#something something media creating bias

[spookymakosharkskizzers]

It’s so strange to me when peoples first reaction to hearing you hallucinate is “gosh that must be so scary”. I wish I could articulate right now exactly what it is that reaction makes me feel but all I I’ve got right now is it’s strange.

[patronsaint-prometheus]

If there’s anything that gmod roleplay YouTubers got right from a narrative perspective it’s the concept of a rational protagonist being placed into an inherently irrational environment and surrounded by inherent irrational people. Even better are the concepts of the rational protagonist eventually becoming less and less relatable to the rational audience as they change and morph due to the influence of their environment and surrounding characters. It’s not a loss of humanity or morality. It’s a loss of the physical and tangible logic within themselves and the way in which they interact with the world around them.

[leqclerc]

i’m glad i’m not the only one worried here. great for the team and all, but this feels like chaos waiting to happen. i thought we finally had it. even if we didn’t get a wdc, they couldn’t even bother to try and prioritize charles for once.

You're not alone in feeling like this! Being worried and not immediately jumping for joy and accepting every decision the team makes isn't any less valid. Because this is weird, this is unusual, this is something I never thought would happen. It's a lot to process. I've cycled through all five stages of grief today, from "oh lol funny memes" to "alright what the fuck does this mean for Charles?"

I get that a lot of people are super hyped about this, especially if you've always supported both drivers, I get that it must feel like a dream come true.

I'm so conflicted because on one hand, okay, maybe our concerns are unwarranted, maybe this will be the best thing ever, just what the team/Charles needs, massive success all around. But unfortunately I'm a chronic overthinker with pessimistic tendencies so of course I worry 🧍🏻‍♀️

But also, like you said, I thought Ferrari were done with bringing in world champions in favour of making world champions, you know? This just feels like it's going to complicate something that's already very volatile and complicated all on its own (see: plethora of issues that usually held Charles back, whether it be mismanagement or poor strategy, etc.) It already felt like everything needed to come together perfectly for him to maximise his chance of winning and now they throw this massive curveball and I really don't know what to think. Especially given the "multi year" deal (2+1 is I think the version journalists have settled on.)

It kind of just feels like the issues that already existed with Sainz will be magnified, you know? The media machine around Lewis is huge, so that's going to be ten times as intense (Sky is already putting down Charles and it's just going to get so much worse), the fan wars ten times as intense... It just feels like he can't win in any scenario, like all the work he's put in so far to get Ferrari back to their winning ways will be overshadowed by the new big star signing. If they create a competitive package and start winning when Lewis enters the team (even if Charles did the heavy lifting in terms of feedback and development) he will be credited for the team's success. I mean, just look at the way this misleading narrative of Carlos "single-handedly saving the strategy" stuck. Oftentimes people don't care about the facts, if a narrative appeals to them they will perpetuate it.

Plus, there will be so much pressure on Ferrari to "get Lewis that 8th title!!!" Mercedes's inability to do so soured a lot of fans' relationship with the team. If Ferrari really puts team interests above driver interests, then I'm sure they'd see the value in being the team that makes that happen. History book worthy stuff. Kind of concerned that in the midst of that Charles and his ambitions and goals might fall by the wayside. And he's got way more to lose in this situation—no matter how Lewis's time at Ferrari goes, he's a multiple WDC, no one's ever going to take that away from him. Same with Fernando, same with Seb. Charles has never even had a proper chance to go for one title with the team yet.

Like, if you think about it, you have clear "eras", right? Someone says Red Bull, you immediately associate them with Max and/or Seb. Lewis will, I think understandably, be associated with Mercedes due to his long stint and all the success he's enjoyed at the team. I guess I imagined that Ferrari was finally gearing up to be that with Charles going forward. But this shakes things up massively and while winning a championship with Ferrari was already a tall order, now it's, like, full on a herculean task.

[blindbeta]

I've noticed that you are interested in stories with multiple blind characters and often propose adding more blind characters to a story as a solution. I really struggle with this because it's not as simple as that -- stories don't have infinite narrative space. The idea that every story has a large cast is influenced by the prevalence of long serialized media in fandom: webcomics, TV shows, etc. But many writers (myself included) write a lot of novellas and short stories which often only have a few characters -- maybe even only 1 or 2! Even novels don't usually have huge expansive casts -- maybe 5 main characters with some additional side characters.

Considering this, I don't understand how it's realistic for every story (or even, say, 50% of stories) to have multiple blind characters (without it feeling forced). This is compounded by the fact that most blogs that talk about other forms of representation say the same! So if I write a 2-character short story and the protagonist is a blind Latino man, does the second character also have to be a blind Latino man? It just doesn't make sense! This is just a general problem I've noticed in discussions around representation -- there's an assumption that every cast will have 10+ characters and narrative space to develop those characters, even though that's not realistic for most narrative forms.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

Writing Multiple Blind Characters in Short Stories

Hi Anon! Surprise. I write short stories as well. I have experience with this. I have never felt like my blind characters were forced or unrealistic, even with having several of them in the same story. I’ll try to explain what might help you.

First, the idea that multiple blind characters is forced or unrealistic comes from ableism. Think about why you feel there is a limit on disabled characters. If you can create stories, I would hope you are creative enough to consider the possibility that multiple blind characters could exist in the same place and time. Challenging this barrier opens up more possibilities, allowing you to explore different types of blindness, different reactions to it, different upbringings, and multiple ways of living, adapting, and navigating being blind.

Second, blind characters need access to their own community. This is where they learn how to be blind. This where they get support. This is where they might find understanding and belonging. You can find more information about community here in an excellent reblog. Also, here.

As you mentioned, I often suggest adding more blind characters when writers insist upon using stereotyped portrayals. Having multiple characters with different experiences helps to make your story more realistic and nuanced, contrary to what people might implicitly believe. Having more than one blind character is something I highly recommend because it helps with not having all your representation rest on the shoulders of one character.

For example, if you are worried a main character who has cloudy eyes might reinforce the idea that all blind people have cloudy eyes, having another blind character with a different experience may help. If one of your blind characters is naive and innocent, you might have another blind character who is brash, displays a lack of trust in others, and has a lot of shocking stories. Maybe they’re in a rock band together. They met while playing blind football (aka soccer) on a middle school team. They bonded over their pet cats and sour patch kids.

Or something.

Another important thing to remember when writing is that you have control over the story. Too many writers come to me feeling stuck because they feel they cannot change their story while also wanting to incorporate my suggestions. This makes it challenging to address implicit bias or stereotypes, much less guide writers in going in different directions.

Additionally, I feel uncomfortable with the complaints about other blogs in this ask. I feel like this isn’t really about me, nor is it something I can comment on. I will say that it sounds as if a bunch of blogs dedicated to helping people write marginalized characters are mentioning some of the same things. They are probably doing so for a reason.

However, while it helps, writing multiple blind characters won’t improve every story, which I explained in my review of the book Blind. I was not impressed with this book. I did not feel that the four blind characters were very good, nor did having them help with offsetting the portrayal of blindness as a miserable experience.

