#showing my hand being a weeb but its the only thing i can compare it too

[huntunderironskies]

I know this isn't what anyone wanted when it comes to WIPs given what I'm known for but as you might know I've been trying my hand at translating and I still don't feel like I'm good enough to share my stuff outside of friend groups but I do like showing that I massively overthink things. I think I've said a few times there's something of an expectation of literal translations in order to "preserve the spirit" of the source and that's part of the reason I'm paranoid, the other issue is that honestly my Japanese is not that good and I pretty frequently run into words I don't know which is why I work with about three different dictionaries open at any given time. Thankfully for all of its quirks, JP pronunciation is very consistent compared to every other language I've learned so as long as you can pick out each phoneme you'll know exactly what to look for.

Anyway. Here's something I've been working on and I'm hoping I can have in a presentable state before the upcoming plot arcs they're gearing up for. Lots of rambling so I'm putting it below the cut.

Context: this is the music project V-Kei Sentai Executioner. The characters in this specific drama track are a group of phantom thieves who turn into a magical superhero visual kei band and had their superpowers granted to them by a demon who they are also forced to live with because he won't leave them alone. They have to use their powers to free the world from time loop causing 1999 to repeat infinitely that's slowly undoing the fabric of reality and will eventually end the world. This only kind of makes sense in context. They have just experienced their first (as far as they're aware) iteration of the time loop.

Yes, I know, I forgot to capitalize some letters in there, I will fix it, I just keep editing other things instead--

So this is admittedly a bit of a personal flourish, but I'll try to walk through the logic of why and how I veer off of totally literal translations.

Exactly what Astaroth says here with a very literal translation is "Yo, kosodoro-domo! Akemashite omedetou da na!" (lit."Yo, thieves [mildly derogatory suffix i can't translate into english]! Happy new year!") And Kiyoshiro responds "Dare ga kosodoro?" (lit. "Who are [these] thieves?")

For further context: kosodoro is a somewhat demeaning term for a thief, by my understanding, several of the dictionaries I looked at translated it specifically as "petty thief." You're more likely to hear dorobou used, at least in all the media I've watched. However, the Asta boys consistently call themselves kaitou-dan, or a phantom thief organization, and all of them seem to take a lot of pride in that. Phantom thieves have entered the not-weeb public consciousness a lot more due to Persona 5 but if you need a refresher, phantom thieves are specifically heroic thieves who operate under a code of honor. It's a pretty different connotation.

Anyway, yeah, I could have just done a literal translation but in my own head there was a chance to try and get everyones' personalities across a little better in English. "Phantom thief" might be understood by weebs but not necessarily a general audience. Now, admittedly, the English-speaking audience that isn't a weeb for this sort of music project is probably nonexistent to the point I haven't doubled back and changed any uses of "phantom thief" in other parts of the translation (and probably won't at this point) but I still wanted to go a little bit off script to try and get my point across. I could've had Kiyoshiro correct him that they're phantom thieves and that probably could've worked but I didn't like that pass. There's a couple reasons, I didn't like the flow of it being one. I also had used the word thief/thieves a lot and the thing about English is that word choice and avoiding repetition matters a lot when you're writing.

Here's what I went with instead and my personal read on the character dynamics. Astaroth is trying to be as insulting as possible. Meanwhile Kiyoshiro isn't necessarily mad that he's being called a criminal, that's objectively true. But he's a criminal who's performing a very valuable function to society and he's also very good at doing it, thank you very much.

I feel like Asta is the one group where the red sentai member isn't the sole moral center of the group, which is also why I'd call them the most unambiguously heroic. Even if he is a utilitarian, Kiyoshiro seems to have a pretty well-thought-out philosophical outlook on art and aesthetics-- he was completely psyched to be stealing from an art hoarder because by his reckoning, depriving everyone else of the joy of looking at sublimely beautiful art is evil. He is the government-mandated kuudere of the series so the first time you get an indication of just how excited he is comes from him aggressively infodumping about the paintings they're stealing and why they should be shared with the world instead of being hidden away in a private collection but it's also the most we see him talk at one time in the entire drama track. He really, really cares about what they're doing.

I still don't know if italicizing the "useless" part is getting my vision 100% across and I might change it in pass #23523 but this feels like it gets the point of their characters across really well while still retaining the meaning of the dialogue. Spirit but not the letter, I guess.

Also the highlighted bit in Shiyuki's dialogue is one of the things I do in my drafts. There's...a lot of them, especially in his lines because it's more slang-y and I tend to leave the original JP in since they end up getting edited the most. In this case the actual line in JP is "akeohayon~" which is smashing together both "akeome" (very casual way of saying "Happy New Year" and "ohayo." I tend to put notes for basically any nonstandard

...oh, this isn't even getting into the other issue which is that the humor in their dialogue is very heavily inspired by manzai which does not track over into English well, and there are several jokes completely contingent on Momiji lying about having a Kansai accent while two of his other brothers do genuinely have one so I did the thing everyone hates and had to do a semi-phonetic Southern accent (I tried to lean in more on regionalisms, speech patterns, and slang instead of spelling it inasmuch as I could.) Yes, I know, the more recent argument is you should use a New Yorker accent instead of a Deep South one since it's culturally closer to Osaka but I'm going to have a significantly easier time writing a Southern accent since, you know, I live here and I hear it all the time.

You see why I don't talk about my process or translating at all much, since this is the kind of thing I get mired down in.

[meliorysm]

i know mike wheeler is gonna give us the most show stopping gorgeous spectacular awe inspiring pov scenes in s5!!! remember how sasuke got his pov chapter at the end of naruto and we figure out how exactly he feels about naruto? remember how kageyama had his pov chapter and recontextualized every single thing he went through?! dont u just love it when authors keep the pov limited on this one person and when their own pov is revealed it is literally mind-blowing world-altering earth-shattering heartbreaking? TRUST! DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME NOW MICHAEL

[iisuya-simps]

Hello! May I please request headcanons with the buster bros (+Samatoki? If that’s okay!) with an S/O who is into anime + idol (rhythm) games? Thank you! Hope you’re having a good day/night 💙

A/N: *Rubs hands together* Buckle up yall, this is a long one. I may have had too much fun writing this... :p lol enjoy~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ichiro Yamada

Ichiro first saw you at a manga cafe rocking some merch from your favorite game franchise and had to go over and talk to you

he also found out that you're into anime too

he may try and quiz you to test how into games/anime you are

his eyes light up and his heart pounds but he plays it cool

after a long interrogation conversation, he asked if you would meet him back at the cafe next week

he lent you the latest issue of a light novel that you never got around to reading

now he would have an excuse to see you again

a few months later one of your favorite animes was being played in the theatre once so you both went on a date to see it

if its a sappy rom-com he will 100% deny that he cried and brush it off as an eyelash caught in his eye

but he totally did

to be fair you did too

though he may prefer light novels over anime most times

he will totally sit down at watch the new season of an anime you two enjoy together

prepare for a brain malfunction if you tell him you're into cosplaying

"oh yeah I cosplayed them a year ago"

"y-you wouldn't happen to have any pictures, w-would you?"👀"

*cue nosebleed*

"That's it, I've found my soulmate" he says he's kidding but actually means it

ANYWAY

him being a weeb

Ichiro is also well versed in rhythm games

he will tell you if your waifu/husbando is trash or not

you both have your own little superstitions and rituals you do before gacha pulls

you might use a certain finger to click the screen because that's the lucky one

Ichiro turns the volume up and closes his eyes before clicking

"What no way!! CLICK MY SCREEN! YOU'RE LUCKY TODAY!"

"AHHH thank you y/n! Look at them! They're so cute!"

you both marvel over the cute characters

he is totally impressed by the songs you can do on pro/master

"NO WAY A FULL COMBO?!?!! You're amazing!" 😍

he will totally challenge you to see who can get a better score

but you always win

he did come close a few times

but gets flustered and flubs it up at the end when you're watching over this shoulder

he finds it cute when you're humming along to the songs while DESTROYING the beat map

Bonus+

*you unbox a package left on the doorstep to find a scanty cosplay* "Ichiro, what is this?!?" "What? I thought you would look cute in it" ;p "I'm not dressing up as your favorite idol!" "wh- babe why not?!" :"( "ok maybe..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jiro Yamada

Like Ichiro, Jiro is a big nerd too

you two met in a soccer match of all places

you were taking a break during halftime when you quoted a line from some weird obscure anime

"No way you watch ___ too? I thought I was the only one!"

you haven't seen each other before because you're on different teams from rivalling schools

after the game he gives you his number then the rest is history

you two end up messaging each other all night talking about other animes and games you enjoy

he likes sports animes along with action and adventure

you also found out he plays rhythm games too

after a while, he'll invite you over to the Yamada household and show you his collection of light novels and games

"There's more where this came from, my big bro is a bigger nerd than I am."

you'll sit down on his bed and show each other your cards and play a few songs

"Jiro why is your tap sound louder than the music!?!?"

"I need to hear the beats or I'll fail the stage!!"

He might challenge you to see who can get a higher score

you both play on hard

but you're pretty evenly matched

"Haha! That's a point for me, y/n!"

"No fair! I don't know that song very well..."

If you don't have the best gacha luck Jiro will cry with you during your loss

he's not much better...

"NOOOO I PULLED THE WORST ONE"

and because of that, this boy spends all of his allowance on gacha...

"Jiro, don't tell me you actually bought a gacha pass..."

"I SPENT ALL OF MY GEMS TRYING TO GET THEM SO I HAD TO!"

"JIRO!!!"

"Y/N PLEASE, I NEEDED THEM!!" (╥_╥)

Bonus+

"Here Jiro I got you this." He excitedly opens the package. "No way! A ___ Figure??!" "They're your favorite right?" "YESS" He sets the figure down and bear hugs you. "Thank you y/n, I'll treasure this forever!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saburo Yamada

Saburo picked up anime from his brothers

they would all watch action animes together as kids

until Saburo started a fight with Jiro and they tried to one punch each other out of existence

"HEY GUYS CUT IT OUT YOU'RE NOT FRIKKIN SAITAMA"

ahem. moving on...

Saburo is a nerd too

but he may be a bit more casual (in his own way)

he spotted you playing a rhythm game in the corner of the hall during lunch break

"Is that _____? I play ______"

"Oh really? Whos your favorite?"

"What? you like them?!? You have no taste..."

"W-what?! Shut up! their cards always have good stats!"

"But look how pretty this one is!"

you two quickly become friends and meet up every lunch and discuss things like your methods to preserve gems

Saburo likes making charts and spreadsheets to predict what event will be next and what characters are featured

"Haha! look y/n I totally called it!"

He likes collecting cards and comparing the stats

cause that's fun too I guess :/

He must assemble the best possible unit

I can see you two having competitions to see who can get the best score

or who can rank higher in an event

Saburo is very good at analyzing the beat map at first glance

he will also point out patterns he sees to try and help you understand the rhythms

he usually plays on hard and pro

while you do pretty well on normal or hard

he likes a good action/fantasy anime

but he likes sci-fi too

maybe even mystery

he was nervous asking you over to his place to watch anime

because you suggested a slice of life rom-com

does this mean he makes a move or you just watch it together and that's it O_o

Bonus+

"Yes! New high score! Y/n, did you see that?" You giggle. Good job Saburo. You lean over to kiss his cheek then see the smoke coming out of his ears. "Y-y/n!" *blush blush* "Hehe, you're so cute when you're nerding out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Samatoki Aohitsugi

Rio invited Samatoki out to a neat cafe because they offered cool exotic blends

When they walked in Samatoki was intrigued spotting your crazy colored hair and tattoos from the corner of his eye

which was weird cause that's not his type

or maybe it was

After ordering the coffee and sitting down Rio noticed that he was distracted

"I see you staring, why don't you go over and talk to her?"

"I wasn't staring! But there's just something about her..."

you were sitting in the corner of the cafe reading manga when he approached you a few minutes later

"uh hey, I like your tattoos"

"Oh thanks! Do you watch___ too?"

*casual panic* "Oh yeah totally, what are you reading?"

You knew he was faking it but continued anyway

"Eh, what's the difference?" 😮 "The difference is--"

He didn't know much about what you were saying but he loved watching you talk about something you were obviously passionate for

through an hour or so of conversation, you realized you both had more in common than you thought

he asked if you would like to do something like this again and gave you his number

You were happy to explain plots of random animes and games to him

Samatoki may not get the appeal but he likes seeing you happy

You go on a few dates and make your relationship official

he's absolutely fascinated by you and your nerdiness

"BABE!!!" "What is it?! Are you ok!?" "I JUST GOT A SSR CARD OF (insert favorite character here)"

Tch, *rolls his eyes. "That's good, right?" "LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE!"

he may get a little jealous watching you fawn over you your fav

"Hmmph, why would you want a fictional character when you have a real man right here?"

*author sobs* :")

you let him try a song on normal difficulty

but it is still hard for him

"What the hell! Why are these notes coming at me so fast?!"

He doesn't pick up any manga or light novels

but he likes watching anime with you though

preferably a good action and or adventure one

he may become more interested when the female lead shows up on screen

hey, eyes up here buddy >:(

he won't say it but he secretly likes romcoms

maybe cause Nemu used to watch them growing up

I can see him getting so invested he'll yell at the characters

"Are you stupid?? She's trying to confess to you! Moron..." he huffs

(he does this with cooking shows too)

Bonus+

"Samatoki come on! The next episode of ___ is airing! You rush into the bedroom. "Hey, have you seen my pho-" "Shut up, I'm trying- to win." You laugh hysterically at him stealing your phone to get a full combo. "You got this babe, I believe in you!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading!

[torinofushi]

So typically I don't write down my opinions to things because I wish to keep my analytical thoughts to myself....however I feel compelled to comment on Yashahime.

Now I grew up with Inuyasha and it was a cornerstone of anime, like it was to many people, growing up. Though to be fair it had some issues of its own....the amount of filler episodes and flashbacks were a bit on the heavy side, but it also had characters that we wanted to know more of. To this day Inuyasha himself has always had a special place in my heart because of how complex he is emotionally.

Now as an adult and a writer...we had Yashahime. Where when I saw the first title card I wanted to know who the children's parents were. I honestly thought at first Towa and Moroha were InuKag daughters and Setsuna may have been a Miroku/Sango or hell even Kohaku daughter........ thaaaaat wasn't the case.

To where will get to the elephant in a room here in a moment but some thoughts on the girls themselves.

Towa: She does in her earnest seem to be a sweet character, however muddled a bit where at first she is this rough and tough "human" that can't stick to schools and then suddenly mellows out when she finds her sister? She didn't even super respond to the fact she's half demon....like I would have thought she'd be more shocked since in her new home there are no demons. She just seems a little too focused on her sister....to the point her own character writing seems diminished to me, but she has potential! First episode where she is talking about keeping the future secret was a cool angle......then idea gets scrapped with her handing out candy and whipping out her smart phone??

Setsuna: I am a bit more intrigued by her because she does have some mystery, but more importantly she has her own character and personality compared to her sister. She actually has had some development which feels minimal at 15 episodes in for the series right now. She seems to have traits of her father where I can hardly see any of that with her sister, but she genuinely grows and adapts to caring about Moroha and Towa.

Moroha: I will admit I've stayed this long watching it solely because of this child. She has both her parents traits, I love it when she talks like her father once did. She's something entirely new, I don't think we ever had a quarter demon in the original series. However I HATE how they use her like an exposition bomb. I HATE they don't show all of her emotions! Hell she doesn't even show sadness in not knowing her parents after meeting her uncle or realizing that her two new friends are actually her cousins?! She's focused on the bounties which we still don't know why completely, but we do know why she was separated from her parents now. I wish they'd make her the focus more than the twins because yes the twins are older, let's face it Moroha is keeping the fans in. I think she has great potential and her and Setsuna are by far the most interesting to me...

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.......SESSRIN

Okay so folks won't lie when I was a wee weeb with the original series I thought that when Rin was grown up (18-20 because in the US thats the fictitious maturity cutoff) she would fall for Sesshomaru as Izayoi did for InuTaisho/Toga. That was when I was younger and thought honestly more likely than that Rin would become an ally to Sesshomaru or perhaps the one to soften his heart and he found a DIFFERENT lady love that was human because of Rin's past kindness. That didn't happen.

Everyone on the internet is commenting and doing math in regards to Rin being the twins mother to which as an almost 30 year old woman I got some thoughts here.

1) With the math, previously the internet said she would be 11 with Inuyasha Final act....however because of people frantically editing I don't know if this is at the beginning or END of Inuyasha where there was a 3 year time skip. So I will give her a range of possibly being 11-13 at the end. Now fast forward to Yashahime episode 15 and she's having twins...Sango's son Hisui is who we are using as a yard stick to the passage of time. I thought he looked young maybe 2-3 however according to his wiki he's 4 years older to the Yashahime girls. So with wiki number it would make Rin 15-18 when she had the twins........

2) People this is a lose lose situation writing wise because if they show her childlike infatuation with Sesshomaru never stopped before she had these girls then that's grooming/groomed behavior or even victim blaming.  If they show Sesshomaru showing interest with her in that sense as she got older that's pedophilia. Yes, I know this was back in Japanese feudal era where it was common to marry at 16-25, yes I know that my culture has its own perspective on predatory behavior and these are two individuals that aren't American or even human, and yes I know that this development hasn't even been fully explained in the series but gods the writing has been atrocious so far and I doubt this will save them.

3) the original series has Kagome age 15 have to deal with propositions and proposals and such where she, as a catalyst for the audience with views closer to our own than a feudal Japanese citizen, was appalled and typically played for laughs. Here in Yashahime they actually DID THAT. Which I don't blame people for being wigged out and disgusted...like what the.... the show itself had a tendency to overexplain EVERYTHING but can't explain the dynamics or progression of what the hell happened here? Because from our/audience perspective it's basically written as "Well she's having kids now." Even Sango, Kagome, and Kaede aren't reacting to anything with this.....not when they had news she was giving birth, not when Sesshomaru shows up, or hell TAKING the girls?!?! The hell is going on???

In short to this rant, Yashahime I think your writing has you in a chokehold. You keep going from explain things only for the audience to know to explain things only for the girls would know which is confusing what your goal/pacing is. Either trust your audience or go full hold our hands, make up your mind. You go into retcons and writing new backstory to important items for the sake of the plot....its a mess.

Old characters used for publicity rather than letting the new characters capture the audience. Honestly if you rearranged your episodes it would have seem more authentic though again good luck with that elephant in the room, its going to turn many fans away.

I don't know guys. I'm not too hopeful they can save themselves at this point. Thanks for reading.

[littleeyesofpallas]

Was chatting with a coworker the other day and two things crossed my mind...

that I've been at this weeb shit so long that I forget what I just sort of take for granted and what might not be commonly known little factoids, and

that VIZ's attempt at a monthly Shonen Jump magazine has been gone so long most people probably never saw them. (nevermind the old RAIJIN Graphic Novels that tried the same thing)

So, here's some fun little things you might not have known about manga if you've only ever read English publications and/or digital scans...

For one, there's the matter of print formatting... In general, Japan actually uses their own standards for print that tend to differ from those in the US; The JIS(Japanese Industrial Standards) series A and B. Magazines like the typical anthology format manga are printed in JIS B5, which is comparable to the US Letter standard, or the ISO A4.

This was the same format that RAIJIN Comics printed in as well, and although I don't have a copy of the old English Shonen Jump for reference, if memory serves they printed in the same format as well in an attempt to really sell that "authentic" manga feel. Sadly, I don't know that the effort or attention to detail was much appreciated. Neither published a volume comparable to a Japanese weekly or even monthly serial magazine, though --not by a long shot. But this might not be the most practical for comparrison, since there actually just isn't much of an English language equivalent format. (unless you count actual magazines that happen to include comic illustrations or miniscule comic strip segments)

Despite the mammoth size of a serial magazine, Japanese tankoban are actually smaller than the North American equivalent. But notably the Japanese small book format isn't just a matter of contending with nearest print standards... What I believe is the JIS B40(although I could be wrong) tends to be the standard print size of small books in general, not just manga, and it's a print size that is only marginally smaller than VIZ's standard size manga, but with the very particular benefit of being deliberately portable. The small difference in size is the difference between a Japanese manga fitting in my coat pocket where as the English equivalent can't.

(I realize I photographed a copy of Shonen ACE, and not Weekly JUMP, but I measured a copy of Weekly JUMP for the thickness and not the copy of ACE; the copy of JUMP was around 506pg, while the copy of ACE was 570pg. Those are both older though, and the most recent digital copy i have of Weekly JUMP actually had around 520pg)

And I don't think it's always addressed just what a difference there is, culturally, in how Japan approaches the print medium. It's kind of an old cliche by this point, and I don't know how accurate it's remained in the past decade or so, but the quintessential image passed around between comic nerds has always been the Japanese bullet train; A place packed with commuters all passing their transit time with isolated preoccupation with music and/or reading, with manga being the king of this time killing arena. And its not just about sheer popularity driven by interest, American comic vendors have long envied the sheer accessibility of manga in Japan.

Here in the U.S. we used to have a thriving newsstand retail scene for comic books, and a kind of similar ease of grab and go comic purchase, rather than the explicitly niche interest driven "direct market" model that has been slowly but surly strangling the comic market ever since. But in Japan serialized manga has remained in relatively quick, impulse friendly, arm's reach of readers on the go. And what lubricates that business model more than anything is price.

I still remember a time when VIZ dominated the English manga market by offering at $7.95(and am I crazy or am I remembering a time when it got down to $6.99?) but now'days it's settled on a low end of $9.99. You know how much the recent vol.29 of My Hero Academia goes for? ¥484. That's less than $4.50.

You know how much that big ass magazine with 500+ pages and 21 different series goes for? Do you think it's more or less than the little pocket-size tankoban? Did you guess something close to ¥290? That's less than $2.75. But how does something bigger in both page size and page count managed to sell for less???

There are a few secrets to that, but one is that the things are packed to the gills with ads. But that's the boring answer. The other feature contributing to keeping an accessible cost on weekly/monthly manga is something we don't think about much in the U.S.; it's the paper and print quality.

