#which is going to make media special interests straight up less fun but also i know that that shit can fuck up ny brain

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[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez who’s an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about new speakers and language revitalisation. But first, some announcements. Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary. We still have a few days left to fill out our Lingthusiasm listener’s survey for the year, so follow the link in the description to tell us more about what you’d like to see on the show and do some fun linguistics experiments. This month’s bonus episode was a special anniversary advice episode in which we answered some of your pressing linguistics questions including helping friends become less uptight about language, keeping up with interesting linguistics work from outside the structure of academia, and interacting with youth slang when you’re no longer as much of a youth. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to this bonus advice episode, many more bonus episodes, and to help keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Itxaso, welcome to the show!

Itxaso: Hi! It’s so good to be here. I feel so honoured because we use so many of your episodes in our linguistic courses. For me, being here is exciting.

Gretchen: Hello to Itxaso and also to Itxaso’s students who may be listening to this episode.

Itxaso: I dunno if I want them to find this episode, though. [Laughter]

Gretchen: They’re gonna find it. Let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Itxaso: I feel like, for me, it was a little bit accidental – or at least, that’s how you felt at that time. I grew up in a household that we spoke Basque, but my grandparents didn’t speak Basque. My parents spoke it as non-native speakers. They were new speakers. They learnt it in adulthood, and they made me native. But I was told all my life, “You speak weird. You are different. You’re using this and that.” Later on, I was told that, “Oh, you’re so good at English. You should become an English teacher because you can make a lot of money.” And I thought, “Oh, yeah, well, that doesn’t sound bad.” When I went to undergrad, I started taking linguistic courses, and then I went on undergraduate study abroad thanks to a professor that we had at the university, Jon Franco. That’s where I realised, “Wait a minute. All of these things that I’ve been feeling about inadequate, they have an explanation.”

Gretchen: So, people were telling you that your Basque wasn’t good.

Itxaso: Yeah.

Gretchen: Even though you’re the hope and the fruition of all of this Basque language revitalisation. Your parents went to all this effort to learn Basque and teach you Basque, and yet someone’s telling you your Basque is bad.

Itxaso: Absolutely. You know, people wouldn’t tell you straight to your face, “Your Basque is really bad,” but there was all these very subtle ways of feeling about it, or they would correct you, and you were like, “Hmm, why do they correct it when the person next to me is using the same structure, but they don’t get corrected.” As a kid, I was sensitive to that, and then I realised, “Wow, there’re theories about this.”

Gretchen: That’s so exciting. It’s so nice to have “Other people have experienced this thing, and they’ve come up with a name and a label for what’s going on.”

Itxaso: It’s also interesting that as a kid I did also feel a little bit ashamed of my parents, who’re actually doing what language revitalisation wants to be done. You want to become active participants. But I remember when my parents would speak Basque to me, they had a different accent. They had a Spanish accent. I was like, “Ugh, whatever.” Sometimes it would cringe my ears; I have to admit that. As a kid, I was in these two worlds of, okay, I am proud and ashamed at the same time of what is happening.

Gretchen: And the other kids, when you were growing up, they were speaking Basque, too?

Itxaso: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I grew up in Gernika, right, and we have our own regional variety. I remember on the playground sometimes they would tell me, “Oh, you sound like the kids in the cartoons.”

Gretchen: So, you’re speaking this formal, standard Basque that your parents had learned as second language learners, and the other kids are still speaking the regional variety of Basque but hadn’t gone through the standardisation process and become the one that’s in the media.

Itxaso: Correct. My first variety was actually this standardised variety that nobody spoke when it was created in the ’60s. My parents learnt this in their 20s, and then that’s the variety that I was exposed to at home. But then you go in the street, and they’re like, “Oh, you sound like Doraemon,” because that’s what we watched.

Gretchen: The character in the cartoon, yeah.

Itxaso: Yeah, in the cartoon. It was like, “Oh, okay, do I? All right.” Then I started picking up the regional variety.

Gretchen: Right. You pick up the regional variety as well from the kids. Then what did your parents think of that if they think they’re speaking the fancy one?

Itxaso: Oh, my goodness. It was absolutely hilarious because my mom, she always thought that the Standard Basque is the correct way because that’s the one that you learnt in the school, so she did have this idea that literacy makes this language important. You know, for Basque revitalisation, that’s important. But I remember we were at home, and she would correct me because, for instance, as any spoken language, you would also shorten certain words. She would always say, “Oh, that’s not how you say it. You’re supposed to say this full word. You have to pronounce the entire word.” Then I said, “But Mom, everybody else uses this other variation,” especially with verbs, which are a little bit complicated, right. Then she would say, “Oh, Itxaso, you know what? I gave you this beautiful Basque, and then you went out to the school, and they ruined it all for you.” Then in order to come back, I would tell her, “Mom, but I am the native speaker here.” So, these tensions of who is right.

Gretchen: Who is the real Basque speaker, who is the best Basque speaker, and in this context where, in theory, your goals should be aligned because you’re all trying to revitalise Basque, and in theory, you all have the same goal, and yet, you’re getting criticism from different sides, and people are criticising different groups in this – but in theory, you have the same goals.

Itxaso: I think growing up in this paradox of I’m also criticising my mother, who actually, thanks to her, I get this language. In the revitalisation process, I think this negotiation is fascinating that you’re constantly being exposed to.

Gretchen: Constantly being exposed to all these different language ideologies around what is good, what is not good. You went to university, and you started encountering linguistic words for these experiences that you had. What were some of those words?

Itxaso: Some of these words I remember was this “standard language ideology,” that the idea or, in a way, that the standards are constructs that don’t exist. And I was thinking, “Wait a minute, in my language, we have a very clear standard.” We actually have a name for it. We call it “Unified Basque,” or “Euskara Batua.”

Gretchen: “Batua.”

Itxaso: “Batua” means “unified.” It’s associated with a kind of speaker. These are speakers that, like my parents, learned Basque through the schooling system, which today is actually the majority of the Basque-speaking population, at least on the Spanish side. “Standard language ideology” – I was thinking, “What is that? Oh, okay, it’s the thought that we have that these standards exist. How do I make sense of that?” I remember when I was in college, the term “heritage speaker” was thrown a lot.

Gretchen: “Heritage speaker” of Basque. Are you a “heritage speaker” of Basque?

Itxaso: I don’t consider myself a heritage speaker of Basque because – so I have Basque heritage, yes, and no. My dad’s side of the family is from Spain as well, but they also grew up in the Basque Country. This comes also with the last name. Do I have Basque heritage? Yes. But I think our connections with language are a little bit more complicated than the ethnicity per se. It’s like, we have this saying that says that it is Basque who speaks Basque. That was this poet, Joxean Artze, that we used to hear a lot during the revitalisation process. The question is, “What kind of Basque?”

Gretchen: Yeah, like, “Who is Basque enough to speak Basque?” And your parents speak Basque, but your grandparents didn’t speak Basque anymore, but if you go far enough back in your ancestry, somebody spoke Basque. But who counts –

Itxaso: But – yeah. My grandparents didn’t speak Basque. Their parents – maybe they had some knowledge. I dunno how far along. What we do know is that the region where my grandparents grew up in, Basque was already in the very advanced stages of language shift. Also, my grandparents were born in the civil war, so speaking Basque was probably not – it could get you killed.

Gretchen: Yeah. Which is a great reason to say, “Hey, you know what.”

Itxaso: Right. Then later on, this paradox is coming into play. As a 5-year-old kid, you’re not aware that your grandpa, you know, could have been killed if they spoke our language, but at the same time, my dad’s side of the family also was going through some kind of shame because he learnt the language as an adult, and he became in love with the language. This idea of heritage – do you need to be a heritage to be part of the language? It was a little more complicated than that. When I asked my mom, “Why do you learn the language?”, for her, she was always, “Because my identity now is complete.” But for my dad, it wasn’t the same reason.

Gretchen: Why did you dad learn Basque?

Itxaso: My dad learned Basque because after the dictator died, the revitalisation was very important, and there were a lot of jobs.

Gretchen: Ah, so just economic reasons.

Itxaso: For him, it was pure economics. Then, you know what, if I learn Basque, I’m gonna have more opportunities to have a government job, and a government job is a good job. Then after that, throughout the time, he actually became even more in love with the language, more invested in the revitalisation. He also did a lot of these – bertsolaritza is this oral poetry that we have. It has a very, very long oral tradition in the Basque Country. He read a lot of literature. He taught Basque in the school system. He was also invested in teaching Basque to immigrants as well because he felt like an immigrant himself as well.

Gretchen: And this question of who has Basque heritage, if you’re an immigrant to Basque Country, you are becoming part of that heritage as well.

Itxaso: Yes.

Gretchen: It’s an interesting example of how economic and social and cultural things can really work together for something, like, being able to get a job doing something can allow you to fall in love with it.

Itxaso: Yes, yes.

Gretchen: Or it can be hard to stay in love with something if there’s no way to support yourself while doing it.

Itxaso: Absolutely. I remember that he was always invested in these processes. I have to admit that – now I’m gonna be a little picky again because these ideologies sometimes don’t always fully go – you know, we still have these biases – my dad’s fluency and also competency became stronger and stronger, and then he started to also speak like locals, little by little.

Gretchen: Okay, you know, this standard, unified Basque – he’s like, “Well, maybe I’ll talk like the other local people.”

Itxaso: I remember that my mom was very clear, especially in the beginning – I dunno if she feels that way anymore – that the standard is the correct one. I don’t think my dad did have so many overt ideas about it. For him, in the beginning, it was instrumental, “It’s gonna give me a good job,” and then he fell in love. And then it’s like, “Now, I have to go to the richness” – sometimes he would say that – “of the dialects of the traditions.” But he didn’t have this heritage Basque. He was born in rural Spain, and his parents moved to the Basque Country for economic reasons.

Gretchen: And he sort of fell in love with it anyway. What’s it like for you – because you live in the US now – doing research with Basque and trying to stay in touch with your Basque identity despite not living in the Basque Country?

Itxaso: For me, I have to admit that, again, I came to the United States thinking that I’m going to be an English teacher when I come back. I said, “I’m gonna do my master’s, and then I’m gonna go back to the Basque Country, and I’m gonna teach English.” Uh-uh, no.

Gretchen: Okay.

Itxaso: I realised that the farther I am from home, the more I wanted to understand the processes or how I felt as a kid because I realised, “Wait a minute, I can find answers to the shame and pride that I had growing up.” I was also ashamed of my grandparents that they didn’t know Basque because when he would take me to the park, right, I knew that people would talk with him. I would just go, instead of him looking at me whether I am falling off from the swing, I was checking on him to see who was gonna talk with him because I was ready to do the translation work for him.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, if he can’t talk to the other parents or grandparents or whatever, then you’re like, “Oh, here, Grandad, let me translate for you.”

Itxaso: Yep. Then I remember that I’d think, “Hey, I’m teaching him Basque. He’s practicing, right?” Every Sunday he would come, you know, to our hometown and, before going to the park, I made him study Basque. He was so bad at it. Like, terrible at it. It was very hard for him, and he would tell me, “But Itxaso, why are you doing this to me? I didn’t even go to school.” I mean, he didn’t have much schooling even in Spanish. I said, “Don’t worry. If you’re Basque, you have to speak Basque.” Those were some of the – and I was 5 or 6. I was so happy, right. At the same time, I had this very strong attachment to him but also internalised shame that in my family intergenerational transmission was stopped. As a 5-year-old kid, you don’t understand civil war – yet. [Laughter]

Gretchen: I hope not.

Itxaso: When I went to graduate school, I realised, “Wait a minute, my teachers were correcting me all the time.” I had this internalised shame that exercised, right. I was told that sometimes I wasn’t Basque enough; sometimes I was being seen as a real Basque. So, what’s happening? This is when I realised that sociolinguistics, which is the field of study that I do, became very therapeutical to me.

Gretchen: You can work through your issues or your family issues and your language issues by giving them names and connecting them with other people who’ve had similar experiences like, “Oh, I’m not alone in having this shame and these feelings.”