Conversely, one of my favorite blind characters is Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Despite being the only blind character in the show, the writers did a good job with her. Would I have liked her to meet more of her community as she travels with the Gang? Absolutely. Even though I like her, she still never had access to her community after being isolated by her parents for so long.

So, no, you don’t need to have multiple blind characters if the suggestion bothers you this much. I even provided good examples of what to do, what not to do, and times where my typical advice was not as helpful for the resulting story.

However, please consider where these feelings stem from. Consider the origins of the idea that having multiple blind characters is unrealistic. Using the example you provided in your question, I wonder, would you say the same if both your characters were white and abled? Is there any way you can challenge the fear of seeming unrealistic? What about being considered unrealistic bothers you so much?

You don’t necessarily need to have characters in the story for them to exist. Even background characters can help. I will try to give some ideas for this:

Does your blind character have family they can talk about or remember? Are any of their family members blind?

Do they have any friends? Just because the friends aren’t in the story doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all.

Does the blind character have any formative memories or flashbacks?

Does the character who isn’t blind know any blind folks?

Your characters should have lives outside of the story. They should have memories and experiences that made them who they are. This is where you can have other blind characters. Perhaps this is how your blind character can have a community.

However, I would still like to see more blind characters interacting with each other. This is what I want as a blind person. If you don’t want to go that direction, that’s fine.

I hope this helps.

[tma-thoughts]

Ive been thinking a lot about the bechdel test. If you've ever been anywhere on the internet, you'll know it as a test of a piece of media's female representation; a movie passes the bechdel test if 2 female characters have a conversation about something other than a man

What i think is so interesting is that, similar to the evolution of the "5 stages of grief", the bechdel test was never meant to be a measure for female representation, at least not the way it is now. The "bechdel test" was created by alison bechdel in the 80s in her comic dykes to watch out for, in which a character says she'll only watch a movie if it fits the aforementioned requirements

Bechdel got the idea from a friend, liz wallace, who in turn might have gotten it from an essay by virginia woolf. In the wider context of the strip, the "test" was a method applied by queer women to see if they could interpret female characters as also being queer

Bechdel described it as a "little lesbian joke" that was never meant to be taken seriously, but as we know the test caught on in the 2000s and is now used as a standard of female representation, with rules added on like the characters must both be named, and they must talk for at least a minute

I guess you could call it a sort of butterfly effect? A lesbian artist in the 80s writing a joke from a friend in her queer comic strip led to standards of gender bias in media 40 years later. That's the part that i really find interesting. There's something to say about queerness affecting popular culture but i can't think of a way to word it

[i-love-your-light]

too many thoughts on the new hbomberguy video not to put them anywhere so:

with every app trying to turn into the clock app these days by feeding you endless short form content, *how many* pieces of misinformation does the average person consume day to day?? thinking a lot about how tons of people on social media go largely unquestioned about the information they provide just because they speak confidently into the camera. if you're scrolling through hundreds of pieces of content a day, how many are you realistically going to have the time and will to check? i think there's an unfortunate subconscious bias in liberal and leftist spaces that misinformation is something that is done only by the right, but it's a bipartisan issue babey. everybody's got their own agendas, even if they're on "your side". *insert you are not immune to propaganda garfield meme*

and speaking of fact checking, can't help but think about how much the current state of search engines Sucks So Bad right now. not that this excuses ANY of the misinformation at all, but i think it provides further context as to why these things become so prevalent in creators who become quick-turnaround-content-farms and cut corners when it comes to researching. when i was in high school and learning how to research and cite sources, google was a whole different landscape that was relatively easy to navigate. nowadays a search might give you an ad, a fake news article, somebody's random blog, a quora question, and another ad before actually giving you a relevant verifiable source. i was googling a question about 1920s technology the other day (for a fanfiction im writing lmao) and the VERY FIRST RESULT google gave me was some random fifth grader's school assignment on the topic???? like?????? WHAT????? it just makes it even harder for people to fact-check misinformation too.

going off the point of cutting corners when it comes to creating content, i can't help but think about capitalism's looming influence over all of this too. again, not as an excuse at all but just as further environmental context (because i really believe the takeaway shouldn't be "wow look how bad this one individual guy is" but rather "wow this is one specific example of a much larger systemic issue that is more pervasive than we realize"). a natural consequence of the inhumanity of capitalism is that people feel as if they have to step on or over eachother to get to 'the top'. if everybody is on this individualistic american dream race to success, everyone else around you just looks like collateral. of course then you're going to take shortcuts, and you're going to swindle labor and intellectual property from others, because your primary motivation is accruing capital (financial or social) over ethics or actual labor.

i've been thinking about this in relation to AI as well, and the notion that some people want to Be Artists without Doing Art. they want to Have Done Art but not labor through the process. to present something shiny to the world and benefit off of it. they don't want to go through the actual process of creating, they just want a product. Easy money. Winning the game of capitalism.

i can't even fully fault this mentality- as someone who has been struggling making barely minimum wage from art in one of the most expensive cities in america for the past two years, i can't say that i haven't been tempted on really difficult occasions to act in ways that would be morally bad but would give me a reprieve from the constant stress cycle of "how am i going to pay for my own survival for another month". the difference is i don't give in to those impulses.

tl;dr i hope that people realize that instead of this just being a time to dogpile on one guy (or a few people), that it's actually about a larger systemic problem, and the perfect breeding grounds society has created for this kind of behavior to largely go unchecked!!!

[lurkingshan]

I've been in multiple tumblr fandoms over the years and the same shit comes up over and over again wrt arguments about how we all engage with our chosen media on here, so here are a few things to keep in mind that have helped me along the way:

Not everyone is going to engage in the same way as you, and that's good, actually. Some people are purely here to gush over the things they like. Some people are here to do deep analytical breakdowns which will include criticism. Some people are cheerleaders. Some people are haters. A lot of people are a mix of both depending on what they're talking about on any given day. It's all good and valid, and it's what gives this space variety, allows us to learn from each other, and keeps it interesting.

The filter, unfollow, and block functions are your friend. If you love a mutual but hate the volume or the way they talk about a certain thing, just add it to your filtered tags (relatedly: tag your shit so people can filter you when needed!). If you consistently don't vibe with the way a person chooses to engage on here, just unfollow them. If you find them actively offensive or detrimental to your mental health, hit that block button, baby. We are all anonymous internet strangers and no one will die.

Someone expressing a different opinion from yours is not a personal attack on you. If someone hates a thing you like, they are not calling you stupid for liking it. If they love a thing you hate, there's nothing wrong with them, they are just taking something different from it than you are. That shit is all about you and your own insecurities, don't try to put it on them.

Vague posting is rude. If you want to directly respond to something someone said to get better clarity about what they meant, reply to their post or shoot them an ask or DM and talk to them about it. If you simply want to express a counterpoint without directly engaging them, just post your own take without vaguely alluding to them and building what is almost certainly a strawman of their original point. People you're vaguing can see you on here, folks. Don't be a dick.

