#the unfortunate consequences of a super sketchy style like this

[razzafrazzle]

rip sadie's leather jacket, hello FULL LEATHER SADIE BABYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!

[image description: art of an original character named sadie. sadie is a muscular demon woman with bent-back horns, a tail, a notch in one of her pointy ears, and combed-back greying hair. she is wearing all leather, including a harness and chaps with chains and spikes attached, a vest, gloves, bracelets, pasties, and a pair of sunglasses. she has her fist in the air and an excited and rebellious look on her face. she herself is done in all red and white, and she is standing in front of the leather pride flag. next to her are red hearts, like that of the flag. end id]

[blessuswithblogs]

Katsura Hashino is a Big Fat Creep and Other Observations

(for the record all uses of the word “queer” in this post are meant in the academic sense as shorthand for a wide umbrella group of gender and sexual minorities and not as a slur i hope that is evident from my past history and status as Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls but let it never be said i don’t cover my ass)

A few weeks ago, Catherine: Full Body Edition or whatever gross subtitle it got was released. Catherine has had a very checkered history as one of those games that is just kind of slimy, though it has endured with a cult following and a surprisingly successful competitive community by way of the game's multiplayer mode where you compete to see who can climb The Dream Sex Tower the best. Honestly, I don't know that much about Catherine because it is difficult to think of a game that repulses me more on a visceral level, but I want to do my due diligence and not talk out my ass. One of Catherine's initial claims to fame was that it was by Atlus Japan, specifically the same people who made the much beloved Persona games. This is evident in the game's art, music, overall style of delivery, and being basically hate speech.

The original Catherine was a greasy, misogynistic mess with some really vile politics about trans people in particular. Deadnaming your own fictional character in the credits is some next level petty malice. Full Body returns with, stupendously, a double down on this ideology that is actually kind of comical in how convoluted it gets in trying to decry the Degenerate Queer Lifestyle. The game adds a scene with Rin, who is apparently a gay crossdresser from space(???????), getting slapped away and running away crying from their love interest after he learns The Terrible Truth. In another game, with a different writing team, this could have been a teachable moment about the destructive consequences of taking too narrow a view of human sexuality and gender expression, but as it stands it's just another tiresome example of Trans Panic with a sheepish admonishment from the other characters that gosh maybe slapping their hand away was a mean thing to do.

So we're already firing on all cylinders here, but the best is yet to come. The bulk of the outcry comes from the addition of a weird "true ending" cutscene where Catherine, who is also from space, goes back in time to make everybody's life better. Or something. This is already pretty stupid on the face of it because its Fucking Time Travel Out of Nowhere, but the scene then depicts a pre-transition Erica, the game's trans character who got deadnamed in the credits the last time. There has been a lot of exceptionally tedious discussion about exactly when this scene takes place in the game's chronology and what it means for Erica, and some brain geniuses have tied their thinkmeats into pretzel shapes to prove definitively that all this means is that she delayed her transition in this Better Timeline, that might not actually be better, because Catherine is weird and selfish, maybe. And. Fine. Sure. Okay. Let's accept that for now. Given the game's previous track record, and continuing insistence on using Erica's pretransition name in the credits even in the rerelease, it is meanspirited at best to show her before her transition at all (many real life trans people would be utterly mortified for such a thing to happen to them) and overall just in poor taste and pretty lousy writing at that because it's so unclear what any of this actually means. Since the game has not yet received an official english localization, the context of this scene is to begin with muddled by amateur translators on the internet all with slightly conflicting interpretations of the scene. It's a fucking mess, by and large.

So I would disagree that this is a fake controversy manufactured by those damnable essjaydubyas. Even with the most charitable interpretation possible, it's still just really sketchy and gross. Erica's english voice actress, who seems to be very fond of the character, has been vocal about her dissatisfaction with the new scenes on twitter and has recently come out to say that the localization team is going to try and take some steps to make things less blatantly hateful. Between this and Jennifer Hale's recent tweet about it being time to grab our pitchforks in response to Activision-Blizzard's mass layoffs, I'm starting to think that voice actresses are pretty cool. I mean honestly I always thought that but we're getting off topic. One of the top competitive Catherine players, who was by all accounts really hyped for the release of Full Body, just straight up said on twitter that he was quitting the game because he couldn't support something like that in good conscience. I don't know if he's remained consistent on this position since, but it was a bold statement, to say the least.