Itxaso: Absolutely. And that there were many of us. There were a lot of Spanish speakers in my classroom who, maybe they didn’t have literacy in Spanish, or they had similar encounters of feelings, and I said, “Wait a minute, so we’re not that weird,” and understanding that, in fact, this is quite common. Or there were also speakers of other language revitalisation contexts that I thought, “Oh, wait a minute, I thought we were this isolate case,” and you’re thinking, “No, we have similar feelings of inadequacy, but at the same time, pride.” I used the world of linguistics in general to understand these patterns and also to heal in some way.

Gretchen: No, it’s important.

Itxaso: I almost had a little bit of a rebel attitude in some ways. For me, it was like, “Ha ha! I got you now!”

Gretchen: Like, “You don’t need to make me feel shame anymore because I have linguistics to fight you with!”

Itxaso: There we go! “And now, I’m gonna go back with my dissertation. I’m gonna make sure that you understand that YOU are the one wrong and not me, and that when you correct me, I am also judging you.”

Gretchen: Does it work very well to show people your dissertation and tell them that they’re wrong?

Itxaso: No. [Laughter] Absolutely not.

Gretchen: I was gonna say, if you said this was working, it’s like, “Wow! You’re the first person that I know who wrote a dissertation and everyone admitted that they were wrong.”

Itxaso: Yeah, but then you have this hope.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Itxaso: Then I realised, okay, well, this is my therapeutic portfolio, basically.

Gretchen: At least you know in your heart that you are valid. So, you don’t like the word “heritage speaker,” which I think “heritage speaker” does work for – we don’t wanna say, “No one is a heritage speaker” – but for you in your context, that doesn’t feel like it resonates with you. What is a term that resonates with you for your context?

Itxaso: For me, it resonates more – I consider myself a native speaker of Basque, or my first language is definitely Basque. We have a term for that in the Basque Country, “euskaldun zahar,” and it literally means – “euskal” means “Basque,” “dun” means that you have it, and “zahar” means “old.”

Gretchen: You have the “Old Basque.”

Itxaso: Yeah, you have the Old Basque, which is associated with the dialects or the regional varieties. It has nothing to do with age.

Gretchen: Okay. You’re not an old Basque speaker as in you’re a senior citizen with grey hair, you’re a speaker of Old Basque.”

Itxaso: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Compared to a “New Basque” speaker?

Itxaso: There we go. Mm-hmm. A New Basque speaker, right, which we also have a Basque term for that, right, it actually means that you started it in more new times, which for us is associated with the revitalisation.

Gretchen: That’s like your parents.

Itxaso: Exactly. My parents consider themselves “new” speakers of Basque, and the Basque word for that is “euskaldun berri.”

Gretchen: “euskaldun berri.” So, this is “speaker of New Basque” or – and the idea of someone being a new speaker of a revitalised language in general where you learned it in adulthood and maybe you’re trying to pass it onto your kids and give them the opportunities they didn’t have, but you have these challenges that are unique to new speakers.

Itxaso: Absolutely. And oftentimes has to do with the idea of how authentic you are. This is something that is being negotiated, right – these negotiations we’re having in our household. When my mom said, “I know the correct Basque,” and I would basically implicitly tell her, when I was telling her, “But I know the authentic one.” Because of that, those similarly wider ideologies, right, this is how my parents also, little by little, they were able to sprinkle their Standard Basque with some regional “flavour,” as we call it, right. They would change their verbs, and they would start sounding more like the regional dialects.

Gretchen: Are there different contexts in which people tend to use the Standard Basque versus the older Basque varieties, like either formal or informal contexts, writing, speaking, like, official contexts or intimate contexts? Are there some differences, sociolinguistically, in terms of how they get used?

Itxaso: Yeah. For somebody that, for instance, I consider myself also bi-dialectal in Basque in the sense that I speak the regional variety now even if my first variety was actually the standard. I use the Standard Basque to write. But that is only part of the mess or the beauty or the complexification because those people that started learning Standard Basque in the school, sometimes, they might feel that their standard is too rigid to be able to have these informal conversations. One of the things that a lot of new speakers of Basque are doing is, in fact, creating language.

Gretchen: To create an informal version of the standard. Because it’s one thing to speak it in a classroom or something, but if you’re going to go marry someone and raise children in this and you wanna be able to have arguments or tell someone you love them or this sort of stuff maybe this thing that’s very classroom associated is too fancy-feeling for that context.

Itxaso: The same way that they don’t wanna sound like the kids in the cartoons, like Doraemon, for instance. [Laughter]

Gretchen: That’s not how real people sound.

Itxaso: Knowing that a standard was necessary for our survival, for the language to survive, at least during those times, but at the same time, we need to get out of this rigidity that this standard might give us. The new speakers in many ways are the engineers of the language.

Gretchen: The original creation of Standard Basque in the 1980s was taking from all of these different regional varieties and coming up with a version that could be written, and you could have one Basque curriculum that all of the schools could use rather than each region trying to come up with its own curriculum, which is logistically challenging.

Itxaso: Absolutely. The Standard Basque was created, finally, in 1968, and little by little being introduced in the educational purposes. And the education in the ’80s, too, is when [exploding noise] bilingual schools skyrocketed, and the immersion programme became the most common one.

Gretchen: And this is immersion for kids, for adults, for everybody?

Itxaso: For kids. You start with kindergarten or, I dunno the terms here in the US, but 2- or 3-years-old, all throughout university. Of course, that went through different stages. Of course, there’s some degrees in university that might not be fully taught in Basque, but overall, little by little, I mean, in the past four years, a lot of that has been done.

Gretchen: What’s it like for you now going back to the Basque Country being like, “Wow, revitalisation is done. It’s complete. Everything is accomplished. We have nothing to worry about anymore.” Is this the case?

Itxaso: Absolutely not. There’s still debates going on. One of the big debates that have been talked – so we have sociolinguistic surveys that we wanna measure how successful is this standard, and what does that even mean. All the people who learned Basque in the schools, like my parents, are they actually using the language all the time? Or even if you grew up speaking Basque. The reality is that Basque revitalisation has been very successful in creating bilinguals. Most of the population, if you are 40 or younger – especially here I’m talking about the Basque Country in the Spanish side because the French side does not have the same governmental support that we do. The answer is that some surveys show that Basque is not as spoken as it is acquired.

Gretchen: People learn it in the schools in the immersion programmes, but then, the kids are playing on the playground, maybe they’re not using it as much, or you’re going into a store, and you’re buying some milk or something, and you’re not necessarily using Basque for these day-to-day interactions.

Itxaso: Correct. I remember when I was doing my own fieldwork and collecting data for my dissertation, I remember that I would ask people from the city because this is where the revitalisation was most impactful because this is where Basque was least spoken before the standard was implemented. That was a – oh, my goodness. There is this saying that we have that Basque is being used with children and dogs.

Gretchen: Okay. [Laughter]

Itxaso: And then I started to notice – and, you know, my sister, she uses Basque with her friends, but at home, she would use a lot of Basque with the dog that she got a few years ago. I was so surprised because then our interactions back home become more Spanish-dominant with time. I was like, “Oh, my goodness. Is this true?” I started to notice. In fact, some adults that would talk Basque to their children but also to the dogs, but later on, a lot of the adult interactions.

Gretchen: But then when you grow up, you use Spanish. You have this ideology of “Okay, well, it’s important for children to have Basque, but then you grow up and you put it away,” which doesn’t sound that great.

Itxaso: Meaning that the normalisation of Basque, it hasn’t started.

Gretchen: It has succeeded at some level, yeah.

Itxaso: Absolutely. But the work is not completely done yet. I don’t think it’s ever gonna be – I mean, when I say it’s never gonna done meaning that you always have new processes or new challenges. One thing that I did notice – so the last sociolinguistics survey showed two very interesting trends in the opposite direction. The first one was that new speakers, and especially young new speakers from the city, they’re starting to embrace Basque in their daily life interactions. They’re adopting the language and using it and engineering it and making it more informal. In fact, we have different standard Basques that are starting to emerge in one city, in Bilbao. Another one might be emerging in Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is the capital. And the other one – San Sebastián. There’s still a standard but with some flavours. People are documenting that. The other one is that in certain Basque-speaking regions or traditional speaking regions like my hometown, for instance, that the use of Basque among teenagers has actually dropped a little bit – slightly. I have noticed that, too, when I go back. I was thinking, “Why would that be? Why is it that teenagers might see” –

Gretchen: You have to think that Basque is cool as a teenager.

Itxaso: Exactly. I also noticed different kinds of trends. When I grew up in the ’90s, during my rebel times, we loved punk. We loved rock.

Gretchen: Was there Basque music in rock and punk and this sort of stuff?

Itxaso: Oh, my goodness, Berri Txarrak, which translates to “bad news.”

Gretchen: We should link to some Basque music in the shownotes so people can listen to it if they want.

Itxaso: We loved it. Little by little, more soft rock became more popular. This is still popular. But I noticed in the past five years or so that reggaetón is –

Gretchen: The young people are listening to reggaetón. Is there reggaetón in Basque?

Itxaso: That’s what we need, I think.

Gretchen: Okay. If there’re any reggaetón artists who are listening to this, and you speak Basque, this is your project.

Itxaso: I’m like – maybe there is. I’m not a big fan of reggaetón.

Gretchen: But it’s what the young people want. It’s not about you anymore.

Itxaso: Exactly. I do wanna hear some Basque – I know there is feminist reggaetón, but I haven’t heard Basque reggaetón as much.

Gretchen: Maybe someone will tell us about it.

Itxaso: Maybe it’s time to adjust to –

Gretchen: And to keep adapting because it’s not just like, “Oh, we have this one vision of what Basque culture looked like in the past, and you have to be connected to that thing specifically,” it’s that it evolves because it’s a living culture with what else is going on in the world.

Itxaso: Absolutely. This is where the making of what it means to be a speaker of a minority language also comes into play. I know that in many Indigenous language revitalisation processes hip hop music has been extremely important in the process of language revitalisation. Maybe we do need some Basque reggaetón.

Gretchen: All right. Sounds good. I’m sold. Basque is famous among linguists as being a language that’s spoken in Europe but that’s not ancestrally related to any of the other Indo-European languages. This makes it famous, but also, I dunno, how does this make you feel?

Itxaso: Aye yae yae yae yae. It makes me feel good and bad at the same time because it’s like, “Oh, you know about Basque? That’s awesome!”, but then, “Oh, we’re being told that this is what you know about Basque,” which is this “exotic” language, and I’m like, “No, no.” That’s the part that I’m like, “No, we’re normal, too.”

Gretchen: “We’re also just people who’re speaking a language trying to go about our lives.” It also has things that are in common with other language revitalisation contexts – I’m thinking of Gaelic and Irish in Scotland and Ireland and lots of Indigenous language contexts in the Americas, in Australia. There’s so many different places where there’s a language that’s been oppressed, and it’s hard to say what is Indigenous in the Spain-France context, but definitely big governments have said, “Oh, you should all be speaking Spanish,” “You should all be speaking French,” and you have to struggle to make this something that is recognised and funded and important and prestigious and all of this stuff.

Itxaso: Absolutely. And for the first time in the history of the Basque language, now we are considered a “modern” language – another stereotype that oftentimes – “Oh, you are such an old language!” And I’m thinking, “But we speak it today.”

Gretchen: It’s not only ancient speakers. There’s still modern people speaking Basque.

Itxaso: Yes, and we have a future. We can do Twitter. We can do Facebook. We can do social media.

Gretchen: You can do Reggaetón.

Itxaso: Reggaetón in Basque. We can do a lot of things in Basque. People associate us oftentimes with these ancient times from the lands of the Pyrenees and caves. I’m like, “Great.”

Gretchen: But you’re not living in caves now.

Itxaso: Exactly. And when they tell us, “Oh, you are this unique language and so weird,” and I’m like, “We’re not weird. We’re unique like any other language, but we also have similar processes.”

Gretchen: Ultimately, every language is descended from – like, languages are always created in contact with other people, so there’s this ancestral descendant from whatever people were speaking 100,000 years ago that we have no records of. Everything is ultimately connected to all of the other humans, even if we aren’t capable of currently tracing those relationships with what we have access to right now.