Credit and reblog other people's ideas when you are building on them, and be kind to the creators who provide the artwork that make this place so special and unique. Reblogging is the lifeblood of this website. It's the only way people get to see content that is by anyone they don't follow, and the gifmakers on here in particular put in so much time and effort to give us beautiful images--share their work and tell them you appreciate it! You also don't have to agree with every single word of a meta post to reblog it (why would you expect to, it comes from a different brain than yours), and you absolutely should be crediting people and sharing their words when they sparked something that inspired your own thoughts. This is just being a good community member.

Embrace the difference between meta and fanwanking. Meta writing is analysis of the actual media content as it is presented, with arguments based in the canon text. Fanwanking is doing your own work to fill in gaps or create headcanons to supplement the canon text. Some people prefer content that leaves a lot of gaps because they love to creatively fanwank; some people prefer to be told complete stories without having to do all that extra work to make them make sense. These are both very cool and fun ways to engage, but when you're fanwanking be aware that those ideas are all coming from you, not the actual media being discussed, so others might not vibe with your interpretation.

When posting your own opinions, try to be clear about where you're coming from and why. If you have a personal experience or bias that is affecting your read, own it. If you're looking at a piece of media from a specific angle related to your own interests and learning, say that. It helps other people to know where you're coming from and why you're thinking about something in a certain way that can then help them puzzle out why they feel differently.

You don't owe anyone your presence here, and you don't have to express opinions on everything or respond to tags or asks if you don't have anything to say. Sometimes you might just want to take a break from posting, some things in the discourse might just flow right on by you, sometimes you will not have a firm opinion on a debate. You can post as much or as little as you want. You can suddenly decide you don't want to talk about a show anymore. You can not log into your tumblr for days or weeks at a time. Do you, boo!

Most people come to tumblr because they do want to engage with others, and this place can be a lot of fun if you just take what you need from it and let things that aren't serving you go.

[arkus-rhapsode]

Are We Returning To 2000s Era Shonen Anime/Manga (A Discussion)

So this is going to be way more of a thinkpiece than I usually do for this blog, but recent trends in the space and niche that I devote a lot of time to, Anime/Manga, have been showing themselves that got me thinking. This is not meant to be a serious sociology case study taken as fact, it's going to be more a theory based on observations of the community that I, like many others, devote a lot of time into than a full on claim, but I do want to ask, is the anime and manga community is experiencing a resurgence in 2000s era shonen manga?

Background

Now let me get this out of the way, there is bias in these observations as I am a western anime fan, but also a North American anime fan. Meaning my gateway and gauges of pop culture are mostly determined by the history of my area of the world’s relationship with anime. From the OVAs of 80s hyper violent and hyper sexual sci fi that you had to purchase from the backs of video rental stores, to the Toonami era of 90s and early 00s programming block the centred around action anime and cartoons, the 4kids era of mass market japanese animated kids shows that were really just giant commercials with some of the earliest memetics in western sphere, and the explosion of shonen battle series in the western sphere in the mid to late 2000s marked by the rise of the colloquially named “Big 3” of shonen jump. I understand that continents like South America or Europe may have undergone a different exposure to the Japanese medium, but as I am going in with some bias in this observation, I would like to make it clear on where the formula is coming from. I also would like to lay down a certain clarification before making this, when discussing the topic of nostalgia I think a lot of people have forgotten what it actually means. If we go by the Cambridge dictionary definition, Nostalgia is “a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past.” This is often invoked when talking about pop culture because people from say 20 years ago don’t seem to enjoy or relate to the interests of today. The belief is that nostalgia is generational ergo if you grew up in the 80s you’re likely wishing to recapture the feelings of childhood that you associate with those trends from 20 years ago. In fact, most revaluation in media has often been catalyzed by a difference of those who grew up in an era rebuffing the opinions of those who didn’t. 

There is the well known “20 Year Rule” regarding pop culture nostalgia. That every decade it longs for what was popular 20 years ago. Probably no better example than “That 70s show” being popular in the late 90s, the return of many beloved 80s-90s franchises like “Ghostbusters” returning in the 2010s as well as series like “Stranger Things” that wrapped itself up in 80s aesthetics. DC's New 52 relaunch that seemed to bring back trends from 90s era comics.

Now it goes without saying that the 20 year rule isn’t a “real” rule, rather an observation that certain trends make a return to popularity because the ones who grew up with a certain media will be the ones who add to the discourse when they come of age and will be the ones having a chance to create consumable art for the masses and that may just be revivals of once popular IP. This isn’t necessarily wrong in regards to nostalgia, but I do believe that one doesn’t need to have been born in a certain era to be nostalgic for something when we discuss pop culture. Pop culture is really just trends and preferences that become en vogue and people can acquire a taste at any given time. Sometimes it can be due to those who grew up with something now having the chance to create and drawing upon their own childhoods, sometimes it's just due to not being exposed, other times it can be a certain feeling of disillusionment of the now, and seeking something that peaks your interest, and even sometimes it can be major corporations or networks looking for things with existing audiences to draw upon that actually expand the audience. In fact one of the most prominent Netflix adaptations of the 2020s has been live Action Avatar the Last Airbender and One Piece, both shows that got their start on American televisions in 2004 and 2005. One of the biggest animated shows right now is Invincible, based on a comic book from 2003

So I want to stress this is not necessarily about how if you grew up with the original Mobile Suit Gundam show you are being replaced by the kids who were watching GetBackers. And or if you are a fan of shows that came out in the 2000s you yourself were born in the 2000s.

But what was the landscape of the English speaking anime community like back in the 2000s? Well let me paint a portrait for you.

What was the 2000s like for anime fans?

The term I used, “shonen boom period”, is somewhat mythologized in the western anime sphere. There was a glut of high profile shonen anime running around the same time that most people identified with this time period and was arguably when we saw the most influx of people getting into the hobby. One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach served as big series known for their massively large casts, MCs with a level of attitude, some of the most hype centric power supernatural/extraordinary power systems, and certain brand of “Japanese-y” humor. We can’t deny that it wasn’t just these series however, as series like Fullmetal Alchemist became many people’s introduction to more narratively intricate series interspersed with a somewhat gothic action style. The gothic and somewhat edgy Death Note became many fans' first ever “battle series that’s not a battle series” that also incorporated many biblical and gothic horror elements into its presentation. And things like Code Geass also incorporated this combination of hyper stylized cat and mouse with ornate and gothic aesthetics and fighting robots. 

Series like Ouran Highschool Host Club and and Haruhi Suzumiya were basically gateways to the more hyper extraordinary slice of life series that didn’t shy away from fanservice and loud comedy. With ecchi like Rosario + Vampire taking it to an even greater extreme. For people willing to go even deeper, series like Fairy Tail began to pop up and share a distinct similar flavor to series like One Piece and Naruto which arguably started the popular conception of it coming from the same magazine as the latter. That’s not also discounting the amount of holdovers from the 90s like Dragon Ball z, Trigun, and Yu Yu Hakusho, which also had an edge towards fantastical combat and comedic oriented series.

