#staff commentary

[chibivesicle]

Well, that explains a lot.  Why Trigun Stampede was Sci fi over Western.

I was toodling on Youtube (as one oft does in these current times) and stumbled upon this excerpt from a Trash Taste podcast where they interviewed a staff member from Studio Orange about Trigun Stampede.  Pretty much this expands upon some of what I’d briefly read from a Sakuracon panel this spring.

TL:DR - Trigun Stampede was a complete remake of the original Trigun with a hired sci fi writer to not only write 150 years of history and lore but also mechanics of the world.  This is why most of the elements of the original are lost.  The manga and ‘98 anime were an example of an American style Western plopped on a desert planet but one where the materials and mechanics of the world are similar to our own.

If you are interested check out the video here:

This both supports what had been my general take away from the final product as well as explains things I observed but had no evidence for without hearing it from a staff member.

1.) Sci fi elements were a huge deal -  hiring an independent writer explains why it has such a different voice and storytelling tone.  One could argue that the original Trigun made it too easy to recognize it was a western, but that was what we were given as readers and viewers.  As much as I, an anal retentive person who like details like thinking that there is no wood on the planet, therefore, we can’t have wood saloon doors.  I also like a story that makes sense and flows.

2.) The twelve episode format boxed them in.  Who knows how these sort of deals are made but they needed at least 24 episodes from the start.  This is what killed the pacing.  You can redo all you want but if the pacing and writing are bad, it will be bad.  I feel like I’m the niche version of someone like Friendly Space Ninja and Amanda the Jedi.  Just because you put a lot of time, money and effort (also money) it won’t matter if your writing is bad. 3.) I fully agree that the CGI was exceptional.  It is obvious that the studio put so much effort into this front.  The animation was breathtakingly well done for the most part.  There were a few too many ‘show off’ animation sequences which annoyed me but the facial expressions were great.

However, due to the shift with the sci fi aspect being much greater than the Western, we get the loss of the ability to animate more of the common people who are largely absent and a key aspect of Nightow’s works.  I’ve stated this elsewhere but the adults in his series are trying to protect the common folk.  By leaning into the desert aspect and the desolation of the desert stereotype, they lacked the random kids, bakers, bankers, laborers, servers, farmers, mothers, fathers etc.  I’m not sure if this is a technical issue from the computational/technical side or a storyboarding/framing issue.  Or that they just forgot about the people in general were a thing?

This also heavily leans into the incorrect assumption that a desert is desolate and does not support life.  Anyone who has visited or lived in the desert knows that despite appearing like it is dead and empty at first, plenty of life is present.  It just has a totally different way to adapt to things.  I was disappointed that the creative team leaned into this stereotype using green plants [photosynthesis] = livable and desert using angelic being plants = livable.  My own experience of living in the desert also made me cringe at Wolfwood’s shoes.  No.  Just no.  You do not wear slip on shoes in the desert.  Lace ups for sure and up past your ankle even better.

4.) Ample amount of creative effort went into this.  Again, Studio Orange put a lot of effort into this.   Technically, it is very nice.  If you wanted to look at it from an anime perspective, the presentation was excellent, and the writing was at most average.  But, with so much source material that they did not include and the creation of so much of their own original ideas and concepts, it took it far from the work.   If they wanted this as their product (which seems to have been their goal) then they succeeded.  However, if they wanted to take the original and build on it and give it a fresh coat of paint with 2020s Pantone Colors of the moment, they did not do that.

5.) I’m surprised at how many YT critics are impressed and overall giving this positive reviews.  I know that people in these positions have made it their job to do anime/manga media commentary and critiques so they may want to be less harsh perhaps.  Many of them saw the original material, and so many seem to be okay with it.  Yet, is anyone not commenting on what happened to all the female characters?  No!  This annoys me so much but repeating myself here won’t really do much other than reinforce the fact that I was very unhappy with Meryl, Elendira, Luida, and Rem.  Lazy writing would be with the limited time space for the episodes they became tropes and shadows of their former selves.  But Meryl was a key character and deserved better. Yes, I love to critique things I love and that is fair but I’m wishing for a more comprehensive critique of Trigun Stampede taken from not a bunch of dudes on the internet.  I have neither the time nor effort to become a Youtube creator and commentator in this space.  With that whole full time job sort of thing that pays quite well.  But I do want to see more women in this space expressing how they interact with media and walk us through their reactions an feelings towards it.  For example someone the The Anime Tea. I absolutely love her analyses! 

https://www.youtube.com/@TheAnimeTea

I honestly would love to see her do a review of Trigun Stampede!  But it might be outside of her general scope and I’m not here to demand an analysis from anyone.  She had a lot of nuanced and contextually appropriate reviews and ways to approaching things which is just - sooo good.