Itxaso: Even within among linguists, right, it has been debated – Basque has been compared to possibly every language family out there. Even Basque people, “Oh, we found a connection! Maybe we are connected to the languages of the Caucasus.” All Basque linguists just roll their eyes thinking, “Here we go again.”

Gretchen: “Here’s another one.”

Itxaso: This idea of also looking at the past has been very important to understand our existence, but also it’s important to understand that we have a future, and that one is going to form the other in many ways. When they say, “Oh, where is Basque coming from?”, I’m like, “I dunno if we’re ever gonna find that out.”

Gretchen: I dunno if that’s the most interesting question that we could be asking because it’s hard to have fossils of a language. Writing systems only go back so far, and the languages being spoken and signed much, much earlier than that, we just don’t know because they don’t leave physical traces in the air.

Itxaso: What is fascinating is that, so recently, there has been some evidence – they found some remains that, in fact, Basque was written before the standard or before when we thought. Initially, we know that the first Basque writings were names in tombs, in graveyards. Now, we actually have some evidence – or at least they found some evidence – that Basque might have been used for written purposes also and that the Iberian writing system was used for that. They’re still trying to decode.

Gretchen: Maybe we could link to a little bit of what that looks like if there’s some of that online, too.

Itxaso: It looks like a hand. The text looks like a hand, and there’re five words there. They have only been able to decode one word.

Gretchen: But they think that word is Basque?

Itxaso: Yes.

Gretchen: Cool.

Itxaso: We will see. I mean, stay tuned.

Gretchen: Further adventures in Basque archaeology, yeah.

Itxaso: Even for Basque people that is actually really exciting. That’s where the part of like, “Oh, maybe we know where we come from!” We’re like, “We actually come from maybe there,” or I dunno, does that make my dad less Basque for that?

Gretchen: And does that make the new speakers less valid? But it’s still kind of cool to find out about your history.

Itxaso: Yes, and that this history’s so complex. It’s also entrenched in our real life today. It’s still important to us in some ways.

Gretchen: You also co-wrote a paper that I think has a really great title, and I’d love you to tell me about the contents of the paper as well. It has a very interesting topic. It’s called, “Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward.” What do you mean by a “unicorn language user”?

Itxaso: Well, first of all, I have to admit that this title was by the first author, Evelina. I mean, amazing. What we mean by “unicorn language users” is that when we study languages, or when we think of people who speak languages, there is that stereotypical image that comes to our mind, and it oftentimes has to be, “Oh, maybe a fluent speaker or a native speaker.” But what does that even mean in a minority language context where language transmission has been stopped and then back regained in a completely different way? Then you also have these ways of thinking from the past intermingled with the modern reality. Who is a Basque speaker?

Gretchen: Right. Is it true that basically every Basque speaker at this point is bilingual?

Itxaso: Absolutely. When you do research with Basque, and with many minority languages, you have to do it in a multilingual way of thinking because if there is a minority, it’s for a reason.

Gretchen: You can’t find this unicorn Basque speaker who’s a monolingual you can compare to your unicorn Spanish monolingual – well, there are Spanish monolingual speakers – but trying to have this direct comparison is not something that’s gonna be realistic. Your co-authors of this paper are speakers of Galician and Catalan –

Itxaso: Also, Greek.

Gretchen: And also, Greek!

Itxaso: Cypriot Greek.

Gretchen: Cypriot Greek – who have had similar experiences with being – we’re not saying “heritage speakers” – but being speakers that have connected to multiple bilingual experiences.

Itxaso: Minorities, right. It all unites us because all of us had some experience that was within Spain. Either we grew up or we live in the nation state of Spain. What was interesting is that, as we were discussing this paper, all of us had slightly different experiences as users of minority languages. In Catalan or in Galician or Basque and also Cypriot Greek. I said, “How can we understand all of these complex or slightly different ways of experiencing” – and our experiences have also changed throughout our lives. How is it that we use the language – what associations we have, what the language means to us, or the languages mean to us, what kind of multi-lingual practices we actually engage in. At the same time, I remember that in the paper we also reflected a little bit on how we also engaged in our research in these unicorn searches in the beginning and how to unlearn that.

Gretchen: Because when you’re first trying to write a paper about Basque, and you’re saying, “Okay, I’m gonna interview these Basque speakers, and I’ve got to find people who are the closest to monolingual that I can,” or who embody these sort of, “They learned this language before a certain age,” because your professors or the reviewers for the paper or the journals – what you think people want or these studies that you’ve been exposed to already have this very specific idea of what a speaker is or a language user – because we wanna include signers and stuff as well – what exactly someone is to know a language compared to the reality of what’s going on on the ground which is much more complex than that.

Itxaso: Absolutely. I feel like we have to self-reflect onto how is it that we’re representing and doing research – or the issue of representation becomes really, really, really important. What is it that we’re describing, what is it that we’re explaining, how are we doing it. Sometimes, there’re power dynamics within this knowledge in the field. When you wanna publish a paper in a top journal, there’s certain practices.

Gretchen: And they wanna have a monolingual control group. “Oh, you’ve got to compare everything to English speakers or to Spanish speakers because they’re big languages we’ve heard of.” Like, “Can’t I just write about Basque because there’re lots of papers that are only about English or only about Spanish? Why can’t there be papers only about Basque?”

Itxaso: Exactly. And you are thinking, “Wait a minute, I can’t find a Basque monolingual.” Maybe they exist, but they’re not readily, either, available, or it’s not common –

Gretchen: In a cave somewhere.

Itxaso: Right. We’re like, “Okay, well” – exactly. Or maybe they do live monolingually.

Gretchen: Yeah, but they still have some exposure to Spanish even though most of their life they’re in Basque. And going and finding this 1% of speakers who managed to live this monolingual life – how well is that really representing a typical Basque experience or a breadth of experiences with the language, which, most of which have some level of multilingualism?

Itxaso: Correct. We as researchers sometimes have to pick. When we make those decisions, we sometimes do not make those decisions consciously because a lot of those questions might come from the field. But then this paper also allowed us to reflect on also thinking, “Why is it that I have to put up with this? This is not working properly and describing things that matter to us” – and matter to us as a community, not only as researchers. Why is it that my parents’ varieties do not get represented that well? Why is it that other participants do not make it to the experiment because they get excluded on the basis of just, oh, literacy, and things like that, which becomes a sticking point as well. Who is a unicorn? Well, clearly there are no unicorns. There are many unicorns.

Gretchen: Sometimes, I think that there’s an idea that being, say, a bilingual speaker is like being two monolingual speakers in a trench coat. The thing that you’re looking for, this unicorn-balanced bilingual of someone who uses their languages in all contexts and is completely “fluent” – whatever we mean by that – in all contexts when, in reality, many people who live bilingual or multilingual lives have some language they use with their family or some language they use at the workplace or in public or that they’re reading more or that they’re consuming media in more. They have different contexts in which they use different languages.

Itxaso: Compartmentalisation is very important but not full compartmentalisation either. There’s gonna be a lot of different overlaps – and so many different experiences. Another thing is that I think doing research with new speakers is important is because those experiences may change from year to year.

Gretchen: Your parents’ cohort of new speakers compared to new speakers who are teenagers now – they’re gonna have very different experiences.

Itxaso: Or maybe a new speaker when they are teenagers versus when they’re in the labour market versus when –

Gretchen: They’re having kids or they’re grandparents or something are gonna have very different experiences even throughout the course of their lives.

Itxaso: Even myself, me as a Basque speaker, my way of speaking has also changed or the way I adapt. One of the challenges in the Basque Country has been “What are the processes – or how is it that they decide, ‘I’m gonna speak the language’?” It’s a continuation. This adoption of the language, you don’t fully, suddenly adopt it.

Gretchen: You don’t adopt it and then that’s all, you’re only speaking Basque from now on. It’s a decision that you’re making every day, “Am I gonna speak Basque in this context? Am I gonna keep using it?”

Itxaso: You negotiate that because, obviously, when you speak a minority language, you’re gonna be reminded that certain challenges might come on the way. Some new speakers might like to be corrected, but some might not.

Gretchen: So, how do you negotiate “Are you gonna correct this person?” “Are you not gonna correct this person?” “Can you ask for correction?” What do you want out of that situation?

Itxaso: Some new speakers, they might want to also sound like regional dialects or older dialects, but some others might not. They create other ways to authenticate themselves and to invest in the language and to invest in the practices that come with it. Each person is unique at the individual level, but then at the collective level, things happen, too. Understanding those is very, very, very, very important.

Gretchen: The balance between the language in an individual and also a language in the community or in a collective group of people who know a language – both of those things existing. We’ve talked a lot about new speakers of Basque. Are there also heritage speakers in the Basque context?

Itxaso: There are. In fact, they do exist. The question is, “Who would these people be?” These people could actually be people that grew up speaking Basque at home but maybe, during the dictatorship, they didn’t have access to the schooling in Basque, so they might not have literacy skills in Basque – so older generations.

Gretchen: They might have things that are in common with heritage speakers. The way that I’ve heard “heritage speakers” get talked about in the Canadian or North American context is often through immigrants. Your parents immigrate from somewhere, and then the kids grow up speaking the parents’ language but also the broader community language and that parents’ language as a heritage language. That still happens in Basque; it’s just that wasn’t your experience in Basque, so you wanna have a distinction between heritage and new speakers.

Itxaso: It’s also true that sometimes if we focus too much on the new speakers, we actually also forget describing the experiences of these individuals that we might consider from the literature as heritage speakers because they don’t use this term for themselves.

Gretchen: The heritage speakers don’t use it for themselves?

Itxaso: Yeah. Or the Basque people that say, “I am just a Basque speaker” or a “traditional Basque speaker” but in a different way. They usually say, “But I don’t do the standard.”

Gretchen: “I’m not very good.”

Itxaso: Sometimes, they think that their Basque is not good enough because they don’t have that literacy.

Gretchen: Or they might be able to understand more than they can talk, sometimes happens to people.

Itxaso: Yeah, sometimes it can happen. Or they talk very fluently, but then they say, “I don’t understand the news,” because they’re in the Standard.

Gretchen: Finally, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, whether Basque-specific or not, what would that be?

Itxaso: I think that – oof, that’s a loaded question, I love it. For me, I would say linguistics is rebellion. Linguistics is therapy. Linguistics is healing. A linguist is the future. [Laughs] And minority languages have a lot to show about that. In this case, it’s Basque – or for me it’s Basque because I’m intimately related to Basque – but those are the key aspects that I would say that you can do therapy through linguistics.

Gretchen: Linguistics is therapy. Linguistics is rebellion. I love it. That’s so great.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get bouba and kiki scarves, posters with our aesthetic redesign of the International Phonetic Alphabet on them, t-shirts that say, “Etymology isn’t Destiny,” and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. Our guest, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, can be found at BasqueUIUC.wordpress.com. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include a behind-the-scenes interview with Lingthusiasm team member, Martha Tsutsui-Billins, a recap about linguistics institutes, a.k.a., linguist summer camps, and a linguistics advice episode. Also, if you like Lingthusiasm but wish it would help put you to sleep better, we also have a very special Lingthusiasmr bonus episode [ASMR voice] where we read some linguistics stimulus sentences to you in a calm, soothing voice. [Regular voice] Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Itxaso: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[soupthatistohot]

Why do I write primarily mlm fanfic?

This was something I asked myself the other day. I am a girl, I think I'm queer (but I am attracted to men, whatever I am), so why do I fixate on mlm relationships? Why do I never feel compelled to write wlw or even just some good 'ol straight stuff? I brought this up to a few friends of mine who also watch anime. One of them said that it’s because lots of popular media only really focuses on developing their male characters well, and I think this to be a very suitable explanation (as well as the fact that I’m queer and thus gravitate towards queer stories).

Take Sk8 the Infinity for example. I could count the number of female characters in this anime on one hand, and one of them is a robot. The others are supporting roles who only serve to support the male main characters. I love Sk8 very much, and with the possibility of a 2nd season I’d love to see a prominent, well-developed female character (but if they make her Reki’s love interest I will literally stab someone). But as the anime stands right now, there are no female characters that aren't just basically plot devices.

