#if I can dig up some more egregious examples I will

[blackbackedjackal]

DogBlud traces? Like, from her own other images or from others? Can you elaborate?

She straight up takes screenshots from movies/shows and traces those or used Ependa's sketches and traces over them. She showed me and Rex her entire process on stream a few times, where she heavily leans on tracing. Here's an example:

It's not like she can't freehand, but she was so anal about how "her werewolves" looked that she straight up would trace the entire face of a wolf then just move around or add features. She used to get on to other people that "she could tell" were heavily referencing/tracing but never exposed how much she actually did it. Any human and werewolf art prior to her using Ependa's sketches were mostly traced or heavily traced, Ependa was just saving her the trouble of digging for references and making her look better by not making it as obvious how much she leaned on it for finished pieces. And yeah, it's is the majority of her artwork. I know a lot of her GW2 Charr art was traced cause I literally watched her do it with my Charr.

I'm not against tracing for practice or corrections or personal pieces, especially if it's references you took the time to gather yourself. My issue comes in with Dog, where she conveniently never mentioned how much she leaned on it for personal work, commissions, and art for others. She was just lazy and wanted to make her skillset look better than it actually was.

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[atopvisenyashill]

i totally get wanting women to be friends, but the more the story unfolds, the more the insistence on rhaenyra and alicent's relationship harms the narrative as a whole

I'm once again yelling that they should have done Regina/Snow from OUAT but better (not that this is a high bar to clear bc ouat sucked shit) and gay instead *gestures* whatever it is they're doing with this. It would have worked with every single theme they're trying to do with Alicent without this kind of weird "this is a story about how women's agency is taken away from them but we will take every moment from the books where the characters attempt to flex their power and give it to a man" thing they keep doing. Because I think the issue ultimately stems from the initial change to making Alicent Rhaenyra's best friend - because they're so dead set on neither woman having a single other friend except each other, it often strands them alone in the narrative in very weird ways even when they're like, just objectively not stranded alone. I think we saw that most egregiously with Rhaenyra last season and now we're seeing the effects of it this season on Alicent - she just doesn't have enough scenes with Helaena and it's incredibly frustrating when her relationship with Helaena is clearly the one that Alicent wants to be the most gentle with, it's the relationship Alicent has always wanted, I think if you asked Alicent herself she would say Helaena is her favorite child but we just don't get to see it at all.

I don't think it's necessarily that their relationship "harms" the narrative, I think making one of the emotional focal points be the relationship between the two queens, the two faces of their factions, is a good decision (and one imo that George himself agrees with) but I think this is an aspect where they just need more time to tell the story - the sept scene for example is soooo fucking clumsy when it would have been so easy to have Rhaenyra call for a parlay, Alicent to agree to it over Aemond's objections (maybe she just goes by ship with help from Larys, maybe we get Dreamfyre and Helaena helping her get to the parlay point, maybe she talks Aegon into agreeing), and have the conversation work that way. Or like, the fact that they both have a cut at the same spot is really interesting and I thought the riot was well handled (Helaena stopping to reach for her mother and Alicent throwing herself between the crowd and Helaena was genuinely some amazing blocking) but then Alicent in this episode was so......bleh. Her reaction was too understated, the reason she was in the wood was too handwavey, and I'm reminded of all the kvitching @kingcunny does about how Certain Stans get really caught up in how beautiful Olivia is that it kinda wraps right back around to ableism, as if the reason Alicent's story is tragic is because she's beautiful and not because like, she's a child bride lol. It just felt like a way to show off how much Olivia can face instead of giving her something really meaty to dig into and show off her acting chops. Llike all the guessing about how maybe it was Alys in the water, maybe there's some mommy fucking stuff going on, maybe it was Rhaenicent related, and then it was literally just a scene of her looking miserable in the water. All style no substance when it could have had more substance if they just had like, 90 minute episodes or 13 episodes ya know.

[eighthdoctor]

Sorry to hit you up again with a seemingly very similar question, but I thought you might have an interesting read on this stance of mine:

Do you think the Horde, or more the Orcs, redemption is undercut by the very story meant to be about redeeming them, IE Warcraft 3?

Because, if we break it down to its components parts its:

The Orc have made the land they are currently on un-liable thanks to their war mongering ways. They leave for a new land and begin killing the indigenous denizens, align themselves with a put upon local factions, and then try to take over, killing off or driving everyone else out.

Its the same thing with the only notable differences being the type of magic the orcs use and the fact the Kalimdorians couldn't organize a sufficient resistance to push the Horde out. Obviously its not intended to be read this way, IE the "Playable species are people and the mobs are not" thing, but it still feels egregious.

The Alliance also have some of this in their backstories, IE, "Gnolls & Kobolds were among the first threats face by humans when expanding into this region but they were pacified." Which is uh... A lot.

Yes.

Like. The problem you're going to run into is that Warcraft doesn't just have racism as part of the worldbuilding, but the worldbuilding is itself racist. It is racist.

Now, it's possible for something to be racist and still well written. Obvious example is Lovecraft. There's easily half a dozen authors who I love because they are good writers, who are also shitbags in one way or another, and I cope with that.

Unfortunately Blizzard is not good writers, and the writing is not good, and you can see this in ways like "did not realize they were writing racistly, continued doing it".

So I don't find this a very productive approach? We just end up going "oh wow this plotline is also racist" which shit dude, they sure are. A lot of the racism in Warcraft is particularly obnoxious because it's just Racism 101. This isn't even advanced stuff it's right out there in the fucking open.

The problem is there's only so much redaction of the racism I can do before it's no longer Warcraft. If I wanted to completely rework the world so it was no longer racist on a Doylist level, I'd just write my own original fic.

It's like. I also don't have a lot of interest in pulling out examples of sexism from Harry Potter. They're all over, not just because JKR was writing a sexist society, but because she has a lot of internalized misogyny she's never unpacked. But I'd rather dig into that, write with the crappy worldbuilding and politics and see what falls out when I shake it.

So yeah, it's fucking racist. Now what?

[nighthazerpg]

Towards 0.4

So, Nighthaze 0.3 has been out for just over 2 years now. Considering that 0.1 and 0.2 lasted about 9 months each, that's a long time on substantively the same version! I think the game is in a relatively good place in terms of balance and like, being fun. However, there's still some wider issues I'd like to address, and they're things that I can't really tackle without rewriting the whole game - which is what the incrementing of the middle number is for.

Nighthaze has an information problem. If you have exhaustive knowledge of the rulebook, you can have a great time playing a fully-fledged strategic immersive sim full of diabolical tradeoffs and satisfying mechanical interactions. If you don't, you're stumbling through spreadsheet hell, making uninformed guesses at what's a good idea and hoping a good time will fall into existence as a result. Some amount of this is unavoidable. A tabletop immersive sim will have a level of irreducible complexity, and different people have different amounts of patience for working through the legal errata needed to build a character. But the game can also do a lot more to help people making their first character, and sticking around long enough to really access that juicy tactical play.