[saga-jihen]

From the official English Cygames account.

[zenosanalytic]

There's a huge thread going around about the importance of relevance when choosing a critical lens to analyze a work which I don't want to add this onto cuz 1)it's Gigantic Already and 2)I don't agree with every addition in the chain I saw? But I want to just say:

Usagi isn't "the villain of Sailor Moon" because she becomes a queen in the future; Neo-Queen Serenity is a Queen because Usagi is a deeply awkward and goofy teenage, and DEEPLY self-conscious of that.

Neo-Queen Serenity is wish-fulfillment; she's a Teenager's FANTASY of Adulthood, and everything Usagi thinks she isn't. That Future-Usagi is a Queen IS important to Sailor Moon, but it's important because of what it tells us about Usagi and the context it puts her personal growth in, not because Naoko is trying to promote monarchism.

Indeed, in a very subtle sense, Naoko is actually deprecating monarchism by presenting NQ Serenity as a child's fantasy. The show is literally, if compassionately and with great understanding from having Fucking Been In Those Trenches Fam, saying that the desire to be So Smart and So Strong and So Beautiful and so Special and SO AWESOME that everyone on the planet adores you and does whatever you ask, is something only a child could want.

[glassesandpassion]

"Ah, Jun-chan... That's the worst part of being an older sister, isn't it? They never appreciate you for what you've done for them..."

[angeltannis]

Thinking about the wax ritual scene in House of Wax 2005. Why was it so Like That.

[w3bpunk]

Hmm ok. So I'm going to comment on this, not because I feel like defending staff. But because misinformation is the enemy of improvement, and posts like this dont give an accurate impression of what is actually happening behind the scenes. I don't expect OP to listen to me because they've made their stance clear, but I think this is useful to write for my own blog and recording-keeping. The sanitization of the internet and data privacy are topics I think about frequently, and that's what I started this blog for.

Let's start with OP's tags. I want to talk about the original December 2018 porn ban that occurred when Yahoo owned Tumblr. These are screenshots from Wikipedia.

I find it hard to believe that Yahoo would have any reason to believe that what they were doing would be popular or profitable. It is true that if they were unable to stay in the app store they would also lose money since it's a fair guess most of Tumblr's users rely on the app. But this was so very clearly not the big bucks move, because let's be honest-- adult content is very profitable. It is just so easy to get hit by legal trouble if you want to do it safely. Here's a quote from the CEO of Automattic.

What I want to zero in on here is the fact that identity verification is mentioned as a necessity factor. For me, that is a frightening thing to propose. I don't especially want to be sending that information online, because data breaches can ruin your life. Now, what I don't understand is Tumblr users wanting sex workers to be permitted on here freely, while also decrying the data collection of Tumblr Live (more on that later) and not understanding that these two viewpoints are not really compatible.

Some might even call it hypocritical, which is ironic because there are people in the tags in this original post calling staff hypocritical for "allowing" Tumblr Live to show things that violate the TOS like this. Well that's the thing. This is "allowed" just as much as the porn bots are, which is to say that staff does not have the resources to spend labor hours on this problem because they are not making a profit and cannot cover it all.

I really wonder about people who say things like this. Do you want this website to function like you believe it should or not? Blaming staff for this is more or less equivalent to blaming waitstaff at a restaurant for being slow being they're understaffed. And the irony is here that Automattic is not understaffing Tumblr because they refuse to pay their employees. It is because they are currently operating at a deficit.

These are excerpts from a more comprehensive post by Tumblr's COO. If you want to read the full post, it is reblogged before this one.

In short-- you want to talk about profits? Yahoo lost so much money they had to sell. Tumblr's current parent company isn't profiting off of it either. Imagining Tumblr as money-hungry is about as accurate as saying needing money for your own labor at work is money-hungry. If you care about Tumblr existing at all, Automattic is probably the best candidate for the job based on them running WordPress. And WordPress is FOSS.

