#the absolute failson behavior of this man

[ragamuffinsage]

Acheron’s page on the Villain’s Wiki is currently making me laugh until I cry

[nanjokei]

man idk if my opinions on smt are bullshit or not but im not backing down from "mainline is pretty mid actually" at this point.

its strange because the games, i dont see them ad individually mid, but coming from the era of when "play a real shin megoomy tensay game" was a proliferating (AND IRONIC. i dont think most people got that it was supposed to be ironic!!) meme, the lionization of mainline now kind of feels unearned aside from it being the sort of center of a digimon-like evolution chart.

really, smt is an in an incredibly awkward spot.

original smt established a formula, and was a pretty fine game on its own. i respect it a lot, and reexperienced it in the form of an lp. i can say despite everything, it holds up, if youre willing to meet it where its at.

the only mainline i dont have enough experience with to judge is smt2... though i do believe its a great game.

smt if is great. anyone who followed me a decade ago knows i freakin love smt if. amazing mainline spinoff

smt nine is really misunderstood i think. they made a lot of capital C choices with it, but i cannot look at it with scorn and disrespect. really, i see it and see a different future we could have had. it was incredibly ambitious, and i realized it had a lot of things that i wanted out of smt in the current day. its anything but stagnant. absolute clusterfuck of a game but i say this as a cautious compliment

nocturne really broke the mold in so many ways, incredible game, i think atlus had balls shifting smt so much with this one release, but their behavior with its legacy later on really sours me on it personally. but yes, nocturne has such a strong identity.

i didnt play a lot of strange journey. but unlike 2 i feel like i can talk about it. as a mainline spinoff, like if, it had a lot of wiggleroom to be more experimental both in its story and overall vibe. they could do it without worrying about the weight of "this is a mainline, we have to please people".

smt iv, what an insane game. honestly, i applaud it for trying. it is more valuable to me for trying than anyone could even imagine. i think it tried to be fresh. the thoroughline between it and strange journey is quite clear— both in terms of literally "sj happened" and the philosophies of the two games. the routes and endings may suck ass but walter, jonathan and isabeau are such strange and endearing characters regardless

apocalpyse. well, the gameplay is fun! i dont hate it as much as other people do, but im confused at why the story is suddenly so pamby namby and dumbed down. i dont follow the belief that ~nanashi ripped off demifiend~ because thats fucking silly, i actually think its the right way to call back to demifiend, but man. um. i like hallelujah i think hes so cute and good :)

smtv. lol. idk its trying so hard to be nocturne 2 but with all the mid legacy of smt as a mainline series. having someone tell me directly that most of the characters in the game are nothingburger does not help its case. i dont get why they did this. honestly, it pisses me off. they made me wait so long for nocturne 2 instead of actually coming up with something new. this is why ill always defend iv even if its kind of failson.

i think smt's issue really is that atlus is not willing to let nocturne go. its becoming very stagnant and its infecting the spinoffs, even.

like sorry but i dont think soul hackers 2 was personafied, i think it was smt mainline-ified. think about it. i already talked about it once. im not repeating myself (also due to tumblrs shit search i cant find the post i made about it atm 🤣)

[roachliquid]

I haven't posted much about Squid Game since I started really getting into it, because I was marathoning the whole show in a couple of days, and where would I even start? Every episode brings some fresh new hell, gradually ratcheting up the tension so that no matter what you saw in the last episode you're not going to be comfortable in the next one. Seong Gi-hun, my beloved, is a richly textured failson who has just enough resourcefulness to keep himself out of Death's jaws long enough for someone else to bail him out and I love that for him. I love how the show depicts, in more or less metaphorical terms, how the rich use the tantalizing prospect of class mobility to manipulate the poor into self-destruction, allowing just enough people to actually make it through that the rest willingly throw themselves into the machine that takes their lives.

I do got... some issues. I think it was pretty weak that the show just went ahead and depicted characters being sexist without addressing the problem in a meaningful way, and the way that Ali was depicted with practically childlike levels of daftitude felt like an insult to migrant workers.

The show also perpetuates the Bourgeoisie Degeneracy stereotype - the myth that the extremely wealthy are evil because their riches somehow cause them to become immensely bored, pushing them into increasingly depraved behaviors in pursuit of stimulation. For a brief rundown on why this myth is problematic, there's two main reasons. The first is that it's simply wrong; yes, wealth does create corruption, but in significantly subtler and more boring ways than this. The second is that the myth is constantly used by bigots in leftist circles to launder their bigotry under the guise of leftist theory - claiming that feminism, anti-racism, being LGBTQIA, whathaveyou, is an invention of Rich People With Too Much Time On Their Hands and not something that actually requires support or accommodation in their worldview.

(By the way, there's one character in Squid Game who displays sexual interest in other men. He's an immensely wealthy man who watches poor people kill themselves for fun. It really is a low point for the show.)

But with that being said, I did enjoy the show immensely. Emotionally, it's not exactly a rollercoaster, but it's definitely very intense. The acting was superb, particularly O Yeong-su's performance as an unsettlingly cheerful old man who has decided playing a terrible murder game beats waiting around to die of a brain tumor, but really everyone was great. And the story itself goes to so many places emotionally, keeping you invested in the characters even while they drop off like flies - a particularly impressive feat from my perspective, given that killing off 90% of the cast after I've already gotten attached to them is normally a dealbreaker for me. But damn if the show doesn't make every death count, bringing something new and meaningful to the table, even for characters we've only known for a short while.

So... yeah, that's my feelings on Squid Game in a nutshell. I could go into more detail (Oh Il-nam my... beloved? beloathed? all of the above?) but that would risk getting into spoiler territory, which I don't really want to cover in a post extolling the show's watchability. Because it is extremely watchable; it's no exaggeration to say that I'm really only into "murder game" stories when they double as biting political commentary, and Squid Game absolutely nails it. Though I don't know how they're going to make a second season work after killing off all those blorbos.