Right now there's a lot of bare metal in the game. The game presents a lot of mechanics without really telling you what they're for and how they fit together. For example, the Sniping trait (+1 damage when there's no interference) only weakly suggests that you get a Scope (reduces interference from range). Relationships like how Implants make spellcasters more vulnerable, or that Tanks are supposed to get Harmonic spells, or how Hackers are more effective on bosses than groups, are implied - which is to say, you're kinda guessing because there's no wiki to guide you. The game can do a lot more to teach people how to play it well.

Nighthaze 0.3 has also gathered a lot of clutter. This is the same initial impetus for the move to 0.3 in the first place - 0.2 had accumulated cruft in the form of hotfixes and neat-idea mechanics that didn't really belong, or just things that seemed like a good idea at the time until the rubber hit the road. 0.3's clutter isn't as egregious as 0.2's (looking at you, magic), but there are still things like infiltration rules, new crafting types, addendums to Martial Arts, and the mess left by multiple reworks of the Diplomacy rules that could do with a clean slate to properly work out. There's a very slick, robust game in there, it just needs digging out of the disorganised manuscript that it's currently trapped in.

Supporting materials need adding. Another consequence of the bare metal is the lack of flavour text in a lot of places, and while I've been steadily adding to the Operator's Manual, what people have really wanted from me is more of the Rogues' Gallery, and one or two actually published scenarios for Operators to run on their own couldn't hurt either.

There's still a couple of big ideas I'd like to try. Given that 0.3 is so stable the temptation is there to not rock the boat, but there's still some bold new ways of doing things like damage that I want to give a test at some point that may find their way into 0.4, so keep an eye out for more experimental playtests like that on my Discord server (what Discord? Check out my Patreon!)

0.4 could end up being 1.0. I've long said that a printed edition of Nighthaze is on the cards for some time in the future, and while you can always tinker with things like this forever, if it's going to see print, at some point you need to call it a day. I wouldn't expect this to happen this year, and probably not in the first half of 2024 either, but it all depends on how the move to a new version goes down. And also whether I can find time to work on the dang thing I'm doing so many other things in that time like goddamn

There's nothing immediately forthcoming from this announcement, it's more just a general statement of intent, that at some point in the next 3 months I want to begin work on a new version of Nighthaze that's cleaner and more flavourful, and just as mechanically deep, but whose depths are more accessible. I guess you can toss out some thoughts on this roadmap if you like, or things you'd like to see in the future, but it's all very vague right now.

[tuiyla]

Sometimes I wonder if the actors knew how offensive some of the stuff they said/did on the show was. I mean I know it was their characters but still.

There was a lot of biphobia from Kurt, Blaine, Santana and even Brittany. There was the line Blaine said in the script read in 5x20 where he said "I'm gay and you're mostly lesbian" to Brittany!!!

Also the Britney 2.0 episode was super offensive and basically just spent 40 minutes mocking someone's mental health which is a huge problem and something a lot of people struggle with.

I know it's not the actors decision but do you think they knew how offensive some of this stuff was.

Also the whole IKAG episode was pretty bad and when Brittany and Sam got together and she said something about "lesbian bloggers" I have to see that as a dig about the Brittana fans!

I know that Naya, Heather and Darren were straight so it may just be that they are uneducated on these things.

I appreciate things like Kevin talking about the Lights Out mess in the Q&A episode of the podcast, but it’s ultimately not the cast’s responsibility. Am I curious what they thought of certain things, sure. Am I desperate for someone to cover IKAG with a critical eye, very. But I think fans already put way too much on actors and expect them to represent characters and their stories way beyond the constraints of the media itself, and that doesn’t feel fair. I’m general on the side of protecting actors’ privacy and right to do their job and not owe anyone anything more.

With things like Britney 2.0 especially I feel like we shouldn’t expect anything from the actors. Sure I like it when they’re self-aware and Jenna and Kevin are at times critical of the show in their podcast (old and new) but this is a typical example of, like, what are we expecting of them? It has been a decade now but particularly when the show was on, I’m sure it would have felt like biting the feeding hand to call out the biphobia or something. If I were an actor on a major network show and given Problematic material I wouldn’t be happy about it but man, it’s my job to say it. And we’ve heard how volatile things sometimes were on the set despite the general alleged good working relationship. I don’t blame people for not wanting to risk RM’s wrath with a public condemning.

I don’t know if they even stopped to consider this kind of stuff. With something like Artie’s offensive lines, Kevin clearly has. And again I’d kill to know how everyone truly felt about IKAG. I don’t know, maybe they knew. I’m sure there were certain things on Glee that raised eyebrows even then. Kevin, Jenna and Harry talk a lot about things not aging well in the Throwdown episode of the Showmance pod. But again, at the time no one was gonna risk a job. I don’t think anything was that egregious on Glee, it’s more like things adding up. But I mean for sure things like mocking Britney Spears and the consistent biphobia were cringe at best and cruel at worst. So no one get me wrong, the biphobia and the SA stuff and all these poorly handled, poorly framed things were bad, it just wasn’t SO bad that it would absolutely warrant an actor having to apologize for it.

Going back to actors’ privacy and all, I don’t like to a) assume their identities and b) make assumptions based on those assumptions. It especially feels strange to say they might have been uneducated just because they wouldn’t have those first-hand experiences e.g. with queer issues. A leap too big for me. And this is a can of worms of its own, but I think we shouldn’t assume with Naya in particular - in terms of identity, that is. There was that View interview that some take as her confirming she was bi; me, I don’t know and I don’t think we need to know. We never will know. Was Naya Rivera straight, was she queer? I say let the dead rest. Either way she was clearly a fierce ally who fought for that lesbian storyline to exist in the first place so whether she personally considered e.g. the biphobic things they had her say messed up or not, that’s really not for me to know or judge. I don’t really feel comfortable shifting that responsibility onto actors, which I understand is not what you’re doing but it’s dancing too close to that edge for me. Even if Darren, Naya and Heather were all Super Woke™ even back then it’s not like they could have done much to fight the biphobic lines. Actors have some say in these discussions, sure, but no one wants to push their luck.

Heather in particular has said some things in the past, iirc during season 4′s run especially that pissed people off but even still I don’t think being a little tone deaf or not living up to fan entitlement should warrant that much criticism. For other things too, I think she gets too much shit because people expect her to be this Representative when she’s just a person. They’re all just people. They’re actors and they get paid to say the words as they’re written. There’s some creative freedom with that but it’s up to the director/producer’s discretion. So again, maybe they were aware of how messed up the more iffy things were, maybe not. My bottom line on questions like these is that it’s not our business and not their responsibility.