The nice little books are printed in what you might expect as far as starch white paper and clean black inks, but those big honkin' phone book(do people still know what phonebooks look like??) size magazines are printed on cheap recycled pulpy newpaper with typically rough print jobs. This is most noticeable in the quality of solid blacks, and when scanning the texture of "white" space.

(I tried to take individual photos of different series chapters to show off the fact that the paper is differently colored... but my phone's camera seems to be smart enough to auto balance that kind of thing when there's no other context to anchor it to. (It doesn't help that it's night and my lights have a harsh yellowing glow to them.) but on th left you can still kind of see the different paper colors; this particular issue alternated every 3 chapters between pink-ish, green/gray, a kind of off-white/gray, and sepia, but I've also seen blue-ish, oranges, and a different shade of yellow different from the sepia-ish one.)

Back in ye olden days when it came to fan scanlations, more slapdash teams and projects would often stumble over levels in photoshop (too much black and the pulpy paper texture shows up as grainy shadows, but too far white and the edges of lineart get crunchy and ugly) but those who had more robust readership and a regular streamlined flow of work, we'd actually go in and touch up the solid blacks and whites by hand. We'd also redraw art to erase overlaid text so the type setters could lay the new English in over top.

(Weekly Jump: Left, Bleach tankoban: Right)

They do however keep a few coveted color pages in better quality paper and ink. In contrast, the standard quality tankoban actually don't include color pages at all, and just print what had been color pages in grayscale. There are also all kind of irregularities between publishers and special editions and such, but on the most basic level this difference in quality both keeps serial prices down, while also incentivizing tankoban purchase.

In the U.S. we might still have the draw of an ad-free reading experience in our TPB, but the print quality between a biweekly issue and a TPB are basically the same. Incidentally, even though manga are generally drafted at a much larger scale than even the serial magazine proportions anyway, the scaled down size of the tankoban also serves to sharpen the image. When put side by side the nice clean tankoban print looks noticeably better than the serial.

Now'days the English scanlation scene seems to be conducted almost entirely through ripped digital releases (at least as far as I can tell with popular, regular weekly titles) which is great for quality, frankly, but it does kind of lack the charm and personal touch of a band of amateurs finding round about solutions to a convoluted bootlegging pipeline. But obviously I'm a little biased.

[edit]: Oops i posted this without really ending it in any sensible ro conclusive way... I feel like ive lost sight of the point since i first drafted this but I guess its mostly just me pining after if we could just get super cheap, disposable quality, bulk manga in that classic Japanese magazine model to work here in the states. I already tend to sell manga in big runs, even at $9.99+, and frequently I'll have customers put volumes back, or clearly want the next volume but just can't afford it and wait to come back. If I could sell these customers more volumes, and more importantly more titles, at the same price, I would love to. I would love to see these things fly off the shelves. I would love to see people keeping up with multiple series. I would love to see someone look at a 44vol long series and actually feel like that's a number of volumes they can afford.

[monkey-network]

‘Change Your Mind’ was a fun, messy anime hoot ‘n holler, I reckon. Is it my favorite episode of the season? Nah, that’s a different episode that I don’t wanna spoil. Is it the best episode of the arc? Nah, that’s still Escapism. But nevertheless, there is quite a lot to unpack that I wanted to express and if I did a play by play of this 44 minute special, we’d be here for several hours and nobody got time for that. And if I continuously jabber on about this in spaced out posts, I’d feel more like a SU Critical blog than I typically am and that’s pretty depressing. So, I’ve packed all my stray thoughts into one package to get it out the way. Spoilers ahead.

Small headscratch, but I question why it’s notably four episodes on the wikis but it’s essentially one episode and should count as one episode. Can’t really see one part without understanding everything else so I’m a bit confused. Then again, I’m not that encyclopedic on media production so it’s no big deal.

I liked Blue Diamond in the first part and this arc as a whole. In spite of who she generally is, Blue was a consistently good character in that her regret and more motherly nature never felt out of place compared what we’ve seen of her initially because her devastation over Pink’s “death” never felt superficial and the times when she got serious were eyebrow raising to me. And her turnaround in this felt reasonable compared to the others for she thought more of Pink/Steven beforehand and looked like she was more aware of how times have truly changed, even when the allusion to abusive families fall flat.... you know, if we were thinking realistic. Eh, Blue best Diamond, if that means anything.

I question why Yellow had what appears to be forced fusions or genuine crystal amalgamates if Diamonds were against fusion. I understand the ones on Earth, but why was she keeping them, probably for some time now, if she has no use of them? Again, maybe they’re born crystal amalgamates. It’s unclear.

I would say deep down I felt cheated that Lapis and Peridot are apparently cool now even when Lapis took everything in the divorce and did the reentering parallel to an Irish goodbye. But I guess dropping the barn counted as an act of apology, and maybe we’ll see them interact more in the future, so plbbt. At least they got to be badass and anime together while looking the part too.

In the back of mind, I forgot that Bismuth was in the episode sometimes. Beyond giving Connie her sword and raking up that star punch, I can’t say she added much to the story.

Speaking of which, wish the Diamond’s Pearls got to partake in kickassery of the sort. Homeworld was surprisingly empty in hindsight.

Loved Rainbow Quartz the 2nd. He’s beautiful and I would gladly get strong for him.

Only one thing bothered me about Sunstone, aside from the sunction cup summon. and it’s with their small arms. I thought those big arms were more for her shapeshifting since Garnet’s known to shapeshift her limbs to be enormous, but they’re always big so... what  value do Sunny’s little arms serve? Least with say, Smokey Quartz or Malachite, their multiple limbs added to their ability but Sunny’s two beefy arms carry most of the way. It’s like adding two dormant legs to the side of a grasshopper. And seriously, what was the point of the suction cups.

Though I love Monty Python reference they added in. That got a huge laugh outta me.

Obsidian was a spectacle, being the first genuinely naked human gem of the series, and the design reminded me a lot of Asura’s Wrath. Though one small detail I wish they had was where Obsidian’s fingers dug into the mech, leaving large dents on the ship, which would’ve hit home the struggle of getting to White as opposed to somehow being able to grip onto the mech’s more or less smooth surface.

Overall I’d say the part between the Diamonds reconciling and finally reaching White was hit or miss if we’re talking writing. Like sacrificing logical flow more for providing the fan service isn’t nothing new, but time could’ve been utilized more for more to go on.

I couldn’t take White as a serious threat anymore, she was just too cheeky and Ebersole sounded like she was really enjoying herself with voiced. I just hope somebody dubbed Glados over her sometime.

Couldn’t take the moment where Steven got his gem ripped out either cuz as hardcore as that was, adding a sound effect sort of killed the tension for me and I laughed my ass off. I’m sorry.

But as much as I loved the scene that was well animated by veteran 2D animator James Baxter, I especially loved the scene where after Pink Steven forms, he turns to White and says, “You should’ve gone for the head.” Snapped his fingers and destroys Homeworld to finally end everyone’s suffering. Like holy shit, that was the best scene in the entire series, hands down.

Plus I like the idea that Pink’s gem... actually fused with Greg’s sperm. *wheezes* I’m the worst

As much I like the idea of White Diamond, having been told off by a child, reforming her viewpoint, being a less coerce being and making the family whole again, the fact that she’s still a mass murdering, mass torturing, mass colonizing, authoritarian Orwellian style villain rubs me the wrong way with how much of a 180 things turned out to be. It’s like if the Beaudelaire siblings immediately forgave and thought Count Olaf was a great person all along after he did that one good thing and then died. But I guess if Steven held White under a small lens of contempt, then it wouldn’t be Steven Universe. What also makes this feel hallow is that.... when you think about it, all this amounted to was the Diamonds doing Steven a solid. They don’t really quit being dictators, they never really claim that Homeworld should change its way, or think White should step down as leader thanks to her perfectionism affecting HW harshly. They’re just nice rulers now... like Kuzco except not as cool. This plot honestly could’ve fallen apart if White Diamond was more reasonable while still maintaining her villainous perfectionism. She was kinda stupid in a way but eh, whatever. Like yeah, she’s shiny... but she’s not

Then again, imagine White Diamond’s current position.

Imagine the sense of losing your entire worldview, ideology, and sense of self to a being the size of your big toe. Imagine everything you’ve built up, potentially taking centuries or millenniums to uphold to sheer excellence, all crumble before you in a instant. How would it feel? To lose your purpose and have nothing to show for yourself beyond your now shrill existence and status regardless of your stature, because you feel that if you were to try again, history could repeat itself but 10x worse. That small being that conquered you, could do it again if tempted and what would you do? What else would you do if you have some semblance that it won’t work out perfectly as before? What else would you do if you’re now capable of fearing something with which you don’t and potentially will never understand? You honestly don’t have anything now, you’re nothing now. So what could work out for you besides smile, wave off your loss with integrity, and feel comfortable knowing that you live another day while understanding now that any day could potentially be your last, given what you know.

You feel me? It’s like that.

And I’ll say that while the Diamonds suddenly having a change of heart can seem off putting, the fact that Steven went through all that shit with his real family just to do so is reasonably sound. Can’t say a redemption arc in the making ain’t all bad if the protagonist didn’t put in work as well. And if Naruto can forgive Sasuke after they beated each other’s ass, I feel that this ain’t too different.

“Change Your Mind“ was a good song, better than the new Crystal Gem extension. A nice cap on the sprite cranberry of an episode.

So it seems like this episode marks the end of Steven Universe. Now it’s time for Steven Universe 2. Because if this wasn’t anime enough... we’re gonna be time skipping, babey. Reasonable enough, this episode messy here and there but I have one counterargument to this, given that this show is five fucking years old.....

I’d be a bitter asshole if I said I didn’t genuinely enjoy this, both initially and on the rewatch. It is an all around entertaining finale and I’m glad it embraced the weeb trashiness in itself like I always knew it would. Funny thing about all this is that we’re going into hiatus and I’m willing to bet that excluding the movie, we’re gonna have the same amount of premieres as last year. But I believe the hiatus won’t matter as much since they certainly gave people quite the show and I can’t help but applaud along.

Now if ya excuse me, I’m off to marathon Kirby Right Back at Ya, an anime I believe is better than SU all things considered. Have a wonderful day.

[xtremedespair3d]

My 10 Year Journey

It’s here. The end of the 2010 decade is finally here and now we’re finally gonna enter the 2020 decade! Although technically the decade won’t start until 2021, but who really cares? I’ve seen people hyping “Best things of the decade” and whatnot, so it still counts.

This post isn’t just going to be a 2019 year review with what to expect in 2020, the year and the decade, but I’m also telling a bit of my life over the last 10 years, though I may vaguely remember what happened, so this is going to be my longest post yet.

Also, this is going to be my final post I’m going to publish in Tumblr, I’m quitting for good. You’ll find out why when you read this post.

First, let’s start off with my usual Top 10 (and 20) lists of everything that happened this year:

Top 20 Best Anime:

20.- Virtual-san wa Miteiru

19.- Kaguya-sama: To be honest, I wasn’t quite impressed with Kaguya-sama, I didn’t like it as much as everyone else but I did like parts of it. And I of course agree that Chika is best girl. Maybe season 2 could help me change my mind.

18.- Fire Force

17.- Watanuki-san Chi No: This one’s more calssified as a dorama instead of an anime like Virtual-san wa Miteiru but whatever. With this and Virtual-san wa Miteiru, I’m still optimistic about the future of VTuber anime because I want to see more.

16-  Dumbbell Nan Kilomoteru: I really need to go to the gym again or try to practice the home exercices as shown in the series.

15.- Tokunana

14.- Fate/Grand Order Babylonia

13.- Lord El-Melloi II Case Files

12.- Ikki Tousen: Western Wolves

11.- BanG Dream! S2

10.- Quintessential Quintuplets

9.- The Promised Neverland

8.- Rising of Shield Hero

7.- Isekai Quartet

6.- Bungou Stray Dogs S3

5.- W’z: Yes, regardless of the hideous visuals GoHands has somehow fallen to grace, I really liked it so much that it helped redeem myself on Hand Shakers as a franchise because of its story.

4.- Girls’ Frontline Healing Chapter

3.- Fruits Basket

2.- Mob Psycho 100 II: Mob Psycho 100 is in a better hands than One-Punch Man has. No studio changes bound and Bones continues to deliver amazing animation that exceeds ONE’s art.

1-C.- Azur Lane: The Animation

1-B.- Kemurikusa

1-A.- Kimetsu no Yaiba: Ufotable wins for the second time in a row since 2018′s Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan series with this year’s Kimetsu no Yaiba!

All of the praise there’s been towards Ufotable with Kimetsu no Yaiba just make their other works (aside from Fate) otherwise forgettable (which is sad and I shouldn’t say that because I’m a Ufotable stan).

But, that’s not the end of the journey, there’s a film based on the Infinite Train arc happening and, surprisingly, it’s actually happening! It’s not a vaporware like the Katsugeki Touken Ranbu film or even Girls’ Work!

I’m still worried about Ufotable’s future given the tax fraud investigation, but whatever the case, I hope they can manage to clear things out and still running with marvelous projects, whatever they have in store (and literally in the shelf with the aforementioned Katsugeki Touken Ranbu film and Girls’ Work)

I had entries #1A to #3 and #20 figured out, but good lord! Figuring out what should #4 to #19 be! It took me forever!

Honorable mentions:

-Attack on Titan S3 - Part 2

-High Score Girl II

-Kakegurui XX

-Danmachi S3

-Manaria Friends

-Lupin III OVAs

-Welcome to Japari Park: This is a 2018 series but it has kept me on high spirit than Kemono Friends 2 ever has, it has given me depression instead. However, that doesn’t mean it tops the original Kemono Friends, this remains like my #2 favorite Kemono Friends anime. By the way, I didn’t know it was a two-cour series which the series got really interesting by the second-cour.

I really hope there’s another season, that teaser at the final episode has so much potential for them to not make any more Welcome to Japari Park!

UPDATE - February 1st 2020: As of the editing of this post, there’s still no season 2 to be found, or worse yet, I think it might not even be made at all. Well, it was quite a ride. F.

Top 6 Worst Anime:

6.- W’z

5.- Virtual-san wa Miteiru

Yes, I know I already had put W’z and Virtual-san wa Miteiru in my Top 20 Best Anime category, I had to include them as the worst because not only sometimes I do feel they’re kind of bad in their right with their visuals, but I’m mainly doing it for the sake of not looking like a lunatic. But there are 4 other anime that definitely need some of their own commentary.

4.- Mini Toji: Speaking of the Toji no Miko franchise, I heard that there’s gonna be an OVA based on the mobile game and my god, I really wish Toji no Miko can just die already.

(To be honest, I don’t know why I’ve grown to hate Toji no Miko if there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just an instinct or something like “I don’t like your guts”.)

3.- Granblue Fantasy The Animation season 2

2.- Miru Tights: I really wanted to like Miru Tights because it’s Yomu anime, but the show itself was pretty boring and tries to push the tights fetish so far that completely turns me off, but the worst thing yet is that TRUSS (The studio that made the series) privatized every episode as weeks went by! I thought watching the series on YouTube with English and Chinese/Taiwanese subtitles was a great accessibility for everyone to watch it! I thought they were considerate to do that but I have to take that statement back on having every episode privatized.

This is why I absolutely prefer stockings/knee-highs over tights/pantyhose, I love me that absolute territory so much.

1.- Kemono Friends 2 and One-Punch Man 2: That’s right, a tie between these two.

With One-Punch Man 2, the visuals are a major disaster and it nowhere near follows the heart from the original by Madhouse despite having some decent sakuga moments but still tries really hard and gets ruined with motion blur. Story is relatively faithful to the manga (because I do read it, unlike you RedMakuzawa), but it just wasn’t told properly with its horrendous animation.

I’m glad that pretty much everyone is saying that One-Punch Man 2 was a disappointment.

Kemono Friends 2 is obviously the biggest thing I truly hated the most this entire year. I never asked for a completely new storyline that won’t even follow the teaser from the first season’s ending, I never asked for a completely new human character to take Kaban’s spot as the main character (I’m happy that Kaban is still here but I’m not happy with her role), I never asked for Kemono Friends 2 to exist at all!

Although, come to think of it, there were like quite a lot of good moments, but most of the time, I couldn’t care less for certain characters like Kaban and Caracal and this entire recycled plotline, not to mention the occasionally inconsistent framerates in the animation too.

Both were destined to become my worst anime of the year, no thanks to studio changes.

Top 10 Best Movies:

10.- Captain Marvel: Let’s start with a little controversial. As a Marvel fanboy, I just tend to watch every MCU movie because of the story, regardless of quality and whatever, and I’m pretty sad that pretty much everyone hates it, even my older sister. At least there’s two friends I know who did like the film and it helps make me feel better.

9.- Once Upon a Deadpool: This is a 2018 release but I happened to watch it on January 2019, so I had to include this here. Yes, it’s Deadpool 2 but with the gore and profanity cut off, but it was worth rewatching the film even toned down.

Except I wasn’t prepared for the Stan Lee parts. ;_;

8.- X-Men: Dark Phoenix: I did enjoy the film, flawed (?) for sure but it wasn’t objectively bad. The way I think it’s flawed it’s because it just made me ask a lot of questions and lacks context about who the villains are, are they Skrulls or not?

(Wow, three Marvel movies in a row.)

7.- Detective Pikachu: So I’m not a big Pokemon person, but I’m sure this year was pretty much Pokemon year, from Sword & Shield, Ash finally winning a Pokemon championship and new anime series, and of course, Detective Pikachu.

This was quite a very good video game movie with appealing realistic Pokemon, albeit the pace was a little too fast.

With that said about how the Pokemon look, I think I’m definitely gonna see the Sonic movie. I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be as great as Detective Pikachu in terms of story, but at least seeing Sonic’s new design is something.(We do not talk about Sonic’s old design)

6.- IT Chapter Two: There’s really nothing wrong with the film. It’s just as good and keeps up the same pace as the first film!

5.- John Wick 3

4.- Shazam: DC has been quite in a roll this year since Aquaman, things just gets better with Shazam and Joker (although Joker is its own self-contained universe and Shazam is DCEU). I nearly cried on the part where Billy’s adopted family turned into the Shazam family! Quite some comic book inspirations!

3.- Fate/Stay Night: Heaven’s Feel II. lost butterfly: This was truly the most chill anime movie experience I’ve ever had in the cinema. Code Geass: Lelouch of the Resurrection was also a decently chill but at times people did yell but not super loudly compared to the other films I’ve seen.

The worst part about my experience is that I was literally dying from the very second half of film! My god, I’m definitely not drinking a lot of soda very often, I even went to the bathroom earlier. I’m blaming it on the Takis popcorn we always eat!

With that being said about the crowd in my cinema, I actually wanted to get a very lousy crowd because I started audio recording my phone so I can share to people how annoying Mexican weebs in my cinema can be, especially at that Shirou x Sakura scene, but it turns out there wasn’t a whole lot of people and the theater was in absolute peace, so I pretty much recorded the entire film in audio.

Anyways, the film itself was still pretty nice, can’t wait for the third part and at this point, I probably shouldn’t be begging for Konnichiwa (the distributor) to bring it, I’m pretty sure they’ll definitely will given that they released the first two films so far.

2.- Godzilla: King of the Monsters

1-C.- Spider-Man: Far From Home: I really quite loved Spider-Man: Far From Home and because I’m heavily biased to Spider-Man films and MCU films for this to become either second next to Avengers: Endgame, the next film just took its place for a good reason.

1-B.- Joker: This was an absolute masterpiece of a movie I’ve ever seen in my birthday! The Murray Franklin interview scene is my favorite scene in the entire film because the Joker monologue where he talks about the three subway dudes he killed and society in general just really speaks to me, it sounds similar on my existential crisis rant I fussed over on Discord servers EARLIER.

Venom was also a good birthday movie I got last year, though it came out a day later and I’m kinda sad, but Joker, since it came out exactly on my birthday, is definitely a gift I wholeheartedly deserved it! I want my movies to be released right on time! I also need more villain movies in my birthday in my life! (Though it depends which character because I’m sure I won’t be as convinced as Venom and Joker)

However, even if it was one of the best birthday gifts I’ve had in my birthday, I DID NOT let Joker to dethrone this next film...

1-A.- Avengers: Endgame: My #1 most anticipated movie of the whole year finally arrived and the one I seriously did not let this film get dethroned like last year with Spider-Verse over Infinity War! Wouldn’t you know it, this film literally brought me into absolute tears, hit me in the feels, EVERYTHING!!!

The way the film was marketed, the secrecy behind it and everything, and while the film delivered, all that stuff we previously believed has all been a lie and it was quite a surprise! They did not mess around with how important this film was going to be!

But alas, there’s still those ungrateful bastards who just ruin the film with things they say they don’t like or whatever! LIKE, SERIOUSLY, COME ON! YOU DO NOT TALK SHIT TO A MOVIE LIKE AVENGERS: ENDGAME, EVER!!! I DON’T GIVE A SHIT IF CAPTAIN MARVEL IS FORCED AND BARELY HAS ANY SCREENTIME OR WHATEVER, JUST APPRECIATE THE FILM FOR WHAT IT IS, THE PURPOSE, AND EVERYTHING!!! LEARN TO BE GRATEFUL!!!

Ugh, whatever. At least I didn’t hear that many complaints that left me a sour taste anyways.

Marvel just went so far with rereleasing Avengers: Endgame but with extra minutes of footage with cut content! That really sounds amazing, and it gets better when it was a worldwide release, including Mexico! Although... I really would have loved to rewatch the movie, but the schedule turned out to be at 9 PM, so for 3 hours, I would have gone around 12:30 or 1 AM and that’s a big no-no, I would have been killed. I also wanted to see it with my older sister but she was hospitalized at the time, and we couldn’t anyways because of the late ass schedule, so we had to wait until Spider-Man: Far From Home instead.

I don’t really care if those extra minutes are rough unfinished CG stuff that we can just see from the Blu-Ray (which I’ll never get), I just wanted to rewatch everything in the cinema, but I couldn’t because of the ridiculous schedule my cinema chose.