Another show I love dearly, Yuri!!! on Ice, is much the same. While there can be more of an argument made here because 1) competitive figure skating is split up between men and women, and 2) I believe that the story Yuuri and Victor is absolutely meant to be a romance, so having the two men as the focus is somewhat necessary, there's an overwhelming lack of fleshed-out women in the story. All the female characters are supporting members that only exist for the benefit of male characters. Yuuko and Minako support Yuuri, Lilia exists so Yuri P. can improve, Mila is just... kind of there, and Sara's whole character is centered around her brother being overprotective of her.

Okay, so let's look at something a little less... fruity. Horimiya. I've only watched the anime, so if there's stuff I miss from not having read the manga (yet), please forgive me. I still think this is a valid perspective, though, because if there's female development that the creators decided was so unimportant that it could be cut, that still supports my point here. In my opinion, Miyamura is a lot more developed than Hori. He has his tragic backstory of being a loner, and having his secret piercings and tattoos and all that. A lot of the story ends up focusing on his side of things... despite the fact that Hori is the protagonist. The story follows her perspective for the most part, we learn things about Miyamura as she does, yet I feel like she's a bit dull. She has a uncommon home life and has to take care of her younger brother, that's her big bad secret? I get that it's kind of unexpected since she's the pretty, perfect, popular girl, but I still feel like it's a tad anticlimactic. It's hardly ever addressed beyond the first few episodes, too, and it just kind of exists as a fact within the story. Even beyond our main couple, it seems like the other female characters development and stories are all focused on the boy they're interested in (except for Sawada, but she's there for like a couple of episodes and then doesn't really show up all that much again... and her crush on Hori is handled really weird, I didn't exactly love it). Remi's entire character is pretty much centered around her boyfriend, and Sakura and Yuki are basically competing for Toru. Meanwhile, the guys have story beats themed around the girls they're interested in, but I feel like it's not as obsessive or dramatic as how the girls are depicted.

So, we're given these female characters, who are really watered-down and honestly kind of boring, and we're not super compelled to write about them. When we are given flat female characters, there's nothing to work with. It's more fun to use the characters who have had development and play around with the "what ifs" and our own personal headcannons. The characters who get this special treatment are primarily male. And while I commend a lot of shows for developing their male characters in such a way that doesn't exactly fit with society's idea of masculinity (ex: Reki's insecurities and depression, Yuuri's anxiety and femininity, Miyamura's isolation and depression), in the end these characters are still boys, men, males.

I also think mlm is so prominent because of both straight girls and queer people. For straight girls, it can often be fetishization (forgive my generalizing, I'm sure not all straight girls are like that, but an overwhelming amount definitely are). I think one of the best examples I can give for this is Phan. This is a bit different since it's not anime, but instead real people, but if anything that really drives home the point even more. The way Dan and Phil were (and probably still are) treated in the fandom internet space is disturbing, to say the least. Their audience, while much of it was queer, was also made up of an overwhelming amount of heterosexual girls who not only shipped them intensely, but also often sexualized them. And look, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a straight girl and writing smut, but it gets to a point where it can be kind of weird if its excessive. Like, if that's all the relationship is really about, and if the people you're writing about are real human beings, that's definitely overstepping. I will admit that I had a Wattpad and that I wrote Phanfic way back when, and this is something I'm not exactly proud of. Granted, I did not write anything explicit, it was still super weird, whether or not I was queer. And I'm not saying all the problematic aspects of the Phandom were because of straight girls, because what I contributed was arguably problematic, and I did not identify as straight at the time. At the same time, though, there were straight girls who wrote exclusively smut (or "lemons" as they might've been referred to at the time). There were those who analyzed every post, every bit of information they could find about these men on the internet. They obsessed over the fact that they occasionally shared clothes (which is fairly common for roomates of similar sizes to do), and gathered evidence to support the theory that they shared a bed. It was bad. It was invasive, and it got to the point where it wasn't about the people, it was about the fetishized fantasy these girls made up in their heads about these real, actual men.

Dan and Phil's online presence kind of disappeared for a few years... and I don't blame them.

Getting back on track, mlm is prominent for queer people because it's the LGBT representation they so desperately want to see actualized in media. If a show doesn't make their favorite queer ship canon (and they often don't), they'll do it themselves! That's what fanfic is for! I also know that queer people project onto these characters a lot, and that writing about them is almost like a form of therapy. They see these characters as queer, and they see themselves in these characters, so they write about these characters experiencing similar emotions to them. The thing is, the most compelling characters are male, so those are the characters they end up focusing on, even if the person in question is strictly sapphic. My best example is how I project onto Reki. Personally, I end up thinking of him as (and thus end up writing him as) having some internalized homophobia around being bisexual. That's literally what I am currently going through. I can't project this onto any of the female characters in Sk8, because I couldn't see them going through this experience because they're not developed enough to.

Despite all of this, I still enjoy all of the shows I mention a lot. I think it's just an interesting topic that I was thinking about. I'm not trying to bash anything that I used as an example, these were just my personal observations based off of what I know about these shows and their fandoms. I do, though, believe shipping real people isn't super cool, and I stand by that as someone who used to do it. I'm not going to stop you... I just think it's intrusive and inappropriate to pretend like you know enough about influencers to dictate who they should be involved with romantically. Their love life is, frankly, none of your damn business.

So, long story short, we should make anime (and popular media in general) less misogynistic.

(Also, please leave Dan and Phil alone, they deserve privacy)

[shadowsole]

I wasn't gonna go into it more because I don't really do that stuff here but I wanna talk more about Iron Widow since it's been a long time since I really got into a book that I read it on like less than 8 hours not including work and I have thoughts.

Some spoilers below

First of all it is so unapologetically feminist in just a way that feels incredibly real.

I am not well read, between time money and just having other hobbies I don't read books like I used too so maybe this is just something that's common these days but the stories I've read that deal with discrimination or anything similar never really catches the anger I think is common in these situations.

Wu Zetian is furious and she feels so real in every part of it. In a way that characters like say Katniss never true felt like for me.

It is also unapologetically Chinese, not that I expected anything different after binging all of Xiran Jay Zhao's videos a couple of months back.

I have a love of reading history from all around the world with a special interest in parts of Chinese history and it was a ball recognising the Chinese history references. Though I'm sure I missed many.

Also I had a great moment of this meme

But going Zhuge Liang?!

I don't think the dynasty warriors designs is what I should have been imagining the whole time though lol.

The imagery was also amazing. I usually struggle with properly picturing what's described in my head but there where so many moments that I just sat back and could see the full cinematic shots. God this book would legitimately make a wonderful movie and It really makes me want to jump into drawing with vibrant colour just to see some of it.

Another thing that was just refreshing was the love triangle being an actual triangle. Again maybe that's more common in media these days but I think it's actually the first time I've actually seen a polygamous relationship in published media. I love how all the parts of the relationship grow and the straight up conversations that are had between the characters about it. Triangles truely are the strongest shape.

Finally, I really liked the relationship between Zetian and her mother. The constant mental almost begging her mother to just give her a reason to not condemn her and the rest of the family. And because of the historical Wu Zetians seemingly positive relationship with her mother I was honestly expecting some kind of reconciliation or forgiveness.

So the ending with that last mental plea to prove herself a good mother, with just an almost emotionless "you're in my way" shocked me.

This actually really resonated with me and my own relationship with my mother

My circumstances are much more benign but I have issues with my mother that I'll never get an apology for that have weighed heavily on me. That last scene with Zetians family and her (by my reading) lack of anger or hatred and just cold this is in my way so I will put it behind me really made me stop for a second and think about my own mother. No more sorrow or anger, no forgiveness. This situation and history is in my way of being a better me and so I'm just going to step through it and put it behind me.

So @xiranjayzhao I don't know if you'll look at this post or read all the way through. But thank you for not giving up on getting published. Not only have you made an excellent piece of entertainment but I think it has actually helped me in my own issues so thank you, can't wait for part two

If anyone else has read down to this a, sorry, b, you should read Iron Widow if it sounds like it appeals to you. Although I don't think I actually mentioned the giant mechas at all, which is a pretty big thing.

Or at least check out Xiran Jay Zhao's YouTube. The history of Wu Zetian told like the juiciest gossip is fun and informative

[catnippackets]

have you seen/would u recommend pacific rim 2? ive heard some things about newt and idk lol

I feel like Im in the minority that actually did think pru was fun but that being said it ended SO abruptly and with like three separate plotlines completely abandoned that I was really frustrated for days after watching it until I had processed everything and had time to think deeply about it lol it just seemed rly unfinished?? it feels like it was deliberately made as 1/2 of two sequels and there needs to be one more to tie everything up. actually I’m gonna ramble abt this bc I have a lot of thoughts (obvs spoilers under the cut)

the thing about the second one was that I genuinely was enjoying it right up until it ended because I swear to god the moment the end screen went up I yelled "what the fuck, that's it?" out loud into my bedroom bc I was so SHOCKED that THAT'S how it all ended, because it just seemed so incomplete?? Like it seemed like one half of a story, that will only be made whole if there's a third one to tie up all the plotlines that they didn't go through with in the second and if that's the case then I will be completely fine with it but if it doesn't or if they dont have a third one at all I will stay so frustrated lol. one silver lining to this is that the vibe of this movie was so different from the first that it almost feels easy to separate it and just imagine it as an AU if you prefer which is sort of nice; usually if a piece of media I like does something bad I feel all gutted and anxious and terrible that this is the canon I have to accept, but something abt this movie just made it feel like it was sort of a totally separate deal. maybe cuz only 3 of the original characters were in it idk

to start off: I felt like there were a couple of plotlines in it that were just sort of introduced and then never seen through which was very ????? Amara & Vik's weird hate-rivalry thing was one of them; Vik instantly has it out for Amara bc she’s jealous, which is a very interesting concept, and then this prompts Amara to become hostile right back at her, which is also a very interesting concept, and then it never got resolved at all? like they couldve done something really cool with those two but it just never went anywhere. and then there was sort of a weird love triangle thing happening between Jake and Nate and Jules that felt so weird bc it had no significance to the plot at all and it felt like it was only thrown in there for the sake of having ~romantic drama~ idk maybe I wasnt paying too much attention and there was more to it than that but it really just seemed like they wanted to put romance in there and didnt want to bother to put any work into it

BUT the thing about romantic sub plots is that THERE ALREADY WAAAAS OOOOOOOOONE which brings me to the biggest frustration I have w this movie because--and DISCLAIMER, this was also my favourite plot point of the movie bc it was by far the most interesting, the biggest reason for me enjoying the movie at all, and the bit I feel like should have had WAY more attention--Newt and Hermann were like legitimately in love in this movie I swear to god I was watching it and thinking “this is GENUINELY the most blatantly gay thing I’ve ever seen in a feature film and I know that straight ppl are very talented at writing gay romances completely by accident so it’s possible that they just accidentally did it this way but also it is REALLY goddamn obvious oh my gooood?” (and then I did a lot of frantic googling and found out that I was right and Charlie Day & Burn Gorman knew what the fuck they were doing and I felt so validated lol), and yet despite this, the movie had them speak for the last time almost at the halfway point of the film and then spend the entire second half apart and not talking at all and even at the post-credits scene where Jake and Newt talked for a bit Hermann wasn't there?? not even behind Jake to give Newt any searching glances?? Nothing??

dude...Newt being possessed by the precursors is a HUGELY interesting concept that actually makes sense and I wish it had had more attention. I’ve seen a lot of ppl say that pru butchered Newt’s character and I don’t 100% agree bc like...being possessed will change you lmao so while yes I’m obviously sad that he wasn’t himself, I feel like it made sense that he had a slight personality change, because it...wasn’t him anymore. we don’t really see the Newt we all fell in love with in the first movie. we THINK we’re seeing him, but halfway through we find out we’re wrong.

my critiques with that plotline are basically that I wish the reveal had happened a little bit later on, and I wish that it had been a little more obvious I guess?? like, we definitely get hints of it (when Hermann excitedly asks Newt to help him with a dangerous unorthodox project and Newt says “dude why are you doing something so risky when we’ve already got a good plan in motion? just wait for that to be done, it’s fine” and Hermann IS us, he IS the audience when he reacts, because this is a completely insane thing for Newt to say. Newt, who, in the first movie, was so obsessed with finding knowledge that he went behind the marshall’s back to literally risk his life doing something incredibly dangerous just to see what would happen? being given the opportunity to do the same kind of dangerous frivolous act and refusing? this is blatantly out of character, and Hermann is all of us when he’s shocked, “what, you mean you...won’t help me??” which means it wasn’t bad writing on their part, it was purposefully supposed to stand out as something that was wrong and something that we needed to pay attention to. that was a really good scene to hint that something was Not Right with Newt), and I wish there had been a bunch more like it. I think the reveal should have been saved for the end of the second act; I think that should have been the moment that act 2 of a story usually has, that dreadful event that happens that leaves the main characters feeling completely hopeless and unsure what to do.

