasn't enough for me to get fully invested in these characters or their world. Despite this, the core concept shines through. This manga had some genuinely intriguing ideas about its' magic systems and how they can be applied for creative problem solving at a time when that modality of magic was becoming increasingly rare, despite the magical girl genre as a whole reaching market saturation at around this time. It's short and cute, even if it's not particularly substantial. It's very of a type, but if this is a type you tend to enjoy, I highly recommend checking it out.

#my posts #long post #Kurumi-tic Miracle #くるみちっく☆ミラクル #Chitose Yagami #八神千歳 #Ciao #shoujo #00s #By the way I just hit 100 followers! Thank you so much!

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talenlee · 5 months

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The Gliscor In A Coal Mine

Gunna talk about Smogon here. Oh, you don’t know Smogon?

Weeeeell, deep breath.

Smogon is a Pokemon fangame played with the basic components of the videogame series Pokemon, which is itself, made by Game Freak and distributed by Nintendo, which you’ll probably recognise as one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Smogon, by contrast, are a forum and some emulators and a surprisingly dense little bubble of Youtube content.

‘Smogon’ in this context refers to a bunch of related games, that form a single fandom game, a folk game. They have, in the terminology I’m fond of using, made a game out of another game, which is a super cool practice I actively encourage. It’s how we get great things like, for example, the entire Legacy subgenre of games, from its dizzying heights of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 to the shocking lows of Pandemic Legacy Any Other Seasons. I like Smogon as a thing to observe through some sort of astrolabe or other technical device. I have no particular interest in engaging with the game itself, as they play it.

I don’t want to get into a play space with these people.

Not because they’re bad or anything, though they are overwhelmingly split between the still-thinks-he’s-on-4chan shithead vs autistic trans girl social binary of internet niches and you’re never sure what side that coin is landing on when you flip it. I don’t want to partake of Smogon because the game they’re playing looks unpleasant to me to play, and because part of Being Into Smogon means looking around at the game Smogon has made and thinking: Yeah, this works. This is a good system.

The current news out of Smogon, such as it is, is that in their OU format (short for ‘overused’), just banned the Pokemon Gliscor. Gliscor is redacted information that doesn’t matter, because you don’t need to know what Gliscor is to come to understand the problem that Gliscor highlights, and the lesson you can learn about making games and control over those games.

Smogon’s banning policy reflects a truth I espouse as a game designer: Players are great at identifying problems and terrible at solving them.

Pokemon as it’s balanced and released and supported and played by GameFreak is, competitively balanced for 2v2, 4-of-6 teams, with information openly available to players through previews. This has some odd knock-on effects, like poor Zoroark kinda got pooched when they make this information public, but whatever, there are more Pokemon than that that aren’t really for playing. This is a kind of game I think of as a ‘pool game’ – the game is built ostensibly around a pool of potential pieces, and you choose which pieces you use and how. Magic: The Gathering is a pool game, Pokemon is a pool game, and even games like Dominion are pool games, because the game pieces that are in the game at the start of each contest are determined by choices outside the game.

In the official tournament context, when it comes to limiting access to Pokemon, there are ‘mythical’ pokemon where you can only have one (or two, depending on the regulation) from that category on your team. The game is broadly speaking open, where almost anything in that pool is available for use. Now, it’s hard to dig into this for hard numbers, because the pool has a lot of stuff in it that isn’t really expected to be played competitively. There are Pokemon who exist for, most likely, their place in a single-player RPG experience, like most first and second form evolutions, and some that exist as more world content. Think Unown and male Combee. Of the pool available, that means you’re looking a pool of, like, around 1,021 Pokemon, you can’t act as if all of those are going to find a place in a competitive head-to-head environment.

The stat site Pikalytics gives us numbers of about 310 Pokemon that showed up at all, and in that space, 37 Pokemon were not allowed. Some of them weren’t allowed because there’s no way to access them, but Game Freak get to make those choices and Smogon doesn’t. Now, that 310 number is a really broad net, and it’s just the stats from one tournament with over 700 players. In that space, two or three people bringing along something for a laff are going to make it show up. And if we say, limit ourselves to anything that had at least 5 people bring it (so, a representation of .71%), that gives us a list of 75 Pokemon that showed up in the tournament. And the stats aren’t telling the whole story just like that — after all, two of the most common Pokemon, Iron Hands and Flutter Mane, were played on 50% of teams.