All of this is to generally illustrate the media diet of what an average anime fan was expected to have some level of access to. As this was far before the eras of Funimation or Hulu having online services. Not a homogenized spread by any means, and im certain plenty of readers could name more underground or smaller series like Mushishi or Elphen Lied, but generally the popular mainstream you could tell that there was a consistent theme of long form media with a very loud, very flashy, and very action oriented type of series. Which I think is fair to say had skewed some people’s perception. And while I cannot claim with utter certainty that Japan was the same in this regard, you can look at magazines like Shonen Jump and notice a somewhat synchronistic trend. With series like Hitman Reborn, Gintama, D. Gray Man, Eyeshield 21, Bobobobo, etc.making a clear marcation of what was commercially successful at the time. Even series not inside the magazine but had smaller nicher, Tokyo-pop-esque series like Rave Master, Flame of Recca, Air Gear, History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi, Soul Eater, etc all had a similarity to the shonen jump magazine. To the point it was not uncommon to see so many jump characters in a collage and one from shonen sunday or shonen magazine in there as if this was all coming from the same place.

Changing Landscape

Now with the advantages of the modern internet, we have the ability to actually keep up with the jump magazine in real time as opposed to the common practice of relying on scanlation site and fansubs that were often devoted to the most popular works. But with simultaneous publication and services like Crunchyroll, being able to access a wider variety of shows and series that we may or may not have access to. I believe that the 2010s in the english speaking fanbase was the decade we saw a somewhat expansionism of what people perceived as anime. Anime could be One Piece and Naruto, but it could also be Erased, it could be the Promised Neverland, Attack on Titan, K-On, Haikuu, and Durarara. With the representatives of the 90s no longer being holdovers in syndication like dragon ball but rather full on revivals of the likes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Hunter x Hunter. 

All of these could be "shonen" but also other genres like Seinin, Josei, and Shojo all had their own varying layers of what they could be in their demographic

The mood of what was popular was also changing, not just in the fact that more flavors of anime and manga were becoming mainstream, but new works from shonen jump showed a rise in almost subversive series like My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer that seemed to consciously deviate or place new spins from traditional tropes of the 2000s characters, and we saw works that were derivative of previous serious like Black Clover drawing upon Naruto the same way it was known that Naruto had drawn upon Dragon Ball before them. Series like The Promised Neverland and Doctor Stone offered up more dramatic series that still infused a certain energy of the shonen genre. 

And of course the series like Attack Titan whose much more darker and gorey storytelling seemed to have become one of if not the biggest hit of the generation with a well regarded adaptation, but something that had felt so removed from what were once contemporaries like the then ending Bleach or Naruto. We can also note that the late 2010s saw the rise of series like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen that began a trend of popular urban fantasy stories. Where fantastical concepts were now in contemporary Japan and the stories that focused on concepts like self identity and the harshness of maturing were juxtaposed to the real world inhabited by monsters. 

It seemed many tropes of the previous decade were still alive in the rise of Isekai anime. Which was particularly the only popular outlet for fantasy stories with an action orientation. But these almost felt disconnected from the wider world of manga as things like heavy harem action series had actually decreased in mags like shonen jump. There was also new tropes being established in this subgenre that became unique popularizations of tropes all on their own, such as the overpowered protagonist whose power everyone believes is weak. But many of these were based on light novels, a form of media that only in the last few years western readers are having official access to and not simply scans found on the internet.

We in North America truly have gone from anime being a niche that was primarily accessible through dedicated TV blocks like Toonami, to a full blown cultural relevance shift.

We also need to talk about this era in its perception of the past also shifted. The 90s and the early 00s often blend together as classics of the anime community. Somewhat encased in amber. However, there is no denying that “feels like a 2000s series” had become a bit of a shorthand for very goofy, Very horny, very action heavy series. Series like Fire Force and and Undead Unluck had their show what more problematic elements be equated to the problematic trends of the past that people just accepted as “a part of the medium.” But lets keep in mind, this is not really describing a time, more a trend. Superficial elements that invoke similar feelings of the past. 

Speaking of anime fans…

Fan Culture

So while I wanted to paint a picture of creatively the landscape has changed, there’s no denying that in the age of internet accessibility, the anime fan community has also changed. It is much much easier now to get in contact with people who are anime fans now than it was to rely on word of mouth like it was back in the day. I can still distinctly remember my anime club which wasn’t even really a club devoted to anime but rather other geek stuff like D&D and TCGs. Our hobbies just happened to have similar overlap.

Now though, anime fan culture is much more relevant and thriving. Going from just posting weekly reviews, to long retrospectives, comedy videos, abridged series, clickbait articles, fan theories, and podcasts. However, I think a defining feature of fans of the 2000s era of anime that were at their most prominent was hype culture. 

Due to many of the biggest anime series at the time being released weekly and focusing on action, many many many discussion boards and videos were often about staying in this cycle of wanting to see what happens next and the action made people very excited to see just how characters were going to win fights or even if they’d have fights at all. 

I want to make it clear that this type of activity doesn’t belong to a certain era, but you can see it shaped by the 2000s era. Especially when discussing “what is the next big 3.” As if it were a true position and title, rather than a moment in time where there were just three very distinct shonen series in the fanbase.This doesn’t necessarily have a “negative” effect on the discussion of anime/manga but you can see that certain genres lend themselves to hyping fans up more and more. 

Someone isn’t reading the most recent chapter of a romance like Blue Box with the same level of anticipation of who will face who like it was One Piece. But there have certainly been series that try.

The Present

Now we reach the 2020s and this decade is still young, so it is hard to say what the future will hold for certainty, but we can look at the last four years and notice some significant waves being made recently in Shonen Jump alone. I already spoke of Undead Unluck, a series that almost wears it would now be considered retro inspirations on its sleeve. With an opening chapter that establishes an MC that seems motivated by a sexual joke, A power system follows a verbal naming gimmick, and a loose enough world that allows for characters of varying aesthetics and to be incorporated into groups. With groups of these powerful characters splitting up to face each other and use their ridiculous power to the extreme. Even in the series' own meta arc about creating manga, the in-universe analogy for Undead Unluck’s manga is commented on as feeling retro. There is no doubt the biggest viral hit of the decade so far has gone to Kagurabachi, a manga about sword fighting and magical crime lords that seems almost indulgent in its stylistic slicing and or dicing of baddies. Its memetic success was primarily due to a somewhat sincere and somewhat ironic belief that it would be the “next big thing” as it promised to be a stylized action series. Another surprise viral success has been the manga Nue’s Exorcist which sees another supernatural swordfighter boy harness the powers of his sexy spirit lady while getting into harem shenanigans that echo a particular form of ecchi of anime’s past that had actually been somewhat absent in the past decade in jump. Both of these series have a somewhat noticeable similarities to Bleach, a long running shonen action series that has seen its own revival in the last few years of writing this with the long awaited adaptation of the final arc of the bleach anime. 

While the other members of the “big 3” never truly went away and became almost inter-generational, Bleach truly did feel like a “come back” as it was absent for so long. And unlike Hunter x Hunter and Jojo which were never really popular in the west and even their older anime are more regarded as anime deep lore. Bleach was one of the most popular series in the west at the time to never receive a conclusion animated. 

Speaking of anime of the 2000s Trigun Stampede was a reimagining of the original late 90s show. This errs a bit similar to Hunter x Hunter’s style of revival, but also seems uniquely its own in actually trying to find a balance between the original series but adding in things cut from its original late 90s early 2000s counterpart. 