I also wish that he had managed to break through more than That One Scene, I think it would’ve been more dramatic if he’d had a few moments where he managed to take control for a second to remind us that he’s still in there and still fighting, and I’m sad they didn’t do that. I saw a fan comic that touched on this idea and I think it’s brilliant, even the idea of him suddenly getting a nosebleed and acting distracted to show that that’s the Real Him trying to fight through would have been sooooooooo good.

I also feel like it didn’t make any sense for Nate to be the one to subdue him in the end, I dont even think those two interact at all so like, why was it him?? it would have been so much more dramatic and heartbreaking if Hermann had been the one to confront him so they could’ve had a little conversation on the roof where Newt could once again break through for a second before getting taken over and then Hermann could like idk have a taser hidden behind him that he uses to subdue him and THAT wouldve been a way sadder and more interesting way to do it. I also think Hermann shouldve been the one to speak to him in the post credits scene, or to have him in the background behind Jake just watching him sadly so we can get a couple shots of intense eye contact like UGH I just wish there had been more interaction between the two of them after the reveal happened!! When the movie was over and I realized they never spoke again I felt so upset!!! they're soulmates!! they're literally in love!! this has been CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and segueing in from the soulmate thing, another thing that made me sad was that nobody came in pairs anymore :( aside from Newt and Hermann, they were the only ones gjdfk but in the first one every character had another character that they were paired up with, both for drifting reasons and just for plot reasons (except Chau and Tendo but I’m pretty sure there's actually significance to that too), and in the second one it just sort of felt like everyone was drifting with each other with no strong connection needed and that made it feel way less special. granted, the movie takes place ten years after the first one so in that time maybe technology advanced to the point where you didn't need a strong neural connection to drift anymore, but for the sake of the story it would have been way better if they'd kept the whole soulmates concept from the first one, it made it way stronger and more special

so yeah in conclusion I did think pru was enjoyable and I probably would watch it again some time but also it definitely pales in comparison to the first one and I’m desperately hoping we get one more so they can tie everything together and FIX THINGS KFGH it’s not too late!!!!! I wish I could write Pacific Rim 3 I genuinely think I would do a good job I love storytelling and I’m very passionate about these characters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[number5theboy]

Wow. Your ask queue has gotten pretty serious today. So I thought about asking you some fun questions as a positive distraction (hopefully). 1) If the UA sibs were throwing a party what would their duties be? 2) 3x5 childhood head canon (since nobody talks abt them) 3) If the UA sibs went to college what majors would they choose?

Dearest Anon, you cannot believe how nice I think this gesture is, I really appreciate and cherish this ask so much, thank you, thank you, thank you.

1) If the UA sibs were throwing a party what would their duties be? 

Allison and Five are in charge of the booze. Both of them know their cocktails and how to mix, and Allison also pulled off enough birthday parties for Claire to know well-tasting, colourful non-alcoholic drinks. They go wild o the decorations, definitely having too much fun with the little paper umbrellas, and Five enjoys playing bartender on the evening (I’m imagining a party in the mansion here) while Allison entertains. Vanya and Luther share the responsibility for both music and food. Luther has absolutely incredible taste in party bangers, but is hopeless with putting together a playlist that doesn’t horribly clash with itself, so he picks songs, Vanya adds some and puts them in the most entertaining order possible. They also put together bite-sized appetizers in the kitchen the entire day leading up to the party, grooving to the playlist made from songs they rejected from the party playlist. Diego helped them out for half the day, but Vanya and Luther have the tendency to make dad jokes, and after a while, Diego couldn’t take it anymore. In the evening, Vanya and Luther put together the sound system, Luther easily carrying the heavy equipment around and Vanya knowing what to do with it. At one point, Luther was carrying a speaker with Vanya perched on top of it, giving commands on where to put what. If you then turn around, you find Team Decorations, Diego, Ben and Klaus. Klaus clearly put his entire heart and soul into the aesthetic of this party, and definitely picked an extravagant and accidentally genius theme, like ‘80s Gothic’. Diego will not admit it, but he did scour the entire house for objects to add to the decoration, and Ben just resigned himself to make sure they had things like cups and plates, but also definitely got a disco ball. So Klaus, Diego and Ben are busy the entire afternoon to put up neon Victorian-style decorations which clash both more and less than expected with the inside of the mansion. Ben uses the tentacles to put garlands up high, just as Klaus manifests ghosts to hoist him up to places where he can’t reach. Diego’s powers help him put up a tower of glasses perfectly. The decoration is wild and fun and everyone’s really happy with it. Ben, Luther and Vanya share the role of photographer for the evening, and they catch a lot of fun family snapshots of the evening. Allison and Five grinning widely behind the bar, little paper umbrellas tucked into their hair. Klaus and Luther on the dancefloor, trying and failing to gracefully remember their Paso Doble lessons from childhood, in the background Five is looking on in horror from behind the bar. Diego and Ben, absolutely mastering the Paso Doble. Vanya, with fluorescent fake cobwebs on her head and Allison in the background, holding up two fingers at the back of Vanya’s head. Luther bear-hugging Diego and Ben. Klaus, his cheeks round with appetizers, making him look like a chipmunk in a very cool skirt. A selfie that Vanya took sitting at the bar, with Five grimacing behind her. Okay I got very much carried away with that idea, I really love it!!

2) 3x5 childhood head canon (since nobody talks abt them) 

Allison and Five, my darlings. I don’t think they were that close growing up, but I think Five must’ve been extremely fascinated by Allison’s powers, as they bent reality. Reginald noticed this interest, and thus used Five the most as a guinea pig to push the limits of Allison’s powers, also because Five had the strongest own will as a kid, always talking back, so cutting him down was in Reginald’s interest. At first, Five was quite intrigued, but Reginald really drove Allison and thus him to the brink, and afterwards, the two of them would sneak up to Allison’s window, just escaping for a bit. They would softly talk about anything but training, sometimes trailing to the future. The last time they did that, before Five got lost in the future, they were thirteen, and they talked about having kids of their own one day. Five, seeing how Reginald treated them, could never imagine having children, but Allison sometimes talked about wanting to have kids one day. It was a conversation replaying in Five’s head when he read Vanya’s book for the first time, and found out that he had a niece he never got to meet, a niece that died along with everyone else, a niece that Allison just have love more than anything in the world. This got sad. Whoops.

3) If the UA sibs went to college what  majors would they choose? 

Oof, that’s always difficult. Luther might do astrophysics, but I can totally see him do botany or English literature as well. Actually, it’d be cute if Ben and him both did English literature, but maybe Luther switched majors at some point, getting Ben to dramatically call him a traitor every time they meet in the university corridors. Diego might do criminology, or social work, but I also see him not go to college at all and rather learn manual work. I have a soft spot for smith Diego, ngl, I think it’d be cool if he could make his own weapons. Also I know he went to police academy in show canon, but just no. Klaus definitely went to college, both for the experience and to test out how much he can push the American education system. He probably did courses like gender studies and might have annoyed Diego in criminology, but totally took some straight white boy classes just to rile people in there up, like economics, business or western philosophy. He genuinely makes friends with at least three frat boys. I know Vanya would go for a violin degree, but after Season 2, I really love the idea of her studying to become a special needs teacher, with a focus on teaching autistic children. Allison definitely did drama, but I love the idea of her also doing media management to get to know the behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, so she can manage herself. And Five honestly could have gone for anything. Clearly, quantum physics is something that fits him well, but I think Five could find interest in almost anything. He could also do languages, in my opinion, or anything with engineering.

[monysmediareview]

Shadowhunters (Freeform show) Review

Review #2!!

In case you missed it, I wrote a review on the Mortal Instruments book series books 1-3 (they’re the only ones I read because a chapter into book 4 and I was over it). I had mixed feelings on it, as I do with most things - including the Shadowhunters TV show, which is what this review is about!

Casting

Let’s talk about the casting in this show. First of all, I think the cast matched the physical descriptions of each character in the books and I very much enjoyed that. I do like when shows take liberties with casting, especially for the sake of things like diversity but there’s something very satisfying about seeing the characters exactly as they were written. 

I don’t think all of the acting was fantastic, but it’s FreeForm so I really didn’t expect much. It did get a lot better as the series went on and I think the actors really found their footing with these characters. It’s one of the reasons that I love series so much more than movies for things like this because there’s growth and the chance to really explore characters as they exist. These characters really took on a life of their own in a way, but we’ll get into that as I go through the rest of my points here. 

One thing I will say is, while this show did much better than others in terms of diversity it is not lost on me that the BIPOC characters in this show (and in the book series as well) were all “other” characters. As is often the case, people of color in fantasy media are usually portrayed as animals such as werewolves, or other “undesirable” characters. This is an incredibly complex part of casting, creating, and writing, and I will not get into it here, but I didn’t want to not mention it. 

Gay Pride & True Love

If you read my review of the Mortal Instruments series then you already know that I love love love Alec and Magnus, but that love grew exponentially when I watched the show. Magnus was an interesting character in the books but Harry Shum Jr. really brought the character to life and that show especially in the scenes with Alec. The show also gives Alec a ton more depth than in the books and I love that they didn’t keep him hung up on Jace (a straight man) for most of the story. He fell for Magnus and he fell for him hard. Magnus is the one that broke through Alec’s shell and encouraged him to be himself. By cutting away all the petty teenager shit that was in the books we were able to see this real, complex, but honest and deep love story that rivaled the main love interests immensely. I would watch this show over and over just to watch these two again. 

Representation and diversity are two huge factors when I think about whether or not I liked a piece of media. These kinds of things are what makes media so relatable, real, and ultimately enjoyable in a lot of ways. This show didn’t make the characters gay-ness a main factor of their relationship; they just showed a relationship as they would with a straight couple. They didn’t ignore their gay-ness either, though, and acknowledged the difficulties within that. By making this normal, they took huge strides in showing these kinds of relationships on TV and I adore that. And I just cannot get enough of this pairing in general - there are so many contrasts and compliments in their relationship and it’s what I honestly consider to be a perfect OTP relationship in any kind of romantic plot. 

10/10 would watch the show just for Alec and Magnus. 

I like Clary better in the show than in the books

Clary is by far, not one of my favorite characters in the fantasy genre. I find her to be selfish, martyr-like, and just kind of annoying but I really felt like the show was able to redeem the decent characteristics that she has and shed off most of the aggravating ones. 

As a whole, I am not a fan of how stupid the books make Clary out to be. Clary falls into the category of characters I don’t like because there is ultimately nothing very special about them yet they end up with a guy who is completely out of their league in every way who is head over heels in love with them. It infuriates me so much and Clary is not an exception to this rule. Her character is still this way in the show but it is much less evident because she seems to be more of an active participant in her own life and I don’t have to sit through her endless internal monologues about how attractive or strong or whatever Jace is. Thoughts that she still has while she thinks they’re siblings. At least in the show, these characters seem to draw a strong boundary here when they think they’re related rather than making out in a field like they did in the books. 