[a-mellowtea]

In the spirit of Nitpick November, I charge you to nitpick your favorite thing about the show: the music!

Nonny, how could you? I have been betrayed! Bamboozled!

... Okay, but I do actually have a couple I can offer. Much as I love the music in RWBY, it is also on occasion hit-and-miss, but music being subjective by nature means that these are all purely nitpicky quibbles.

In no particular order:

· If Weiss gets one more mirror-related song that reiterates the exact same thing, I might lose what little is left of my sanity. There is very little variation in her lyrical tracks and it's frustrating as hell.

· Please, for the love of god, give your titular character (Ruby) a proper solo song. It's been nine years since "Red Like Roses Pt. II". · I really don't like Lamar Hall's rapping. It was fine and good in "I Burn" and a track like "Celebrate", but more and more it just feels like a jarring, unnecessary thing used to spice up songs that don't need it. · The worst piece of score in Volume 5, and dare I say all of RWBY, is the music under the talk about Semblances in Chapter 4. It's a stock drum beat with a painfully generic pop piano melody overtop, and it reeks of a low-effort last-minute "we need to fill dead air" inclusion. We all know Jeff can do better with his non-lyrical music. · I wish the leitmotifs for the specific Kingdoms had been written at the outset, and not for Volume 4's World of Remnants. This is a "hindsight is 20/20" nitpick, but Mistral's gets some good love in Volumes 5 and 6, we hear Atlas' now and again, but I'm not sure whether we'll hear that thematic material at all for Vacuo/Vale. It's a shame, 'cause they're really lovely melodies unique to each major location (besides Menagerie...). · Volume 8's album is a mess. "The Truth" should not have been its own track, "Awake" being rereleased under the RWBY label is a bizarre choice that was likely only done to add a seventh song, and there was a major missed opportunity in not having "When It Falls" be the album's acoustic track. In fact, there is no acoustic track. · Jumping off that last nitpick, the mix quality of the Volume 8 album is painfully subpar when it comes to the score, nevermind that it was barely edited and I am fairly certain the automation tracks weren't removed. There are some tracks that are more egregious than others, but the example that immediately jumps to mind is 3min 55sec into "The Final Word Pt. II". You can hear the fuzzy compression distortion on the drums. It ain't good. · I wish Erin Reilly had been invited to do the "I May Fall (Acoustic)". She did the original arrangement and vocals years ago. In a Volume with so many guest vocalists, she should have been allowed to sing what was, by all rights, her version of the song. She's not even credited in the digital release. · On that note, I really wish they did more collabs. Volume 7 was a breath of fresh air with the likes of Caleb Hyles, Adrienne Cowan, Dawn M. Bennett, Erin Reilly, Santi C etc. It doesn't have to be to that extent--from what I've heard, getting all that done was a hassle--but one or two per Volume to switch things up would be lovely. · I'm going to wait to hear what it's like, but I'm not really digging the sparse, synth-heavy nature of the back half of Volume 8 and what we've gotten of Volume 9. I do like that type of music, but it's so off the rails of RWBY's until-now orchestral-focused score, it's jarring. The last cue of Volume 8 comes to mind as feeling too synthetic, cold and disconnected. Which was maybe the point? If it was, I certainly don't think it worked.

[canmom]

Animation Night 132: Makoto Shinkai... 2

Hi everyone! It’s Animation Night! Apologies for the late start today, I’ve not been in the best of sorts lately.

Tonight we’re going to be revisiting Makoto Shinkai. I’ve written about him before back on Animation Night 44, in which I related the start of his career and heavily praised the compositing in his films. At that time, I had seen little more than Your Name - but we took the chance to dive in and dig up his early works like She and Her Cat and Voices from a Distant Star.

Sadly, Weathering With You turned out to be a little disappointing - nothing egregiously off with it, there was indeed some lovely character animation, but the story was just a reiteration of the same familiar Shinkai sekaikei devices, so it just felt like a weaker take on Your Name. And I think this is the source of a lot of people’s frustration with Shinkai: the first film about a heterosexual couple torn apart by fate may seem novel, the fifth one it becomes kinda ‘oh there you go again, Makoto’. Or less charitably, you start calling them ‘tfw no gf movies’.

Anyway, this year Shinkai is back! His new film Suzume no Tojimari (すずめの戸締まり) has been getting strong praise from people who have seen it (e.g. my writing-about-animation senpai Matteo Watzky, usually a Shinkai skeptic). But... right now that pool is limited to people in Japan who can watch a film in the cinema, so we’ll have to keep that door shut for now. (I’m not sorry.)

Shinkai is a director who really led the charge in adopting new digital compositing tools in anime, and that has been a big focus of basically all his films - lushly rendered water drops, shots with the sun providing a lens flare to divide two characters, warm light spilling everywhere, lavish depictions of food to rival those at Ghibli, shiny surfaces with carefully depicted reflections. The effect draws a lot on photography, e.g. by simulating bokeh, but makes it heightened and hyperreal. By the time he made films like The Garden of Words (言の葉の庭, 2013), he had it down to a science. He’s inspired many imitators (not always successful), and it’s become a big part of the ‘anime look’ in the 2010s and 2020s.

A huge amount of credit must go to the background painters - their exceptionally detailed but still painterly look is a massive element in the Shinkai visual mix. One such artist on Shinkai’s later films is Mateusz Urbanowicz, a Polish-born watercolour painter and animator who apparently created 120 backgrounds for Your Name alongside various other anime films - you can find his Youtube channel here with a lot of watercolour paintings.

For an example of what I’m talking about, look at this shot from The Garden of Words. This shot is designed to create the appearance of a narrow focal range pointing at rain that is catching a beam of sunlight. Most of the background is blurred out using a lens blur filter. There are two layers depicting the actual raindrops. The further one (A layer) is just a bunch of streaks, which cycle through without much pattern; these are blurred out with the same bokeh filter.

On top of that (B layer), we have narrow, long streaks in the foreground depicting individual raindrops striking the tiles. These each appear on screen for only one drawing, and each one is associated with a bunch of particles; it is impossible to try and track individual splashes. There’s also a small amount of blurry mist. What really makes the effect though is the shadows of the raindrops where they hit the tiles, which really gives a convincing sense that the rain has depth in 3D space.

In the slightly nearer foreground, we have a shadow - creating a dark-light-dark value structure - and a bunch of little specular highlights of splashed drops which have also been lens blurred. To finish it off, there’s a blurry lens flare effect at the edge of the frame in the nearest foreground, with flickering pentagonal bokeh shapes. There’s even a layer of dust and scratches which flickers in and out as the reflected light catches it.

To create something like this takes an absurdly close study of real photographic footage. Why not just use that footage? By abstracting a little, making it constructed and removing distracting details, we turn it from just ‘a mechanical picture of rain’ to ‘what a person sees in rain’.