That’s the metagame for an official tournament, broadly speaking; the full pool is somewhere around 310 Pokemon, but the core of the pool is much smaller. And importantly, when I say there are ’37 Pokemon that were not allowed,’ these are Pokemon who are very specifically set aside by the game experience and with related traits indicating that they are not for typical tournament play. You never could play with them in this format, they are not appearing and disappearing based on feedback.

Smogon doesn’t have tournament-to-tournament kind of environment like this; they instead have a tiered tournament system which cares about usage and then cultivates that usage. What his means is that the Pokemon are divided into groupings described by, well, how often they’re used. That means the main, core space, at least according to the Smogon people I spoke to about it, is ‘OU,’ for Overused. Overused is a 1v1 format. At the moment, there are 31 Pokemon legal in Overused. You can use Pokemon from a lower tier in this tier, but it generally works out badly, because those Pokemon are not strong enough for this tier. There are 19 other Pokemon that were in this tier, but have been banned out of it, sent ‘up’ a tier to the category of ‘Ubers’ for being, well, too good. Ubers, for context, has about sixty two Pokemon in it.

That is, Smogon centralises its design space around 31 Pokemon, and only after kicking 19 of them out.

In the announcement banning Gliscor from their format, there were people calling for bans to Sneasler, Samurott-Hisui and Gholdengo. That would bring it up to 22/29, which feels unpleasantly close to half the format being banned. Even at 19/31, that’s essentially 2/5th of the format banned. And when you dig into this situation, you wind up chasing details that can’t address the whole problem:

Gliscor was too powerful at setting hazards and being hard to kill.”

“Well, why was it hard to kill?”

“Because it could heal from lots of small hits.”

“Well why not hit it very hard with a big hit, since it has a 4x weakness?”

“Well nothing in the tier can hit it hard enough.”

“Well, why don’t you bring up something from a lower tier that could do that?”

“Well nothing in that tier is good enough.”

“Well why aren’t there good ice types in this tier?”

“Well we banned the one that hits really hard.”

“Why did you do that?”

“It was too good at hitting things very hard.

And like, this whole conversation is is continuing to diagnose problem after problem after problem, but never finding anything that solves those problems. Because Gliscor being banned resulted in people talking about how now, there were more problems that had to be fixed.

A lot of this is the peculiarities of what Smogon does and doesn’t allow. For example, hazards are so important because everything in Smogon is expected to swap out constantly, and hazards make that hard to endure over time, meaning that hazards pull the game towards an end state. This swapping out constantly makes some statuses pointless (like confuse) and a lot of setup moves pointless too. It means that multiple sequences of turns can happen where players don’t attack one another because they’re just swapping back and forth to jockey into position. There are whole move types that are banned (baton pass and evasion boosters), because if you didn’t, people would use them. They had to institute a 1,000 turn timer on games because some tournament games ran that far without anyone actually winning the game.

What if those 19 Pokemon were just left as it is? You got rid of the Evasion rules and the banned moves and just let the game settle, as it is, on what people can do, in that space, and see how it works. I’m told it becomes a pretty simple game where everyone does the same thing of trying to get an angry fish into play with baton pass and kill your opponent. This is apparently a bad thing, where by banning a bunch of strategies the format is instead facing a situation where the’re almost halfway through banning the entire tier, to try and capture a way the game ‘should’ be. It seems to me the point of a usage-based tiering system means that if one tier sucks, everyone leaves that tier and recognises that the Pokemon in that space push a style most of the people there don’t like, and instead they go on to play in other tiers, like Underused. The best stuff gets pressurised out of it, pushed up and out into that rarified atmosphere by the math and social pressure of the natural churn of the system, right?

Right?

But they don’t.

They want to play OU.

And they want OU to be the ‘main’ format.

There are two competing challenges here, for me. The first is that Smogon can’t actually add anything to the game. They see their place as having to exclude things. I get this problem, kinda because ostensibly, they want their version of the game to be a thing you can play ‘on hardware’ rather than through their emulator. This ‘on hardware’ play therefore can’t actually add anything or overlay new rules, like, for example, adjusting the stats of Pokemon, or instituting score-based team building or even elimination drafts. And you don’t get to go ‘hey, that’s really obnoxious or hard to do,’ because Smogon’s ruleset is not easily processed or parsed, and it is not welcoming.