If you're unfamiliar with what that means, it means that WordPress' source code is available for the community to view and make suggestions for, and the service is free. This is how Linux's community functions. It is a huge deal if you want any chance at defesting corporations like Meta or Google or Microsoft. You can see Automattic feels a type of way about it from their company values (automattic.com/creed). Not to say I give them my full and open trust, but that I look at it with cautious optimism, and we need more people to value what FOSS does for us.

Lastly, let's talk about these comment tags from a reblog on the original post. I already briefly touched on the idea of data privacy, but what data does Tumblr Live collect from users?

The answer is that Tumblr Live collects age, username, and IP location. They also have a policy where you do not need to show your face for age verification purposes. That's IP location, and not GPS location like some apps use. Therefore, if you use a VPN, all Tumblr Live would have to identify you is your username and your age. I cannot stress how much nonsense it is to put this on the same tier as say, Discord. Discord is about to start scraping user messages in order to train chatbots. That is so many times worse because the data being collectived is much more sensitive. You, as a conscious user of the internet, need to make a distinction between what is actually sensitive data and what isn't. Not just stopping at "this service collects data" and seeing red. This is actually important in order to articulate what is and isn't okay for corporations to do with your data. One more thing-- the contractor being used for Tumblr Live is actually European themselves. They're based in Germany, who have always been more stringent about private data than the US.

Okay. I think that's enough. Unlike OP, my ask box is open for conversation about this. This wasn't written to be a dick, but because I wanted to do my due diligence here. My citations aren't perfect but if you would like me to extrapolate about something with a source, I will.

[papa-birb-kai]

With every new shitty update put out by @staff, the less and less i want to bother trying to revert my dash back into something user friendly and the more i just want to leave it entirely.

Stop trying to make Tumblr into Twitter or Instagram. Let them stay as themselves, and let Tumblr stay as Tumblr. Please. Everything was fine the way it was before you guys tried to make it just like every other generic social media website.

Please give us the icons back, and please stop trying to be a website you're not. Thank you.

[omegafan101]

It’s times like these I’m really glad I got the dashboard unfucker because I had no idea what the fuck people were talking about until I turned it off. What the actual fuck staff?

[grislyintentions]

给我就此消失!!!

[obvslybatgrl]

show me tits tumblr

[cherry-bomb-ships]

I may hold the opinion that Radical Entertainment nose-dived the Crash franchise into the ground and killed it for nearly a decade, but their sense of humor was absolutely unhinged for better AND worse, and I don't think anything will compare to the high followed immediately by headache that most of the moments in these games gives me

[peanutblowandjobsandwich]

not ever to suck tumblr's dick bc it's unwashed n gross but it's myb less of a tumblr needs to fix it's post correction issues n we all need to learn to calm down n stop fear mongering clout chasing posting everything immediately n then reblogging what was posted without stopping to double check it like can we all try doing tht first?

[sonicprim3d]

" Is it strange to feel slightly envious of the other versions of myself that are able to forget about their own birthday, since I wouldn't have the chance to myself? "

[horse-girl-anthy]

Our Happiness: The Happiness Depicted by "Evangelion" 

Kunihiko Ikuhara: Hmm, what I'm hoping for from Evangelion is that it will be a drama that shows us an embodiment, a concrete way to be happy.

Hideaki Anno: You mean the way to embody happiness?

Kunihiko Ikuhara: Yes, yes. There are many young people who think that they will be happy if their current situation changes. They think that because the situation is bad, they can't be happy or do well. That's not true. What makes us happy is our ability to materialize - to give shape to our happiness.

Hideaki Anno: Is happiness tangible? Is it something that can be easily put into words?

Kunihiko Ikuhara: Happiness can be expressed in many ways. For example, I'm happy to be dating so many girls.

Kotono Mitsuishi: Oh man... (laughs)

Kunihiko Ikuhara: (In a panic) I'm just talking about an example.

[charlotte-liddel]

"Goodness me, sometimes humans really do amaze me with how obtuse some can be in putting out "fixes" for any number of things that weren't broken and working just fine already."

"It's like putting a nail in a door frame to stop the door from hitting the frame, to give an idea. Often pointless "repairs" to a non-issue make a larger issue overall for everyone. Really it just falls back on the old saying of: If it isn't broken, don't fix it."

Lottie is looking a little disappointed as she scrolls a few social media apps on her phone, letting out a sigh at the attempted homogenization of the UI for many different sites causing them to all look too similar but still somehow opposite. Not the most enjoyable thing to encounter in the modern realities.