When this style works, it really works; when it doesn’t it, can be overbearing, or you can end up with a movie where the narrative gets a little lost. Last time I briefly compared Shinkai to his contemporary Naoko Yamada, who also draws heavily on photography and carefully observed naturalistic acting in her style. Shinkai himself once said he felt Yamada was the better director, and honestly, he’s right lmao - Yamada, in her work at both KyoAni and Science Saru (c.f. AN91 Heike Monogatari) has an unrivalled ability to turning these methods towards painfully nuanced depictions of character and emotion. But hey, there’s two cakes! Even if Shinkai’s films are ‘just’ a vehicle for spectacle - and honestly, at his best, that’s very much selling them short - what spectacle it is...

So, let’s pick up where we left off almost two years ago! We’ll sample a few more films from the last two decades of Shinkai and get more of a sense of how he developed his ‘thing’.

First up, we have the above mentioned Garden of Words (2013). This is the grounded end of the Shinkai range: an ephemeral relationship between two people who meet in a park without anything especially science fiction. It draws on a number of strands: Tokyo and its Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, an old Japanese word for romantic love 孤悲 koi which glosses as “lonely sadness”, and a renowned collection of ten thousand poems from the late 700s called the Man’yōshū.

It tells the story of Takao, a lonely 15-year-old boy with an interest in shoemaking, who encounters an older woman in the above-mentioned park during the rainy season - a woman who unexpectedly recites an unfamiliar poem to him asking if he would stay if it rains. Gradually, it turns out that this is literature teacher Yukari Yukino, who has been mistreated at work and retreated to the park. Yukari gradually recovers from her despair, while Takao falls for her, but inevitably... well, this is Shinkai film. They’re not getting together. (Which is really for the best, considering she’s nearly twice his age.)

In accordance with its poetic inspiration, nature may be the main character of The Garden of Words. The relationship between the pair is framed through a pair of poems in the Man’yōshū, which you may read on Wikipedia along with a really thorough account of Shinkai’s inspirations and the movies themes. For my part, I’m going to have to leave it there - not least because it’s been a lot of years since I saw it, so I’d rather talk about it after a rewatch, not before.

Since I talked about backgrounds and compositing above, I should mention - this film makes especially heavy use of photography, with Shinkai (himself, I think?) directly painting over photos in photoshop in a lot of cases. Also notable is the digital integration of the cel-drawn characters into the ambient colour palette of the scene - something that is perhaps more standard now, but was novel at the time.

To complement that, our second Shinkai film of the evening will be Children Who Chase Lost Voices (星を追う子ども, 2011). This is at the other end of the Shinkai range: a grand scifi adventure into another strange world. It follows 6th-grader Asuna on a journey into the land of the dead to say goodbye to her classmate Shun, who died suddenly and unexpectedly. She’s joined by a number of other humans. The setting is a blend of esoteric ideas and mythology: Agartha, the world inside the hollow earth, is interpreted as an afterlife, and Aztec deity Quetzlcoatl as a psychopomp. Asuna and her companions must make their way through the world of Agartha, and Asuna must figure out what really motivates her.

This is a film in the same vein as something like Patema Inverted or Big Fish and Begonia - an imaginative but kind of thin fantasy setting, a relatable young protagonist with an emotional lesson to learn, a suitably misguided villain to complicate it. Like so many of Shinkai’s other films, it’s about a relationship that ends and the grief that carries, but this time, oh boy, it’s death! Which doesn’t mean it won’t be a solid, fun film.

I admit, I have less to say about this film - I have seen it, but so long ago that I remember only scant details. I think it will be an interesting one, not just as a fun summer movie type of story, but also historically since it represents a less refined Shinkai-the-compositor. Watching clips, the immediately striking thing is how just about every light source is given a flare - very noticeable when they flicker behind characters. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of nice things to see here. Even the beginnings of the fascination with drawing food...

I’d love to tell you who animated this but it’s a case of artist_unknown! The fight scene further up is by Kenichi Tsuchiya though. If you look closely, you can see the camera spinning effect is defined by sliding static, painted ‘book’ layers, with Shinkai’s usual bokeh effects catching all the light highlights on the foreground rocks. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this movie when I’ve watched it.

What about Shinkai’s latest? I’ve been avoiding learning much about Suzume, since I’ve found lately it’s really good to go into a film knowing very little and just see where it takes you. If you’re out in Japan and get to go see it, I’m jelly, tell me what you think!

And that’s enough from me. Animation Night 132 will be live in just a moment, at the usual place, twitch.tv/canmom - films will be live in 30 minutes around 23:00 UK time. We’ll watch Voices and then Garden. Hope to see you there!

[vaicomcas]

So I saw a post where Dean asks Crowley for a spell to bind Death to kill Godstiel, which also includes killing the part of Godstiel that is Cas

That post was tagged Destiel. Like where are their standards? Where do they draw the line? I do NOT see that as a Crowstiel moment either. It is more like Crowstiel broken up. Or it is like the ENEMIES part in enemies to lovers to enemies to lovers

Like if I saw every Cas and Crowley scene as Crowstiel it would be fair if I was laughed off the stage lol. Like not every scene supports a ship. Sometimes the scene says your ship is filling up with water and it has to be fixed before it sinks

But like it's hard to take a ship seriously when they view EVERY scene as proof of their ship. As proof of Dean's love for Cas

Like have standards??? Like having low standards is one thing and that is fine but like they have no standards whatsoever???

I won't lie my standards for Crowstiel are low when viewed against healthy ships. Like my standards for Crowstiel are low when compared to ships like Gomez and Morticia Addams. But viewing Crowstiel for the enemies and lovers ship it is meant to be? Well my standards are pretty high for what the Crowstiel dynamic is

But when a ship aka Destiel is intended to be "family" by the narrative I expect shipping standards to be higher

Like is that unreasonable? Like Dean and Cas are supposedly "family" so yeah my standards for Destiel are gonna be higher than for Cas and Crowley lol

I hear you.  It’s irritating enough when I see scenes that to me is Dean hurting and undermining Cas being construed as evidence of the ship.  In this case killing Cas!

I never really thought of standards in a ship though.  I assumed shipping is pure self-indulgence and therefore no standards are required.  However, if you have standards for your shipping, then you have the right to apply standards to others shipping.    I do agree that some destiel takes are far less reasonable than others, your example being an egregious one.

I think Destiel is such a huge and ubiquitous ship, for many it’s automatically assumed to be the “correct” take on the show.  The show definitely endlessly teased it (although I still think the part they pushed was mostly Cas loving Dean – I know destielers disagree), so there is plenty of substrate.  Destiel content is everywhere if you are exposed to fandom at all.  Because of that, it allows destiel shippers not having to think deeply about it.  It can be taken for granted. It can be fluff.  (doesn’t mean all or even most destiel shippers are on autopilot.  But even if only a small fraction are, given how large the destiel army is, that fraction will outnumber those of us in the minority of fandom).