Now, whenever an incident like this happens, the inevitable string of More-Progressive-Than-Thou white boys who watched an anime once and thought the bouncing titties were a little much appears to start pontificating about the cause of such untoward elements in media. And it's basically all just a bunch of Orientalist bullshit. Every time. For whatever reason, people still really love to be racist towards Japanese people because it's still sort of socially acceptable when couched in the language of "oh japan!!! ecks dee" and so the neverending procession of softboi neckbeards declared with confidence that Atlus's continual inclusion of Actual Hate Speech towards LGBTQ+ people was the result of the inscrutable Japanese Mind and its Mysterious, Antiquated Culture. Many mentions of the philosophy of Wa, wherein the nail that stands out gets pounded down, and lots of very lovely psuedointellectual claptrap. Evidently, people just seem to think that queer people don't live in Japan, or that they don't fight just as hard as we do for equal rights and protections under the law. They do live there, and they do fight as hard as we do. Obviously. You fucking imbeciles.

In their quest to clearly illustrate their moral and intellectual superiority to the backward, collectivist Asiatic Peoples, these highly reasonable and enlightened manboys forsook a very important logical principle: Occam's Razor. Sure, you could blame jApAnEsE cUlTuRe for Atlus's impropieties and just conveniently ignore all of the fantastic queer media it has produced in recent years like My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Horou Muskou, Nier Automata, etc. Or you could go for the simpler and more logically consistent option: Katsura Hashino is a big fat creep. Who is Hashino, you ask? He is the director of every Persona game since 3, as well as Catherine, and all of these games' gross shit and self-contradictory themes of self-acceptance and rebellion against an unust society (unless you're gay, ew) can probably be traced to him and his gaggle of accomplices. In addition to the fact that Atlus games not by Hashino's team tend to just. not have these problems to nearly as large a degree or even at all, Hashino himself has gone on record saying some really kind of hilariously backwards shit. Most infamously, when asked why in Persona 3 literally all of your social links with girls ended up with Hot Makeout Sessions regardless of like. Previously Committed to Relationships. Hashino simply said he couldn't imagine friendships between boys and girls. So that's where his brain is at. Since subsequent games in the series graciously allowed the player the option to not be a Huge Cheating Bastard, one can assume either his moral development has progressed past early puberty or somebody on the team convinced him this wasn't actually a normal thing to think. Given the man's output, I would say it's probably the latter.

It is because of this man's decisions and behavior that so many people are simply unwilling to give Full Body the benefit of the doubt. The game's director is, quite simply, a well known louse, and not in the endearing, Roger Smith way. Once again, it requires far fewer leaps in logic to assume that Hashino is just being a bigoted creep again than to go through some fuckin galaxy brain Kingdom Hearts-esque dot-connecting to justify it as just a LITTLE BIT bigoted not REALLY SUPER bigoted, or simply blaming the whole ordeal on some strange ineffable property of the Japanese Character. He's a gremlin! An overgrown manchild with a warped view of human interaction and society put in charge of games about exploring those concepts for.... reasons. My bet is that his dad knew somebody and then Persona 3 was successful enough for the rest of Atlus to just go "alright fine let him do it while we do mainline games". Unfortunately, Persona became so popular that the mainline games sort of switched places and became side-projects, at least in the eyes of the Western consumer base (which let's be real is the only perspective that any of these Serious Online Commentators even pretend to care about).