The moment Captain America said “Avengers... Assemble!”, I literally started bursting into tears, and so were the crowd being hype as fuck! My god, what else can make me cry from something this hype?!

There’s just a lot of stuff I want to discuss about Avengers: Endgame but I really can’t just process it! This was my absolute #1 favorite movie of the year and I definitely did not let any other film dethrone it! I love it 3000!

Honorable mentions:

Toy Story 4: I enjoyed the film regardless of everyone saying “Toy Story 3 should have been the final movie for good and this is just a cashgrab” or whatever, thankfully I didn’t cry at the ending, but I’m sad that my older sister didn’t like it for some reason.

Promare: I’m seriously disappointed that Promare didn’t come out in Mexico while America were seeing the film. I’ve been seeing fan arts galore and maybe a bit of spoilers, though I’m kind of in the dark about it. I really hope Promare comes out in Mexico next week! Just as long as the crowd isn’t absolutely noisy, though I had such experiences before, but I heard that America is much worse on noisy people in the theaters when the film was rerun a couple of times, jesus...

Top 10 Best Games:

This might be my most controversial category yet because I literally haven’t played any single of these games (except for two) and I’m heavily biased towards franchise I care the most, developer(s) I care the most, aesthetic, etc., not so much about quality and most importantly, experience by having played them at all. But even so, I want to congratulate them by their existence.

10.- Persona 5 Royal: As much as I like Persona 5 from how it is, the aesthetic and everything (I haven’t played it myself, I’ve seen my older sister play it), but it has turned somewhat of a controversial topic for me, because literally everyone I know has quite some harsh feelings on the game and it just affects me so much given how much praise I have seen, so I kind of walk away from P5 nowadays.

But now, there’s Persona 5 Royal! Not only has some cool new content, but I hope it improves some issues the vanilla version has left behind!

(I only want the new content, to be honest)

I wonder if Persona 4 had this kind of similar backlash, because I see Persona 4 Golden in a different light where it just simply adds new stuff and not try to fix the issues from the vanilla version (it does but it’s not how I see it)

9.- Kingdom Hearts 3: I’m not a Kingdom Hearts person but I’m happy that the long awaited KH3 is finally out, although it might be quite divisive because of the story and its issues, but it seems like ReMind is going to fix these issues.

8.- Pokemon Sword & Shield

7.- Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

6.- Fire Emblem Three Houses.

5.- Untitled Goose Game: HONK!

4.- God Eater 3: I wanted to tie GE3 with Code Vein, but I was eager for Code Vein the most than God Eater 3 and I haven’t seen much of it honestly, but I’m still including it here because I like the God Eater franchise but I’m not quite an avid fan, at least until I play GE2 and of course GE3. I just need to grow some interest with God Eater some more because I really like the post-apocalyptic aesthetic and everything.

3.- Azur Lane: Crosswave

2.- Resident Evil 2 Remake: Capcom’s redemption arc continues! And with its success, it’s even lead to the development of Resident Evil 3 Remake which it’s gonna come out next year, and I’m surprised that they’re working on it already.

1-D.- Code Vein: I’ve become quite furious when the reviews for it came out. The Metacritic shows that the game is average at best and people be like “This is garbage, I’m out” and my god, I’m seriously frustrated with all that shit. I waited for a fucking year and I don’t want to get disencouraged when I’ll ever have the chance to play it.

But thankfully it didn’t stop me from seeing people playing the game and it makes me more than happy that they do.

I had to go so far on spoiling myself and... what I heard was one of the best things ever, which I’m probably not gonna spoil for you.

1-C.- Astral Chain

1-B.- Devil May Cry 5/Travis Strikes Again: I have to make this a tie for two reasons, they’re my biggest franchises in my life, but they have differing levels of my personal importance.

With Devil May Cry 5, I never thought the good DMC will ever come back, after having to suffer through DmC, there was also DMC4: Special Edition released in 2015, but that’s kind of whatever, but then, shit just got real when it was revealed in E3 2018!

Anyways, let’s talk about post-release, the story is absolutely nice, they went with throwing a bit of throwbacks and it just screams everything absolutely worthy for answers and pay-offs, though the ending feels kind of inconclusive, seems kind of they’re going to be open with maybe a Special Edition of DMC5 or even DMC6, but who knows, but then hopes get ruined as Capcom announced they were done with the development of DMC5 after the Bloody Palace release, which means no more Vergil, Trish and Lady DLCs, which it’s utterly disappointing! (But will there still be a Special Edition? It took 7 years for DMC4 to get one (2008-2015))

One other problem I have with DMC5 is that Capcom might have done a very poor job on keeping Vergil a very big secret. I think it was already known that Vergil might have going to appear in DMC5 for so long, from Dan Southworth’s (Vergil’s VA) Facebook post with the #DMC hashtag, from people editing Urizen’s voice and they found a match on Dan’s Vergil voice, to Capcom outright releasing a spoiler trailer! Sure, people sure want to avoid that trailer, but really? Weren’t they supposed to treat Vergil like he was a really huge deal for the game that’s not worth spoiling at all?

Also, the game continues to be extremely stressful with the harder difficulties, but since I have played DMC3 a long time ago, my skills haven’t gone out of practice!... Mostly.

Now, let’s talk about Travis Strikes Again. The moment it was announced on the Nintendo Switch event in January 2017, I literally started bursting into tears and yelled out loud! Later in August, at PAX, a new trailer was revealed and even if it was a teaser CG video (it’s the first game’s opening post-release) and my god, it looked gorgeous. Then things started to get sour as Atkin Downes tweeted that he was “disappointed”, that he wasn’t brought back to voice Travis or something, and I was utterly disappointed, but things changed when in December, it turns out that Robin Atkin Downes was returning to voice Travis, not only him but the original voices for Shinobu and Bad Girl are returning as well, my hope was restored! (Though I was already gonna see how the game would turn out regardless)

The game came out and at first, I saw seeing Grasshopper‘s Twitter account retweeting positive reviews from lesser known articles, which I was good at first, but then someone posted the Metacritic where it has mixed reviews, like at 70 something (under 75) and I was kinda sad.

Some people may say that the game is a disappointment and the gameplay is repetitive, and boy, I don’t give a SHIT about what these fuckheads (see what I did there?) say about the game. Though I still have yet to experience the gameplay myself (chances are that I wouldnt really find it repetitive. Pretty much every game is. Uh, hot take), but when I watched walkthrough videos of the entire game, the Travis Strikes Back segments (a visual novel-inspired segment) are what brought me ABSOLUTE HOPE for the game overall, the story pretty much has! The lore and everything that explains what happened a little with Travis’s disappearance from Santa Destroy, he’s even got kids with Sylvia, Badman’s origin story from Badman Strikes Back from the DLC, EVEN THE EASTER EGGS LIKE FUCKING MONDO ZAPPA FROM KILLER IS DEAD, ALL THE EFFORTS SUDA PUT INTO THIS IS JUST AN ABSOLUTE LOVE LETTER FOR ME AS A NO MORE HEROES FAN (And for general Suda fans too, though I’m not the most hardcore Suda fan as I haven’t played The Silver Case and other games to understand the references).

The second patch of the game came and there’s a brand new opening featuring Killer7! And this just changes the No More Heroes Universe, no, the Sudaverse!

My god, there’s a lot of stuff I want to say but can’t process, but let me just say this: Even if you didn’t like the game, or you find it disappointing, you’re wrong! The story and the lore should be the biggest redeeming factor of Travis Strikes Again!

Just when I thought I want to get a Switch to play Travis Strikes Again, a few months later, a rerelease of the game with all of the DLC for PS4 and Steam came out in October and oh boy, that gives me a huge opportunity to play the game, either on my shitty ass laptop or in my PS4 (which I finally got it after so long and I’ll later explain why)! I really hope it goes the same for No More Heroes 3--WHICH BY THE WAY, there was a bit of problem around Travis Strikes Again where people thought NMH3 was going to be sequel bait when Suda said that if TSA sold well, the development for NMH3 would start, but I didn’t care if it was a problem or sequel-bait or not, I just wanted people to buy this game as much as possible, especially when the post-credits scene straightup teased NMH3!

One other thing I find it weird about TSA’s existence, is that Suda says that this isn’t much of a numbered sequel or a spin-off, I don’t really get what Suda means on what TSA is, but I’m still treating it as a sequel storywise, considering that NMH3 takes place after TSA. The post-credits scene definitely doesn’t mess around!

Then E3 2019 came and... NO MORE HEROES 3 IS A REALITY! IT’S DEFINITELY HAPPENING AFTER 9/10 YEARS!!! I’M REALLY GLAD TRAVIS STRIKES AGAIN GOT SOLD WELL ENOUGH TO MAKE NMH3 HAPPEN, AAAAAAA, I’M SO HAPPY!!!!! I NEED A SWITCH TOO!!! THOUGH I DO WISH THE GAME WILL COME OUT ON PS4 TOO, BUT AT THE MOMENT, I WANT TO GET A SWITCH FOR NMH3!!!!

Anyways, I’m done discussing Travis Strikes Again.

I put these two games as a tie for big reasons: They’re both my favorite franchises I hold dear the most (though I absolutely hold NMH at the very bottom of my heart more than DMC), both games are fighting between their pros and cons, one I definitely have played (DMC5) and one I haven’t (TSA)...

Let me point out their pros and cons real quick:

Devil May Cry 5:

Pros:

Amazing gameplay and graphics.

Amazing soundtrack.

Amazing story with neat throwbacks.

Cons:

Development finished, so don’t expect any more DLC.

Travis Strikes Again:

Pros:

Story that’s a much bigger love letter, helps explain what happened to certain characters after NMH2, etc. And even features Suda51 easter eggs.

Two DLC expansions than DMC5 will ever have.

Cons:

Kind of whatever gameplay. (for other people, not for me)

I do think Travis Strikes Again is much better in terms of content than DMC5 but it’s kind of a debate. They’re still amazing games regardless!

1-A.- Death Stranding: A Hideo Kojima Game = Instant #1 winner. And perhaps this is the most surprisingly divisive Kojima game I’ve ever seen in my life (Perhaps more or less divisive than Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain), at least with the reviews alone (At least in America, Europe and Japan have 9s, 10/10s), that doesn’t stop from seeing quite some cultural impact already, memes, fan arts and stuff.

I’m disappointed that it didn’t win Game of the Year in The Game Awards because obviously it’s such a big game, though not everyone really cares and it makes me sad, at least it’s still won some awards and won GOTY in other not-so relevant award shows.

The game is pretty much filled with an excellent gameplay, with a bit of realism where you trip yourself with rocks and everything, the game is filled with quite some originality, the actors, easter eggs, pretty much the most ambitious Kojima game ever and I’m having a damn fun with it!

As of the writing on December 28th, the day before I just beat episodes 4 and started episode 5, so it seems like I’m still long ways off on finishing the rest of the game and I still haven’t finished through the story (which I don’t find it confusing, by the way).

Part of the gameplay definitely reminded me of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the controls and everything felt familiar and it was really neat, even if it’s something for a completely original IP, part of the gameplay was still familiar with some MGSV vibes.

For those of you who think that Death Stranding is a disappointment or whatever (looking at you WatchMojo and everyone else), you are absolutely dead wrong! I don’t know what kind of Kojima game you definitely expected to be so bad but turned out to be something else, just get out of here and try to focus on something else, maybe you’re better off with seeing Kojima things with Metal Gear! Death Stranding definitely isn’t for everyone alright, especially for assholes like you!

I definitely expected Death Stranding to come out on 2020, but I enver thought it might already come sooner in November 2019 (Although Kojima did tease it might come out in the “year of Akira” (being 2019), so I guess I should have seen that coming, I completely forgot about it). Kojima has come a really long way with making his new studio, hiring people, finding studios to cooperate and make Death Stranding, everything in just 4 years and it was amazing for him and his team to put all of their efforts when it comes to making this and the wait was definitely worth it!

Honorable mention:

Custom Order Maid 3D2 English version: I had played the Japanese version before and I see there was a trial version for the English version. I hadn’t really thought it was gonna be an actual thing until I started seeing a Custom Maid Twitter artist retweeting a tweet of a Japanese gaming news site that the page for Custom Order Maid 3D2 was live.

Things around the English version of the game are relatively fine, but that is until the CR shop maintenance, talks about how to improve it, and even considering outlandish requests people make which aren’t on the original Japanese version of the game, the kind of original content just screams a huge insult for the Japanese Custom Maid community. Shit gets worse when the people I have talk with can’t even access the Steam page!

With all of the content that’s way behind and everything, I decided to go back to playing the Japanese version (especially when I found a torrent of CM3D2 + COM3D2 with all of the DLC until Spring 2019 or something). Except that given that it has way too much content, it’s so fucking slow for my laptop. But at least I’ll use the JP version for making characters and screenshots and I’ll play the English version for the campaign.

Whatever brand new original items might end up being, I hope they might be interesting enough for me to start begging for them to come out on JP so hard.

Alright, here’s a non-biased GOTY list with new releases that I HAVE actually played and some older games too.

3.- English Custom Order Maid 3D2

2.- Death Stranding

1.- Devil May Cry 5

Honorable mentions (Older games):

Valve games: Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead games.

VA-11 HALL-A: I’ll explain the story of how I came to play this game later down the line.

Saya no Uta: Steam release. I know I probably shouldn’t rely on official Steam releases and go for the fan made translations especially when they don’t have the adult content, but the thing is I didn’t have trouble buying the adult patch, and it was super cheap too. Besides, I don’t have any trouble with the translation so far, even if I don’t really speak Japanese, even if the little I know I definitely understand with the official English translation, so I’m not really dumb.

Melty-Blood: This is the first fighting game I have played for a bit in a long time when I’ve grown to be less of a fighting games person. I haven’t played the story campaign nor I would want to right now because I’m going to save it until I play Tsukihime just so I can understand some characters and other things.

There, you happy? (I’m definitely not using this non-biased list at all and honestly, it’s a hard tie between DMC5 and Death Stranding because I love these games right now)

Anyways...

Dishonorable mention:

Left Alive: I’m not really mad about how bad it is, but it sure looks quite unplayable. How did the developers even get away with making a broken game like this? The only things I can appreciate this game is how good it looks (at least on still), and of course the Yoji Shinkawa art.

Instead of doing a traditional review focusing on 2019 alone, I’m going to explain my journey I went through for the last 10 years, of course I’ll review the year 2019 in there, and after that, my resolutions and what awaits me in 2020. I may not remember everything, I only remember the biggest parts of my life.

Worst game:

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG: Every time I look at the game, mainly from the writing, I can’t help but think the game just gives me an existential crisis, because if I pull some shit like how they referenced a real life death of someone and among other ludicrous things, I think I’m definitely walking away from joining the industry and for my creativity to exist.

Bonus

Song of the year

“P.S. RED I” by TK from Ling Tosite Sigure: Spider-Verse was a 2018 film, but it didn’t release in Japan until March 2019 and what better way to promote the movie is having a kick-ass theme song by TK! Seriously, ever since I’ve been seeing the Japanese trailers and I heard a portion of the song, I was absolutely eager to check the full song, and once I started listening to it, I couldn’t stop listening non-stop! I’m not sure if it’s actually featured in the movie, but even if it’s not, at least this song is still something!

Ling Tosite Sigure (The entire band) also made another Spider-Man song this time for Spider-Man: Far From Home titled “Neighbormind”. With these two songs, I want TK/Ling Tosite Sigure to make Spider-Man songs forever!

Sorry, Devil Trigger, even if Devil May Cry 5 is a 2019 game, you already came out last year.

Artists of the year

(NSFW content warning)

Ogata Tei: I sure am super fixated on Ogata Tei’s Childhood Friend series because at the beginning of the year, I really couldn’t care much for his new works, but until Summer, my spirit has been lifted where Ogata is still delivering more of the series, not just once but twice in two Comikets in a row! I seriously can’t wait for more Childhood Friend series to come out and buy every single one of the doujins! (If possible, I also wish Ogata Tei wouldn’t be so slow with the DMM FANZA releases because the previous two doujins took about a year for them to come out digitally) (Also, please, I’m not a stalker)

Hinosuna: This one is truly the best Custom Maid 3D2 artist I’ve ever seen and met, not only he makes amazing futanari CM3D2 pictures and he’s quite a gamer too. He’s also the first Custom Maid person to make collab pictures with my characters and he did some in July and for my birthday, and he event went so far for gifting me VA-11 HALL-A on my birthday and boy, that was one of the best surprises I’ve ever gotten in my life!

I’m really sorry, Souryu, no more Kouiunogaii, not worth mentioning you here.

(This is probably gonna be the last time I’m going to do this category)

And now, we’re finally done talking about our Top categories! Now let’s finally start talking about a bit of my life in the last 10 years, and then my 2019 review and what to expect in 2020!

2009: Let’s start off with a little silly but upsetting, this was the year where I made my definitive Roblox account. I have played Roblox like a year or two prior as a guest but I finally started to play as a full account or something. I’ve always been making like a few but I wasn’t getting satisfied with them, probably because the usernames had really long numbers, e-mail or password, something like that, but then one of the usernames with really long numbers stood out, and I decided to make into the Brandon2126 account, I played it non-stop until I stopped playing Roblox for good in 2013 the moment I got my PC fixed for like the 5th or lost count for how many times my old computer kind of got messed up, but this one had finally has Windows 7 Home Premium and my sister was like “No Roblox.”, and it magically made me stop playing Roblox anymore. And in the process where I was making the accounts, I was genuinely being yelled at and beaten and even threw water on me in the process... yeah.

There’s another bad memory in 2009 I have, and it’s where I was watching Life in Portal: Madness on Newgrounds, this predates Avengers: Infinity War with the most ambitious crossover 10 years ago, but for some reason, this kind of encouraged me because I kind of hated how they killed Eddsworld (or just Tom), my mom started talking to me and at some point, I yelled at her to the point that I legit made her cry... yeah... this was probably like the first time, even at almost 10 years old at the time, I was becoming a human trash like I partially become today...

Okay, what a lovely way to start my 10 year journey from 2009 with some bad memories, but now we’re moving on to the next years with short but good memories... that is until you reach 2012 or 2013.

2010: I don’t really remember much of what happened this year, but the only thing I remember is that in Halloween (October 30th or 31st), I went to an anime convention with my older sister, it was really neat but then I saw a booth with a screen playing Highschool of the Dead, and the one frame I remember is the bloody floor from episode 2.

I wish I can go to these local conventions very often but at the same time I tend to think how kind of cheap and poorly made are by my city’s standards or something...

2011: This was the year where I started to finally get gaming consoles, starting with the PSP Go, and it’s where I first started playing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and I believe this was my genuine first Metal Gear game I started playing. I grew up with Metal Gear with Egoraptor’s Awesome series but I definitely haven’t played any of the games at all.

2012: I vaguely remember what happened to me or what were the most special things that happened and did, but all I can remember is that I’ve had some really bad problems with DeviantArt. Going by BMT2126StudiosMK, I had some seriously bad behavior during those times, to the point where I was kind of like straight-up method acting or something like that, and thinking about it just grosses me out and wish I can go back in time to stop myself for how I was back then.

2013: My problems with DeviantArt start to get much worse when this shit happened. Geez, 13-14 year old me was the absolute worst, ever.

That aside, ever since I played Metal Gear Rising, I can’t help but think that the game has gave me so much inspirations for the projects I want to make, it pretty much boosted my creativity in terms of the weapons, the technology, everything else in MGR.

2014: This year was my worst yet. It started with one of the best moments of my life early that year, because I get to watch Highschool of the Dead in my own cable TV with my older sister. I happened to notice that HOTD was coming to Mexican TV from a Facebook group about people who want to change Cartoon Network LA by removing the censorship and every other crap the channel has, if it weren’t from that group, I wouldn’t have ever known about it.

But in a few months later (I forgot specifically when), one night, I was watching La Sopa (Mexican version of The Soup), and when it was on commercial break, I checked my Twitter a bit, but when the show was back on, my sister came back and spotted me using Twitter, she yelled and then I ran away to my bedroom upstairs... There’s a lot that happened after that and either I can’t remember or I don’t really want to talk about it. Anyways, long after this happened, my family scolded me for who knows how many times I’ve been through this hell, the following weeks I’ve spent my life trying to make alternate accounts just so my sister won’t notice, but she ultimately has.

2015: This is where I finally started to become independent, like I was finally free from using my computer right next to my older sister, it happened like early in the year where I got to watch anime on my own and then watching seasonal anime ever since, starting with the Kancolle anime. (Regardless of what everyone says about it nowadays, I still enjoyed it)

2016: Here is where starting with Batman v Superman is where I had a hatred for critics. Every time a movie came out, they’re rated as trash, but when I saw them, they’re not really trash at all.

2017: This year has become my breaking point and I turned into the person I am today, someone with an absolute vendetta against opinions, I even had to make a post about my problems with them nowadays.

2018: You already know by now what a painful year 2018 was, and I can’t even bother to transcribe pretty much what happened, so I’ll leave my review here.

There were a couple of great moments, but the majority were painful moments after another, but still some positive ones somewhere.

If all my stories from all these makes make you disgusted at me as a human being, you’d better stop getting along with me now.

2019

Alright, time to finally discuss everything that happened to me this year and before we do that, let me give you a small headline of the year overall:

2019 is just as bad, if not, MUCH MUCH WORSE than 2018

Life continues to be a dumpster fire to the point where I’d really like to time travel and just stop everything. one can only dream. Anyways, let’s discuss why 2019 was my worst year yet, starting with:

The worst moments that drove me insane and nearly destroyed my life

For starters, the first two months were a hell of a rough start with my usual problems with my obsession with personal opinions and lack of progress in my novel; as for the latter, I had my older sister give me feedback on a few elements, but she later suggested me some ideas I’m not super comfortable at all, like not using real locations, nationalities, etc., literally make the entire world of my novel fictional, I had told her to not make me ruin my baby any further, she replied “good luck”, so I gave up on talking to her on my project for good.

Then in late March, one of the most heartbreaking incidents I’ve ever witnessed was that artist LOLICEPT and all the harassment he went through by one or two people thinking that one of his pictures was a poorly timed joke for the earthquake. I wasn’t aware of this until I saw hews tweeting about it, I was wondering what’s going on and I was looking at replies of that tweet hews made about LOLICEPT.