Whereas for fans of uncommon ships, there is no other choice but to put a lot of thought into that ship.  Case in point is your own approach.  I like how you always dig deep into the motivations and emotions behind Cas and Crowley’s actions in each scene.  Nothing can be taken for granted, everything must be justified. And they are. 

I can’t be too critical of destielers, though, even though I am bitter about destiel content.  That is because I do not try to be objective or fair about my opinions of Cas and the show, so I can’t ask others to be fair with theirs.  In real life, I try to be open to different perspectives and be aware of my many biases.  When it comes to Cas, I made the conscious decision to throw that away, and give in to my feral and dysregulated emotions.  (because if not, I’ll have to accept that it’s just a TV show, is not real, and does not warrant my insane obsession). I admire some of the destiel enjoyers who are open to Dean-crit content; I am not capable of such open-mindedness. I get viscerally upset when I see any Cas-crit mention and skip it completely.  I can’t read destiel content because it makes me sad and angry.  But I can’t help thinking destielers would feel the same way when they see my opinions.   

Here is a confession.  I used to ship destiel.  After binge watching 12 seasons of Cas-having SPN within 2 months after the show already ended, I fell in love with Cas and was desperate for Cas content, so I went online searching for it.  All I saw was destiel. I clung to it because Cas was in it. Like a child growing up in a totalitarian country believes that any good person would have undying loyalty to the supreme leader, I assumed any un-homophobic fan would support destiel.  I changed, of course. But I know how easy it is to be all-in on destiel.

Sorry about the ramble.  Thank you for the ask, and thanks for your brilliant Crowstiel posts. 

[syrupspinner]

i just completed Aerial_Knight's Never Yield 

can you believe some places dont include the apostrophe in the title? like it's not proclaiming who spearheaded Never Yield, its a statement

my only experience with runners, as a genre, is through bit.trip. I beat the first game and played a bit of the second. this game, which I'm gonna call AKNY for short, is honestly a pretty good second example.

the controls make a lot more sense that bit.trip. I remember complaining that duck was down but kick was Y so I had to switch to keyboard or something. in akny, you've got the colour-coded cardinal directions, which applies to both the dpad and face buttons: up is high jump (obstacles you need to high jump are always red), left is midjump (yellow), down is duck (purple), and right is sprint (blue). straightforward, easy to nail in a split second, this is good. it's a little silly that you have two jump buttons, because yes there are obstacles colour-coordinated to mid that you can clear high, but it's still pretty elegant with how simple it is to grasp

the plot is... uh, minimalist. there's no dialog, so here's what I've got. you've got the main character, who i just kinda called Runner in my head. he escapes from a tube in a lab and spends the rest of the game dodging the authorities about it. there's also another guy, implied to also be from the same tube situation, who I called Swords cuz he's always got some swords floating around him. Swords is king of the streets or something, he's the strongest guy around, and Runners out to take him out and claim the crown. that might be wrong, especially since it seems like the sequel is more fleshed-out, but the story isn't all that important anyway. watch the cool guy do something cool and then play a level about it

I really dig the style. if anything's gonna sell you on the game, it's the vibes. the music is ultimately a bit simple, but they're all really solid hiphop instrumentals. the design is... it'd call it comic-like, but it's more like a graphic novel almost. it's not vibrant but it's still colourful, y'know? oh, speaking of style, I love the level where you're running up a building and you've got this really funky camera angle, added such a cool visual flair. 

that's kinda it! the game is pretty short, I beat the campaign in like 2 hours I think, and a lot of that is from killing myself when I missed that stupid coin in the school level. y'know when people call a fighting game character honest? that's what this game feels like to me. it's as stylistic and badass as the budget let's it, and I respect the hell out of it. totally worth playing.

and then there's endless mode.

I understand this was added in an update. you run laps around a gym dodging randomly spawning obstacles. youve gotta play for, according to my research, 30 minutes straight of this for all the achievements. woof. so... I just kinda got to it. it took me three days, across... I'd guess three or four hours of attempts. I put kitboga on my other monitor and reached the world's stupidest zen state, just reacting to the obstacles. if you wanna keep track of your progress without pausing all the time, I'm pretty sure it took me about 165 laps. thats a bit egregious. there's already an achievement for 30 laps, which I think works great as a threshold of basic capability. like, if you can do 30, you can do it forever, kinda like how crypt of the necrodancer only asks you to get a 10 run win streak before saying "okay it wasn't luck you can do this forever if you wanted to"

not enough to ruin the game by any means, especially since it's optional. this game has a great soul and fun gameplay to back it up, absolutely worth trying out! just a heads up, don't expect triple-a polish, keep your expectations realistic for an under-the-radar indie.

[jkrowlingbodydouble]

FAQ

Is this satire/a bit?

No.

Are you a deluded fanboy who can't accept that your favorite author turned out to be a shitty person?

No. My experience with the Harry Potter franchise before this whole debacle consisted of watching the movies on Apple TV with my father as a very young child, reading the first book under circumstances where I had nothing else to do but read and a limited selection of books to choose from, getting the second book after that and then falling off halfway through, and then playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (a Pokémon Go-style social location-based AR game released in June 2019) for the 6 months in which it was popular before the near-simultaneous occurrence of the situation this blog addresses and the COVID-19 pandemic obliterated it.

But this is like, spy shit. Spy shit is for governments. Even the biggest and worst corporations don't do spy shit.

I regret to inform you that they do. Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey is one particularly egregious example, but there many are others.

So, the original J.K. Rowling is dead, right?

She may be dead, or she may be in some sort of holding cell deep within the bowels of Disney, feeding them information only she would know under threat of torture to enable the body double to pass as her. It would certainly not be difficult for someone with Disney's resources to extralegally imprison one 50something year old woman with no skills relevant to breaking out of prison, but I do not feel confident that this step would definitely be necessary, so I choose to apply Occam's Razor and assume by default that she's dead if it matters.

When was she replaced?

My lower and upper bounds are 2011, before which she was working too closely with the film and theme park teams for the swap to be viable, and 2019, when she first began to express transphobic sentiments. I additionally suspect that she was replaced before the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for reasons detailed in the evidence masterpost, but am not certain of this.

If she was replaced that early, why did they wait so long to make her transphobic?

First of all, they likely wanted to play it safe and test the waters to see if the facade had any cracks before doing something big and new that would attract lots of attention, and second, while it may seem obvious now that if you're going to replace a celebrity with a body double to sabotage their brand, terrible political advocacy is the way to go, hindsight is 20/20, so it may be that their original plan was simply to have the double sabotage the quality of future Harry Potter projects and the TERF idea only occurred to them a few years in.