The second thing is that Smogon’s process for changing the game is their idea of democratic. It’s voted on by experts who can identify the problems and supposedly make good choices going forward. This means these people need to be socially active and engaged in the forum place and capable of earning respect within the competitive and social environment that represents which, let me tell you, that’s a worrying place.

And the thing is, this is all being done with an assumption that they’re trying to carve away what’s ‘wrong’ with the format to find the right version of it. On the one hand, yeah, that’s cool, they’re making a game out of another game. On the other hand…

Says who?

They use terms like ‘noncompetitive’ and ‘unskilled’ to refer to when a strategy can present a player with an abrupt choice and if they choose wrong they’re at a disadvantage, as if games with sharp swings aren’t competitive games that require skill. The language has the familiar structure of designers discussing problems with games but without the fundamental idea of being able to actually change it. Much like Smash players who try to remove variance from a game built around it, Smogon is trying to take something designed to get out of hand with crits and failure chances and make it fit something else.

Famously, new ideas and new mechanics get introduced and Smogon tries to route around them, to preserve the way things were in earlier generations rather than adjust to what the new generation is doing. Back in Generation 8 of Pokemon, Smogon just straight up banned Dynamax entirely; a mechanic that meant any pokemon could have a big bulky tank mode for a short period of time and punch through protects. That meant they played the entire format without access to a mechanic the main game was balanced around. Anyone who played Smogon exclusively through all the years of Generation 8 is someone who has no idea what a core mechanic of that game does to the game based on their play experience.

When Gliscor went, in that same announcement, people were bringing up, again, that they need to ban Terastallize, for the whole duration of the generation. Because the current format and game’s defining special rule is something they want to ignore, which just further builds on the idea that they don’t want Scarlet Violet OU. They don’t want the Pokemon that would bubble to the top of those usage stats so they could select where else they’d rather play. The only tool is shrinking the game… and it just so happens that it means that each generation kind of slowly but surely winds up looking a lot like the previous ones. They don’t want this ‘Pokemon’ game interfering with their game. And they don’t want to take measures to address these problems,because whatever they’re aiming at, it has to be socially agreed upon, voted upon, enforced by bans only, and only validated by vibes.

It’s all said with the selfseriousness of people sitting on the sofa glaring at the TV that they know what the game ‘should’ be and not considering what the game is. Which is fair! They’re making up their own game out of this other game, after all, and that game could kick ass! It doesn’t look like it, it looks like a rat’s nest of rules corner cases, with a stone-faced defensiveness that suggests newcomers have to Get Good and Do The Readings, and if you’re not involved, you should not dare comment on their game. Any opinion about their game must show due deference, even if it’s just recognising that it exists. An absence of praise is a presence of violence.

It’s very funny when they complain about Gamefreak’s decisions, mind you. Gamefreak’s game is one of the most successful multimedia franchises in the world and Smogon is a forum for a few hundred very sweaty dorks. Like, yeah, I don’t think Gamefreak are thinking about you when they make their choices about how to continue ongoing engagement with their multinational game empire. Which isn’t to say their game is better, the game you play is the game you want to play, but acting as if ‘Gamefreak doesn’t know what they’re doing’ – they do. They aren’t caring about you and the way you play the game, and haven’t for like… fifteen years? Your game isn’t unbalanced because Gamefreak are stupid, your game is unbalanced because you’re playing in the space Gamefreak is explicitly not balancing.

But okay, let’s look at what I said up top: Players are great at identifying problems and terrible at solving them.

These players are able to identify the problems they’re having. They don’t want to play doubles, and the singles game is balanced around a kind of play they don’t like. And when you’re dealing with playtesting of your own game, you need to be able to listen to this kind of thing and accept it as entirely neutral and entirely correct feedback. Players might lie to you about how they feel but you should always trust it anyway. They have identified a problem.

As it stands, right now, Smogon’s only tool they consider acceptable for changing this game is to take things away from it, and for the process of doing those changes being entirely social, and ostensibly democratic, with a real ‘well, if you didn’t vote, you don’t matter’ kind of approach to that.

And this is what you get.

Gliscor was used in somewhere between five and one teams in the Pikalytics, by the way.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#pokemon #smogon #Games

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