And now we must examine other shonen magazines. Series like Gachiakuta created by a former assistant of Okubo, the creator of Soul Eater, carries with it much of the similar energies of that series. Its also noticeable as being a truly dark fantasy series. Not an urban fantasy, but rather a completely new world that had a very grunge and dirty world building. And then there is Daemons of the Shadow Realm, a series by Fullmetal Alchemist creator Hiromu Arakawa. This series is also set in modern day japan with supernatural elements, however Arakawa’s style of writing is practically unchanged from her time on FMA. With an emphasis on action, intricate mysteries, and character building comedy with her trademark over exaggerated blocky style. There is of course Hiro Mashima who has started another new series, Dead Rock, and his style has also not changed that much. Then there is just flat out sequels to 2000s series like Gamaran Shura.

This to me shows that we are  seeing a bit of a combination of people who are now entering the workforce inspired by creators of the past, but also that creators of the past still exist 20 years later and are still making content that hasn’t really undergone significant change. 

Of course, we can’t also forget the implementation of the Manga Plus/J plus service which has opened up a very interesting ground for creators to have some of the most creatively out there series than what you may have expected from the shonen jump brand. I genuinely don’t think series like Make the Exorcist Fall in Love or Fire Punch would’ve ever been acceptable in the pages of a weekly shonen series. However one series in particular does feel like it could've and boy its been quite the success. Kaiju no 8.

Kaiju no 8 almost feels as though it is the AoT of a new generation with the amount of anticipation this one series has as well as the similarities between the series superficial elements. However, I'd say the key distinction between the two has been the tone. AoT took a dark and practically dour tone on its titan infested world. With an MC declaring war on all of his enemies. The pain was realistic, with human bodies being brittle and vulnerable. And the belief that just because you were a good person you weren't going to make it out alive. Kaiju no 8 instead opts for a more action oriented tone. Down playing the bleak realism for more "Hell yeah!" moments. With super science weapons that feel more akin to a tokusatsu show and fights and battles between humans an kanji the feel like the Dragon Ball style wrestling matches of old.

And of course, that’s not to say Jump hasn’t continued with series that feel more modern like the realistic and mellow romance of Blue Box or the dramatic coming of age story of Akane-Banashi. 

But the presence of these series has caused somewhat of a friction with the popular conception of the magazine. Its safe to say that while “shonen” tends to think of action male oriented series, it can really just mean works aimed more at adolescents. But I think many tend to associate this familiar feeling of “what is shonen” with their popular introduction of the magazine. With a saturation of action and brash comedy series. This is further complicated by the fact many action series in jump are actually ending over the last decade. With new ones not popping up to replace them as frequently and series like One Piece and MHA and Black Clover basically stretching out across an entire decade or longer. In fact, I don’t think it's unreasonable to believe that the hype for something like Kagurabachi was in part a belief that it signaled a return of a type of familiar series and genre that had been missing. Or at the very least, looked to fill an inevitable gap the magazine was obviously going to be facing. Followed by the other commercial success of Nue’s Exorcist, we are likely to see these series last for a long time. At the time of this writing, Tokyo Revenger’s author Ken Wakui has released Astro Royale, a series that feels very similar to his previous work yet infused with this almost GetBackers flavor.

So that leaves us with the question at the start, are we seeing a rise in 2000s nostalgia in anime and manga?

Conclusion

So I'm sorry if I disappoint, but the best I can say is, I’m not certain. I do believe that from my observation I think it is reasonable to say that we are seeing a rise in creators in the shonen space being ones inspired by series from 20 years ago. However, I think we are also seeing creators who are from that time period also returning to write how they have always written. 

On the consumer side, I think we can see that fans of anime and manga have changed in the sense their tastes can now be shaped by a much larger catalog of series at their disposal. But in the case of shonen, I think we are simply seeing those who likely got their start in anime at around the 2000s resonating with newer series drawing upon those series, but also with younger fans now likely to grow up with the tail end of what was popular in the 2010s now being influenced by the 2020s. I also believe that one of the defining features of the anime community in the last decade is hype culture. And currently we are seeing a rise in series that actually feel more catered to hype, be it a revival of a series they liked or predicting what will be the next success. 

All and all, this piece was trying to tunnel on the shonen demographic in general, which is more likely than not going to have similar traits relative to itself. I do see us as a community endorsing trends of the past and there’s an excitement for these things to “come back” even if they may or may not have left. If you liked this please drop a like or reblog because I may do more of these think pieces in the future.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[lost-technology]

Trigun Maximum - What the Gender???!!! Okay, so I'm sitting here doing a re-read of Trigun Maximum Vol. 5 and I get to the last chapter. I am reading the print edition from Dark Horse - Japanese publication in 2001, English language translation publication in 2005 according to the back of the book. Anyway, I got a little confused by something I hadn't remembered that is apparently there: The page where Elendira is dumped out onto the ground from the Ark (and wants to gut the helmsman) Meryl says: "A transvestite?! (He has a nicer figure than I do...)" I had forgotten that because I believe that most people tend to refer to the Trigun Manga Overhaul fan-translation for that, which is here for that chapter: https://www.trigunoverhaul.com/TVol5Ch06.html and has Meryl saying: "A trans-woman?! (But she has a better figure than I do...)" One is official (comic-licensed), one is fan-translated (but is said to be very accurate, done as dedicated fans rather than people just paid for a task). I am wondering which is more accurate? Specifically, I am wondering if the latter one "cleaned things up" for the sake of modern sensitivities or if it really does carry more of the gist of the original. I mean, I found myself with a bit of confusion at that chapter when skimming Overhall and seeing Legato say "She saved me," when my Dark Horse book has "He saved me" which had led me to believe that Legato had been referring to Knives (Knives chose to spare him, by order) - while "She saved me" (referring to Elendira) completely changes the meaning. Legato *does* have one of his "fanatical" facial expressions there, thus leaving me confused as to whether he is surprised that Elendira the ("he" in DH or "she" in Overhaul) saved him or if it might have been "he" referring to Knives ordering him spared? I am not asking for people to cancel Nightow... (ugh, please don't). I don't even know if pronouns work the same in Japanese as they do in English (I heard that they do not). Having been alive in 2005 and having read the volume back around then (either that or I got it in 2006 or so, anyway, I was alive back then AND old enough to read a very bloody, adult-oriented manga), well, I seem to remember "transvestite" being a more common term then / the basic common before "transgender" "transwoman" and "transman" came into common usage. Not being a part of the trans community, I do not know if it was more "the accepted common term" then or if it was always a slur and I thought it used to be the common term before new terms were created? If my recall is accurate, "transgender" / trans - man/woman was coming into play then and "transvestite" was fading out as it was more often used in a derogatory fashion than as a descriptor. (I honestly do not know very much about the culture of the words, so forgive me if I am getting things wrong).* *There was a similar process that I saw in real time regarding what is now known as the R-word for certain disabilities. I was alive (a child) back in the 1980s when the word was actually a medical descriptor but was ALSO a slur and by about the 1990s other medical terms were used and "R" had become exclusively insulting. - It is one of those things that one must be mindful of when encountering old media. (I watched a Twilight Zone 1985 episode I hunted up having vaguely remembered it from my childhood on Youtube some time ago that treated the condition and a character that had it with sensitivity, but had his parents and medical staff using the term and it felt like a shock / I had to remind myself "that was the term back then"). I'm just left wondering about the bias DH translators might have had back in the day having been jumpscared by that when most of today's manga-readers are obviously reading Overhaul.