Why trans people? Why not make her, say, racist?

Because it's the most efficient way to convert money and clout into suffering in our current political climate. Explicitly racist groups in the modern day Anglosphere are either disorganized street/prison gangs or only exist anymore so politicians can pay them to endorse their opponents, and she had already talked about Dumbledore being gay before the switch, so homophobia was out.

Do you have any, like, actual hard proof of this whole accusation?

Not yet. If I did, I would be going to the government or the press, not putting up posters and starting a Tumblr.

Even if all this is true, what do you want me to do about it?

For now, spread the word. Tell your friends. Post on your social media of choice. Write your congressman. Submit additional evidence via the ask box. (Or submit counter-evidence, if you have that. My first commitment is to the truth.) I want to state up front that I am not an expert in anything, merely a person with a hard-won knack for knowing when I am being decieved, and I am hoping if I get the word out I will attract more competent people who will be better able to translate awareness and resources into action than myself. I do have a preliminary objective, though. This theory does not require the NSA to bust down Disney's door and dig through all their files to be falsified. J.K. Rowling has three living biological children. It is exceedingly unlikely that the body double also had three living biological children who were also trained in impersonation and looked enough like Rowling's children to pass as them with makeup and/or plastic surgery. If we raise enough awareness, we can mass demand that Joanne and her children undergo some kind of publicly verifiable DNA test (I do not know how one would ensure it was tamper-proof, if such a thing is even possible, as I said I am not an expert of any kind) proving that she is their biological mother, and if she refuses, that would constitute undeniable hard evidence with which to back further action. Think of it like Pascal's Wager, except it actually makes sense. If you join our campaign and we're right, we've unmasked a reprehensible conspiracy and probably brought Disney's tyrannical stranglehold over American culture to an end, and if we're wrong, all you've done is mildly inconvenience a hatemonger. Sounds like a win-win to me.

[gothicprep]

i saw some pretty ghastly shit on my dash last night, and i have nothing better to do than to weigh in. but instead of naming names, i'm going to try to toe the line and redact some specifics & paraphrase while trying to represent this as fairly as possible. take my word for it when i say i got my hands dirty enough to get the full picture on this.

person a makes a post that says something to the effect of "it's wrong to e-stalk someone with the express purpose of sexually shaming them for a callout post. if someone is circulating a post that's saying 'this person is into omegaverse? it's that disgusting?', in my opinion, OP is significantly less safe to be around than the subject of the post. most of the time this happens, it's targeting a trans woman, and this is good enough reason to be more critical about this practice"

before i move on here, it's important to point out that this sort of thing happens so often online that it's impossible to look like a statement like that and definitively say it's referencing something specific. i think the most egregious example of this i can think of relating to a callout here is five years back where a nontrivial amount of the post was. like. screenshots of sexually explicit conversations between 14-15 year old users. and that's just tumblr. not even getting into the far slimier versions of this on kiwifarms, 4chan, or if you really want to turn back the clock, encyclopedia dramatica or something awful.

the post makes the rounds and is intercepted by person b, who does some mental calculus and deduces that it was made in reference to a large callout post that was going around. unfortunately i have not been able to dig the post up for the life of me because everyone who's been talking about this situation has been vague about this, but the gist is that it had several people on it an the broader theme was extreme sexual creepiness – race play, noncon, pedophilia, and bestiality included in the mix. person b expresses surprise that person a apparently sided with racists, and people who sexually assault children or animals, but concludes that person a is a cis white woman and "they're usually all three".

person a gets angry about this for reasons that i think don't need to be elaborated on. "this statement could be applied to this call out, therefore it definitely is, and person a is defending these people specifically and she's doing it because she's like them". both are doubling down. person b is also saying that person a was the mod on an anti social justice blog in '14. there is no evidence for this, other than the blog having a mod from the same country as her, with the same nickname, which is very, very flimsy grounds.

so, what exactly happened here? A doesn't mention any of that stuff in the post. omegaverse, maybe you could make some kind of case for if you're reading the post as "defending omegaverse" rather than "condemning sexual harassment". but i don't think racism and sexual abuse apologia is an entirely fair thing to extrapolate, even if omegaverse is the given example and it's a dubious trope. especially because the big call out wasn't about the omegaverse, right?

the short answer is i'm not sure what B was doing here, but i feel like her response being to try and dig up dirt on A's online past, and deferring to something speculative and unsubstantiated when she can't readily do that is a massive call for concern.

but all that out of the way, i want to talk a little bit about how situations like these are good examples of how frivolously extremely serious allegations can be thrown around.

for one, making a joke about "well most of the people in this demographic group fuck children and pets anyway" doesn't really seem like the kind of shit you say if you take abuse seriously by any real measure. but it gets worse.

do you guys want to know why conservatives are really fond of casting gay & trans people as pedophiles and child groomers? it's because it's very, very common for people to be okay with violence against people who sexually abuse children, and feel urgently enough about this that they're willing to turn a bit of a blind eye to forgoing due process in support of that, due to the weight of it. their goal is to tap into that same justified anger and visceral disgust and weaponize it against a group they dislike. so seeing B react to A's post highlighting that this sort of cyberstalking tends to hurt trans women the most with "well white women tend to be pedophiles, amongst other things" strikes me as very, very reckless advocacy. and that's me being a lot more generous than they deserve.

also:

you could apply this vague post to a callout –> she's probably a creep in the same way they are –> *additional accusation based on extremely circumstantial events*

you can follow how this has a way of calling into suspect the original allegations in the callout, right? if this vague statement about a common instance online can be used to suggest that someone is a pedophile, how exactly was that determined for the other people involved in this? did someone come forward and say "this older user put me in some very uncomfortable sexual situations" or was it a similar situation of "i read their post in the worst possible light"? we understand that it's extremely dangerous to create a boy who cried wolf situation with stuff like this, right?

there have been plenty of bunk callouts on here. some cases like the lesbian makeup application photo, which was just complete shit. or the mitski sex trafficking debacle, that was the unfortunate result of a user having a psychosis episode – even though they later told people over and over again that they had written it while hallucinating and it still kept circulating. surely we need to have some kind of vetting process? but many situations of abuse are not going to have a paper trail, which complicates things.

what to do, then? i guess something like this, it's worth your time to dive into posts that have more of a gossipy "they said a bad thing" tone and figure out why it something is being said/if it's a fair interpretation of events. as for things where this isn't an option, i truly don't have any ideas.

either way, the kind of internet conduct where you just assume the worst possible faith at all time isn't keeping anyone safer.