So I would once again caution everyone against just assuming that Japan is some sort of quaint anachronistic country of weird gameshows and backwards social mores. This is both a gross oversimplification of an entire culture and the struggles of their own subgroups and minorities and simply a grand display of lacking self-awareness. Like have you fucking seen the guys in the White House? The preposterous media that gets routinely greenlit on prime time TV, theaters, and digitally? Don't make me laugh. The West has no claim to any sort of progressive superiority to anybody else. The white cishet bubble of comfortable middle class affluence might distort what you see of the rest of the world, but believe me: we got problems too. Big ones. Even the presupposed bastions of Demsoc Virtue like Sweden have an awful track record of discrimination and eugenics. But Dazzlyn that's different, you cry! All of these groups and forces don't represent the entirety of Western culture! Yes. Exactly. Oppression is not culturally bound like cuisine or art. It is a nasty, universal thing that worms its way into everything, and it will use any excuse it can find to murder and exploit. It's against Christian values! It represents a genetic defect that must be purged! It's ostentatious and immature! The list goes on. And every time you giggle and go "oh those silly japanese" you're just being another expression of the same vile ideas.

I'm going to relate some of my own personal experiences, because as a noted Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls, I feel like maybe I have some authority on the matter? Just a little? Enough that if I make a well reasoned argument it can't be dismissed out of hand? Let's hope. So, what's the gayest game I've ever played? Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Look yeah I know I'm talking about it again but come back this is important. Final Fantasy is a series that has had a lot of LGBTQ+ undertones pretty much since forever, and while they have largely been in keeping with the times in terms of tact and representation (the Crossdressing Cloud debacle is a deeply bizarre, uncomfortable sequence in a lot of ways but there's also some genuine Good Gay Shit in 7 like Cloud's surprisingly cute and genuine date with Barret. I think. It's... it's been a while.), by God, it was at least there, and 13 had honest to god Lesbians, Harold in Fang and Vanille. I don't want to say it has pedigree, but the series has dabbled. XIV continues on the tradition with a vibrant world that's actually got a lot of characters and NPCs that are just incidentally there and kind of gay. The adventurer couple that befriended the Tonberries in Wanderer's Palace, a vendor that appeared in the Rising cosplaying as Minfilia at her wife's behest, a miqote lady bathing in the oasis that lets on she wouldn't mind having cute girls stare at her instead of grabby boys, every horny Elezen in Ishgard, Samson and Guydelot (shoutouts to Lulumi Lumi), and probably more that I've missed. More than that, though, is that because FFXIV is an MMO, it is by necessity a social space, and in my experience it has been one that has gone out of its way to be inclusive to everybody, from the GMs handling reports of abusive behavior right up to the top decision makers who made same sex player marriages a thing just immediately on its implementation and letting boys wear the gold saucer bunny costume too (albeit after quite a bit of pleading). The game's got a huge queer community of which I am kind of part of sort of. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. Hell, they've recently partnered with a pride group in Australia to have an FFXIV float in a parade. I usually turn my nose up at such things as meaningless corporate grandstanding, but it does seem to be more meaningful than two boy pastas getting married or rainbow colored oreos because like. Cheesy as it sounds, it's more than just a brand to a lot of people, it's a place, sometimes the only place, they can go to feel safe and accepted in a community. Having official, vocal support from the dev team means genuinely a lot, I think.

Now, there is one quality about this game of which I am speaking that might strike you as noteworthy: it is Japanese. It's made by Japanese people, in Japan, under a Japanese company. A middle aged Japanese man goes up on stage in Gunbreaker cosplay to speak in Japanese about the upcoming expansion, while a meme obsessed gremlin translates for him. It's not perfect, there are problems, etcetera, why do I even need to qualify that in 2019, when everything sucks, god. But it's better than most things. I hope that it serves as an example to people that even in the supposedly regressive countries of the world, queer communities are still living, fighting, and sometimes even being heard, and that the only thing you're enriching by dismissing them wholesale as socially backwards is your own internet penis. And nobody fucking cares about that you simpleton. I expect 5.0 to be gayer than ever before because they're taming up with Yoko Taro to do a Nier themed raid and by the 12 Warrior of Light Dazzyn Reed is going to kiss 2B or an equivalent model right on the robot lips.