[showmey0urfangs]

Are you getting paid to defend these white people like this? Like let me know so I can apply.

Really Killejoie? Are you really this pathetic? Taking the time out of your finite existence to create a whole ass troll account so that you can keep sending me hate even after I turned off my anon asks? This is extreme, even for you. 😂

But you know what, I will give you the unearned courtesy of answering your question:

This has nothing to do with defending ‘white people’ as you put it. Nor is it about fandom racism like you want to gaslight everyone into believing. This is just the latest iteration of something that has been happening since last year.

I'll give it to you though, it's a clever tactic. Everytime you get called out for your toxic behavior, you shift the blame away from YOU as an individual and from your own actions, and you make it about ALL black fans and the racism we experience in fandom spaces. It's clever because obviously no decent person would disagree with such a valid point or be seen as supporting something as heinous as racism.

And it almost worked; you managed to stir the entire fandom into an uproar and now I have white women in my inbox and on my dashboard trying to 'educate' me and other black people about what racism is, while being completely oblivious to how pathetic and condescending they sound.

How unfortunate for you then that tangible proof emerged to contradict your lies and attempts at gaslighting, and to show everyone what this issue, which has been ongoing for more than a year, is REALLY about.

And for those who still don't get it, THIS is what it's really about:

----

THIS is why everyone calls you antis and bullies! THIS is why everyone in the fandom hates you! THIS is why you are on several block lists. THIS is why everyone complains about you in discord servers and in DMs because most are too scared to say it to your faces for fear of being targeted next. Well, sadly for you I'm not! There's nothing you can do to me that you haven't done already in the past year. 🙃

I repeat, this has nothing to do with being black because again, most of you aren't even black!!! And yet you have the audacity to attack black fans who disagree with you and think you can speak over us while still calling yourselves #allies.

This is not about fandom racism! Any rational thinking person agrees there is racism in fandom spaces, there is racism in mainstream media, and the is also racism and overt racial bias in Anne Rice's writing—that the show does a more or less good job of correcting. You are preaching to the choir! I've spoken endlessly about all of these points myself and will continue to do so. But that's not what this is about.

This about YOU specifically as individuals. It's about the wildly disrespectful and vile way you treat others in this fandom. It's about the constant harassment, the death threats, the vile language you use to refer to everyone—including black fans, including Jacob Anderson himself.

----

I repeat for the people in the back—including some of my mutuals who don't seem to get it: THIS IS NOT ABOUT FANDOM RACISM! This is about a small group of individuals, a lot of whom aren't even black, who think they can act like complete assholes to everyone in this fandom and get no pushback. This is about people thinking they are entitled to dictate how everyone should interpret these characters and trying to enforce their control through bullying and silencing of dissenting opinions.

Enough with the bullshit!

[zvtara-was-never-canon]

ok. in my best attempts to understand zk arguments I stumbled onto a puzzling argument: Aang is not real, he is two adult white men, therefore, one can say whatever one wants about him

May be you and your audience could help me here.

1) All AtLA characters are not real. They are all created by two adult white men and their creative team of adults.

2) sure, a real person cannot hurt and harm a fictional character. No matter how many times a fan calls Aang an incel and a rapist, Aang is not suffering. On the other hand, if one harasses a fan, who is a real person, then there is a real harm done. I agree with it wholeheartedly. Nobody should harass fellow fans.

3) yet, back to fictional characters, why does it mean that we are not allowed empathized with Aang? Why Zuko’s pain is allowed to feel real, and his reactions are understandable, but everything about Aang is fake and he only allowed to be criticized as a construct? Both Aang and Zuko are created by the same people! Both are equally fictional! But saying is “Zuko is traumatized teenagers showing a typical reaction to parental abuse” and then turning around and saying “you can’t say that Aang is a twelve year old in pain, he is two old white dudes actually” are both the height of zk media literacy?

4) it just doesn’t compute for me. Help!

It's simple: they want an excuse to hate on Aang, and it is acceptable to make fun of straight, white, cis men online, so they go "AANG IS THE SELF-INSERT OF ONE OF THE WRITERS" to pretend that their shallow "criticism" of a fictional 12-year-old for the crime of being 12 is actually deep criticism of The Patriarchy.

And that goes into the double-standard between he and Zuko. When Zuko does something bad, we gotta remember the entire context of his backstory and how it led to that specific decision - after all, he is a character in a story, and connecting those dots is just basic analysis of said story, and him making mistakes is why he's a compelling, complex character and a surprisingly real look at what trauma can do to a person.

But when Aang does it? Suddenly he's a real person hurting real people - or, at the very least, it becomes a conversation about "bad exemples that teach the wrong lessons to young boys", even though the show always makes it clear when something Aang is doing is wrong, and the narrative punishes him for it.

It really is just the basic "People say The Little Mermaid is """""problematic""""" because Ariel wants a prince, but no one says shit about Aladdin desperately simping for a princess" but with ship wars being the bias instead of sexism.

[dragoneyes618]

In the room where we often called for G-d to bring peace, the students and faculty around me watched a screen and celebrated like our prayers had been answered.

It was September of 1993, and my classmates and teachers cheered watching the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

I did not.

A friend berated me.

“What’s wrong with you? You don’t want peace?” he asked.

I was 15 but knew enough about critical thinking to understand that to be for or against something, you need to know the details. I had watched on TV where they said some issues would not be included in the deal and would be left to a later time.

There was tremendous peer pressure back then – as there is today –in order to look virtuous, to proclaim you were in favor or against something.

I attended the Frisch School in Paramus, N.J., which was a rigorous and great school that helped prepare me for life, and from meeting current students I can say without bias that it is one of the best high schools in the country.

But there is a new challenge that all Jewish schools must meet. There needs to be a class called “Debating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” It should start next year.

The majority of Jewish high schoolers will not go to Yeshiva University. And many will go to Ivy League schools, despite the recent protests, as well as to other schools where professors have been indoctrinating students to believe that Israel is a white colonizer.

Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro and Hillel Fuld all articulate cogent messages about Israel but I don’t know that all Jewish high school students are aware of them.

Jewish schools teach the kashrut question of batel b’shishim. If, for example, a drop of milk fell into a pot of chicken soup, if the drop is not greater than 1/60th of the soup, it may still be deemed kosher.

It’s a good idea to teach that. It’s also a fine idea to teach the same students important facts about Israel so that when they hear slander, they don’t feel like 1/60th of a Jew.

We now live in a reality where people, especially younger people, are inundated with message from TikTok and other social media that are anti-Israel. From watching TV and podcasts alone, I must have seen it said that Israel is committing a genocide at least 500 times, mostly with nobody disputing it.