[orangezinnia]

i. can butterflies suck blood ?

yup! more specifically, the entire Lepidoptera order is capable of it, since the most egregious example you'll find is the Vampire Moth- it's proboscis tongue is armored with barbs, a bit like a mosquito, so that it can anchor into skin (or animal hides) and lap up that good good red stuff! scientists guess that it evolved that from how these guys tend to dig into fruit for its syrupy sweet nectar, but since blood is wayyy more sating then fruit juice, they went down this route instead.

regular butterflies do it, too, just that it's a bit less drastic. it'd be part of a behaviour called "mud-puddling", wherein they dig into moist and mineraled substances like mud (that fruit drops and rots in), so they can slurp up those buffet-line nutrients. blood, as well, is a moist and nutritious deliquesce, so if they come across it, then, bon appetit!

that's probably also why some species in the Danainae family (like Blanchard's Ghost) have been observed cannibalizing their young! these fellas are called "milkweed butterflies", because they drink up the sap that their little claws scrape out of milkweed leaves. but if a caterpillar gets in the way as they're leaf-scratching, and the butterflies get a sip of them, well... food is always better when someone else makes it, right? 😊

[duhragonball]

What do You think about Maron, the Krilin's ex-girlfriend? I know she is hated a lot because she looks like Bulma and because of her poor intellect (although it must be admitted that she cares about others), but I would like to know your opinion about it? Why do you think that, without any reason, they introduced a character like her and why make she looks so much like Bulma when they could easily avoid a thousand controversies by even changing the color of her hair?

I think you don't understand the issues surrounding this character.

First off, let me take this moment to clarify something, mostly so I can remember it myself. Krillin's ex has almost exactly the same name as his daughter, and here's how to remember which is which.

Maron (マロン Maron) is the ex-girlfriend.

Marron (マーロン Māron) is Krillin and 18's daughter

The names sound indistinguishable in the dub, but they're spelled differently in English. The ex has one 'r', and the daughter has two. And the names are also spelled differently in Japanese, with a long vowel mark added to extend the vowel in "ma".

The characters have nothing to do with one another, and the naming was likely just a coincidence, since they both tie into the same chesnut wordplay that Krillin's name uses.

Anyway, the ex-girlfriend was introduced first, and she gets one 'r', and the daughter came second, and she gets two 'r's. Convenient.

So there's two major problems people have with Maron. The first is that she's a filler character introduced in a long stretch of filler episodes. By the end of the Frieza Saga, Toei's production schedule was cranking out episodes faster than Akira Toriyama could keep up with the manga. This was always a logistical hurdle with Dragon Ball (and other anime), which was always resolved by padding episodes with filler scenes, or sometimes entire filler episodes. But things got especially desperate around that time, so Toei had to do an unprecedented run of filler episodes to keep the show on the air. And this was how we got the Garlic Junior Saga, the Driver's Ed episode, Mr. Shuu, the flashback to Frieza getting turned into a cyborg, and so on.

It also gave us Maron. The thing is, a lot of people don't care for the Garlic Junior Saga to begin with. It's ten episodes of marking time, Goku's not even in the story, it doesn't even try to fit into the continuity of the show, and many of the plot "twists" just feel like random stuff tacked on to drag out the conflict. Personally, I like the arc okay, but that's mostly because I dig the Black Water Mist and Makyo Star lore. But I do find myself checking my watch in the final leg of the saga. Let's face it, this thing doesn't need to be ten episodes long, and you could easily trim it down to seven if you edited Maron out of the show.

So that's Problem Number One: She's a filler character shoehorned into what was already a filler saga. Her job is literally to waste time, and while there's plenty of timewasting in Dragon Ball Z, Maron is an especially egregious example. For a lot of fans, Maron represents everything wrong with the show, all of the pointless bullshit added in for production schedules rather than entertainment value. Making her a redhead wouldn't have solved that.

Problem number Two is that she treated Krillin like dirt, and fans love Krillin. He's the fucking best. She seemed to like him well enough, but it was impossible for anyone to figure out what she really wanted out of their relationship. Characters would ask her directly, and she would just avoid the question or say "I don't know," like a friggin' toddler. Meanwhile, Krillin's trying to figure out how to propose to her, constantly worrying about whether he's worthy of her, but she doesn't even know anything about him. He takes her to meet his friends, and she flirts with the boys and insults the girls. I don't think she was being intentionally cruel about it, but the message of that arc was that she wasn't taking the relationship nearly as seriously as he was. She was too impulsive and flighty, and indecisive, and Krillin was focused and serious and ready to settle down. The only reason he put up with her for as long as he did was because he lacked the self-confidence to understand that he could do better.

This is why all of his friends were so supportive of him when he told them he broke up with her. They were skeptical of Maron the whole time, and they were glad Krillin had finally wised up to the situation. This was only borne out when she showed up at Kame House again, three years later, trying to rekindle their romance. Roshi told her where Krillin was and why, and she didn't pay attention to any of it. She almost ran off with some complete strangers for no real reason. Then she tried to make out with a turtle. Then she called like two dozen "boyfriends" to pick her up, presumably because she was bored waiting for Krillin to come back.

Roshi and Turtle agreed that they should never speak of it again, and really, why should they tell Krillin about this? Maron's entire visit was a complete waste of time, and she fell in and out of love with Krillin all over again, without even seeing him! Again, this is a character solely created to waste time and make you feel bad for Krillin, and that's not a road to popularity. A new hairstyle wouldn't solve anything.

You say "it must be admitted that she cares about others", but no, I won't admit that. Maron doesn't have the attention span to care about others. She only seems to be interested in "having fun", but in this really vague way that doesn't require any sort of commitment to anything or anyone. I always imagined that she was created as some sort of bitter parody of a real-life ex-girlfriend, like the writers were trying to express their frustration through her.

I find the idea of Maron interesting from time to time, but more as an overlooked curiosity than anything else. A dedicated writer might find a way to get a cool story out of her, but I don't see any takers, and I've got bigger fish to fry. For most fans, I think, she's just a speed bump in Krillin's character arc, which leads into the arms of #18.

Maron's main contribution to the show is "fanservice", which is a term I've never cared for. Maron wears a revealing swimsuit through much of her time on DBZ, but the house-style is poorly suited to that kind of aesthetic. Most of the time she ends up looking like someone tried to make a woman out of stockings stuffed with ground beef. I watch DBZ for gonzo cartoon violence and occasional slice of life stuff. No one was doing me a "service" with all of those lingering shots of Maron's cartoon boobs.

[ssaalexblake]

Random but you understand. Getting steadily more annoyed at people (especially if white guys) just refusing to admit there’s anything to Yaz, let alone her obvious crush on 13.

oh yeah, i mean i know i complain about ppl perceiving 13 with the average skill level of a drunken anteater but... Yaz gets it worse. Add in 13 to that specific conversation and it's a damn nightmare that alone would justify my avoidance of the dw fandom... I mean there are So many more reasons to avoid it but that'd do it on its own for me.