[wnnbdarklord]

Dear Trick or Treak 2017 creator

Hi there! I’m so glad you’ll be creating something for me. This is my first year participating, but I’m sure everything is going to go great :D

Below, you’ll find a list of my general likes, dislikes and fandom specific prompts. Happy creating!

General Likes: Polyamory, gen, het, slash, femslash, families of choice, competence, BAMF female characters, angst, hurt/comfort, teamfic, pretty much all the tropes especially if there is a twist, worldbuilding, humor, redemption, for want of a nail AUs, time travel, werewolves, crossovers, non fantasy/SF canons encountering the supernatural/aliens, fix it fics, etc.  

Smut is fine, but I’d prefer that the focus is not on that.

General Dislikes: I’m not a great fan of permanent character death, rape, torture porn, underage stuff, infidelity, humiliation, character bashing, ship bashing, no powers AUs, love triangles, fake married/dating, incest, power imbalances in relationships, hate sex, hardcore kinks, necrophilia, PWP, abuse, fusions, zombies, 1st person POV

Crossovers: I love crossovers! Feel free to crossover any fandom here in any combination. I've elaborated more on crossover specific things in my Crossovering letter, so if you're feeling inspired to crossover, feel free to take a look:

http://wnnbdarklord.tumblr.com/post/163153222375/dear-crossovering-2017-creator

Trick likes: To keep with the theme of the exchange, I'd love to get some darker stuff. Spooky stories, mysteries, horror, body horror, WEREWOLVES (all my love if you get some werewolves in there, whether the canon has them or not), creepy mythology and gods, ghosts, monsters, magic, sacrifices, ancient and abandoned places, grim takes on lighthearted canons or alternately grim events that keep the lighthearted tone of the canon, dark consequences to canon events (psychological or otherwise), dragons, sudden disappearance of the supernatural in fantasy/SF canons and the consequences and the reverse in non fantasy/SF canons, immortality, shapeshifting, apocalypses

Trick Do Not Wants: ZOMBIES. I'm pretty mellow about most things, since my dislikes are mostly covered above. But just...no zombies. Ever.

Treat likes: characters getting along and bantering, OT3s, characters not dying when they were supposed to, healing (especially if the canon is a relentless shitshow usually), happy or at least hopeful endings, found family, exploring the world/universe, friendly encounters with the supernatural/aliens, ancient knowledge regained with a good outcome, people working together, pets, sudden appearance of the supernatural in fantasy/SF canons in a good or funny way, magic returning to the world, rebuilding after an apocalypse

Art: I'm pretty sure I'd love any art! I love sketchy styles with maybe just a splash of color to draw the eye. As for subject matter, I'd love to see any scenes from the fandom specific prompts or stuff from my likes. Characters being affectionate, gentle touches, characters as werewolves, characters in fancy dress/costumes, characters doing magic are also all welcome.

Fandom specific prompts:

Crimson Peak: I am probably one of the few people requesting this fandom wanting happy, hopeful or silly things and completely disinterested in the fucked up dynamics between Thomas and Lucille.

Anything post canon would be great! What happens to the house? Does Edith get on with her life? Do the other ghosts find peace?

Or maybe an AU where Lucille never left the mental institution? What do the other characters' lives turn out like then?

For something more crack, consider this post: http://romanticdaydreams.tumblr.com/post/129166110088/i-saw-this-on-my-professors-door-and-i-cant-even I'd love crack takes on gothic for this fandom! Maybe Lucille and Thomas try to pull of their scheme again, but things keep comically going wrong?

Frozen: Anything based on this where Anna succeeds and Hans falls in love with her: http://deylandisneydean.tumblr.com/post/80038513436/insuffera6le6itch-deylandisneydean-hans (If you can't see the link, it's basically Anna confessing she wants to kill Elsa to rule Arendelle and Hans going 'That's what I was going to say!') It can be crack or taken more seriously. I've just wanted fic of this ever since I saw that post years ago.