Clary also has a much stronger sense of self in the show and often reflects on what her life was and what it has become, how she’s grown. And I think that’s a huge part of it - that she has grown when in the books she was just constantly such a dumbstruck teenager who only thought of herself. I absolutely love the difference in her character here so I’ll give the show a star for that. 

Her relationships with other characters is also so much stronger. I believe this is in part because we don’t know her every inner thought about them and we also aren’t distracted by her distraction that is Jace. Her relationship with Izzy is so much better and stronger. I’ll always give good reviews to strong female relationships! Even her friendship and relationship with Simon is more in depth in the show. Their book friendship is very baseline; they constantly say they’re best friends but that’s not really reflected in the way they act around each other. In the show they have anecdotes about the past we never see in the books, they talk in a comfortable way and even show their relationship with each other’s families a lot more. This plays into her being an active participant in her own life as well. 

The Lightwood Family Drama

This might be something that happens later on in the books (however I don’t think so because of some spoilers I’ve received on my main account) but I really liked the Lightwood family subplot. I would imagine they have some marital problems after Max’s death in the books but considering they don’t kill him in the show, divorcing them earlier and giving Maryse a second chance was a fantastic choice. I kind of wish they had kept Max’s death because to me, it was the driving force between Izzy and Simon, but overall I don’t mind the way they did it. It just felt like a missed opportunity for drama and angst.

Back to the point at hand - families are complicated and the only “normal” or rather, nuclear family we see in this series is the Lightwoods. Clary was raised by a single parent, as was Simon, and no one else really has parents that we’re introduced to to be able to judge their family life. By making their family story a complicated one, rather than the “ideal”, it becomes not only more dramatic, which is fun and interesting, but real. And it may seem counterintuitive to make things seem real in a fantasy genre show/book series but that, in my opinion, is what makes it easier to believe the fake stuff. I can focus more on the magic and the demons and the end of the world as we know it if it’s grounded in something that’s familiar to me. The Lightwoods feel like a very real family with complicated relationships between kids and parents, adopted children/siblings, and marital issues that affect everyone differently, which invites us as an audience to relate to them and doesn’t make the Shadow world so different from ours. 

A scene I loved specifically is when Izzy brings the doctor she’s seeing to the Hunter’s Moon and they’re all messing with each other, eating, drinking, laughing, talking. They really felt like a family there, like adult siblings which can be a really difficult feeling to capture but I think it was done very well. I didn’t want to go through this review without mentioning that part since it was something very special for me. 

Design Choices

Changing topic just a little bit, I wanted to talk about the design of the show. First thing I noticed was that the runes were not at all how I pictured them. Now, that may be a fault of the writer because they weren’t very well described so it all landed on imagination which is different for everyone. The show design gave me kind of Henna tattoo vibes, whereas the books gave me full black ink vibes. 

The clothing was also something very strange to me. Izzy was always described as wearing long silvery skirts. I very much imagined her as wearing borderline rave outfits in most of these scenes but she mostly just wore crop tops and low cut shirts. I also noticed that as the series went on she dressed in a bit more of a conservative way compared to the first half of season 1 when I recall her wearing literally just a sports bra as a shirt in a few scenes. It was apparent to me in the books that the way Shadowhunters dressed was something that separated them from humans, made them stand out, and the show lacked that. I think this also took away the idea that Shadowhunters are a whole race of people with a history and culture separate from being human (they are, in essence mixed raced, but this comes with a lot of implications and is not a complete statement or comparison in any way). My point with this is mostly that I wish there had been more of a separation visually between Shadowhunters and humans beyond their runes. 

I also pictured the Institute to have a very non-human, Catholic type of design and instead just got pseudo-futuristic feel. I didn’t hate it, it just feels overdone in these kinds of shows and movies. For example, the Divergent series or Maze Runner or even Tomorrowland all have this type of vibe and I was hoping for more of a DmC: Devil May Cry approach. 

Jace Wayland is a beautiful character

I had mixed feelings about Jace in the books; he felt stale and like every other straight, white, male, romantic lead. In the show, however, I think Dominic Sherwood did him a great deal of justice and gave him the depth that actually made him a desirable person that I could understand someone being in love with. He’s charming, and a little cocky but we also get to see a deeper side of him than we do in the books. We see his emotions, especially his unconditional love for Clary (whether I agree with that or not). 

The Owl plotline was a waste of time in my opinion, but the scene when Izzy and Alec go to save him from inside his mind and we see him break down is absolutely beautiful. Jace is introduced to us from the start as hard, strong, calloused and here we see him vulnerable and scared with two of the people he trusts most in the world. I will accept the Owl plotline if only to keep this scene because I think it is absolutely essential to his character arc. 

I also found that scene to be indicative of his relationship with Izzy. In the books it’s often alluded to that he and Izzy had been together in one way or another but that’s not the case for the show (thank the angel) and here you can really see them as siblings more than in any ther scene, I think. But this takes me to his relationship with Alec as well. 

Parabatai 

I don’t remember Parabatai being mentioned much in the books but it is a huge deal and talked about quite a bit. I this this is super cool, personally and it’s not something I can really think of too much in fantasy outside of sires or singers or the like in many vampire novels but that has a whole “owner” vibe that doesn’t exist with Parabatai. I am super intrigued by this idea and I loved how much they played with it being a strength and an essential part of their existence. 

The relationship between Alec and Jace is obviously stronger than just brothers, but it also isn’t quite love in the romantic sense. It’s something else and it makes them vulnerable to each other. They feel everything the other person feels, sometimes literally, and while that can weaken them they use it as a strength. It’s really beautiful how honest and open these men are with each other. I feel like the Parabatai bond breaks down a lot of the toxic masculinity traits these characters might have otherwise and I will always be in favor of tearing down those walls. A+ characterization if you ask me. 

I thought Izzy deserved better in the books - the show gave it to her

In the show Izzy is way more badass than in the books, which I wasn’t sure was possible. They made her so much smarter, gave her important roles at the institute like head of weapons and she even did autopsies? In the last episodes we even see her as Head of the Institute. Beauty, brains, and brawn simply can’t be beat. 

Her love life was even more interesting! She wasn’t boiled down to just a slut who slept with everyone regardless of species: she was a lover who fell quickly and saw the best in people despite what people might tell her about “their kind”. She’s strong and very sure of herself; she doesn’t need a man in her life but she wants love and I think that’s a really amazing trait they gave her that deepens the character. 

They made her an activist, too in a way. She’s found really standing up for her beliefs in the show and challenging the way things are. In the books Izzy is pretty stuck in the way Shadowhunters do things but in the show she speaks up when something isn’t right. Her connections to downworlders does a lot of really great things for the Shadow world as a whole. They certainly could have beefed this up a little bit, but it wasn’t a huge part of the show in general so I’ll allow the pass on it. 

Her Yin-Fen addiction was so interesting! Again, I don’t know if this is something that happened in later books in the series but this is just another layer to Isabelle that I really loved. No one is perfect, even her, and it built her relationship with Rafael (another plot I was a huge fan of) which was incredibly complex. 

All in all, I would die for Izzy. Please give me shows and books about her and more characters like her. 

This series was steamy as hell

I can’t write a review on this series without mentioning all of the steamy scenes with so many of the characters. I mean, of course, I expected as much with Jace and he got a lot but so did everyone else. We got saucy scenes with Alec, Magnus, Simon, Izzy, Maia, everyone. (Not all at the same time, thankfully). But they were all very well directed and acted and I enjoyed them quite a bit. What can I say? Sex sells. 

In conclusion, I liked this series a lot. I really was not expecting to. I was warned that it was bad, and to start off it was but I found myself unexpectedly enjoying a lot of it. There’s still work to be done and it is by no means perfect but it was entertaining and had some really good moments. I also give so much credit to the actors and creative team for doing so much with material that didn’t give them much depth in the first place. 

Would recommend for something to enjoy but maybe not think too hard about.

xoxo

Mony

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

The Princess Bride: A Product of the Times

The 1980s were an age of surplus in terms of just about everything.  From the music and clothes to the explosions on screen, the 1980s were a clear example of excess, of wealth of ideas and resources, and nowhere was it more obvious than in the movie industry.

From teen films to comedies to blockbuster action extravaganzas, the 1980s movie industry, led by directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Richard Donner and more, brought a combination style of ‘throwback’ + innovation to many of their films.  Movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones directly imitated and updated sci-fi and adventure serials from Spielberg and George Lucas’s youth, whereas films like Joe Dante’s Gremlins poked fun at ‘50s B-Movie horror movies. John Carpenter’s The Thing provided an updated look at a classic monster flick, and his The Fog called back to plenty older ghost stories, while making something new of his own.  Although the 1980s was a period of exploration in film, with new genres being pioneered and explored in different directions, part of that exploration included looking backward and experimenting with previously existing genres, with the up and coming generation of ‘Movie Brat’ directors choosing to play with elements they’d grown up knowing and loving themselves.

That extended to the fantasy genre.

From the pulpy style of the Low Fantasy Conan the Barbarian films to the magical feeling of movies like Labyrinth or Willow, the 1980s theaters experienced a major boom in terms of fantasy films, experiencing varying levels of success.  From Excalibur to Legend, these new fantasy films took risks with special effects, methods of storytelling, and styles of characters (although lots of them became known as Cliche Storms).   These movies utilized unique spins on fairy-tale stories and legends, updating and modernizing aspects of them and either making them darker, or finding new ways to acknowledge the fantastical elements of the story.

Most interesting is that, in the 1980s, the fantasy genre didn’t have a whole lot of history to draw from.

Unlike the B-Sci-Fi flicks from the ‘50s or the Creature Features, or even the adventure serials that would go on to spark Indiana Jones, there wasn’t a lot of previous canon in the fantasy genre.  Films like The Wizard of Oz, which were landmarks in the genre, didn’t have a whole lot of obvious influence on the sword-and-sorcery films that came afterwards.

Now, you may be asking why all of this matters.  Or why any of it matters, in fact.

Here’s the thing: no film is an island.  Every movie, (some more than others) is directly influenced by the culture it exists in, and the pool of resources that have come before it, especially in the cases of the films directly designed to emulate genres or specific movies that have already been made.

And that certainly seems to have been the case, at least partially, as far as The Princess Bride is concerned.

Despite being released in the 1980s, with the original book by William Goldman written in 1973, The Princess Bride doesn’t wholly read like it’s contemporaries in the fantasy genre.  If you watch it alongside the likes of Ladyhawke, Labyrinth, and Legend, you’ll find that more about the film stands out other than not following my alliterative pattern.

In many of the other fairy-tale-esque stories populating Hollywood during this decade, the characters talk and act very much like they are in a very grand story.  There is gravity to the situation and most of the characters, (exception being some of the creatures in Labyrinth) and the story is typically an epic one.

The Princess Bride, on the other hand, manages to avoid this tone and story structure, by including a very traditional fairy-tale plot: save the princess from the evil prince, but by going about it using styles more typical of a different era entirely.

Rather than using the fantasy, action, or even adventure styles traditionally used by the 1980s, The Princess Bride utilized something a little earlier: the swashbuckling style of the 1930s.

Due to the way that the story and characters are written (with a sharp, sly, tongue-in-cheek edge), The Princess Bride cannot be played as a straight fantasy film (check out the Genre article to hear more), and while it does retain plenty of the 1980s charm about it, it also uses the fast-dialogue and witty humor found in stories like The Adventures of Robin Hood and other swashbuckler stories from that decade of adventure films.  Watching the fencing match between Inigo Montoya and Westley is eerily similar to many such fight scenes in older action-adventure movies, and listening to the dialogue during this and other sequences, the humorous tone with dry, quick wit, is also an echo of older screwball-style dialogue.

Whether this was intentional or not, the fact is, this makes The Princess Bride’s style very fresh and new in the middle of the fantasy boom of the 1980s.  It also had a very interesting side effect:

It made The Princess Bride ‘timeless’.

The idea of something being ‘timeless’ is an interesting topic in the film world.  