Then, I started tweeting thanking hews about a bit of context, while he wasn’t like 100% sure first, I thought that it was still something of a clue. Someone got in our conversation saying that they’re writing a thread of what’s happening and I was on board with the idea, I waited a little while and the document went live, I read the whole thing and I couldn’t help but feel heartbroken about what happened.

There was like a lot of shit that happened, but later on, I noticed that LOLICEPT was still active on Pixiv under a new name: Belko, he started like a day after the incident happened and deleted his old LOLICEPT accounts and I was late into that. Then on May, I noticed that he had a Twitter too, I thought he wouldn’t return to Twitter anymore but now he has, now my life seeing LOLICEPT again, even with a new name, is all I need, and I’m glad he’s still drawing which it’s the most important thing... although I have a complaint and I made a thread about it, but regardless, I’m glad he continues to draw, that’s it.

Now, there’s another issue that happened to another artist, I saw this tweet where it was an artist named kun0 and his girlfriend insulting DreamNekoTV’s art style live on Twitch, and that is not something you should do, you do not criticize artists like that. As someone who hates criticizing art and artists (well, I do have my rights to criticize whatever they make sometimes, I vent them out on my private server, but I do have a rule of NOT criticizing right AT them or anything; Okay, maybe art critique should still exist, but not like this, okay?), I just really can’t stand people criticizing whoever artist and their art style and stuff, because, well, that’s their art style and they all try their best (that is part of why I was never fond of the Saberface jokes on the Fate/Type-Moon community, same face disorder jokes is not something that should be ridiculed). This backlash was very big that not only fans, but even creators like Jacksepticeye, DrLupo, Joey The Anime Man, and many others have expressed disgust over this, and with that, DreamNekoTV has gained over 40k followers at the time (Right now she sits at ???k at the time of uploading this post).

So 2019 wasn’t the best year for artists.

With the kun0 controversy, I wish it had a much MUCH bigger impact, not only for the art community, but like the entire world as well, for non-artists like the creators I mentioned above have expressed.

But wait, things get a lot WORSE in the art community!

An artist under the name @Naju075 made this picture of Nessa and there’s nearly a thousand comments, most of which are people talking shit about “neSSa iS nOt BlAck eNOugH” or something like that, then there’s people who of course defend the artist, telling the artist to ignore the haters and even a meme of the art police who think they are vs who they are in reality (the former is they’re being like normal cops and “making things right” and the latter they’re straight-up clowns). This kickstarted a running gag amongst the art community where artists would occasionally make pictures of Nessa with intentional different color skins, including one from BOW with a rainbow Nessa, and even one from hews with a completely white Nessa intended to bait.

But that isn’t the worst of all, the next thing I’m going to discuss is the grandest worst thing from the art community yet:

Tutorial artist Manga Materials had posted a “Difference on a beginner and a pro’s line strokes” tutorial (which you can see on her Pixiv Fanbox now), this had caused controversy by a couple of assholes (Here are the culprits compiled by Andyface) were harrassing her because they thought her tutorial was “offensive” for the “beginner/pro” part. This harrassment was so bad that Manga Materials herself lead to close her English Twitter account for good, and she’ll continue doing tutorials on her Pixiv Fanbox account. She still has her Japanese Twitter account but she’s taking a break from it for a while and continue her work on Fanbox.

(Messages from her Fanbox: 1, 2. (Even though that second one is similar, but there’s still a different message in there))

This was the second artist scandal that pissed me off so grandly, it breaks my heart seeing artists suffering like this. I wish I could continue supporting her and see her tutorials, but I hate Pixiv Fanbox because it won’t let me use my debit card, and her subscriptions can be... quite expensive to say the least.

Like the LOLICEPT incident, as I mentioned that Manga Materials had deleted her Twitter, I don’t want to judge her decision, especially for a very sensitive person, I just would really like to see her pictures archived or anything. We’re going back to square one with the archive thing I mentioned with LOLICEPT above. (I wouldn’t like to be repetitive)

There’s another artist controversy that happened on early July, but it isn’t much about harrassment, it’s about plagiarism. Sky-Freedom had posted an Oneshota series titled “Rich Thots” starting on January this year (or late December because there are some pictures that Sky-Freedom hasn’t posted on Twitter; and the series wasn’t explicitly called Rich Thots, but the first pictures had “rich_thots” as the filenames so people took that as the series’ name), I never got to see the NSFW pictures from his Patreon until late June, I managed to save every picture right on time. Then, on July 1st, I checked my mail and I saw a picture Sky-Freedom posted, then I visited his Patreon... and every single of the JK oneshota pictures are gone. Sky released his apology and I was utterly shocked. It turns out that the first picture Sky made was a straight-up copy from a similar picture made by an artist called Shinjiro (@shnr2626/@shnjr4545). To think that Sky-Freedom himself would copy from another artist... This is hard to believe.

I want to keep supporting Sky-Freedom, but at the same time, I don’t want to anymore. Not because of the fact he plagiarized, I want to keep supporting him but I can’t even bother to care for his other content, such as Tejina Senpai and Azur Lane doujins which he sold at C96 like fire.

I wanted to ask Sky and Shinjiro about it but Shinjiro blocked me on Twitter (at least he blocked me from his talk account, I’m still following his art account fine), my obsession was so great that I even went so far on making a Twitter account (It was originally @JKOneShota but I changed it to @SkyOneShotaFan to be more a direct reference to being a Sky-Freedom JK oneshota fan account) to try to spread word and try to make both artists to communicate each other a lot more with the help of my feedback as to what I believe in the pictures themselves, unfortunately the account hasn’t met my expectations on spreading word and everything like I wanted, I want to delete the account now but I’ll leave it for historical purposes, even though it was meaningless. At least it serves as an informative account or something.

August 28th, 2019, the shnjr4545 Twitter account posted a new tweet, I signed in the Save Rich Thots Twitter account and spammed “ JKおねショタを復活させる” (Revive JK Oneshota) to that tweet, as well as the previous one (Seeing this image just adds fuel to the fire on the controversy) and... got blocked. I thought this was a pure art account and didn’t give a crap on people, yet here I am. 😂

So, yeah, Shinjiro pretty much doesn’t want you to talk about the Rich Thots series at him, or else he’ll block you. Don’t asking him anything about it, just stay silent.

But wait, after all that ranting with Sky-Freedom vs Shinjiro over Rich Thots, on October 7th, Sky-Freedom has revived the Rich Thots series and OH MY GOD, I COULDN’T HAVE BEEN HAPPIER. My heart and faith on Sky-Freedom has completely restored! (So much for that “protest” account. Although from October 7th to November 18th was kind of disappointing but I hope the next few weeks will start to get better. Even with the two new onee-sans featured lately, I wish Sky can reuse the other three girls before the plagiarism bullshit. At least change the two black haired girls a little bit and the blonde gyaru is 100% original)

Another thing I want to talk about artists is how at least two of them have been driving me insane with their art block. Moisture and sub_res, but the latter is the absolute worst). There isn’t really much to talk about with Moisture other than he just complained a lot about his “inability” to draw and stuff, I forgot when it happened but at least he’s stopped complaining. Now, moving on to sub_res and boy, I seriously hate this guy now. He complained literally every single day about his art block, his inability and all that stuff and no matter how many people tell him his art is fine and all that, sub is very neglective about listening to his fans and everything. He’s still going and at this point I really don’t want to follow him anymore if he continues to whine like that.

I seriously shouldn’t underrestimate the struggles artists have because I’m an expectator, but even if I’m a hobbyist artist, I do have my struggles to, but I do deal with them, I’m more confident with whatever I draw than sub does, especially when I don’t have such a mentality when I see some fine ass drawings as utterly shit (well, sometimes but most of the time not really) like sub.

There’s yet another artist drama around early November with artist Piukute062. It all started with him uploading this NSFW looking picture which it became the loading screen for the English version of Azur Lane. When I saw this picture, I thought it was super hot, but it was NSFW enough to be in a Azur Lane loading screen contest, and it happened... but only for an extremely short period.

As soon as the loading screen went live, it got removed out of the blue. Then a day later when Piukute posted a WIP for his next art piece, he stated that it got removed for the R-17 art, which it was expected because I always thought it was NSFW enough to be in the contest, but at the same time it sucks that it got removed. Two days later, he released an apology note to put an end to this drama for good.

Now, I’m glad that he’ll continue to do artwork for Azur Lane, whether fan arts or official, and he’s learned from this drama, but to be honest, I’m kind of conflicted about this...

Seriously, 2019 wasn’t the best year for artists.

Anyways, sorry for dragging all my talk with art and artists, but this shit matters for me as I’m more of a hobbyist artist. Anyways, let’s move on to even worse things that happen in real life.

On May 22nd, I went to Walmart with my mom and older sister, I find the Matchbox Jurassic World cars I wanted to buy, and we did, but when we were checking our bags when we were about to leave and pick the taxi, the cars went missing and we went rushing on searching for them, then a man came and and asked for the cars, and we were glad that this man came to give us the cars, but my mom and sister were in an argument and yelled at me that I need to be more careful, I felt a little sad and broken I had to make a thread about what happened, then my older sister messaged me on Discord and said that her friend saw what I posted and then she apologized. A friend of my sister, okay? Uh, okay.

Before I continue, let me address something: I think around early June or something (It’s been a while and I forgot), I was in the RPG Site Discord server and people talked shit about Persona 5, and pretty much everything they say about the game just hurts my soul so much that I decided to make a TwitLonger post about why I’m practically done with the Persona series for good. Later I made a bit of off-topic rant, going a bit existential and then I went to sleep. Then at 7 AM, my mom just came to my bedroom and she argued with me about the depressive stuff I write, she even went so far that the government was watching me. (Now that I think about it, there’s no fucking way that’s true). Later I checked Discord and my older sister DM’d me saying “My friend saw your stuff again, you need to lay off the internet for a while. You take people’s opinions too seriously.” It seems like my sister’s friend was apparently my stalker, this was starting to feel like 2014 all over again when I got stalked by one of my sister’s old friends. Wow, way to keep ruining my life for my “own good”... Thankfully a while later, they got suspended, and when they got back, they stopped following me. Moving on...

Etika... What happened to Etika was really sad. I don’t really want to talk too much about Etika because I’m scared that I may speak ill of him, but everything that happened to him leading up to his death sucks. Then there was also the Kyoto Animation arson, which that was an absolutely horrendous even to ever happen in Japan in recent years.

Around the same time Etika died, and I shit you not, a few days later, my older sister was hospitalized for her behavior, I don’t really know what happened but I remember hearing my mom having a phone call with the hospital and then i heard my older sister yell “WHO ARE YOU CALLING TO?!” and then they left and she got hospitalized.

Then around the same time, there was quite some problems with a DM group made by one of MysticDistance’s friends. First off, I’ve had quite some rough times with MysticDistance’s DM groups and I seriously feel bad because I hate being the way I am with my opinion vendetta, I can be quite a bitch. Anyways, with this new DM group by one of Mystic’s friends, first thing was that when my older sister was hospitalized, I spent most of my money buying stuff from Steam because it had the Summer Sale at the time (and bought other things that was a little expensive like Wallpaper Engine), then when I noticed my debit card’s wallet (Yes, I finally got a debit card, more details later), I started... e-begging, to get a bit of money so I can get like 300-400 pesos back because I needed the money for the three of us to go see Spider-Man: Far From Home, someone brought up the subject of our finances and one person got really mad at me because when I had shared my PayPal.me link about my financial struggles, someone else shared the other person’s PayPal link about their... cancer donations, and the person who made the tweet linking their PayPal for cancer donation really lashed out at me real bad, later I eventually clarified and all seems went to normal.

There was another situation in that DM group but we’ll get into that later.

Also, let me rephrase that, when my older sister was hospitalized, I spent most of my money I was supposed to use for Spider-Man: Far From Home buying shit from Steam! Man, I can’t get any worse. But don’t worry, my financial struggle quickly got fixed as one of my friends definitely volunteered to give me 20 dollars, which equals 400 pesos! The dude just saved my life.

My Summer vacation was the most boring and shallow vacation I’ve ever had in my entire life.

August came and went, and while the first few weeks were fine, like around the middle of the month, it just turned into absolute hell: Spider-Man leaving the MCU... but then that quickly got resolved a month later.

September came and there really wasn’t much big things to talk about, moving on to October boy, my 20th birthday was the absolute best I’ve had in my life. Still nowhere near the kind of birthday I always want, but I got some surprises and stuff that I’ve always been looking for. I’ll address this later in the positives of the year. Although there’s something I have to say which made me sad, but thankfully happened a day after my birthday: One of the Custom Maid 3D2 artists I’ve liked, kirishima_ss (NSFW, click with discretion) blocked me on Twitter after I tweeted them that yesterday was my birthday. Like... seriously dude? I just turned 20! Did they block me for the sake of not getting suspended from young accounts interacting with mature ones?! Or are they racist?! I kinda want to tell the other Custom Maid 3D2 artists who follow me but I don’t want to get them in trouble and they’ll end up getting blocked too...

Then like at the end of the month, I also got kicked out from the one DM group because I shared one of MysticDistance’s tweets saying something about popular series and whatnot, I asked what do they think and everyone proceeded to give answers like “I don’t care” and such. Me bitching out, I was like “...Really? Try to put some more heart to it” and one of the guys used me as an example of if a series is popular I kinda get angry with opinions and something like that, I asked that if that was really necessary to use me like that, and then I noticed that I got kicked out of the group out of the blue. I asked SAL about it and it appears that one of the people who was in the chat blocked me, I immediately thought of this one person and she did indeed block me. Well, okay, I always had the feeling she hated me anyways. (ROT13 message incoming)

Ebfr naq Wnevq, vs lbh obgu ernq guvf, ab, V'z abg tbvat gb haoybpx lbh. Jryy, V qvq sbe gur fnxr bs lbh ernqvat guvf, ohg bapr lbh qb, lbh'yy creznaragyl erznva oybpxrq sbe gur erfg bs zl yvsr orpnhfr V qba'g jnag gb frr lbh nalzber.

Wnevq, lbh'er fbzrgvzrf qvssvphyg gb gnyx jvgu, ohg Ebfr, V'z fhcre fpnerq bs lbh xabj gb gur cbvag jurer V ernyyl pna'g nccebnpu lbh ng nyy, V nyjnlf unq gur vzcerffvba lbh fgnegrq gb ungr zr rire fvapr gur gvzr V r-orttrq, naq abj lbh qb ungr zr naq lbh whfg xvpxrq zr bhg bs gur QZ tebhc, irel sbaq bs lbh gb trg evq bs crbcyr yvxr zr, V ernyyl tbg bire lbhe areirf jvgu gnyxvat nobhg gur fnzr vffhrf V unq sbe gur ragvergl bs gur lrne be whfg orvat n cynva nffubyr.

V qba'g ernyyl pner vs V'z xvpxrq bhg bs gur QZ tebhc abe V jnag gb erwbva, V jnf trggvat gverq bs frrvat zl Zrffntrf gno trggvat gur 1 vpba rirel qnl. Fb ybat.

November went by and nothing very big, but I have to say, and this isn’t much of a positive nor a negative thing but I need to address this here, on par with the first paragraph of this segment: When I opened Chrome and started checking on my WordPress site for my project and under my pen name, I came across two which were posted on October and I really have never noticed it in a month. The first one was just a guy saying “Hype!” because he was intrigued with my project, but the second comment from the same guy... was quite a long harsh feedback I’ve gotten so far. (Not the first or the most unhelpful (although it kind of is) but come on). The only feedback I genuinely care for my future as an author is I want grammatical issues, narrative issues maybe so I want everyone to give me suggestions on what do I do with certain characters I’m not sure about, but issues about the concept?

Let me real about this, the only kind of feedback I care about are grammatical issues, narrative issues maybe because I want to fix some character backstories and other things I’m not really sure with, but issues with the concept and everything? I don’t give a shit. Can’t there ever be some liberties with having to make some things without considering too much backstory or anything?

Oh, I almost forgot to tell something from November, I FINALLY GOT MY PS4!!! Though... the outcome didn’t turn out as hype and peaceful like I wanted. My mom and my older sister started arguing because mom used all of my sister’s money, and my sister got aggro. After seeing my mom and sister argue, my mom told me to come with her to go back home, but I turned and walked away from her and I said “I’m not going because you’re useless”. But then, I immediately felt bad and tried to search my mom around the plaza, but whatever, I decided to go home once and for all while my older sister was still hanging around in her own.

Later that day, my sister came back home, she and I finally set up the PS4 and I started playing Dark Souls 3 (Yes, I now understand how Git Gud feels like), but then mom came back home and she and my sister started arguing again, they even went so far to return and sell the PS4 back, then I (tried really hard to) pillow yelled that they were gonna sell the PS4 as soon as we bought it. But then, the next day, all got resolved and it turned out to be my sister’s fault for something. I have no idea what just happened, but hey, we’re not selling the PS4 anymore!

Seriously, my mom and sister are incredibly stupid, I always think their chemistry sucks. I wish either of them are dead already if this kind of shit continues to happen.

Anyways, moving on. December came and went, and the biggest thing that first happened and must talk about: The Game Awards. This was the biggest waste of time I’ve ever been, and the absolute worst one yet. The only things that I cared about were the No More Heroes 3 trailer (which I’ll talk about later), DMC5 winning Best Action game, and Death Stranding winning a couple of awards (I’m truly disappointed that it didn’t win GOTY, but at least it was something), everything was maximum sleep.

Anyways, Christmas came and I got some decent gifts: I got me a fluffy blanket, a new wallet and 500 pesos from my aunt. I got a new bath coat and a wristband from my mom. They’re good gifts but they certainly don’t top last year’s Christmas gifts where I got a new phone and Spider-Verse. (Speaking of which, I wanted to buy the Spider-Verse wristband but mom didn’t want me to because she thought “nobody wears wristbands”, and somehow she changed her mind with the one she just gave me. Now I need a ring so my hands look cool). I hope next year I get much better gifts, something crazier and expensive, though I might be asking for too much. Same with my birthday. But hey, at least the chocolates are always a nice side-gift (?) to get. (We always get bags full of various chocolates for Christmas, and got one for my birthday too)

This last paragraph wasn’t so much of a negative thing as it is more for positive, and this category is more like a long telling of my life in general throughout the rest of the year anyways.

And now we’re finally here, New Year’s day and, what else? You’re reading this post talking about my life throughout the decade and my long 2019 review.

Seems like there’s nothing else to discuss, so I think we’re done talking about the mostly negative things that I’ve been through in my entire life this year. But we’re just getting started...

The positives

For the most part I have pretty much discussed a lot of very negative things that happened in my life, but I had to do it so I can get it out of my way and I want people to understand what I’ve been going through in my life this year. It may or may not be worth getting sympathy over something that’s always my fault and stuff that is common in life, but at times it really drives me to give up on achieving my dreams and kill myself, but now the entire year wasn’t that bad like I think it is, so let’s discuss my biggest positives:

Starting around January, I finally got to have my own debit card and that seriously changed my life... For the better and for the worse. You see, the one thing I always do with my money is spending over 100 pesos on supporting artists, mainly on Fantia every month(Sometimes on Patreon when their pages are the ones that take away my money instantly, I’ve seen some that don’t really take away the moment I subscribe to one of their tiers), I also bought porn illustration CG sets in DMM FANZA. At some points, I went into a serious financial struggle. So yeah, I pretty much always spend my money with porn every month. I kind of wish I could try to save my money a bit, but sometimes, the Fantia artists’ content is too good to ignore them (Some pages have their contents posted limited for a month, others are unlimited).

I haven’t spent my money only on porn alone, I also bought games on Steam, especially during the Summer Sale. I bought various Valve games, Melty-Blood, etc. Even long after the Summer Sale, I managed to buy Killer7, Saya no Uta and Custom  Order Maid 3D2 (English Steam).

Man, my debit card is my best friend, I can finally start buying stuff and supporting artists I really care about, though the only problem is that I want to support artists on Pixiv Fanbox but Pixiv (Yes, all of Pixiv) won’t allow me to use my debit card at all. Sometimes Google Play is for some reason broken because when I try to buy stuff from Fate/Grand Order and Azur Lane, I always get an error despite putting my information correctly, but I hate Pixiv the most because they definitely strictly want credit cards. Sure, I can still use PayPal to support artists on Fanbox, but there’s no way anyone would ever give me money on PayPal.

Another best thing that happened in my life is that I finally achieved one of my long gaming dreams, I finally own a PS4 after years! Though, like I said, the outcome turned out grim, but still, I finally own a PS4 after so god damn long! My first PS4 games are Dark Souls 3 (We bought it along with the PS4 from some promo in the RadioShack we bought the PS4 from), Devil May Cry 5 (I never expected my older sister to buy DMC5 from Amazon a few days after buying the PS4 already), and lastly Death Stranding in December. November was basically Buen Fin (Mexico’s less chaotic Black Friday), so that’s how we got the PS4 after so long! (Though given how much I play DMC5 and Death Stranding lately, I don’t think I’ll ever touch Dark Souls 3 ever again). Man, I really hope I get enough money to buy so many releases we missed over the years!

About my novel I always wanted to make... Well, don’t really get me started on it. I still haven’t started publishing chapters of it at all. But still, early this year, I started making accounts with my pen name my older sister come up (I told her that I want her to help me out but as her feedback grew ludicrous, I gave up and decided to follow what I want to make myself), I’ve also been making a site with Wix, but several months later, I gave up with Wix and decided to make another one with WordPress.com and it’s so much better.

Even if I haven’t started publishing my novel’s chapters, at least I have been trying to write some of the prologue alone! So that’s something, I guess...

One of the best things that has happened to me on Twitter so far is that I’ve been getting followed by a few Japanese illustrators, but mostly Custom Maid 3D2 artists, and I can’t believe I happened to be friends with at least two who I really like talking with the most. Not only that but some also made collab pictures using my OCs and boy, I couldn’t be any happier. (See the collabs here, NSFW). This is how it feels like when having your favorite artists follow you but they also make pictures of your OCs. I’m very grateful that these Japanese artists are following and even talking to foreign nobodies like me, let alone Mexican.