I'm just. Is it just me? Who finds the characters so Easy to understand in this era? It's all there?? textual??? It's really obvious? Like not in a dickish way, i just genuinely think this is all very textually evident and the basics are laid out for all to see (like, family target demo... Some of that stuff small ones aren't going to Get get, like the implications in can you hear me? and how that effects what we saw before that, but while the subtleties aren't explicit you know enough to know Yaz's frame of mind which is all you need to grasp the story's mood, really) and am legitimately confused. It should be noted i get this feeling from a Lot of female led shows i watch where people just Don't See any depth to the ladies at All and it's Such a Shame they finally had women in something and they got stuck with bad writers and If Only they hadn't and then they could actually like it, but alas...

I've seen that line like 8 million times with tons of different things by now guys, try something new for a change, if nothing else it gets boring.

Honestly, i'm just so done. The contrasts within fandom are damning, Rose is Still everybody's darling girl and, frankly, doesn't have half the character depth of Yaz (not a rose slam, she doesn't actually Need anything more than she has narratively for what they were saying... Apart from a different ending, anyway) but people will dig miles underground to find it anyway, meanwhile Yaz is apparently a flat character while the narrative peels back layers and layers of her as character independent of 13 And then adds the stuff with 13 too as a bonus and everybody is all 'i pretend not to see it'. It's kind of like how people will and have spent hours analysing david ten/nant's eyelashes as Ten but fail to notice 13 blatantly wearing the universe's creepiest evil grin on multiple occasions because it's not obvious enough, apparently?

i am in a constant state of both eye emoji and a massive eye roll.

Most of the time, if i try to write about Yaz, i fail because i can never work out how to organise my words into a coherent post. Yaz has so much depth but, also, None of it is weird sci-fi bs.. it is All character work. There's no impossible girl or bad wolf or mystic pregnancy or whatever was going on with river or elderly centurion security guard or 'oops i accidentally made an immortal' or any other example here, Yaz's character work is genuinely that, character work. And since i've spent a fair while reading ppl on here laud the rtd era companions for just being normal people with no sci-fi gimmicks being used to prop them up (even when sometimes there Are sci-fic gimmicks, if much less egregious than moffat era ones) it's a Bit annoying Yaz is getting the lowkey slam for it.

so yeah... yeah. Me too. I could have just said yeah but it'd be ooc of me to not be long winded.

[hellyeahheroes]

Why the Big 2 is hard to get into

This is something I wanted to write in response to @thankskenpenders who answered an ask regarding how the Big 2 is hard to get into compared to Archie Sonic(which mostly sucked up until Ian Flynn took over and even then was burdened by encyclopedic lore) and IDW Sonic(which is great and you should read it). They,don’t know their pronouns, say that the big 2 is costly and hard to get into thus alienating newcomers. I hate this argument because it’s true, and also doesn’t account for what both companies do to mitigate that or it overemphasizes the shared universe of Marvel or DC. So I want to write this post to help people who feel overwhelmed about pursuing this hobby.

First, newcomers are not supposed to tag along with characters with decades of lore and backstory because doing so is daunting. And this is where the differences between Marvel and DC.

Marvel doesn’t do reboots or they prefer soft reboots in that the previous lore happened but they rather change the tone and focus of said character. Yes, you could read from Amazing Fantasy #15 and all of Amazing Spider-Man volumes and Spectacular Spectacular Spider-Man and Web of Spider-Man to now, and it will be one long continuous story. Drawbacks is that it’s hard to just jump in but Spidey is a character in which the framing device doesn’t involve a lot of benchmarks in Peter Parker’s life. Yes shit happens but the comic doesn’t make the big shit not be impactful. Marvel has done retelling of the same story but again, those are either gimmick what if’s or widget universes or a modern retelling. The latter doesn’t last long and the former only reflects a periods.

DC does reboots or convoluted excisions of characters and concepts. Case and point, New 52 Reboot. The issue is that no one forgets that continuity that was retconned because it was written and experienced. And ignoring that history only makes it more apparent that the writer and/or editors had a bias. More on that subject for another post because I don’t want to get on a tangent.

Point is that new readers are supposed to hop on newer books that are explicitly made for new characters. Marvel does this better than DC. Instead of reading the convoluted history of the X-Men, new readers were supposed read books with the newer X-Men. Or instead of reading the 60 year history of Peter Parker’s adventures, you either picked up Ultimate Spider-Man or start with Miles. Don’t read the Avengers. Read the Young Avengers or the Champions or whatever. The issue is that Marvel does little to market those characters except for Miles Morales. Or they wait way too late to do so and opt to give media deals to characters who do not need the exposure to the kids that would be interested in their stories. Now Into the Spider-verse was a gift that came about because Lord and Miller read Miles Morales and became fans. Marvel had no intention of making a Miles Morales focused piece of media. It’s why they didn’t market the movie when Black Panther came out. And that’s the rub here. There characters that are made for newcomers aren’t focused on and you have to dig deep to know about them.

Not even going to tackle DC for fear of having an aneurysm covering their stupid shit.

Point is that you aren’t supposed to or expected to know everything in the DC or Marvel Universes. Both companies are aware of the entry gate and have means to superseded.

Another thing that is overstated is the shared universe aspect. You can ask any fucking comic reader of the Big 2 and no one will actively say with their whole heart that they keep track of fucking everything. I am Spider-Man fan who has read like 500 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, a couple of dozen of Spectacular, and all of Ultimate and Miles Morales, and never once have I needed to know what the Avengers were doing. Or what the X-Men were doing. Or what the Fantastic Four we’re doing. Or fucking Doctor Strange who Peter apparently went to school across the street from. Generally if you follow a character or just a title and stick with it, interactions with other characters are limited and are treated as guest appearances. And that is the same with title or character in Marvel. DC is mostly the same way. Most readers just pick an idiot and stay with that idiot.

But I suggest new readers look for those gate entries when presented them. New character getting a book is introduced? That is your train! Do not miss it. A reboot or retelling that isn’t a soft reboot? Jump on that shit and hold on tight because the shit might not last long.

Which brings me to the crux of the argument: why it’s hard to get into? Honestly, it has to do with fans not letting shit go. The most egregious example is the X-Men. Legacies refuse new characters in favor of the old ones who no longer have stories to tell. They never develop nor change. They become static characters that only exist as avatars for power fantasies that eschew the original point as to why they were created: to be fresh or to be different and to be all-new. In some situations, newer characters are sacrificed to create drama for the old guard or the older characters canabalize of the stories of the newer characters to remain fresh. Peter Parker is the biggest offender as of late of the latter. On top of the over reliance of those old characters and preserving those stories, it becomes a quagmire of pages and quotes and panels.

So yeah. It sucks out here and this is why I largely stayed away from the Big Two fandom. But yeah. Here you go.

@ubernegro