The word ‘timeless’ is best defined as ‘not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion’.  It carries the implication that, applied to film, a ‘timeless’ movie would be one totally understandable and relatable years after the culture has changed.  Carried further, the ideal ‘timeless’ movie would be one with no cultural identity of its own, completely orphaned from the original context that the story originated in.  In other words, this is a story that can be enjoyed no matter how much time has passed.  Typically, this word gets applied to period stories, sci-fi films, or fantasies: stories not set in the contemporary time period.  

In direct contrast, of course, the word ‘dated’ is simply used to apply to anything created in a discernible time period.  This word typically carries the connotation of ‘old-fashioned’.  This word’s connotation is that, (applied to film) a ‘dated’ film is one that is less understandable by those looking from outside that particular culture or time period.  This would be a film that hasn’t ‘aged well’, most often describing contemporary films of the day.

So, here’s the thing.

These definitions, while technically correct, are far more complex than this in the film world.  

By the dictionary definition, no film is truly timeless.  Every film is a product of the times they were created in, because people who lived in those times created them.  Every movie, every piece of media are products of the times they are from, but they are not defined by them.  A film is not ‘dated’ because it shows the culture, or the technology of its time, or uses that technology when trying to create the world of the movie itself.  A movie is not dated because it uses puppets instead of CGI.  

As I mentioned, a film is considered ‘dated’ in a true sense if it is less understandable or enjoyable in hindsight, from a place outside of that specific culture.  Less easily overlooked are ideas, and here’s what truly does date a movie.

It really doesn’t matter if a film is made in the ‘70s and set in the far future, or made in the ‘50s and set in the distant past, because quite frankly, the movie is still being made in that decade.  As a result, even period films end up carrying the thumbprint of the contemporary ideas of the people who made it.  Indiana Jones is best remembered as an ‘80s style action hero because although his films are set in the 1930s and made in the style of adventure serials from that time period, the style of action and characterization was very current, in order to update the genre.

The ideas and thematic core of a film, how certain topics and characters are treated and viewed, both in universe and in the narrative, can be what truly dates a film, even if it has none of the recognizable trimmings like a tie-dye shirt, and here’s where we can tread into good vs. bad territory: because while in some cases, the ideas can be pleasantly positive, in others, the opinions presented by the filmmakers can be rather uncomfortable to modern audiences.

So, all of this is to lead us to an important question:

Is The Princess Bride timeless, or at least, as timeless as movies can get?

Well, some would argue no.

A glaring problem with modern movie-goers is the character of Buttercup, who, as I mentioned in the ‘Characters’ article, really doesn’t do much apart from getting passed-around, fought over and protected.  Admittedly, especially to a generation used to Princess Leias, Marion Ravenwoods, and even Lilis, Buttercup seems largely useless, relegating the only woman of the film (aside from Valerie, Miracle Max’s wife) to a plot device, an object without much personality.

To a lot of moviegoers, this is pretty blatantly bad representation: there are two named women in the movie, and one of them has less than five minutes of screen time, and the other essentially exists as nothing other than the title of the film.  The film also employs a distinctly monochrome cast, another element that can lead to people pointing to a different era of Hollywood, one that didn’t tend to focus on that kind of representation, or in the case of Buttercup, borderline problematic representation.  

There are other moments of issues: Westley’s line about ‘there are penalties when a woman lies’ and his berating her for ‘moving on’ and getting married when she’d long thought him dead might rub modern moviegoers the wrong way.

In the end, though, is this…a problem?  A detriment to enjoyment of the movie as a whole?  Do these elements actively work against the movie in a modern environment?

Well…yes and no.

It is true that now, films are making an active step towards more diverse representation, and that is certainly a good thing.  Many movies now are also including more female characters with stronger characters than the distressed plot-devices of old.  Heck, even other movies of the 1980s were instituting more ethnic diversity and female characters with more agency in films like Aliens, Baby Boom, The Color Purple and Willow.  

Looking back, it can be easy to wince at those moments in The Princess Bride and make the assumption that the film was just being outdated because of when it was made, or due to the ‘fantasy’ period, or even because it’s deliberately utilizing story elements from 1930s films, but in the end, those elements don’t actively hurt the narrative.

Female characters don’t have to be sword-wielders like Sorsha from Willow, or Silk-Hiding-Steel like Isabeau from Ladyhawke.  Princesses don’t have to always take over their own rescues.  In the end, there’s more support for female characters in the variety offered by the 1980s rather than the eradication of any weak female characters whatsoever, because as it turns out, some women are weak, just as some are strong.  (It would have been nice if the weak character wasn’t the only female one, though.)

Is The Princess Bride progressive?  Well, no, not really, but it’s not regressive, either.  It doesn’t actively serve as detriment to the film to notice these things, not in the same way that other movies experience backlash for outright sexist and racist content.  As it stands, The Princess Bride is an excellent movie that manages to stand the test of time because it is so ridiculously fairy-tale-esque.  As I said before, the old-fashioned story and dialogue paired with the budget and technology of a 1980s film (except for the ROUS, which is charmingly unbelievable) manages to create something similar to George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy: a film that is as removed from its cultural context as a piece of media can be (aside from the Grandson’s bedroom decor).

It is potentially largely this element, this aspect of borderline ‘timelessness’ that has allowed The Princess Bride to stand as a forgotten, overlooked classic for over thirty years.  That, combined with the genuine warmth, humor, and passion of the film itself, will allow it to continue to stand for far longer, as long as we keep telling our children fairy-tales.

Don’t forget to leave a comment, like, or some other form of love if you enjoyed this analysis, and please, follow for more articles like this!  Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you in the next article.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2020 (In No Real Order)

Oh, hey! Right! I have a website! I’m like a week late on writing this, but what’s a week on top of an entire year of not writing, right? 2020 was... well, we all know what 2020 was. For me personally, it was simultaneously the best and worst year of my life. The worst in both ways you can probably assume and ways you definitely can’t (neither of which I’ll be getting into), and the best in ways I absolutely never would have guessed. That uncertain job I mentioned last year got very suddenly much more certain, at a much bigger company, for a much larger amount of money. That allowed me to get my own place, making my weird living situation much less weird. Still haven’t gotten the majority of my belongings off of the east coast, but if the entire world wasn’t currently fucked up by a global pandemic I’d have sorted all that out too. What I’m saying is that, for the third year in a row, my life has been a complete whirlwind that has left me very little time to get comfortable with any aspect of it. But I did manage to play more video games than I did last year! Which is perfect, because it’s once again time for another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2020.

Astro’s Playroom (PlayStation 5, 2020)

My one word description of Astro's Playroom is "delightful". It's just an absolute goddamn delight. A total surprise too! Included with every PlayStation 5, Astro's Playroom is, in my opinion, one of the best pack-in games of all time.

First off, it's an incredible tech demo for the PS5's new DualSense controller. It was easy to brush off Sony's talk about the controller's haptic feedback and triggers as some Nintendo-style HD Rumble bullshit, but it really is incredibly cool once you get your hands on it. The game is obviously more than a tech demo though, or else it wouldn't be on here. It also just so happens to be an extremely solid and fun platformer on top of that. Astro controls exceptionally well and the levels are all well-designed and fun, even the gimmick vehicle ones designed to show off different features of the controller. It also has an oddly compelling speedrun mode, made all the more compelling by the PS5 notifying you when your friends beat your times and the ability to load into it within two seconds from anywhere on the console. But the biggest thing for me and, call me a mark, because I am, is that the game is an honestly incredible love letter to PlayStation history.

For the first time ever, Sony has pulled off a nostalgia piece without it ending up as embarrassing garbage in the vein of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. There's a Nintendo-like joyful reverence for all things PlayStation oozing out of every single corner of this game. There are so many nods and references and gags for literally every PlayStation thing of note throughout the the last 25 years, and then on top of that there's a whole heap more for the things that AREN'T of note that only hyperdorks like me would get! A sly reference to the ill-fated boomerang controller? Yep. A goof on the fat PS3's Spider-Man font? You betcha. A trophy you can earn by repeatedly punching a Sony Interactive Entertainment sign until it breaks and reveals the Sony Computer Entertainment sign it was slapped on top of? Yeah buddy. It's deep cuts all the way down, even up until the final boss which had me grinning like a total dipshit the entire time. The game is endlessly, effortlessly charming.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the perfect game at the perfect time. That doesn't mean it's a perfect game, I actually have some issues with it, but it could not have released at a better time than when it did. It came out at the very very beginning of everyone going into lockdown due to the pandemic, and it was the biggest game in the world for a couple of months as a result. I played like 300 hours and that pales in comparison to the amount of time many others put into it.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most different Animal Crossing game there's ever been, and I'm of two minds on it. Like, I loved the game, I played a ton of it, but it's lacking so much of the stuff that made me love Animal Crossing in the first place. The series has been slowly trending in this direction for a bit now, but it's not really a game that happens around you anymore. It's all about total player control. You select where everything goes, you customize every detail of everything to your liking, hell, you can even terraform the landmass to be exactly what you want. Your neighbors take a backseat in focus and end up as little more than decorations with limited dialogue and next to no quests associated with them. Series staples like Gyroids are missing in action. Facilities and services that have been around since Wild World aren't implemented. It's similar to past Animal Crossing games in a lot of ways, but on the whole it feels like a different thing.

But like I said, two minds. New Horizons strays from what I truly want from an Animal Crossing game, but I can't deny that the game as it is is a hell of a lot of fun. There's SO much you can do and SO many options, it's super addictive. Plus it implemented my long-requested feature of letting you effortlessly send mail to friends online! Too bad the actual online play is as cumbersome as ever.

In conclusion, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a land of contrasts. I'm kidding. It's good, but definitely missing something in a way where I can understand some people being disappointed in it. I had a ton of fun though, and I'm probably going to get back into it later in 2021.

Trials of Mana (Nintendo Switch, 2019)

Late in 2019, with the physical release of Collection of Mana for the Switch, I decided I was going to play through each game on it for the first time and finally find out what this whole Mana thing was about. I went into Final Fantasy Adventure (the first game in the Mana series, because every RPG had to be Final Fantasy back then) with zero expectations and found a totally serviceable little Zelda-like with light RPG elements. I enjoyed my time with it. I went into Secret of Mana with the expectation of it being a beloved classic and found the worst game I beat that year, hands down. That game fucking sucks. I get why it made an impression on people at the time, but it's just so so SO awful to play. Needless to say I was pretty disappointed. Honestly, I would have been disappointed even if I hadn't heard it was one of "the best games" for so long. It would have been a disappointing follow-up to Final Fantasy Adventure, a game that in and of itself isn't anything incredible. Secret of Mana is just that rotten.

I braced myself for more disappointment when (after a much needed vacation from the series) I started up Trials of Mana. This game had a reputation too, as a long-lost classic that never made it stateside. One of the best games on the Super Nintendo, criminally never released for western audiences! Like Secret of Mana before it, I'd heard nothing but effusive praise. Unlike Secret of Mana, however, I was very pleased to find out that Trials of Mana mostly lives up to the hype. From a gameplay standpoint, Trials is an improvement on Secret in almost every single way. It's not perfect. The menus are still kinda clunky, animations for things like magic and items are still frequently disruptive. But the main thing is it actually plays like a sensible video game designed by humans with brains. Attacking is responsive! Hitboxes aren't complete nonsense! You don't constantly get stunlocked to death! There are more answers to combat than casting the same spell for five straight minutes to kill your enemies before they get a chance to move! It's great!

On top of being an enjoyable video game to actually play, the presentation is top notch. Secret of Mana could be a pretty game with decent music in some spots, but Trials is consistently gorgeous and the soundtrack is across the board great instead of randomly having songs that sound like clown vomit. And while Trials of Mana doesn't have the deepest story in the world, it manages to avoid being completely paper-thin like Secret. The story actually kind of has a reason for being a bit straightforward, and the reason is that it has a really cool system where you pick your three playable characters from a pool of six. Each character has their own goals and storyline, some of which line up with other potential party members, some of which don't, and you'll even run into the characters you didn't choose as NPCs along the way. This and the relatively brisk pace of the game make it highly replayable.

I'm really glad that Trials of Mana made it over here in an official capacity, even if it was like 25 years late. It's as good as I expected Secret of Mana to be and singlehandedly saved my interest in seeing any more of the series. I'm aware the quality of what came after is very spotty, but I'll get to the rest eventually!