Oh yeah, there’s also the fact that I’m attending fine arts school now, but it isn’t my best positive thing, I honestly feel mixed about it because my mom forced me to go to school again after a year being a NEET. But then, around earlier December, I got some scolarship money and just when I was thinking that I wanted to give up on attending this school after a year, the money just convinced me, so I think I have to stay a little longer, I guess...

And now, it’s time for the one big speech I want to make so my soul can finally be clean and set free once and for all!

My current mental health and trying to get my last laugh on everyone

As you probably might have guessed, my long struggle of dealing with people’s opinions and criticisms is never going to stop. No matter how much you tell me to ignore people with what they say and still try to like what I like, no matter how much how much you’re gonna tell me that I need to take a break from the internet for a while, none of that shit is going to happen.

I won’t take off the internet for a while because I don’t know what else to do (besides gaming and other things), I’m gonna get bored to death and there’s a lot of things that makes me happy, being fan arts and porn.

No matter how much you tell me and I promise to myself that I need to behave myself, I won’t keep my word and I will always continue to make fuss about everything about people’s mentalities when it comes to what they say and everything else in this life.

Everything I was a loner in 2015, as years went on, I’ve started to become more socially active and I have made more friends. But now, I’m not grateful for it. I wish I hadn’t made friends. I wish I remained an absolute loner for the rest of my life.

Let me try to make one last rant and hopefully somebody will understand and I will be free.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with everyone, everyone always tends to attack some things I really find okay with or for no reason. Everytime I watch something bad, I’m like “Hm, okay, that wasn’t so bad”, and then literally everyone goes way too far by being insecure asses yelling at everything on how offensively bad these things are. I know I had some experience too, but most of the time, I don’t really care, either from fandoms or just general communities that have some things in their interests.

Even if people tell me that they don’t have problems that I like what they don’t, that doesn’t change their hypocrisy, they’re cynicism! It’s not just one person that has a contrary feeling to mine, it’s always, ALWAYS a god damn circle of cynics that I can’t even want to interact with them and get along!

The biggest problem is that even if I were to enjoy what I enjoy and ignore people that they don’t, there are people that are even precious to me, but my hopes and dreams immediately get destroyed the moment they say one bit of negativity around something I hold dear the most in my life and it’s an absolute red flag an absolute offense for me!

Talking about things, for example, Overwatch or even Star Wars with Rise of Skywalker, or even the Fate fandom, pretty much any community is absolute cancer. Even for general communities, hearing and reading what people are saying about stuff you like but then they proceed to say things that they expect you to believe is nothing but a social taboo! There is no fucking way that I’m gonna agree to literally everything you say and my means by disagreeing opinions is always by lifting my voice and fight for it! It’s a social taboo to the point that we’re not even “mutuals” because we have nothing in common!

If you even dare to tell me that you’re not forcing your opinions or anything, then don’t even bother telling me to not force my opinions because that’s what I pretty much want! I want to force my opinions towards people until they give up and admit that I win!

It’s even worse when there are “fans” out there that are just outright bashing things for absolute no reason! If you do that, you’re basically destroying your pride for that series you’re supposed to be into, what it means to you, what it represents you! Sure, I may have some issues with certain things, but at the same time, I don’t really have problems with anything nor I even care to think or even agree to anyone with whatever bullshit they say. I don’t give a shit whether nothing is perfect, well it is for me and my heart, as long as I have fun or don’t have problems, that’s it!

People think they’re fans of a certain franchise they represent, but no! Why can’t anyone become real fanboys to the point that they’re more like blind fanboys like me where I tend to support literally anything regardless of some situations!

It’s even dumber that there are people asking for people to make “good” things or anything that they think it’s “good”. First of all, please for the love of god, define “good” because you clearly have no idea what do you even mean or even want. If you think you want people to make “good” things as a general principle of life, you’re dead wrong! There’s no way anyone would ever make “good” things or whatever you want, instead, you might be thinking that the good stuff you want is stuff for you. So stop abusing the word “good” as a means of a principal rule for every creator to make, and instead try to find some things that you may find interesting, things that speak to you, by yourself!

The worst thing yet is that people abuse their opinions as “facts”. Like, seriously?! You do not use your opinions like that and call them “facts”, no way in hell anyone will ever believe you!

I always thought that people expressing their opinions by text is just harmful for me but I’m sure if anyone are able to speak it out by voice, then I wouldn’t have any trouble, but voiced opinions are no different because of the god awful tones people make with their voices! (This is part of why I don’t like watching The Unreal Bruhcast anymore)

So from now on, I don’t really care about pretty much everyone’s opinions. Not from friends (Belsheber Rusape, Pixelbuster), not from family (my older sister), not from YouTubers (Jacksepticeye), not from artists (Akai Riot), anyone! I’m really sick of anyone voicing their opinions, mostly expressing hate for everything I’m curious of, and what I hold dear the most, because I hate everyone, I really hate everyone so much!

You people have failed me! You have failed me! As friends! As mutuals! Everything! I have thought really high of you but then you always blew everything up the moment you start talking shit about the stuff I hold dear the most! I don’t want to be with you anymore! You always try so hard in trying to convince me by heart to ignore whatever bullshit people say with your empty words! Either that or I will seriously never learn and I will continue to talk shit right back at you!

By the way, @BrinkOfMemories/@BrinkArtist was one of the pioneers for developing my hatred because, my lord, every time I read their opinion tweets, they always gave me an absolute headache and I want to punch them so bad!

Now, let’s talk about my desire and my future of becoming a creator (artist, author, etc).

Every time I see people talking shit about stuff like Kojima’s writing, or any kind of poor writing people talk about, I always think that I would like to walk away from becoming a writer. why? Because I know nothing about the most basic things of “good” storytelling!

Seriously, who the hell do people think they are? They think they’re trying to be better than most of the creators (artists/writers/game devs, etc) are trying to be and what they make? Do they seriously can even understand the thought process of what people tend to make? Why do people always be like “This franchise needs to be this, the core” and all that shit. And what’s with all this “These characters need to be relatable to a lot of people”, “this story doesn’t follow the core of the original“, “this story is predictable”, like, what is all that garbage vocabulary?! This is why there’s no creative freedom anymore!

Not a single fan is even civil with the creators they respect anymore! Nobody really thinks what it’s like to be the creators they love and hate like I do, as someone who wants to get in the entertainment industry in some way! They can’t even think what it feels like to be the creators they inspire/aspire to be!

You think people like you who think they’re better than most creators do and even go so far by fixing some of their works because they’re incredibly flawed and all that shit, to be somebody but the fans themselves, they don’t! They think that people should make stories or anything and expecting them to be great instead of developing any sort of trust and cofidence and even try to be more hyped to check their works out regardless of quality, and then let everyone have their creative freedom!

I’ve had some really harsh feedback where in my project I want to make so bad that I tend to draw characters only to be shoved in the story by just showing them off and don’t have any real purpose, I don’t really give a shit! I’m just trying my best to figure out what kind of characters do I want to make or whatever! This is the kind of feedback that affects me so god damn much to the point where I seriously try to give up on making my project a reality! When that shit happens, I always think that I should give up in making my project beacuse nobody deserves to see my masterpieces I have in mind, my magnum opus I’ve been trying to develop for years! All because of your stupid intellect and you seriously think you have the means to make a “great” story with great storytelling, memorable characters, and everything that makes you think they’re so good, why not try to make that story with said things or even try to write my project yourself?! This is my kind of creative freedom I want to have and you people always destroy it! Not to mention that you always ask me what’s it even about and I seriously can’t process to answer what it actually is! It’s nothing but peer pressure!

Then there’s also another feedback I’ve gotten about my project as the “Why this?”, I get asked a lot of “Why...?” because people always want to look for a purpose for literally EVERYTHING and it makes me sick! Sure, I do have some things in mind for some things having a purpose, but dear god, can’t you just let anyone try to make anything without having to think of a story way too much?!

Speaking of which, there’s always these kind of people who are like “This character is my favorite because of their great actions” and whatever, and I’m literally the only one who’s just like picking a character and calling them my instant favorite from their designs alone! I may be a simpleton of a brainlet who thinks that way, but if you’re gonna force your opinion that the character I like is terrible, get out of my sight! Isn’t it something like a friend tells you “Hey, see that guy/girl over there? I think he’s/she’s hot.”, huh?! Shouldn’t it be the same for fictional characters as well?

If there are tons of things you hate in fiction so much, then I’m bound to make the same mistakes as everyone else! Make a gacha or any other things you hate that are being inserted in fiction! And do you have any idea why do creators keep putting things you hate? Because they have creative freedom! They can do whatever the hell they want! Why not let them be?! What about yourself?!

And then things get worse, there’s always a bunch of SJW assholes who always attack artists because they “promote pedophilia” when they draw shotacon/lolicon stuff? That kind of shit ALWAYS happens and it seriously need to stop! You seriously have to think that all what they do is ONLY FICTIONAL, you should keep that up in your god damn asses and never show up with these artists ever again! That’s the thing, aside from writing, why not let anyone draw whatever they want to?! Don’t you people know the rule that you should separate art from artists at all costs?! I draw gore and some dark shit a few times, but that doesn’t mean I’m an emo or edgy person! I just draw what I like!

Oh, and if anyone’s going to attack me because of my insecure opinions like this or even call me a p3d0 because I support shota/loli art (keep in mind this is strictly FICTIONAL), please don’t do that and get out of my sight!

Going back to the topic of my project, the project is absolutely top secret because if I become big enough and even under a different name, if I tell and suggest everything to everyone I know, it’s unlikely but some might make allegations about my rude behavior and how much porn I retweet, I’m basically gonna get cancelled and I don’t, for the faint of heart, I DON’T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN, PLEASE! So for all the people I tell everything about my project, I’m grateful for you to support me, but it’s time that I really wish you should forget about me and everything I said and just wait to get surprised!

After everything I just said, let me give one last fuck you to everyone I’ve grown to meet, like and hate

One last time...

I’m never going to be like you! I have my own reasons and I have better issues to be mad about and they’re not something everyone knows or even cares!

I think I am definitely done discussing what I always want to discuss and I really hope you will understand my feelings. Thank you.

Now, let’s finally move on to...

What to expect in 2020: The year and the decade beyond

Now that I’m finally done making my long review for 2019, let’s now finally talk about what am I gonna expect for 2020, mostly about the year and a little bit of the decade beyond!

Although, to be honest, I don’t really have high hopes on what the year and the decade has in store, because we’ve come to the point where we’re now in the age of extinction, pretty much everything and everyone we loved and care are disappearing, so I’m really scared of the future. Sure, I could move on but sometimes it might be hard thinking back on the stuff and people you used to admire not being there anymore...

Anyways, even if I’m going to lose the people and things I care the most in my life, there are still some new things I’m going to discover, so there’s that.

Now, let’s get started with talking about the 2020 things!

Resolutions

Like I said, I’m not really looking forward with making resolutions because I already know that I won’t be able to keep my word, pretty much anyone else might, but for me it’s kind of a big deal. I’m still gonna try to mention what are my resolutions are, and it’ll probably be the last time I’ll do this, so just in case, here they are. If I seriously don’t accomplish these at the very first days or anything, I’m basically doomed:

Release my novel once and for all: After my long ass rant about my future as an author with my project. LIke I said above, I seriously may still have not been able to start publishing at least my prologue alone, at least I’m still writing like 3/4s of it the best I can.

I’m publishing my novel as a serial on my WordPress site because I don’t want to publish them on Wattpad or Royal Road for one because I don’t have a cover, I don’t have the money to pay for an artist I want to make a cover for me nor I want to make like a placeholder at the moment.

Speaking of the cover, after making my pen name, all I did was asking a lot of Japanese artists if they can draw me a cover for the novel... When I’m already aware that I DON’T have money at all (I was asking for spec work). Thankfully some of the people I asked have turned down and most haven’t responded at all.

Let me tell you a little bit of my project. I used to dream of wanting to make this into a game, maybe an RPG Maker one right now, but I had no idea what to do with RPG Maker nor I think I would like to make my own textures and assets, I don’t think I would have gotten patience. But then about 3 years ago, I wanted to write the script for the game, but that turned out to be more like a character encyclopedia book because I really had no idea what kind of scenarios I wanted to write. Also, most of the character biographies was written by a friend who I regularly about my project with. So I gave up on my dream on making my project into a game. Besides, I don’t think I might ever learn game design or anything.

Then like two years later, I just somehow realized and learned the importance of books getting adaptations and stuff, I decided to turn it into a novel instead mainly because I want people to adapt it. So my dream of wanting my project to become a video game is still there, but all I have to do is make a novel and try to talk stuff like how I want to get it adapted or something.

(I’m not sure if that sounds like the best plan for you, writing a novel only for the sole purpose of getting adaptations, but that’s what I really want, to be honest)

I always thought that writing a novel was going to be easy as pie, but trying to figure out how to write the scenarios, describing them, the action scenes and everything is a nightmare!

I have researched quite a lot about the writing process, and the one advice that stucks to me is “You don’t have to write perfectly, just try to write something no matter if it’s garbage”, and that’s what I’m kind of trying right now.

Anyways, here comes the one thing I’m sure I might regret this, but I think it should be time to talk a LITTLE bit about something from my project.

Do you really want to know the name of the project? Well, I can’t give you the full title, but here’s a working title of sorts:

“Cebwrpg SZJ” (Definitely not used with something XIII)

(This is just to throw people off. The people I talked about my project with of course know what it means. And if someone figures out what it means, I’m probably gonna keep quiet. Although I think it might already exist somewhere...)

I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the project really is about, so I might have to leave you in the dark until I publish the novel and there’s a lot of attention and it becomes big, so that’s all you’re getting for now.

I have quite some ambitious goals which you may or may not believe me and might laugh at me but hear me out: I want to become the new SCP, Type-Moon and Marvel.

I want to be like the SCP because every time I look at the website, the creatures and everything, just truly inspires me, I’d love to do something like the SCP with writing a ton of information about my characters and stuff, but the big problem is that I really have no idea how am I gonna translate my thoughts or things into words to make lengthy profiles or something. I’d like to be like Type-Moon because... all I can think of is doing nothing but Cebwrpg SZJ as much as TM is doing nothing but Fate, but then they’re also toying with the idea of the multiverse, even though they never explicitly ever address if the Fate projects are multiverse because most of them tend to have their self-contained universe, it’s a general comic book concept of multiverse with different incarnations of characters I really can’t stop using the comic book things with Fate. Lastly, I’d like to be like Marvel because, we’re going full circle with the multiverse talk, but I’d also like to be like the MCU (Pretty much everyone else is) with shared universe and everything galore. Although for me, it’s not just going to be MCU, it’s also going to be more like the Disney/Pixar Universe theory. I just like shared universes, okay?

I would also love to become a Virtual YouTuber, just to conceal my identity and hide my public appearance, but at some point, I would still like having public appearances in conventions or any sort of these events anyways. The kind of VTuber I’d like to be is just all by myself, I wouldn’t like to be like Nijisanji or Hololive where it’s everything under corporate control and I wouldn’t like to play a character with features I’m not really sure with, I’d like to make and be my own characters.

This is the real job I want to start doing right now, and there’s no way I’m making my novel writing hobby for free, I really gotta get serious and try to make some money off from donations from chapters and eventually the full book release. (I’m planning to publish it on KDP, by the way)

I just want me and my franchise to become something big for the 2020 decade and for the Reiwa era, I want to be something! I want to achieve my dreams as soon as possible and I’d better make it fast! (I only have 10 years to do so)

Also, here’s my retirement announcement for you to read because there’s a reason why I want to stop writing blogs in Tumblr for good.

Try to behave better and be more respectful: Aside from taking people’s opinions seriously, another recurring problem about my behavior is that I always fight with my mom every time I do my older sister’s homeworks. There’s just really something from her that really frustrates me. I do feel like I really start lifting my voice at her for no reason, but my brain just feels like it’s tired of her shit, or that doesn’t want to be reminded or whatever, so I hope I could try my best at trying to have some more patience, but I still have to fight for it.

Get in shape: I gave up on going to the gym at the beginning of Summer because I wanted to rest and because I was gonna attend the fine arts school I go now because I wouldn’t have the time to go to the gym right in front of my house but I get back home exhausted and I want to save hundreds of pictures I retweet on Twitter and bookmark on Pixiv. But then Dumbbell Nan Kilo Moteru came and I immediately regret stopped going to the gym.

But it’s fine because it does show exercises you can do at home, and probably the most basic thing I can do to reduce my fat belly when having a decently fit body is doing crunches. Probably 3 sets of 20 will do, and I really hope I can do this every day. Not just crunches, I also want to do planks, but sometimes I’m not really sure if it’s effective or anything because I want to feel that my abdomen is getting burned or something.

Draw regularly until I improve my art drastically: Back in 2012, I used to draw comics mindlessly, now I’m feeling kind of tempted to draw comics again but this time it’s going to be focused with the Busujima Sisters. As much as I think that I would like to do so, I’m not really sure if I’m prepared to be drawing comics again. I mean, I do have ideas for some panels but I need some time to think better on how to structure things out.

I’m mostly a traditional person, but I really get frustrated on how the graphite is like really buried on the paper and I can’t erase anything no matter what, it’s even worse with lighter pencils, so I think I should also try to learn and have more patience with digital art. It drives me nuts on how digital art works, from brush size vs. canvas size (The bigger the canvas, the smaller even the bigger brushes are going to be) and my least favorite, layers.

So I think I might become a full-fledged artist account, not only by doing Custom Maid 3D2 pictures (Though I’m not really sure because I downloaded a torrent with CM3D2 and COM3D2 with most of the DLC and when I open COM3D2, it’s extremely laggy to the point that it might even be unusable for my laptop), but by posting doodles or even fully colored illustrations (if I have the patience) as well. I have posted pictures a little bit, but I think it should be time for me to become a full-fledged regular artist.

Choosing between traditional vs digital is a straight-up 50/50, but it’s going to be worth the try with both if I were to draw literally every day until I run out of sheets from my sketchbook because all I do is just doing doodles, but that’s the point.

Try to retweet less: This is one goal I’m not really 100% sure if I really want to do and I’m still gonna write it and not fulfill it anyways, so I’m just gonna write this here just in case. I’m always retweeting a lot of stuff, mostly porn, and I’m really concerned about my followers who might see the porn I constantly retweet a lot and they see my name everywhere, some don’t really mind but I seriously need to try to stop that habit for a bit.

Although even if I would stop retweeting, liking tweets is no different, I always retweet because I really like going to my profile and see the tweets I retweeted and everything. Retweeting tweets means keeping the person’s tweets to yourself, that’s what I always believed in my retweets. And yes, I’m lazy to go to my Likes page but I always tend to like replies, so they’re going to be a hassle to get through.

Most anticipated releases

It’s finally time to talk about my favorite part of every year, new releases! I’ve seen some stuff aimed for a 2020 release, but I’ve even seen some that are slated for 2021 and beyond, but for now, let’s talk about what this year has to store.

Although, I may vaguely remember what am I looking forward the most, but I’m just going to talk about the ones that comes to my mind first.

Also, better keep in mind that while some things may have their 2020 release dates, delays are always bound to happen, but we still have to count in some things anyways.

Anime:

There’s just so many anime coming out that I think I might have lost track. Sure, you can look at my previous Fall 2019 Final Impressions post to see what are my upcoming Winter 2020 anime, but here are the biggest shows for 2020 I’m excited for.

Attack on Titan season 4: This is going to be the final season of Attack on Titan and we have come a long way for the finale, especially that the manga is going to end soon as well. Don’t worry, this is slated for a Fall 2020 release, so as of the writing and publishing of this post, we have 10 months for S4 to come out, especially when the manga will finish by then. It’s to be determined if it’s going to be a one-cour series or a two-cour series, but what I expect the most is that it should at least adapt the finale, kind of like how Tokyo Ghoul:re the anime happened a while after the manga had ended or something, except Attack on Titan S4 is going to be faithfully adapted of course.

Akira remaster and new TV series: A 4K remaster of Akira is something I’m quite curious on how it’s going to work, but a new TV series is what I’m the most curious. Apparently, the new TV series is being made so it will fully adapt the manga where the film didn’t (the creator directed the film but the manga hadn’t been finished at the time), animated by Sunrise. I wonder if the Akira TV series will capture the original film’s style or something.

2020 sure sounds like it’s going to be the year of Akira, though 2019 was the year Akira (and Blade Runner) is set and then the Taika Waititi live-action film is going to be released in 2021.

Also, with that being said about an Akira TV series that adapts the entire manga, I think we’ve come to the point that we’re getting anime remakes with the sole purpose of adapting the manga to its ending, see Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Fruits Basket 2019. Speaking of which...

Fruits Basket season 2: I haven’t read the manga or watched the original anime, but just with season one of Fruits Basket 2019 alone, I was impressed, so with the second season, I’m looking forward on how will TMS adapt the ending!

Fate/Stay Night: Heaven’s Feel III. spring song: At this point I definitely trust Konnichiwa (the Latin American distributor) and of course they’ll bring it to Mexico and Latin America like they did with the first two films so far, I shouldn’t be begging way too hard on wanting to see them. (I am with Promare if it’s gonna happen)

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: It’s been years since we have last heard of Evangelion 4.0 ever since the film got delayed because Hideaki Anno was directing Shin Godzilla, now, the film is finally happening.

This is the one film that I’m sure fixated on wanting for Konnichiwa to bring it, I see Konnichiwa as the kind of distributor that brings big franchises and big hits and Evangelion is such a big franchise for another distributor to bring the film to Mexican and Latin American theaters!

UPDATE - February 1st 2020: As of now, Konnichiwa have announced the following movies they’re going to release throughout the year:

Violet Evergarden

Konosuba

Human Lost

Fate/Stay Night: Heaven’s Feel III. spring song

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising

So... None of them are either Promare or even Evangelion 3.0+1.0, at this point I truly lost trust with Konnichiwa, they definitely lost me. Although it’s good that they’re still bringing Fate/Stay Night: Heaven’s Feel III and My Hero Academia, but no Promare or Evangelion? Really? Come on! Human Lost of all movies?! Who thought it was a good idea?!