Two great examples of someone speaking against it were Coleman Hughes, an author and speaker who was the guest on American’s top podcast, “The Joe Rogan experience.” The other was a man named Steven Borrelli, who goes by the moniker of Destiny, who was on a show called Breaking Points, debating Omar Baddar.

Hughes told Rogan (who by his own admission is not knowledgeable on the topic) that if including estimates of those in Hamas who were killed the ratio of combatant to civilian is similar to when American soldiers fought in Mosul, and that if Israel did not go into Rafah, that would create a blueprint for any future group to jump over the border and kill civilians, then go back and hide among civilians with impunity. Rogan had no counterpoint.

Destiny explained the same thing regarding the ratio, and in this and other debates he asked why only Israel is accused of genocide, but America was not for Iraq or Afghanistan, or World War II, and explained that there is a double standard.

We just finished Pesach where we teach about the son who doesn’t know how to ask. Too many Jewish youngsters don’t know how to ask at colleges: What is your definition of a genocide? Why would Israel give warnings? What is the ratio of civilian/combatant?

Another fallacy is that Jews are not allowed to criticize the Israeli government. That is of course, false, but the problem is when too large a portion of criticism is put on Israel and little blame to terrorists. (It is also important to acknowledge the pain and suffering of Palestinians who have been under the thumb of Hamas.)

Another question one must ask: What are the details? You may be in favor of lunch, but not if the waiter then brings you a plate of fire.

Many ignored part of New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech when he said Palestinians must drop their demand for a complete right of return (because the demography would mean there would be more Palestinians than Israelis in Israel) and a Palestinian state would be demilitarized. Schumer’s speech likely encouraged these protests, but absent from his talk was that there is no indication Palestinians would agree to both conditions or care what he says in that regard, let alone what the Israeli people want.

There is a video of a UCLA student Eli Tsives who questions a woman who claims to be a professor at UCLA. He does know how to ask, and the woman is so flummoxed she asks for help. The reason she has no answer is that bullying works until you come up against someone who is not afraid and knows how to ask the right questions.

It is very telling that when journalists ask questions to the protestors, most have no answer.

The protests against Hamas are small but should be larger. And Jewish schools should prepare students to be able to know what questions to ask and how to give an answer. Jewish schools in New York should also have trips to the Nova Exhibit which I went to and I interviewed survivors; I also interviewed Hannie Ricardo, a woman whose daughter, Oriya, was murdered by Hamas.

I held back tears as Ricardo told me she took some solace in knowing that while her daughter was murdered, she was not burned or defiled.

On that same day, back in 1993, my Judaic Studies teacher, Mr. Zucker spoke with me.

I asked him if he thought there would really be peace.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

[mariacallous]

Billions of people are voting in elections around the world this year, and it feels like political disinformation is on the rise and buoyed by the rapid emergence of multiple AI technologies. So I’m spending my time looking for experts who can explain what’s happening.

As research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Renée DiResta has helped unmask Russia’s online support for Trump in 2016, China’s use of Clubhouse for spying, and Instagram becoming a hive of child abuse material. But in the face of unrelenting—and baseless—allegations of anti-conservative bias from right-wing lawmakers like Jim Jordan, Stanford didn’t renew her contract last month.

Luckily for us, DiResta just published a new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, which outlines how unseen people and technologies shape our realities today, and how it's all being leveraged to win elections. I spoke with Renée about the book—check out our conversation here!

David: Hi Renée, thanks for chatting with us. In your book, you speak about “bespoke realities.” Is everyone effectively now living in their own reality?

Renée: There's a lot of movement into factions, where people are really deeply entrenched in a highly-specific niche political identity. One of the things you start to see is that faction A and faction B are often not even seeing the same kinds of content. You have communities that are absolutely outraged about something that has happened on the internet and the other community has absolutely no idea that this is even happening.

David: Key to these factions are influencers. How have they become so powerful?

Renée: They have the followers. Even conspiracy theorist influencers have followings in the millions at this point. Mainstream media doesn't necessarily get that kind of readership on a given article or viewers on a given piece of content. But the influencer is algorithmically pushed into your feed and they have that ability to speak back, to engage in a way that media brands often don't.

David: How important are algorithms in helping these influencers get their message out?

Renée: The influencer needs to be seen by their audience, and having that relationship with your audience is key, but that's always mediated through what the algorithm is going to push to people, particularly as more and more of that in-feed real estate is determined not by who you follow at all, but by what it thinks you want to see.

David: In your book you write about Ali Alexander, an influencer who helped organize the Stop the Steal movement in 2020. How have people like Alexander become so influential?

Renée: People who are not Trump supporters might see him as clownish, but among the group that he's speaking to, they trust him, they believe him, and he compels them to take action. It's really important to realize the effect that influencer relationships have in shaping reality or driving people to act in a way. They really come up from the crowd and they're given their power because the crowd continues to engage with them and support them and drive them.

David: Is this what Trump is doing?

Renée: What you see with Trump over and over again is what we call this bottom-up rumor mill, where people are chattering about things, they say it, they post it, they tag him, he retweets them, then they have the benefit of that additional clout within the community. They've done their part, they're fighting for the cause. You see him very deftly working this system on Truth Social [where] he's constantly amplifying fans and followers and engaging very much among the online supporter base.

David: What are we missing about our current information environment?

Renée: What I find most alarming is that people have the ability to just create reality by making something trend, to reinforce over and over and over again these conspiracy theories. You do have this increasingly divergent set of realities where there's a deep conviction built up over many, many years of reinforcing the same tropes and stories. You can't just correct that with a fact check.

David: And following the demise of the Stanford Internet Observatory, there are even less people fact-checking this stuff. Who or what was to blame for your departure from Stanford?

Renée: The chilling effect of congressional inquiries and associated lawfare, and the politicization of research, is real. Institutions need to see the writing on the wall. We have seen these tactics in the past, such as during attacks on climate scientists a decade ago, yet the playbook continues to work. If spurious investigations into politically inconvenient findings succeed in cowing institutions, there will only be more spurious investigations.

[antagames]

Dear Anta, I hope today is your happy day. This is the first time I write something like this for my favorite artist, I was quite shy and it took me a few days before decided to send this but I know I want to. ( Also, I'm not really good at English so I hope you don't mind :( )

The first thing I want to say is that I really love your art work and games. In my opinion, I find your games are really good, with both interface and story. I also like how you create a charater, each char have their own story and a special personality, which gives them an attraction to me.

The second it's about one of your games: 'Trapped with Jester'. I'm a big fan of visual novel games and when I first saw this on itch io I was very curious. After experiencing the game, I felt extremely curious about the story after that and also wanted to know more about the Jester. Since I start playing visual novel games, I realize Jester is always my number one yandere bias. I love him so so much <3.

And in that case, I want to ask you about Jester backstory, his favorite things, favorite food and everything about him. I was really curious about the story behind that smile.

And that is all I want to say, I'm waiting everyday to see more of your games, especially the games that have Jester in it ;), I will always support you with your product.