Or perhaps a darker take on the trolls in the movie and their actions regarding Anna. Especially considering that creepy song they sang about her and Kristoff.

Scooby Doo: I'd love to see something with a modern take on the Scooby Gang. What would be different, what the same? OT4 totally welcome!

A crossover with Leverage would be amazing! Or even a fusion where the gang turns to less legal methods after discovering not all their masked criminals are so easy to keep in jail after being arrested, if they even are.

Friends: Murder mystery time! Ross gets gruesomely killed and his ghost is haunting the others. Can they discover who his killer is? Or does Ross' frustration at their inability to solve it make him less of a friendly ghost? Bonus points if it turns out it was just a really unfortunate accident that caused Ross to manifest out of the sheer indignity of having died like that.

Or maybe Phoebe actually does have or get supernatural powers?

Star Trek the Next Generation: I have a hard time shipping anyone in my childhood fandoms and STTNG definitely falls under that. I'd strongly prefer gen and (if you must) very background canon pairings only for this.

Anything where Q plays with the crew would be fun. Perhaps he traps them in a murder mystery game or a haunted mansion. Perhaps he introduces them to the supernatural?

I'd always wanted to see the Enterprise crew in something of an apocalypse scenario. Specifically, I think they would be great at rebuilding after something like that, especially with the philosophic underpinnings of the canon in that humanity constantly strives to better itself. It strikes me as a lovely hopeful thing in such a scenario.

Perhaps something in the far future where the Federation is gone, but records (especially of the Enterprise crew) remain and give hope for a better future?

Gargoyles: Anything to do with the Fae, especially Puck. What made him decide to reveal himself to Xanatos? What was he up to during the exile from Avalon?

The end of the show had the gargoyles reveal themselves to the public. What are the consequences of that? I'd love to see something where the gargoyle population comes back from the brink of extinction in the face of a friendlier human populace.

I also love the show's take on mythology where all things are true. Maybe something with Slavic mythology in that setting? More Norse mythology?

Discworld: Anything with Granny Weatherwax, Death or the Nac Mac Feegles. I love this setting, so pretty much anything will be great.

If you feel like writing a crossover with LOTR, I would love love love any of the prompts from this post: http://berry-muffin.tumblr.com/post/160194985845/thebibliosphere-teapotdragon-zephyrantha

Lord of the Rings: For ultimate spooky, maybe something where Boromir and Faramir end up scouting Mordor or are captured in Minas Morgul? How would they escape, what horrors would they see?

Any scenario where Boromir lives would be great. Or Boromir interacting with the elves, especially once he remembers they actually participated and lived through battles he read about.

I have a total inexplicable soft spot for Boromir/Arwen, so something with them would also be great!

Ages ago, I read a fic where elves returned to Earth during the present day. I'd love such a scenario where the magic also returns and so does the memory of starlight in Men.  

Marvel Cinematic Universe: I'm sure my fic and tumblr make it fairly obvious Loki is my favorite character. That said, I am also fond of the other Thor characters, the GOTG crew and the Iron Man crew.

Unlikely team ups would be great, especially between characters that have never interacted before. Characters forced to work together to survive or just stuck together snarking at one another.

Something with Loki's shapeshifting or children would be amazing, especially translated for the MCU setting. Genderfluid Loki is a big plus!

Involuntary werewolf Loki for extra angst to go with his jotun heritage? Yes please!

Maybe the world ends once Thanos gets his hands on the Infinity Gauntlet, but Tony and Loki somehow manage to travel back in time to prepare?

Instead of Thanos and the Chitauri, perhaps the GOTG crew finds Loki? Or the Ravagers?

The Defenders: Anything where Jessica and Matt interact! I loved them in the show. Extra super bonus points for Foggy as well.

Foggy representing Jessica would be great.

Colleen, Misty and Claire mutual admiration society! Maybe the two of them help Misty adjust to her new bionic arm?

Also dragons! Maybe some dragons survived somewhere? How did they even get to Earth? How did the people in Kun Lun discover that their bones can bring back the dead/heal people? I want all the dragon stuff.