Keifuku-san: As of the writing of this post in December 30th, this is a surprise I really never expected to see! I saw Marissa Lenti’s tweet about “new Tatsuki anime” and the tweet she was quoting was of the Crunchyroll news where Tatsuki teases a Keifuku-san anime, and I freaked out because I’m excited that he’s already working on a new anime already based on his shorts. The teaser was posted two days ago and I seriously hate that I missed it!

With the success of Kemurikusa 2019, I think we’re seeing some sort of a post-Kemono Friends reinassance with Tatsuki by making remakes of his old classics, except Keifuku-san is his most recent short but I’m glad he’s turning into a full-fledged series, I want more Tatsuki! More Tatsuki More Tanoshii! (This is the polar oppososite of “No Tatsuki No Tanoshii” and I hope everybody gets to make a similar phrase)

UPDATE - January 4th 2020: That mystery anime from Tatsuki turned out to be Hentatsu and it’s out today. What in the world did Crunchyroll think it was Keifuku-san though the box did imply it might have been Keifuku-san. But it’s fine, Hentatsu going from shorts to a full-fledged TV series is cool too!

Golden Kamuy season 3: Just when I thought there wouldn’t be anymore Golden Kamuy, it is indeed happening and I’m happy that it is!

Zombieland Saga season 2: I’m impressed with the first season and I’m happy the second season is happening and I hope it’d better pay off the final episode’s teaser, that teaser is just too good to pass it up!

Games:

No More Heroes 3: Easily my #1 most anticipated game of the year! I’ve been a long time No More Heroes fan and I’ve been waiting for a third No More Heroes game for so long! Although the one big thing I’m skeptical for is the soundtrack, since there’s a new composer, being Nobuaki Kaneko, and it’s no longer Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda (Though he’s still working with sound design, so that’s a plus), I’m pretty sure the soundtrack will be nowhere near as good as the first two games, and hearing the composer’s tracks in Spotify, my skepticism grows stronger, but we’ll see. Overall, I’ve been waiting 10 years for my whole life for NMH3 and it’s finally happening!

I just need to get a Switch as soon as possible so I can start playing it on launch, but getting a PS4 was my long time biggest priority. So I really hope Suda will do the same with Travis Strikes Again by releasing NMH3 on PS4 and PC!

Resident Evil 3 Remake: With the success of RE2, they immediately started developing Resident Evil 3 Remake, and with the trailers released, I’m absolutely impressed, and it uses the same gameplay as RE2 Remake. Also, Remake Nemesis is looking good. Though, honestly I’m not really sure about the nose, but if there’s one thing that I really love about Nemesis, is his teeth.

Tsukihime remake: The Tsukihime remake is the most infamous and meme-worthy vaporware from Type-Moon that it’s not even a contest between it and Half-Life 3, if “See you in 10 years” thing may be true, then there’s already signs of its existence right now, with confirmation of test plays. So there might be hope that we’re finally going to see something about the Tsukihime remake in the light of day, and even a release date eventually!

(I’m a terrible historian, I don’t really know much about the Tsukihime remake’s history)

Also, when there are news about Tsukihime Remake’s release date, I’m going to play the original! (As long as I finish Saya no Uta because I need to finish that one first)

Half-Life: Alyx: It still may not be Half-Life 3 as mentioned with the Tsukihime remake, but I’m surprised that Valve is finally doing something with their old IP after all these years, it may be a VR but it’s still going to be something interesting. I hope it’s going to kickstart a new reinassance era for Valve if they continue to make amazing games again after Half-Life Alyx, hopefully we won’t see any repeat with Artifact.

Death March Club: This is the very first project Tookyo Games (new studio by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi) is releasing. Looking back, I was really not aware that Danganronpa V3 was going to be the end of the Danganronpa franchise for good and it makes me sad, there’s so much potential for V3′s univverse to be developed, but it appears that this might be it. I really hope Spike Chunsoft will do something about Danganronpa in its 10th anniversary, hopefully something new and good and not just some lame celebration messages or whatever, I want a new game or a new anime, something new Danganronpa! ;_;

Anyways, even if there may not be any more Danganronpa, I could still follow Kodaka‘s new developments with his new projects (along with Uchikoshi). Teased back in 2018, there are two projects featuring Rui Komatsuzaki’s art, one is a new game and the other one is a new anime by Pierrot, and I’m seriously the most excited for these two!

Movies:

Black Widow and The Eternals: I haven’t kept track with the upcoming Marvel releases right now, so I’d better keep a careful eye out for them. Not only Black Widow and The Eternals are coming out, there’s also going to be the MCU TV series in Disney+, like Falcon and Winter Soldier and WHAT IF...?. I’m especially intrigued for Falcon and Winter Soldier right now.

And for those who are like “Welp, time to stop caring about the MCU because all they want us to do is use our money for the movies and for paying Disney+” when there were news that Kevin Feige says that the Disney+ series are going to be crucial for the MCU, fuck you. (I’m talking to you, Pixelbuster and Macuelos. You boomers)

As for Black Widow, I’m concerned that it’s going to be Captain Marvel 2.0, not only for having SJW trolls (which that wasn’t the biggest deal for Captain Marvel), but rather even normal people bashing it out for its quality, the biggest thing people have criticized at the first trailer so far is Taskmaster’s costume where it looks nothing like the comics. That shit is seriously none of my concern and I really think Taskmaster looks really cool, it reminds me of Crossbones and that’s what makes their military aesthetics so special. (And please swallow that)

Venom 2: I’m supper happy that, regardless of its critical reception, the first Venom movie became a financial success and a cult hit with Eddie x Venom shippers. With that being said about making a lot of money, I’m really happy that they’re working on Venom 2 right away! That post-credits teaser with Carnage is just too good for a sequel to not be made!

I don’t care if it’ll “improve” the first film, I do think Venom 2 is going to be “better” but in a sense of topping the original because of Venom and Carnage, not because of improving the first film’s issues and all that shit! Give me more Venom movies and Venom vs Carnage and I just want the second film to be at the same pace as the first film which my older sister and I loved it!

I really hope the film will still come out in October, especially that in October 2020, my birthday is going to be on Sunday, which that means I’ll finally get to see a Venom movie DIRECTLY on my birthday just like with Joker this year!

Morbius: This wasn’t high on my anticipated movies list, but the trailer was released on January 13th 2020, I must talk about it now: The trailer looks interesting and I’m definitely going to see it, but the biggest surprise yet is that there’s Michael Keaton’s Adriam Toomes/Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming at the very end of the trailer. Seems like this is definitely setting up some small ties to the MCU with the Spider-Man characters, and it all depends if Tom Holland’s Spidey will appear in some form with either Morbius or Venom 2, most likely Venom 2 but we’ll see about Morbius.

Wonder Woman 84 and Birds of Prey: 2019 was sure the best year for DC with Shazam and especially Joker, though I’m concerned that the good DC movies period is already going to be over with Wonder Woman 84 and Birds of Prey where people aren’t going to be fond with these films, but I’m still going to see the films regardless. (Especially Wonder Woman 84 because a lot of people had trouble with the first film’s ending smh.)

There’s also going to be major events like the Tokyo Olympics 2020 and I’m curious to see how much of the anime pop culture there’s going to be for global television, but I’m also worried if the way they’re going to handle Comiket without using the Tokyo Big Sight because they are going to use it for the Olympics, and there are also news that they’re removing porn from convenience stores, basically the porn in Japan is being removed for the Olympics, but the biggest thing I’m concerned is that if Comiket 98 taken place in May is going to be the last Comiket for good because I haven’t seen like any news about it and that’s all what the Wikipedia page has, I really hope there’s still more Comiket in the future, even when I don’t really go to Comiket at all because I don’t live in Japan, but I really love seeing artists setting their circles and having their doujins all sold out.

There’s also going to be the Playstation 5, which it may or may not be the best thing in the world to happen right now considering that I just got my PS4 in November, although Sony did confirm that the PS5 has backwards compability with PS4, but then there are also reports that it’s backwards compability with all the previous Playstations and that smells like bullshit to me.

Anyways, I’m definitely not buying the PS5 at launch, I’ll wait in a few years until there are some really interesting exclusives, or even if there devs making new games for the PS5, they’re still bound to be released on the PS3 as well. Just like I did with the PS4, we never bought it at launch and we waited for a long time for cooler releases to get there and that’s where we finally decided on getting a PS4, albeit several years late but whatever.

The PS5 won’t be coming out until the Holidays 2020, so I have an entire year to play with my PS4 and take my best advantage of it, in the meantime, I’ve been playing Devil May Cry 5 and Death Stranding, and hopefully we can get to buy the many other releases we missed over the years.

Ugh, I don’t know what else is coming out in 2020 with different media, but I think that’s enough about my most anticipated releases that I could think of! As time goes on, whenever news about some things pop up, I’m of course going to keep track of those releases!

Conclusion

We have at least reached the end of this long long post I have made yet, I’m sorry if I made you through read all of this insanity, but I really hope you might have skimmed through some parts and read a little bit of the most important pieces, the ones that you find the most interesting.

This was an amazing yet painful but still a fun wild ride with this decade. I’ve had plenty of fond memories and developed lots of new interests, though having lots of suffering in the process, but still, it was a joy to live through out this decade. Can’t wait to see what will the decade have in store. Still not expecting for real life to become the future like we see in pop culture, but I’m sure there’s still going to be some great technological advancements and most important of all, lots of amazing pop culture! (I know lately has been mediocre with neglectful creators and corporates and cringey memes inserted by old men, but who really cares?)

I’m really hoping for a far positive 2020 decade, but as you would expect, countless groups of SJWs attacking innocent artists, scummy corporates, cringeworthy memes and pretty much everything else will remain unchanged.

But regardless, there’s still going to be amazing new things we’re going to discover to love and hate this decade and the Reiwa period!

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is the last post I’m going to make because lately I’ve seriously been getting burned out by writing the same posts and the worst part is that I’m always trying to make them huge and I really have no idea to process these posts. Another reason why is that I want to start focusing on my career as an author, I just need to get over this blogging side to be over and I’m sure it’s going to be even more painful than blogging, but that’s something I really want to focus and don’t want the blogging to get in my way.

As for the future of making posts like these, I’m just going to make like a thread of tweets of my top 10 anime/games/movies of the year with 4 pictures of my top 4 or make a TwitLonger, to make things simple because I’ve really been exhausted on making this post even when I had this MONTHS in the making. Man, I seriously need an agenda so I won’t try to remember certain events that happened.

Anyways, thank you all who supported me over the years and I hope we can continue to support each other out throughout this next decade, whether I succeed with my dreams or not. I love you all. Let’s all do our best, and I so hope I’ll do my best as well, until the day I die!

And just like that, good bye Tumblr. My time is finally done.

UPDATE - February 1st 2020: Nobody is definitely noticing this but every now and then, I’ve been adding some new words into this post. February and I’m still editing this post.

By the way, January was already dismal: I nearly lost my cool with personal opinions again, but my worst nightmare yet is my eternal procrastination. Although I have at least been writing like over 100 words every few days, my constant headache from perfectionism and brainstorming a decent, cohesive and believable story will just never stop.

Not to mention that I haven’t been drawing as regularly like I wanted, and recently, I went back on using my Wacom Bamboo pen tablet and I immediately regret it.

Better not worry, we’re still early into 2020, we only have 10 months to survive and I know I mustn’t rush things, but I really hope I get to be a little more productive as soon as possible.

My Carrd.

[hakureiillusion]

Magician Girls and You: A Yu-Gi-Oh! Archetype Primer and the History of the Dark Magician Girl

This ended up being far longer than I expected! I’ll put a break here, but feel free to keep reading where I discuss the origin and troubles of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Dark Magician Girl (one of my personal favorite cards) and her recent rise, culminating in ideas for a pair of decks that will bring out her recent potential.

History of the Dark Magician Girl

Flash back to the turn of the century. Yu-Gi-Oh! has taken Japan and the US by storm, a multi-media project by Konami encompassing a TV anime, movies, CDs, manga, and of course, the card game itself.

Our main characters at the time were a boy named Yugi Muto and his ancient Egyptian alter-ego Yami. Their ace card: the iconic Dark Magician. Those who played the card game would likely recognize Dark Magician as being... well, largely underwhelming. Even before the game’s massive power creep. Dark Magician was a two-tribute 2500 ATK monster, outclassed by both Seto Kaiba’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon (a 3000 ATK monster for the same cost, also the “rival” character and monster) and Yugi’s own Summoned Skull (matching Dark Magician’s 2500 ATK but only requiring one tribute).

Despite this, most kids loved Dark Magician, even if largely for sentimental and iconic value. Dark Magician was always there whenever Yugi or Yami needed him, always coming out on top somehow despite the odds being stacked against him. Later seasons would expand on the duo’s relationship with their favorite card even more by revealing the card’s inspiration to be one of Yami’s retainers from when he ruled Egypt as its Pharaoh.

With Dark Magician’s popularity, Konami naturally began to capitalize by creating more cards built to support the iconic monster. Among the first was a female counterpart, aptly named Dark Magician Girl.

Dark Magician Girl made her debut in the year 2000, a particularly rare card that did not get released worldwide or with any saturation until years later. Her popularity spiked when she made her anime debut in episode 26, where Yami uses her to defeat another Dark Magician user named Arkana. And that was the day the world fell in love.

There were many reasons for Dark Magician Girl’s rather immediate popularity. For starters, having a card that supported the iconic Dark Magician gave her a leg up already. Second, her design is... well, it’s adorable, to be frank. Rather cutesy, but also quite cool in her own right, in sort of a girl-power way. Combine this with an audience of adolescents and prepubescents, and you have a recipe for many a future weeb’s first waifu.

Though despite the popularity and love she received, Dark Magician Girl would once again prove to be an underwhelming card. Along with her consistent popularity both in the anime and along other adaptations, she quickly went the way of Dark Magician; iconic and beloved, but borderline useless and only used in decks by people who really wanted to use her. And even when Dark Magician did get some eventual support to bring him up to a more viable status, Dark Magician Girl was left in the dust, now outclassed in every way.

Now fast-forward to the present, and Dark Magician Girl has finally gotten the support to match her popularity. More Dark Magician support cards have been made with her in mind, giving her some extra options, but her time to shine was finally reached with the release of the most recent movie, The Dark Side of Dimensions. This set introduced--among other things that help her--five new “Magician Girl” cards, not only to support Dark Magician Girl but also to establish her as the leader of a new archetype of cards. This has also made her quite unique in that she fits into both the “Dark Magician” and “Magician Girl” card archetypes, allowing her to benefit from cards that support both. Not only can she now stand alongside Dark Magician in a deck built around him, but she can even surpass him and run the show with her new Magician Girls behind her.

And now that I’ve thoroughly gone over Dark Magician Girl’s long-winded history, that’s what the rest of this little piece will be about: a pair of decks that capitalize on the new synergy between Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl, or just Dark Magician Girl herself. And whichever way you prefer, with the new Magician Girls backing them up, they are more dangerous than ever before.

About the Magician Girls

Including Dark, there are six Magician Girl cards; each are Spellcaster-type effect monsters from levels 1 through 6, together spanning across all 6 main attributes. Though their ATK and DEF may rise as their levels do, each are unique and bring their own irreplaceable support to each other. Before we go into deck ideas, let’s look at each of them in general.

Berry Magician Girl Level 1 EARTH Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF - 400/400 Effect:  “If this card is Normal Summoned: You can add 1 "Magician Girl" monster from your Deck to your hand. Once per turn, during either player's turn, when your opponent activates a card or effect that targets this card, or targets this card for an attack: You can change this card's battle position, and if you do, Special Summon 1 "Magician Girl" monster from your Deck, except "Berry Magician Girl".”

Berry, while the weakest of the six, brings a very unique and vital ability with her. While four of the six Magician Girls have the ability to search out and/or summon more monsters to help them, Berry is the only one who requires no sort of cost or action for one of her abilities that do so. Her first allows you to add a Magician Girl to your hand just by normal summoning her, while her second--in addition to protecting her by changing her to defense position when attacked--will allow you to Special Summon another Magician Girl from your deck.

If Berry can be protected by other cards until the next turn, every turn is an opportunity to Special Summon another Magician Girl. However, this is rarely worth it; her job is to stack your hand with fuel for Lemon and Apple’s abilities, and replace herself with something better before her inevitable (and likely quick) destruction. If she survives a turn, she can be useful tribute fodder for Kiwi or Dark, but aside from that you shouldn’t fret over losing her.

Lemon Magician Girl Level 2 LIGHT Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF: 800/600 Effect: “Once per turn: You can Tribute 1 "Magician Girl" monster, except "Lemon Magician Girl"; add 1 Spellcaster-Type monster from your Deck to your hand. Once per turn, if this card is targeted for an attack: You can Special Summon 1 Spellcaster-Type monster from your hand, but its effects (if any) are negated, then change the attack target to it, and if you do, the attacking monster's ATK becomes half its current ATK.”

Lemon’s main ability will become quite familiar to you very quickly; half of the Magician Girls have variants of it. While Berry protects herself by switching herself to defense position, Lemon does so by both weakening its aggressor (cutting their ATK in half, permanently until they leave the field) and plopping a meat shield in front of herself, which the attacker is then forced to target. She can Special Summon any Spellcaster that doesn’t have unique summoning conditions in this way, giving you great freedom in exchange for the summoned monster losing their effects until they leave the field. While powerful, this needs to be used with caution, as a lost effect can make the summoned monster lose much of its value.

Her second effect likely won’t be used much, as it’s not particularly prudent to lose any of your other Magician Girls on the field just to stack your hand, but it plays well into her own ability. Berry can be tributed once her purpose is served, for instance, to grab a stronger or more vital Spellcaster into your hand and ready for Lemon’s next effect. Just be careful not to use Lemon to summon them if you need their ability.

Lemon synergizes well with the main “muscle” of the Magician Girl deck, namely Dark Magician Girl and Dark Magician of Chaos. Neither of their abilities are particularly vital, and after the ATK-reducing effects they can take down monsters with base ATKs of 4000 and 5600 respectively. For decks that also run Dark Magician himself, he has no ability to lose from being summoned by Lemon, making him a prime choice as well.

There is some debate as to whether or not Lemon’s effect-negating extends to the effect of Dark Magician of Chaos that states to banish him when he leaves the field. While people are assuming that it does not, other rulings for similar situations (such as Archlord Kristya and Skill Drain) do suggest so, as well as the exact wording of his effect... Konami will likely need to issue an official ruling on this soon, but until then, figure it out with your friends.

Apple Magician Girl Level 3 FIRE Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF: 1200/800 Effect: “Once per turn, if this card is targeted for an attack: You can Special Summon 1 Level 5 or lower Spellcaster-Type monster from your hand, then change the attack target to it, and if you do, the attacking monster's ATK becomes half its current ATK. If this card is destroyed by battle or card effect: You can target up to 3 other "Magician Girl" monsters with different names in your Graveyard; add them to your hand.”

Just like Lemon, Apple’s main claim to fame is her ability to simultaneously weaken anything that attacks her while pulling monsters from your hand to protect her. Compared to Lemon, this ability is slightly more limited, requiring the monster to be level 5 or lower, but doesn’t carry Lemon’s effect-negating drawback. On the plus side, all of the new Magician Girls ARE level 5 or lower Spellcasters.

With the effects of monsters summoned by Apple perfectly usable, this means that you can effectively “chain” Apples. Have one summon another, who in turn summons the next (or Lemon, or Chocolate), cutting your enemy’s ATK further each time. Nearly anything that can be bested in battle WILL fall to this.

Apple’s second effect will be your saving grace. When her effect falls short and she ultimately kicks the bucket, she allows you to take three different Magician Girls back from your graveyard. This allows you to recycle the ones that tend to end up there most (Berry, Kiwi, and Dark, in my experience), and makes her a fantastic mid-to-late game trump card.

Chocolate Magician Girl Level 4 WATER Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF: 1600/1000 Effect: “Once per turn: You can discard 1 Spellcaster-Type monster; draw 1 card. Once per turn, if this card is targeted for an attack: You can target 1 Spellcaster-Type monster in your Graveyard, except "Chocolate Magician Girl"; Special Summon it, then change the attack target to it, and if you do, the attacking monster's ATK becomes half its current ATK.”

While Dark may be the face of the Magician Girls, and Kiwi the biggest of the new five, Chocolate is the star player by far. Her respectable 1600 ATK makes her decent muscle, especially if she comes in on a half-ATK enemy.

Obviously though, her worth lies in her abilities. Just one look at them should tell you what you need to know; summon her, dump a Spellcaster to draw a card, summon that Spellcaster next turn to protect her. Easy, and frighteningly effective. Dump your strongest Spellcasters and bring them back, or use her to give Apple another go after Apple fetches Magician Girls from your Graveyard.

She’s as simple as she is powerful, and you’ll find yourself giddy with excitement every time you draw her or add her to your hand, as she is usually the initiator of the most devastating combos a Magician Girl deck can pull off.

Kiwi Magician Girl Level 5 WIND Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF: 1800/1200 Effect: “During either player's turn: You can discard this card; "Magician Girl" monsters you currently control gain 300 ATK and DEF for each "Magician Girl" monster with different names on the field and in the Graveyards, until the end of this turn. Spellcaster-Type monsters you control cannot be destroyed by card effects, and your opponent cannot target them with card effects.”

And finally, here’s Kiwi. She’s the most different one out of the new five, being the only one who doesn’t Special Summon another monster, as well as the only one higher than level 4 (and therefore the only one requiring a tribute to Normal Summon). In return, she gets two very unique and VERY helpful effects. I referred to Apple as a trump card earlier; and while that may be true in many situations, Kiwi is your REAL trump card.

Kiwi’s most basic effect is that she completely stops card effects from destroying your Spellcasters (including herself), and stops your opponent (but not you) from targeting them. This shuts down most ways for your opponent to deal with your monsters short of attacking them; which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly what you WANT your opponent to do so that you can activate the effects of the other four.