Aww thanks! Don't worry about your English, I really appreciate it when you all try to communicate with me despite the language barrier. As for Jester's backstory... unfortunately, I can't talk about that. The day I just drop his whole lore in text without any accompanying media (be it game, comic, MV, etc.) is the day that I've completely given up on making any other content about him, if you get what I mean? If I just drop his entire lore, then there'd be little to no more future content. I can answer more trivial questions though! For his favorite things... I think I've posted about it on my Twitter account before (but it's really hard to dig up-), it is hinted in the game itself as well, and outright mentioned in the Art+Lore Book, including his 'favorite food' (mentioned as food he's fond of). If you want to know more about him, I've posted some lore on my devlog if you haven't seen that yet. I've also made a few lore drops on my Twitter, but again, you'll have to dig it up... and I'm not sure if I've properly tagged them all.

[0sincerelyella]

Can you do a Josh Allen one shot where you are comforting him after losing a game? Possibly with cuddling and smut 😊 thank you!

Wins and loses -Josh Allen

Summary: Josh can take losses if big games a little harsher than other people, taking it personally, and beat himself up way more than the others. the only way he gets out of that headspace is y/n

Notes: UGH IVE BEEN WAITING TO WRITE FOR JOSH ALLEN he so is my second favorite NFL quarterback. we can ALL agree that josh allen is, pardon me, a giant cry baby during games, from ACTUAL fits, to yelling at his teammates, which doesn’t make me love him any less it just makes this plot so much easier to write so thank you for the personality trait josh. i

hope you love it!

i’m writing y/n as a bengals fan (from a bengals fans perspective maybe i’m bias but it’s to create more drammmmaaa)

i also may do a part two or make a josh allen series bc i had so much fun writing this, would anyone read it?

the score of the game was very conflicting to y/n. It was the play off game before the AFC championship, and unfortunately for y/ns love life and fortunately for y/ns sports influencer life the bengals had just beat the bills and are going to the AFC championship.

Y/n, growing up in cincinnati, was on the social media team for the cincinnati bengals. she grew up in ohio, and moved to wyoming for college in 2014 where she met her long term boyfriend when he transferred in 2015. in 2017 the two of them graduated and y/n traveled around the country for her boyfriends job until 2020.

in 2020 she got an offer to work on the bengals social media team, and she couldn’t turn the offer down. so she moved away from her boyfriend, josh allen, who lived in buffalo and was the quarterback for the buffalo bills, and she moved to cincinnati.

days like this made the relationship hard to maintain. she hadn’t seen josh since last may towards the end of off season when he had visited her. she texted him every day and called him every night, even showing up at his games all the way across the country to support him, but never being able to see him due to the teams tight rules.

today was especially hard. Today was the AFC divisional round leading up to the Championship game. The bills were playing against the bengals in cincinnati, the first game against the teams since the Damar Hamlin incident.

The bills had just lost, and like every bengals win, y/n walked onto the field, this time not only to congratulate her team, but also to chase after her extra emotional other half.

since they lost, their season is over and josh is going to stay with y/n for awhile. it’s all bittersweet.

y/n ran across the field. throwing mindless congratulations towards the teammates who are playing kansas city next week. She chased after josh who had already buried himself into the locker room. He took these loses. especially in the playoffs. feeling like, what the internet calls, “the bills curse” is all his fault.

y/n say down outside the locker room and waited. players passed her going in and out. she waved hello and goodbye to bills players as they retreated to their hotel before they flew back to buffalo tomorrow.

stefon diggs stopped as he left the locker room, sitting next to y/n. “he’s worse than usual” he said, leaning his head back on the wall. “do you know why?” he sighed. “i think it’s cause you were watching”

“i watch all his games stef.” y/n knew the bills very well. though she barely ever saw them, she texted them checking on josh often. she and stefon have grown to be good friends.

“yeah but i think this has something to do with your job, i think it’s mixed with jealousy” y/n nodded, sighing as the coach walked out of the room.

“no one else but josh. go ahead” coach said, causing y/n to practically fly out of the seat. she ran into the locker room in search for josh.

“joshy” she called out. he was sitting in a chair, in the middle of the room. it was empty, the only thing in the room is josh’s jersey he disposed of in the middle of the floor.

he sat in a chair, his head in his hands. y/n could tell from his red knuckles he had been punching the punching bag that hang in the corner of the locker room. she knelt infront of him. “hey joshy?” she placed her hand on top of his and waited for him to look at her. Josh moved his hands, and rested them on his knees. “y/n” he said, he’d been crying.

“oh josh,” she said, hurting for her boy. “it isn’t your fault” she said, gripping the hand on his knee. “y/n you don’t get it.” he tilted his head back. “no i don’t, i don’t know what it’s like to feel like you’ve done the wrong thing in such an important situation” she said, hinting to the decision between her job and her relationship

“y/n you know that’s not what i meant”

“i know i’m sorry, but really joshy. it isn’t your fault. it takes a whole team, and sometimes the other team just had an advantage” josh scoffed

“you have to say that, it’s your job. your team, the most important thing to you”

y/n moved her hand, placing it on his cheek, his hand moved to hold onto hers in fear of if he let go he’d lose her like he lost this game

“Josh. you know i couldn’t turn this down. it’s close to my sister and her kids, i grew up here. she said, watching tears well up in his eyes. “nothing is more important to me than you, but that doesn’t mean that other things arnt important to me” he nodded.

“but i’m sat there, infront of hundreds of thousands to millions of people who are saying it’s their year and i can’t make it. i can never make it” her heart broke as his desperate tone.

“babe, you need to practice staying cool”

“did joe teach you that?”

“joshua.” she said, huffing at his accusations “do you watch him play josh? you are just as good if not better than him” he watched her intently as she tried to make him feel better

“the only difference between you and joe, is your temper.” she stood up, reaching her arms out. “come here give me a hug” he smiled, stand in front of her, pulling her swiftly into a hug. “i’m sorry i snapped at you beautiful” he swayed them back and forth. “i just get so worked up and i don’t know how to control it, but never should i take it out on you” he kissed her forehead as she curled into his chest.

he hugged her close. “i love you beautiful” he said, smiling happily. “here stand on the chair let’s go to the car” he said, standing in-front of the chair, letting her jump onto his back.

he walked to her car, sitting her down, opening the passenger seat to let her sit while he drove her home.

the drive home was peaceful, he held her hand, resting it on the automatic stick in front of the consul. When the two arrived to y/ns apartment, the two of them changed, y/n into one of josh’s tshirts that she kept from before she moved, and josh in a pair of sweatpants.

the two turned on a movie and layed on the couch. josh held y/n on his chest, he played with her hair as he pretending to watch the movie that played. “you know princess, if you were on the field with me all the time i would’ve won the super bowl already” he laughed, hoping she’d laugh at his joke. instead of laughing, as he waited for a response all he got was heavy breathing. “oh come on, that was the most hilarious joke i’ve ever made and your sleeping” he whispered, tucking the blanket around only her as he skillfully snaked out from under her.

with perfect ease he picked her up and walked her to her room. after tucking her in, he got into her next to her and cuddled up next to her. he kissed her cheek, “i love you princess” he whispered and held her close. he yawned, closing his eyes and finally getting a good nights sleep.