Mirror Force? Laugh in its face. Raigeki? Useless. Your own Dark Hole? Wipe your opponent’s side of the field, but not yours. The applications of Kiwi’s protective effect are endless, and crafty players know just how to summon her at the perfect time to avoid a board wipe. To properly counter this your opponent needs to use effect-negating or hand-returning effects that don’t target, and then has to deal with your setup afterwards to ensure you don’t just get Kiwi right back up and running.

Kiwi’s other effect, while not as all-encompassing, is equally fantastic. By discarding her from your hand, she gives every Magician Girl you control an extra 300 ATK and DEF for each uniquely-named Magician Girl on the field and in both graveyards. At best, that’s a solid 1800 ATK and DEF (if you have all six Magician Girls available). Combine this with the other Magician Girls’ effects that halve enemy attack and redirect attacks, and you have ways to beat high-ATK enemies in battle while also dealing some rather substantial reflect damage. This ability can be activated during damage calculation as well, allowing you to time it perfectly.

For all her utility, Kiwi is still somewhat on the weak side; 1800 ATK isn’t great, especially for a monster that needs a tribute, plus she’s the only one of the new five that can’t Special Summon others to help her, so she could use some protection from enemy monsters. Do that, though, and you’ll find her to be an invaluable support.

Incidentally, Kiwi is the only Magician Girl not to get censored in any way. Apple, Lemon, Chocolate, and Dark each have had their art edited to cover and/or remove parts of their cleavage and/or thighs, Berry and Dark have had the stars on their brooches replaced with simple red gems to avoid any relation to a pentagram, and Apple and Chocolate have had the garter straps on their legs removed. Kiwi got away scot-free, somehow.

Dark Magician Girl Level 6 DARK Monster - Spellcaster/Effect ATK/DEF: 2000/1700 Effect: “This card gains 300 ATK for every "Dark Magician" or "Magician of Black Chaos" in either player's Graveyard.”

The original Magician Girl herself. Once a lone counterpart to Dark Magician, she now stands at the crossroads between the Magician Girl and Dark Magician archetypes, a huge threat in conjunction with either.

Dark hasn’t changed at all since her inception; if anything, her effect is even less useful than it used to be. She gets an extra 300 ATK for each Dark Magician and Magician of Black Chaos in each graveyard, and while before this meant it took two dead Dark Magicians for her to pull more weight, over time Dark Magician support made him more useful than even the most powerful Dark Magician Girl.

But that time is over. Dark doesn’t even NEED her effect anymore, not with the other Magician Girls backing her up. Her small 300 ATK boosts are just icing on the cake, giving you a small leg up for each Dark Magician you lose.

Dark’s new claim to fame is having the highest ATK of all the Magician Girls. 2000 isn’t fantastic, but considering that half of the time she’ll be coming in on a monster whose ATK just got halved, it’s plenty. And Lemon’s drawback of negating the effects of monsters she summons is hardly a worry when it comes to Dark, who often isn’t relying on (or even using) her effect to begin with.

A slew of new cards (and a few older ones) have also given Dark plenty of support, to make her even more deadly on the field. She’s the biggest of the Magician Girls, and while not strictly the baddest, she packs the heaviest punch. And that’s really all she needs to do; leave the trickery and strategy to the other five, and plop Dark down on the field when something needs to die.

Now that we’ve introduced the six Magician Girls, let’s go over two vague deck outlines to put them to work. When I mention quantities, those are cards that you’ll definitely need; when I don’t, you can probably live without them, but they may be quite helpful.

Deck #1: Magician Girl

This deck will eschew the standard Dark Magician entirely, focusing around the six Magician Girls. The main point of this deck is to cut down on fluff, keeping it at a trim 40 cards that all synergize well. Primarily a gimmick deck; we all know you just want to use a deck full of cute girls. But it still works well if you play it right!

Main Monsters Surprisingly, you’ll find ONE male here! There are only seven different main monsters in this recipe, so if you have three of each you’ll have 21 total. A pretty good number for a 40-card deck.

Berry Magician Girl You’ll want three of her, for sure. She can search out just about everything in this deck, keeping your hand and field ready for whatever may come.

Lemon Magician Girl Three isn’t a bad idea, but you can live with two. Lemon synergizes well with both Dark and Dark Magician of Chaos, as they are the strongest monsters in this deck and their effects aren’t vital.

Apple Magician Girl Like Lemon, three is preferable but not required. Three gives you the ability to chain their effects nicely, but two is all you need to properly have them recycle each other as they die.

Chocolate Magician Girl You want three copies of Chocolate, hands-down. Like Lemon she synergizes well with Dark and Dark Magician of Chaos, discarding them to draw a card and then summoning them back when she gets attacked, effects intact.

Kiwi Magician Girl Again, three is the best, and HIGHLY recommended as she is the only one whose different effects require her to be in different places. If you want to run two you can, but you tend to always want to have an extra in your hand.

Dark Magician Girl You need three Darks. You will be searching them out frequently with Berry and Lemon, and those three will be out of your deck very quickly. If you could have four in a deck, I’d tell you to put four.

Dark Magician of Chaos In a pure Magician Girl deck, this is the only monster who will fall outside that archetype. Dark Magician of Chaos can be summoned by Lemon and Chocolate, and his 2800 ATK will make mincemeat of anything that had its ATK halved by their effects. Even things that didn’t will have trouble matching him. While Dark is more versatile for fetching and summoning, Dark Magician of Chaos is the real muscle in the deck and a fantastic choice when you can get him out. Three of him. Period.

Extra Monsters For the Extra Deck. You can’t possibly fill this up with viable monsters that can be summoned, so if you want to toss in a few extra level 1-5 Xyz monsters, go nuts. Just make sure they’re Spellcasters.

Dark Magician Girl the Dragon Knight The only non-Spellcaster this deck will run. She doesn’t get protection from Kiwi, but since she technically IS a Magician Girl, she does benefit from Kiwi’s boosting effect. Plus her own effect is nothing to scoff at, nor is her 2600 ATK.

Magi Magi Magician Gal As of yet unreleased in English, and it’s difficult to get her out since she needs two of a type of card you only have three of, but her utility is great and you have plenty of room in your Extra Deck to fit her.

Ebon Illusion Magician Like the Magician Gal, Ebon Illusion Magician is going to be hard to get out. You technically don’t have any level 7 Spellcasters to summon him with, but he can also be summoned by a rank 6 Xyz Spellcaster... namely, Magi Magi Magician Gal. Again, he probably won’t come up, but your Extra Deck is just that; extra. Having him in it can only help.

Spells Ironically for a Spellcaster-focused deck, you won’t find many necessary spells here. But there are obviously some you need.

The Eye of Timaeus This is how you get Dark Magician Girl the Dragon Knight out on the field. It’s cheap and effective, plain and simple. Not worth having more than one or two copies of.

Magical Dimension While there are plenty of great ways to use this card, you should keep one as a bit of insurance; if your opponent tries to wipe your board with a card effect, use it to summon Kiwi from your hand and protect them. Or summon Dark Magician of Chaos with it and use his effect to recycle it! I tend to run two of these in my deck, though three can be useful too.

Secret Village of the Spellcasters Situational use for when your opponent doesn’t have any Spellcaster-type monsters, maybe better as a side-deck card but can find use for discard effects in the main deck as well. This card synergizes FANTASTICALLY with Kiwi, making her (and therefore your other Spellcasters) even harder to remove than before.

Mystical Space Typhoon A classic. Raigeki Another classic.

Dark Hole Yet another classic, but now with Kiwi you don’t have to worry about wiping your side of the board as well.

Dark Burning Attack Budget Raigeki. Not as good, but totally unlimited.

Swords of Revealing Light Honestly sometimes goes against the theme of the deck (you WANT your Magician Girls to get attacked), but buying a few turns when things aren’t going your way is always a plus. Also useful for flipping your opponent’s monsters to nail with Dark Burning Attack.

Bound Wand This is how you keep Kiwi alive; the extra 500 ATK and ability to summon her back after her death will make her an absolute terror.

Traps According to my recent Google Image searches, Dark Magician Girl can be a trap too...

Magicians’ Defense Damage reduction and Special Summoning; everything you could ever want.

Dark Renewal Trade in one of your Spellcasters (and your opponent’s freshly-summoned monster) to Special Summon Dark Magician Girl or Dark Magician of Chaos from your deck or graveyard.

Torrential Tribute Again, Kiwi will save your own Spellcasters from this.

Magician’s Circle All six Magician Girls can be searched and summoned with this.

Magic Cylinder Another classic, for when you want to give Berry a chance to take a second hit or to protect Kiwi.

Call of the Haunted Kiwi’s effect stops the monster tied to this card from being destroyed by its effect. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Kiwi is amazing.

Shift Opponent isn’t attacking the Magician Girl you want them to? Make them!

Battle Mania The best way to deal with a Magician Girl deck is to not attack. Unless Battle Mania happens.

Deck #2: Dark Magician Duo

This deck will use the Magician Girl deck as a base, trimming some of the fat to add Dark Magician and his support cards. This deck has stronger monsters and tends to not worry too much about waiting for your opponent to attack, though to keep enough copies of proper cards your deck might start to slip further and further away from that 40 count.

Main Monsters Now featuring even more Y chromosomes than before!

Dark Magician Obviously. As a normal monster he’s a prime candidate for Lemon’s effect, and even Chocolate can make great use of him. You’ll want three of him, two minimum.

Palladium Oracle Mahad Arguably just as useful as the Dark Magician himself, better on his own but without the support Dark Magician gets. But when he dies, you get a Dark Magician anyway. Fit as many of him as you reasonably can in the deck.

Magician’s Robe Basically a free Dark Magician if you can pull off its effect.

Extra Monsters A few more possibilities open up once Dark Magician and Mahad are in the deck. You still have plenty of space, fitting at least two of each.

Dark Paladin The classic dragon-slayer, and with The Eye of Timaeus you don’t need Buster Blader to bring him out.

Amulet Dragon Can be useful if your opponent runs a spell-heavy deck. Keep in mind that Kiwi does not protect him.

Ebon High Magician An Xyz monster that can be summoned with the help of Dark Magician or Mahad. When he dies you can then pull Dark Magician or Dark Magician Girl to replace him.

Spells Wait for the best card ever...

Dark Burning Magic The best card ever. Between all the Magician Girls and Magician’s Robe, it’s painfully easy to plop down a Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl during your opponent’s turn and the wipe their field during the battle phase.

Sage’s Stone Here’s a Dark Magician Girl, and here’s a Dark Magician. A tried and true card, though not as useful as it used to be now that there are more ways to get Dark Magician out. But with the ease with which this deck can get out Dark Magician Girl, you can’t ignore it.

Dark Magic Attack If you can’t pull off Dark Burning Magic, this is good too.

Dedication Through Light and Darkness Generally there are better ways to find a Dark Magician of Chaos, but if you need one NOW...

Dark Magical Circle This card is expensive for a reason. It makes your Dark Magician into an annihilator while also helping you make the most out of your deck.

Traps Dark Magician traps, not nearly as cute.

Magician Navigation Like Dark Magical Circle, this card is expensive because of how good it is. Pull a Dark Magician, and then either another one or a Dark Magician Girl. Then later use it to kill trap cards. It does everything.

Other Options

Monsters Magician’s Valkyria Normally shunned due to how difficult it is to pull off her combo, the Magician Girls have given her one last shot at relevance by making them easier to get out. In particular, combining two of them with Kiwi can effectively lock out your opponent; Secret Village of the Spellcasters makes them even harder to break through.

Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning Magician Girl decks aren’t as flush with Dark and Light monsters as standard Dark Magician or Spellcaster decks would be, but he’ll still have plenty of fuel for summoning and is always useful. Again, keep in mind that he is NOT a Spellcaster.

Magician of Black Chaos Usually not worth running, but he can be useful, even if just to feed Dark Magician Girl.

Spells Dark Magic Veil Only three monsters in this deck can be summoned by it, but they’re all things you want out.

Magic Formula Bolsters Dark Magician or Dark Magician Girl’s ATK and gives you a bit of LP back, but generally not worth the space in the deck.

Traps Eternal Soul Good support for Dark Magician, but you need Kiwi to avoid getting wiped if it gets destroyed. Probably not worth it unless you build around it.

Dark Horizon Situational but can save you when nothing else may.

And there you have it. She’s had a long and bumpy ride, but Dark Magician Girl is finally where she deserves to be: not just in the hearts of people everywhere, but their decks as well.

[demidon117]

Suicide Squad Review

***Author’s Note: So, this is a review I wrote about Suicide Squad in a week long fury binge. IT IS LONG AND IT IS NEGATIVE. If you liked Suicide Squad, great! Don’t let me keep you from enjoying the things you like, these are just my angry, personal feelings about a movie. This is a seven-page review; like I said it’s long; if you read the whole thing, and agreed with it, give me some notes! Maybe follow? If this gets attention then I’ll post more film reviews here. Thanks for reading!*** Suicide Squad. Where do I begin?

   Well, first, this movie leaves me with such an irrational fury, I needed at least an hour of ranting and raving before I could sit down to write this. The lack of understanding of the original characters is astounding, its attempts at trying to be an all-out action movie and superhero team up are laughable, and its manipulation of emotions to try and get a response out of the viewer is sickening. This movie doesn’t only fail as a superhero team-up movie, it also fails as an action movie, which is inexcusable since we have movies that have already done this correctly. But, enough being angry, let’s get into the reasons why this movie fails so spectacularly. 
    Amanda Waller wants to create an off-the-book, black-ops squad of the worst of the worst to do tasks that no one else wants to do. So, she hires Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Killer Croc, Diablo, Captain Boomerang, Katana, Enchantress, and a team of Navy SEALs, all the while the Joker tries to save Harley and Enchantress’s brother saves her. Do you see the problem here? There are way too many characters in this stupid movie. It’s obvious what this movie wanted to be, it wanted to be the Anti-Guardians of the Galaxy. It wanted to be dark and gritty and prove that DC could produce the same kind of movies Marvel could and give us a big superhero team-up. Except, that Marvel devoted several movies establishing characters before throwing them all together in a big blockbuster, and Marvel also knows how to devote time to showing these characters as relatable people. Suicide Squad tries to establish even more characters than the Avengers or Guardians did and do it all in two hours. But, hey, what about X-Men? They had a lot of characters and that movie was good. Yes, it was, but that movie already had the team established and didn’t give us background on every character in the movie. It focused on Rogue, Wolverine, and Magneto and that was it, and it was enough. This movie tries to develop every. Single. Character. And it doesn’t work in the slightest and it’s manipulative and disgusting. Half of the characters don’t even need to be in the movie. We don’t need Enchantress’s brother, Killer Croc, Captain Boomerang, or the Joker. Hell, I’m not even sure we needed Rick Flag and his group of Navy SEALs. The movie is so saturated with terrible characters trying to take the spotlight that it’s maddening. The only characters that were really interesting and had any depth at all were Katana, Diablo, Harley, and Deadshot. Those four could carry a movie and it probably would’ve been fine. But, I’ll get to that soon enough.


    The next problem is the villain they’ve got to fight. The character, Enchantress is is inhabiting the body of a scientist who’s in love with Navy SEAL Rick Flag, the leader of the Suicide Squad and basically the bodyguard/parole officer of Enchantress. Enchantress is some old god witch who was trapped in a doll, along with her brother Incubus. She escapes from Flag and frees her brother and the two of them try to take over/destroy the world for reasons. Do you see how complicated that is? In a movie where they’ve got Harley and the Joker trying to love it up, Deadshot trying to take care of his daughter, and a dozen other plot lines that don’t matter. The villain is too complicated for a movie like this, and she’s too powerful. The Suicide Squad isn’t a group of superheroes. There are only two Meta-Humans in the team, the rest are just highly skilled people. They’re a strike force, not a superhero team. Enchantress is a powerful goddess type character and her brother is equally powerful, if not more. This is not the job for a bunch of side villains. Especially when they go out of their way to show the Flash and Batman in the movie. A villain of these stakes needs to be saved for the Justice League movie. I mean, it’s such a powerful villain, ANOTHER city has been completely destroyed and abandoned, the aftermath yet again saved for another movie. When will these stupid movies address the destruction without destroying a city? All this death and destruction is becoming meaningless, and I hate to say it, but boring as well.

   So, it fails as a superhero movie, what about an action movie? No. In fact, that part is even worse. The movie takes two hours, and it’s split up into two halves, the first half establishes the characters and the second has them fighting. If you don’t know, this is a terrible idea. Firstly, the first half of the movie moves at a mind-numbing pace. I could take in what they were saying just fine, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t care about any of these characters because it didn’t give me time to care. It just kept going and going without giving you time to breathe. It introduces the main characters fine, I suppose, but then it tries to establish the dozen necessary plot lines. Let me tell you something, Fast Five had a lot of characters, and it had to establish a lot, but it didn’t do it in the span of just an hour. Sure, some of the characters were returning from previous movies, but people can sit down and watch Fast Five and enjoy it without seeing the previous four movies. Then, there’s Hardcore Henry, another great action movie, that keeps the plot moving at a comfortable pace and it would stop to have serious character moments and have a deep scene or two. “But you can’t compare those movies!” Some may cry, “Those aren’t genre movies!”

   That doesn’t matter. Suicide Squad desperately wants to wow you as an action movie without caring at all to make it coherent or exciting. The second half of the movie moves at a snail’s pace compared to the first half. It kept dragging on in muddled blackness. The fights were boring because there was too much going on. Yeah, that’s right, there was too much fighting in the fight scenes, so much in fact, that it sucked all of the fun out of the air. There were too many people fighting, I couldn’t tell who was supposed to be impressive or not. Am I supposed to focus on Harley? Katana? Croc? Deadshot? Because lord knows it sure as hell ain’t Captain Boomerang. He throws, like, two boomerangs in the entire movie. Two. And his damn name is Captain Boomerang. Not to mention, most of the fight scenes in this movie are just people walking around shooting guns. It’s boring to just watch people walk around shooting guns. It could be impressive if it just happened once or twice, but it happens every time there’s a fight scene. The SEALs in this movie are so efficient that they could’ve carried the movie, it’s like they wanted to be Battlefield LA. So the movie, at the big climactic battle scene takes an hour to play through and it’s boring as sin. There are hardly any super powers in this movie about a comic book, y’know, the thing these characters are known for? “But, what about the end? There are super powers then.”

   Oh yeah, that. Spoilers here, so skip to the next paragraph to miss it. Though, I’m not sure why you’d want to. Anyway, at the end of the movie, the characters end up fighting Incubus, Enchantress’s brother. Anyway, they’re getting the snot kicked out of them, and the whole movie, Diablo is building up to something, saying he’s holding back, and thus far, he’s been impressive, so what could he be holding back? Well, the fact that he turns into a giant flaming Aztec skeleton, and I’ll be perfectly honest, it was amazing. He shows up speaking Spanish in a demonic voice and just throwing fire at the Incubus and punches him and it’s awesome. And then he runs out of juice and his pinned to the ground by, well that’s okay, they’ll save him right? No. They don’t. Despite the fact that he’s weakened the thing and that Katana already showed that she could cut off hands and that they obviously had enough time to save him because they took the time to debate it, they use a high powered explosive to kill Diablo and Incubus. But, they kept Captain Boomerang, because “Hey! Wacky Australian antics!” So, one of the two characters I cared about died, thus ruining any chance I had to watch the second movie.

   Anyway, the superpowers are kind of cool and the effects are impressive, but it’s hardly seen in the actual fights and it’s just disappointing. Like, I get it, you want to show how dark, edgy, and serious these characters are because they use lethal force, but seriously, it’s so boring to watch because it’s just shooting guns. Katana who could’ve been the most fun to watch, and would’ve been incredibly popular among those sword wielding weebs, is hardly seen because Will Smith and Margot Robbie are the most famous people in this movie. And the movie knows that because they get the most lines, the most screen time, and the most development and it sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with most critics in that they were fantastic. Will Smith brings a depth to Deadshot most people didn’t know, even though his backstory and motivations are stock and generic, and Margot Robbie does a great job as Harley, I honestly can think of anything she does wrong, it’s all the fault of David Ayer for ruining the character. Like, who wears underwear to a war-zone? I’d even accept a stupid skirt. And I wouldn’t say there were bad performances, per se, just bad characters, so it made the performances hard to care about. Well, one exception, Jared Leto as the Joker is one of the worst things I’ve seen in the history of the universe.

   I usually like Leto, I think he’s a pretty good actor. He was good in Mr. Nobody and Requiem for a Dream. He did a good job of being a douche bag in Fight Club, though, I’m beginning to think that wasn’t all acting…

   Anyway, his portrayal of the character was just all wrong. His laugh, his mannerisms, his antics while the movie was being filmed, it’s just… Stupid. It’s easily the worst Joker performance I’ve ever seen. Especially when we’re coming off the heels of Heath Ledger’s legendary performance and Mark Hamill’s iconic voice and laugh. There’s so much inspiration on how to do the character right, and the fact that this movie got it so wrong, it makes me feel ill. And I’m all for taking the character into your own, but this portrayal is just so wrong. Leto just doesn’t have the necessary charm or intimidation to ground such a character. Worst of all, he’s not funny. Say what you will about The Joker, but he was funny. He’d crack jokes, he’d play pranks, yeah he’d kill you, but he’d still try to have fun. This Joker tries to be more realistic as a gang leader, kind of how Heath Ledger made his Joker more realistic as an avatar of chaos. Leto is able to make the Joker erratic for sure, but it’s so stupid. There’s never any reason as to why people follow him. Ledger promised people a revolution, Hamill ruled them through fear, Jack Nicholson was already a gang leader when he became The Joker. Leto? Well, he’s erratic. All we see is that he knows how to use guns, like every other character in this movie. So, why is he in charge? There’s never a moment where we see why he’s in charge, only that people follow him for some reason. Finally, my biggest problem with this entire movie, the worst thing that happens, the thing that makes me so damn angry about it, is how it plays up the romance of Harley Quinn and The Joker. 
    Let me be clear, in case you don’t understand, the Joker is the evilest creature ever put to paper. He is not sympathetic, he is not caring, and he is not someone to be put into a relationship with someone like Harley Quinn. Their relationship is not loving and romantic, it is abusive. From her conception, Harley was meant to show just how heartless the Joker can be. He would hit her, berate her, and use her as a human shield, but she followed him because she had Stockholm Syndrome. She was tricked into thinking she was in love with him. And the Joker knew that. So he’d drag her along and play along with her delusions, so long as it benefited him. The current run of the Batman comics shows the Joker being so monstrous to Harley it’s honestly hard to read. The Joker and Harley are not a loving couple. So, whenever this movie shows The Joker caring for Harley in any way, it makes me sick to my stomach. It’s because of this stupid movie that people started romanticizing the two again. This part of the movie is so big and important to the story that I can say this is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. The Joker does not love Harley, he just can’t and just won’t.

    Finally, there’s a bunch of superficial garbage that I hate about this movie.  The music is so irritating. It feels like they wanted to do what Quinten Tarantino does with having a soundtrack of recognizable songs that flow with the story. Except they don’t flow with the story in the least bit and are way too recognizable. It really feels like they had a list of popular songs and just slapped them in during the late stages of editing. Listen, music is shockingly important to movies, watch a movie on mute and you’ll realize how important backing tracks can be, even during quiet scenes. You can have popular songs in your movie and have them work, Tarantino does it, dozens of other action movies do it, but they do it sparingly. This movie feels like an iTunes playlist was shoved in. It’s so irritating and it pulls me out of the film each and every time a new song comes on, and it sucks because the original score is honestly pretty good. That’s one of the few things I’ll give to DC movies, the original score is usually pretty good. I can’t hum any of the melodies, but I remember a scene where Diablo shoots fire for the first time in the city, and the thing that struck me the most, was the music, it was loud and dramatic and perfectly encompassed the shock, horror, and amazement we needed to feel at that moment. It’s just such a shame they had to drown out all of it with annoyingly recognizable music.

 Then there’s the editing. IT’S SO DAMN DARK. No, not the story and subject matter, the actual brightness in the movie was too dark, so any of the fighting scenes in the movie were practically impossible to see. I don’t know if it was the Amazon Video version, but I had to adjust the gamma on my screen to watch the film. I’ve never had to do that before. Then, during the scenes where they were introducing the characters, they had these neon graffiti effects show up and had caricatures of the characters. It was actually kind of cool, if not trendy, which is actually bad, so I guess this compliment doesn’t work, but whatever. It would’ve been nice if that color was peppered throughout the rest of the movie because the rest was so muddled in blackness that I couldn’t tell if this was a horror movie or a superhero action romp.

   I remember right before this movie was released, they actually had to go back and reshoot some scenes to make it funnier. And I thought, “Great, it’d be nice to laugh unironically,” But, guess what, it wasn’t funny. It was obvious they added scenes of Captain Boomerang and his gross fetish with a pink unicorn because it was shown twice and completely forgotten about. This stupid unicorn was important enough to bring into a war-zone, but as soon as he dropped it, it was forgotten. Then, when they showed people getting evacuated (which was an obvious attempt at trying to show us “Hey! We learned from Man of Steel!”) there was a girl walking around with her friends in party dresses and said something like “This is the worst birthday ever.”

   Why? Why would you add that? It wasn’t funny, thousands of people are dying/dead, and you’re going to take time out of your two-hour movie to shove in a line like that? No. That’s not okay. It’s not funny, it’s not amusing, it’s insulting and completely ruins the immersion. I was never more aware I was watching a stupid movie than right there and then.

   NOT TO MENTION, the first half of the movie just feels like extended trailers all smashed into each other. There’s undeniable whiplash when they enter the city. Actually, they had two different editing studios work on this film. Like, DC just didn’t know what to do, so they had two different studios work on it, and instead of thoughtfully using the edits to make a good, coherent plot, they literally smashed the two different versions of the film together to make some disgusting half-trailer-half-cinematic monstrosity. Honestly, this would probably explain the piss poor pacing of the first half.

   So, I’ve been ripping at this movie, being angry and ranting, but not giving any real ways to try and fix this movie. And yes. There are ways to make this movie work. And yes, there are ways to make it work. Keep in mind, this is all coming from my own story choices. Were I in charge of the movie, this is how I’d write it. 

    The first thing to change is the villain. The Suicide Squad is a hit squad, meant to do secret operations you don’t want people to ever hear about, or to take down a target that only super-villains could take down. This Enchantress character, as I’ve said, is too powerful for these characters to take down. So, instead of them fighting Enchantress, have them go after the Joker. I’m not kidding. This would set up a lot of moment of conflict for Harley and would give Margot Robbie something to reach for other than edgy scene girl. The flashbacks into her and the Joker’s past would have more meaning and show how manipulative he is into tricking her into loving him. This would also set up a good relationship between Harley and Deadshot. They had undeniable chemistry together, as I expected of Will Smith and Margot Robbie. I’ll admit it, I wanted Deadshot and Harley together. Sue me.
    The next thing would be to cut out most of the characters in the Suicide Squad. All you need are Deadshot, Harley, Katana, and Diablo. Why? Well, for one, these are the only characters in this stupid movie that have any decent backstories, and for two, they all have incredible potential to make good characters. Send those four after the Joker and it’d add up to something pretty tense. Hell, you could even keep Batman in the movie like the animated feature they made. Then, you stop using that horrible soundtrack. The original score was good enough, don’t keep throwing in pop songs. It’s not fun and it’s distracting as hell. Then you use ONE studio to do the editing, and I’d say that’d add up to a pretty enjoyable film.

   I just can’t believe DC ruined another movie like this. If I were them, I’d immediately drop the rest of the plans they had for future movies because there’s no way they can salvage this universe after Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad. This movie was just poor decision after poor decision, and instead of making a movie that’s so bad it’s good, like The Room or xXx, this film is just bad enough to be infuriating.

[recentanimenews]

Life Under State of Emergency: Tokyo and Rural Areas

Shibuya Crossing (Photo: Daryl Harding)

  Previously, we looked at how the state of emergency was affecting the lives of anime fans in Japan, focusing on the areas of Kyoto and Sendai. Today in part two, we speak with two people who live in Tokyo and a rural area outside of the main cities to get their perspective and feelings on how the “lockdown” is affecting them. We asked them all the same questions to get their differing points of view.

  (Note: all answers have been edited down for clarity.)

  Inside The Capital of Japan

  An empty and close Tokyu Plaza in Harajuku, one of the most Instagram'd places in Japan (Photo: Daryl Harding)

  I spoke to cosplayer, writer, and Tokyo native, Kaho Shibuya, who in her past has been a newspaper reporter, a TV, radio and YouTube channel host, and a teacher among a vast array of other colorful professions. She lives in the heart of Tokyo.

  Firstly, how are you doing in the “lockdown,” even though it’s not technically a lockdown?

  Under our current law, the Japanese government can’t force us to stay at home, so there are some people not behaving the way we’re advised to. Yet things have definitely changed when the prime minister declared a state of emergency: In major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, a great number of shops have closed, so you don’t have destinations for just hanging out anymore.

  The transportation system, however, hasn’t been affected so people can still commute. With how punctual and on-time our train system is, people are still heading to school/work. The extremely crowded train ride in Persona 5 isn’t exaggerated at all and is still happening.

  This means unless you can work at home or you work for a company where they care about your health your job puts you at a higher risk of infection.

  How has the quarantine affected you personally?

  Actually, I hardly go out to socialize other than work. As a non-drinker, I would be happy only going out to attend business meetings or networking gatherings. All my friends are business-related so when we naturally come together, we work together.

  My hobbies are reading manga and watching anime, evidentially, alone. My favorite genre is RPGs, which doesn’t require another player. I live very close to my parents. Quarantine thus far hasn’t affected my personal life at all.

  My work gives me an excuse to talk to people and be an extrovert, so I cherish it very much. Otherwise, I’m an indoor otaku detached from society.

  What about professionally?

  I have many deadlines to meet: weekly, biweekly, and monthly columns, plus my upcoming book. There is still a lot on my plate, though I usually visit a café or somewhere not my room to work. Staying at home makes it absolutely difficult to concentrate.

  Usually, my favorite workplaces have been the worst locations to go to due to during the coronavirus crisis because of their confined spaces, like karaoke and manga cafés to name a few. Japanese people often use karaoke places for business talks because you don’t have to worry about others listening to your conversations and waiters won’t bother you. Manga cafés give you access to almost every popular show and magazines in print. You appreciate the sanctuary if you’re a classic physical book lover like myself.

  Was there anything you were looking forward to that has now been canceled?

  I’ve had the luxury of visiting quite a few conventions overseas as a guest and was looking forward to going more this year before you-know-what happened. My last con was Anime Los Angeles back in January, and I miss the geeky energy there.

  I was going to voice the main role in a new anime show and was really looking forward to it, then the production was delayed due to COVID-19. In fact, a lot of TV series and movies I’ve been waiting for have been postponed such as Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- and Case Closed.

    Is there anything you’ve started to do because of the lockdown?

  I’ve actually joined Twitch and started streaming in April. With everyone experiencing isolation, I thought it’s important now more than ever to stay connected and share the same moments together live.

  I don’t show much of my private side on social media, almost always posting pictures from professional photo shoots plus simple puns and messages, so streaming for hours from my room is definitely something new. It’s not only a good way to tell people how I’m doing through webcam, but what kind of person I really am beneath all those smug model pictures. Some might want nothing other than sexy from me, for sure, while others might relate more because I relate a lot to the topics Twitch users talk about.

  Streaming on Twitch, I can practice speaking English since there are way more English-speakers on the platform than Japanese, and I get to talk passionately about manga/anime/light novels/games in the chat room with people who are really into those things and want to genuinely know about Japan. Especially with cons getting canceled where I get to weeb out together with my international fans whom I cannot see often because of the obvious long-distance in between, interacting with them and staying passionate about our favorite things is what I crave. Like talking about the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba stamp-rally I went to in Kyoto, or other Japanese-related anime events.

  Although, if it weren’t for lockdown, I wouldn’t consider making my own account since I’m so not a tech nerd (just a nerd, period). But my friends offered to help out and I’m truly lucky that I have them. I’m in good hands and now thinking of setting up for game streaming and more!

  What are you using to cope with being forced to stay inside?

  Now that new episodes of seasonal anime have been suspended, I take this time to go back to older shows, like Bleach, Gintama, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Angel Beats, and Steins;Gate, all from 2004 to 2011 when I only have a vague memory of following every single episode because we didn’t have anime streaming sites to catch up. While the first two are very long to binge-watch, the middle two series have only 12 episodes, then the last one is somewhere in between plus its extra season Steins;Gate 0.

  Currently, I’m watching Mob Psycho 100 in English, all thanks to Crunchyroll by the way! I want to digest amazing shows in English too so that I get to talk with more people about them.

  Kaho actually put the A Certain Scientific Railgun puzzle together during the “lockdown.”

  How has your neighborhood/town changed?

  Considering it’s central Tokyo, the number of people I see on the street is now surprisingly low, especially on weekends and late at night. Some shops and offices have either closed or shorten their business hours, so it’s very quiet in the evening.

  What are you looking forward to once everything is over?

  Once this pandemic is subdued, I’m planning to have my first gig as an Anisong DJ! I’ve been practicing and was going to debut in April, so now I have to make my performance worth the wait!

  I’d been to some clubs that played mainly anime songs in Japan, but when I attended Kawaii Kon in Hawaii, I made friends with AniParty members from NY at the LUMICA booth, and their energy and audiences were great. I wanted to be a part of that, bringing smiles and music to dance to, letting everyone know about stunning OPs and EDs.

  In addition to signing, paneling, cosplaying, and emceeing, I’ve been eager to contribute more to events. Some other projects are going on too which I can reveal at my next con, whenever that is. This stay-at-home time is for me to grow, and after that, it’s time to show!

  How do you feel about Japan’s response to the pandemic?

  It was quite a long time before our government took things seriously. I mean, they should’ve regulated if not banned traveling, they were very reluctant to make that decision.

  If such action was made earlier, I believe we could’ve been in a much better situation. Given that we have a bigger personal space in social interaction; we rarely hug or even handshake, and we’re used to wearing masks because of hay fever in the spring. And more than everything, our biggest city, Tokyo, is incredibly clean and safe compared to other big cities in the world. I hope you all get to visit when this international fear is gone …

  Any other stories you’d like to tell?

  A lot of my friends from overseas reached out to me to make sure I was okay, which was incredibly nice. In these hard times, you realize the importance of people around you, you discover who is really precious to you and who feels the same way about you in return. Without the quarantine, we are usually too busy living our own lives every day to ever think about things like that.

  The Rounds in Rural Japan

    Finally, I spoke to Ernest Lin, an American who has lived in Japan for the last three years and currently quite a way out of Tokyo — outside of the four main prefectures. He’s a senior editor at the video game website PlayStation Universe and works as a consultant in Japan in various fields.

  Firstly, how are you doing in the “lockdown,” even though it’s not technically a lockdown?

  Surviving so far — things for me could be worse but could be better.

  How has the quarantine affected you personally?

  There's an overall sense of anxiety that I feel has been cast over everyday life. There are days where my mood has been pretty gloomy. Obviously, not going out as much and being separated from friends and others has played a part in that. I follow the news of the COVID-19 situation in Japan and America a lot, so I'm especially worried about my friends and family around the world.

  What about professionally?

  Ah, unfortunately, it has affected me in that regard. I missed out on some work — there are a few of my on-going projects on indefinite hold until the situation quells. Additionally, it's been hard to get some other things off the ground.

  Was there anything you were looking forward to that has now been canceled?

  Oh, at this point it feels like countless things — anime and gaming industry events, other festivals here in Japan, various movies, and series releases. With everything else going on bringing perspective, the cancellations and delays are only slightly disappointments. I completely understand and support them if it means keeping more people out of harm.

  Is there anything you’ve started to do because of the lockdown?

  I started cooking more. The situation has given me time to work on bigger personal projects. Also, I've been able to catch up with loved ones, especially back in America, via voice and video calls.

  What are you using to cope with being forced to stay inside?

  I use some of the time to study more Japanese and organize my living space. Games have been a nice temporary escape (Final Fantasy VII Remake has been perfect for that!) and multiplayer ones like Fortnite have served as digital hang-out spaces to replace meeting up in real life.

  Ernest traveling to Midgar in Final Fantasy VII Remake

  Before the "lockdown," I hadn't binged many shows in a while since my job and other life stuff usually kept me really busy. Like everyone and their mom, I watched through Netflix's Tiger King. I've tried catching up on some anime shows I missed in the past. I recently finished Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai plus its sequel film and was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved them.

  How has your neighborhood/town changed?

  Places, in general, are a little less crowded and various public spaces and businesses are temporarily closed or at reduced hours. Almost everyone is wearing masks.

  What are you looking forward to once everything is over?

  Karaoke for sure.

  How do you feel about Japan’s response to the pandemic?

  Frankly, I do not believe the measures that have been taken have not been swift or adequate enough. It's one of the reasons I'm constantly concerned about the situation spiraling into something worse ... I hope it doesn't, but I'm always afraid it will.

  Any other stories you’d like to tell?

  A month or so ago, I was attending a meeting to check out a property for a project. I showed up at the entrance without a mask, and before we could proceed with the meeting, one of the staff made a remark about how I didn't have a mask. Embarrassed, I realized I had forgotten to wear one (I was born and raised in America, so I sometimes forget). Fortunately, I had extras in the car, so I ran back and came back with one on.

  Around that time, I had a dinner meeting where the food was self-serve, buffet-style, but we were given gloves to wear while using the tongs and such. That was a first for me.

    Thank you so much to both Kaho and Ernest for sharing their stories of isolation with us. Kaho Shibuya can be found in multiple places all over the web with most of her social media found on her website (NSFW warning), or you can find her streaming on Twitch. Ernest can be found on Twitter @erniichan.

  If you have your own story about life in Japan you’d like to share, feel free to share it with me at any of the links in my bio below.

  If you or someone who know is living in Japan, coronavirus-based English resources are available at NHK World Japan. 

  Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs the YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram. 

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[melindamelissa]

Diary Entry 1

it’s been a long time since i wrote about how im feeling so i figured i’d start now. I have a harder time writing down my feelings in a diary since it takes longer and I don’t like having to wait to see my thought process pan out. 

So where to start. I feel happy, anxious, nervous, inspired, provoked, and mystical. I don’t really know where to start. I know what I want to talk about. I just don’t want to jump into it because i know there is a lot more i should be tlaking about. 

Should I start with my commitment issues?

why do i think i have commitment issues?

Well, there is a lot of evidence. One, I broke up and got back together with Arash in high school, switched schools a lot, i feel nervous to start any romantic relationship but i think that stems more from my insecurities and beliefs that no one could like me which is wiley because ive had people confess to me that they liked me like A____ this summer. So I guess its just my current dilemma with Y. 

why am i nervous? II am nervous because the ball is sort of in his court. But at the same time is it not because i want drunk. I know I need to just ask him about it but i dont even know what to say. 

ITS TIMEEEE to ROLLPLAYYYY BOIIII

Hey so I wanted to talk to you about how you’re feeling about me, i guess. 

It’s even hard for me to type with when no one else is looking at this or ever will besides myself. 

Do you like me still? Did your feelings disappear long before the school year ended or did you just say that to spare your lack of reciprocated feelings for me. It still is fascinating that you had feelings for me but i also don’t know if you just said that to make me feel better. I normally never read into this like this but i suppose there is a first for everything. 

I look at things very simply for what it is except for this occasion. I wonder why. I suppose its just the uncertainty. It drives me wild haha. I wish i just knew so i could get over it. I loved how direct A was about his feelings towards me because there was no miscommunication. While with Y, it left me very confused. I need clarification before it is too late. I have to ask before i leave. I feel like a wuss for thinking about him right now because for some reason i do not like giving him the power that I’im thinking about him if hes not. If he is thinking about me the way I am, I would not be thinking this way. I just don’t like it when people have the upper hand on me in a plausible romantic way. 

Like for A, i didn’t feel threatened because i was in a position of power and that made me feel secure in who i was. If i liked A and he did not feel the same way, i would not have been nervous about it because he would have been direct with me. However, with Y, and I don’t like to compare but it’s what is helping me discover what im feeling, I feel like if he liked me and I didn’t like him, i would feel malicious for some reason. like “oooo he liikkkeeeesss me hmmmmm” but i feel like that is a normal reaction i would have with anyone like I did with everyone that had feelings for me. I guess it feels different because i’m making these hypothetical situations that put my mind in a different mindset than what i want/am in. I cannot view it unbiased so i cant really describe how i would actually feel but i suppose it would be the same with A. OR maybe its because i feel threatened by how funny he is and how silly he is. But thats why i like him so i should just be happy that he is funny and silly and not jealous that he is too. Everyone is different and i should not be looking at what people are good and bad at for my own personal gain. I should just accept who i am and understand that i am always growing but i should not compare myself to others when put in a socially foreign situation, if that makes sense. Like feeling as though im 3rd wheeling a group of friends when really i know im not but it does feel like that which is understandable and no ones fault.  

I need to learn that even though there are a lot of nice, smart, hard working people around me, that I am also a talented and well rounded person. I need to stop shitting on myself for feeling stupid around others. I am smart. I am hard working. I am funny. I am silly. I am learning and working on being myself and not feeling like i have to put on a show for people. Start now. 

When you see someone next, do not pretend to be someone you are not. Just be yourself. Breath. Relax. Enjoy the company of good people. 

It will all fall into place. 

Don’t worry Melissa, its August 17th, 2017. You have grown so much as a person and you shoudl be proud. You moved out, you are going to a wonderful school filled with wonderful people, you are doing improv again, you are proud to me a weeb ass gamer, you are happy to be silly, you are listening to your body, you are asserting yourself, you are keeping up with your friends and family and those you are important to you. You are the best version of youself right now and it will only get better with time. I am so happy you aren’t throwing up anymore. I am so happy for you. I am so happy for me. You are listening to yourself. You feel cute and sexy and happy to be yourself. I truly would not change who i am. I have no regrets. I would not want to switch bodies with anyone, or brains, or type of humor. I love who i am and I am happy to experience life through my own lense. My reality is this; a happy one with a lot of bumps on the road, and a couple pot holes, and a giant sink hole, but there is still a road that has a lot to go. Or maybe not. I do not know where/when my life with end but whatever happens, i will be happy to know that I have lived life to the fullest of my capability. If i died right now, I would be happy. If i died 50 years from now, i would be happy as well because time and life are meaningless so you better fucking believe im going to give everything a happy meaning. And i am not going to let anyone get in the way of that. I do not need people who are going to bring me down, make me feel guilty, or invalidate my feelings. I am valid in what i feel at every moment, but i know i should not let that affect others negatively. Treating others kindly and fairly is all i need to worry about when wondering if my feelings are valid. As long as no one is being hurt, I am free to do as i please unless it is also at the expense of my current happiness. 

I love you Melissa and keep on smiling. That’s what makes you you. You are Smiley Smelly Melly and I know you won’t let that name’s aura and energy stop you from becoming the positive spirit of your reality. 

so you can stop watching anime in front of people to prove something. Just do you. but HEY i wanted to watch it on my laptop and i thought maybe others would want to watch and they didnt and thats okay because everyone has their own taste. Theres some movies i would walk away from too. You are good. You finally watched it so thats good :) 

Okay, ill leave this post now. Have fun! Have a good weekend! Make sure you spend time to meditate/do yoga at the beach by yourself. Also, boba wouldn’t be a bad idea >;3   also you should go watch a movie alone. that would be fun! like at the nick, bring a blanket, some snacks, etc. 

what should i do tomorrow morning? 

Get a baked good at a coffee shop 

write a one act

meditate at the beach

yoga in your room with headphones

dance alone :)

watch an anime series

watch Before Midnight!!!

Plan VV’s birthday present

oooo i gotta figure out what i got to get her.

okay for real, gunna go. 

and remember, be confident, sweet, cute, and giddy because i know that;s the real you. Don’t try to be “”cool””. .Its not your default, that is when you are on your guard. Be yourself becausethat will make you cool :)