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PlayStation 4, 2020)

They (almost) did it. They (basically) pulled it off. They remade (a chunk of) Final Fantasy VII and (for the most part) didn't fuck it up. Ok, funny parentheticals aside, Final Fantasy VII Remake is astoundingly good coming off of over two decades of just absolutely dreadful post-FF7 sequels, side games, and movies.

Final Fantasy VII has been historically misremembered as this kind of miserable, angsty, brooding thing, both by fans and by the company that made it. FF7-branded media after FF7 itself is a minefield of changed personalities, embarrassing original characters, and monumentally lame stories. Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first post-FF7 anything that actually remembers the characters, setting, and plot of Final Fantasy VII and what made them memorable and special to people in the first place. Which isn't to say it's a slavish recreation! There's a ton of changes and additions, and I actually like almost all of them! Except for some really big stuff I'll touch on in a bit!

The combat in Final Fantasy VII Remake is great. I was super skeptical about it when the game was first announced, but they actually managed to make the blend of real-time action and turn-based RPG menuing fun and engaging. The characters all play super differently from each other too, which is a huge and welcome difference from the original game. The Materia system fits like a glove in this revamped combat system as well. The remixed music is good as hell, and the visuals are beautiful (outside of a couple of very specific spots that I'm kinda of surprised they haven't fixed in a patch yet). It's a well-executed package all around.

But alas, as always, there are negatives. For starters, this is only part one of the overall Final Fantasy VII Remake project. It goes up to the party leaving Midgar which, as you may or may not recall, is the first six hours of the original game. They compensated for this by fleshing the hell out of the Midgar section the game, ballooning the overall playtime to total of about 30-ish hours. The game feeling padded is a common complaint but for what it's worth, I didn't really feel it until the unnecessarily long final dungeon, There's also the previously mentioned and funny parenthetical'd changes and additions I don't like.

This is big time spoilers for this game so if you don't want that jump ahead to the next game on the list. The Whispers suck ass. Final Fantasy VII Remake should have been brave enough to be different without having to constantly derail everything in the most ham-fisted and intrusive way possible. You can have Jessie twist her ankle without making a spooky plot ghost trip her. I don't want to fight the physical manifestation of the game everyone thought they were getting as an end boss. If you're not doing a straight remake, that's fine, but have the fucking guts to stand by your artistic decisions without feeling the need to invent the lamest deus ex machina I've ever fucking seen. The last couple of hours of this game are 100% about the Whispers and are awful for it. It's a true testament to the strength of the rest of Final Fantasy VII Remake that this aspect didn't completely sour me on it. I can only hope that they stay dead and gone for good in the games yet to come and the remake can be different while standing on its own two feet.

I truly cannot wait for the next entry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. I'm excited for Final Fantasy VII in a way I haven't been since the late 90s. I have a bit of trepidation that they could royally screw it up. I mean, they already got kinda close, as I said in my last paragraph. But they got so much right in this entry that, for the first time in decades, I'm willing to believe in Square Enix when it comes to Final Fantasy VII.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PlayStation 4, 2020)

My one word description of 13 Sentinels is "fucking crazy". I realize that's two words, but shut up. A bizarre hybrid of visual novel, adventure game, and strategy RPG, 13 Sentinels not only makes that work, but makes it work incredibly well. 

The story is fucking bonkers. It's told entirely non-linearly and is purposefully dense and confusing, but it does an amazing job of hooking you with a cast of likable characters and some impressively well-paced twists, made all the more impressive by the fact that you can tackle the story in basically whatever order you want. I'll say it again for those in the back, the story is Fucking Bonkers. Wherever you think it's going, it's not going. Where it is going is PLACES. Seriously, if you want a wild goddamn ride, this is the game for you. The presentation is also stunning. It's a drop dead gorgeous game with a really nice soundtrack. Easily Vanillaware's best looking game, which is saying something seeing as looking good is Vanillaware's whole deal.

If I had to levy one criticism against the game, it's that the strategy RPG portion is just kind of ok. It's enjoyable enough, it doesn't get in the way and there's not too much of it, but once it starts introducing armored versions of previous enemy types it's kind of done doing anything different. It is really good at getting people to out themselves as having no idea what tower defense is as a genre though!

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

I haven't really historically been a "Musou Guy". Not to say I've actively disliked them, they're just not something I've seeked out very often or played very much of. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition kinda turned me into a "Musou Guy" a little bit? It's good, surprisingly-less-mindless-than-you'd-think fun.

I actually super don't care about the Zelda branding. I think all the fanservice stuff is meh at best. What I do care about is that there's a ton of character variety and a metric shitload of content. There's so many different characters and weapons for those characters that all play differently from one another and SOOOOOO many levels to play. Like the story mode is, again, kinda meh, the real meat of the game is the Adventure mode and there's a ton of it. It's 8 different world maps, each based off a different Zelda game, with each square of the map containing a little mini-scenario with unique objectives and rewards. There has to be at least 1000 scenarios between all the maps. There's so much. And that's not even getting into some of the other side stuff like the challenge modes and the fairy raising. It's a crazy amount of game in this game.

And again, it's not as mindless as it'd seem. It's not really a game ABOUT destroying 5000 guys, it's an area control and resource management game where the 5000 guys are one of those resources. Knowing who to send where and when to fight who is way more important than pressing the XXX YYY XXX YYY on the more than one million troops.

I'd say that if you're even cursorily potentially maybe interested in a musou game, this is the one to try. And if you like it, it could literally be your forever game. A sequel came out recently too, and I'm looking forward to trying that out soon.

Phantasy Star Online 2 (Xbox One, 2020)

Phantasy Star Online 2 finally came stateside in the year 2020, eight years after its initial Japanese release and initial American cancellation. It's no Phantasy Star Online 1, but it is a really fun game in its own right provided you can find the willpower to break through its clunkiness and eight years of confusing poorly tutorialized free-to-play MMO cruft.

The main thing going for PSO2, and this is a major improvement from PSO1, is that the act of engaging in its combat is fun. The combat is just feels really really good. There's a bunch of different weapon types and classes, and once you find the ones that really click with you you're in for a good time, whether you're izuna dropping dudes with wire claws or literally doing air juggles and rainstorm from Devil May Cry with the dual machine guns.

The other stuff around that combat is weird. I generally like it, but it's weird. The story mode is one of the most bizarrely presented things I've ever seen. It apparently used to be something you'd seek out in the levels themselves, but presently it's just a list of scenes you pick from a menu and watch with next to no context until it makes you fight a boss sometimes. There's some weird moments in there that MIGHT have been cool if it were presented in literally any other way?

The systems and presentation are also way more... I dunno, pinball? Pachislot? In very stark contrast to how chill original Phantasy Star Online was, everything in PSO2 is designed in a way to maximize that flashy light bing bing wahoo you got ~*~RARE DROP CHANCE UP~*~  feeling. Which isn't to say I don't like flashy light bing bing wahoo, but it's a weird different thing.

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, sure! For me! This is another one that I played like 300 hours of! I haven't even seen half of it, I fell off right before Episode 4 released because it coincided with my move! I'm gonna go back and see all that shit! PSO2's fun! A different flavor of fun than the original, sure, but fun all the same. Another one that I'm glad finally made it over here.

Riichi Mahjong (A Table, 1924)

Holy shit I fucking did it I finally learned how to play Mahjong and it rules.

It started when I picked up Clubhouse Games for the Switch. I saw that it had Riichi Mahjong and something in my brain snapped. For whatever reason, I decided that this was the time I was going to rip the band-aid off and figure this shit out. It wasn't too dissimilar to the first time I decided to try eggs, but that's a different and much stupider story for a different time. I did the tutorial in Clubhouse Games, looked up some more basics and advice because the tutorial wasn't super amazing, and I kept playing while being aided by the game's nice helper features like the button that pulls up recommended hands. I kept playing and... sorta got it. I learned the basic rules, but none of the strategy. And then I stopped playing for a few months.

In that few months, for whatever reason, a decent amount of people I know had their brains snap the same way? Like a more-than-two amount of people I'm either friends with or following online also decided to learn Mahjong. I decided to get back on the horse and downloaded Mahjong Soul and I don't know whether it was perseverance or the power of anime babes, but this time I got it. I still refer to a sheet with all the hands and whether they work open or closed, and I'm by no means a master player, but I actually honest to god understand what I'm doing and it's an incredible feeling.

Mahjong has such a huge amount of what I like to call "Get That Ass" energy. It is the energy you feel when you get someone's ass. In Mahjong you are either constantly getting someone's ass or getting your ass gotten. Someone puts down the wrong tile and you fucking GET THEIR ASS DUDE! They're got!! They're a fucking idiot that put down the wrong thing and now you have their points!!! Or you draw what you need yourself and you're a brain genius all according to plan and everyone gives you points because you're so wise!!!! It's great!!!!!

Mahjong has long been one of those games where I'd say "I'll learn this someday" and never reeeeally actually try to learn, and I'm so glad I finally took the effort to because it's good as hell. And, truth be told, it wasn't THAT hard to learn? Like you can get to the point where I was where I didn't know the strategy fairly easily in my opinion, and once you do that It's just a matter of continuing to play to understand the rest. I highly recommended that you also go out and learn it if you similarly revel in getting that ass, it's so satisfying once you do.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PlayStation 4, 2020)

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio took a big gamble with Yakuza: Like a Dragon. After seven games (more if you take spinoffs and remakes into consideration) they decided to focus on a new main character and, even more unexpectedly, they decided to change things up by turning the series into a turn-based JRPG. Their gamble paid off in spades. This is easily in my top 3 favorite Yakuza games.

The JRPG gameplay is surprisingly solid. There's definite room for improvement, but they nailed a bunch of it right out of the gate. Some mechanics are a little janky and I wish the job system was more fleshed out or just worked more like Final Fantasy V's, but they nailed one of the most important things and made the battles brisk and fun. It's a great foundation, especially for a team that's never attempted anything like this, and it's way more fun than the combat's been in any of the previous Dragon Engine games. I can't wait to see them iterate on it.

Everything else is top fuckin' notch. The music is great, the side content is fully fleshed out in a way it hasn't been since before they switched to the Dragon Engine, and I love the characters and story so much. Yakuza has a new main character in Ichiban Kasuga, and he's my son and I love him. Kiryu was great, and I love him too, but he was a bit of a passive protagonist. Stuff happened around him and he mostly just stoically reacted to it. Ichi is a much more active lead and it's great. He's a big lovable dope, and his tendency to keep an upbeat attitude and eagerness to leap into action is such a breath of fresh air. And it's not only Ichiban, since this is an RPG you have a whole party of characters and they're all great! Having them with you at all times bantering with each other and reacting to things is another great change of narrative pace, too. 

Yakuza: Like a Dragon just straight up rules. As someone who has historically not been too much of a fan of the Dragon Engine games, it's simultaneously a refreshing new take on the series and a fantastic return to form. I can't wait for what comes next. Wherever Ichiban goes, I go.

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

After 23 years of Japanese PS1 exclusivity, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure finally got an English release this year for Nintendo Switch. I'm glad it did, because Moon isn't just the very definition of A Sebmal Game. It's the Sebmal Game missing link. In addition to being just a great video game, it helped me make a mental throughline for a bunch of games I love and a large part of my taste in video games.

To keep a long story short (seriously, I have a much much longer version of this saved in my drafts that I'll maybe finish someday), Moon turned out to be not the JRPG I assumed it was, given the title and basic story pitch, but a secret prequel to a game I love named Chulip. Moon's developer, Love-de-Lic, was formed by a handful of ex-Squaresoft employees, many of which worked on an extremely formative game I love named Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Love-de-Lic broke up in the year 2000 and its staff went on to form a bunch of different studios that ended up making a BUNCH of different games I love like Chibi-Robo, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, Dandy Dungeon, and the aforementioned Chulip. These games, when you make the connection and line them up, all have a very distinct weirdness in common that makes perfect sense once you've realized many of the same people worked on them. Figuring this all out felt like snapping a piece of my brain back in place, and it was really crazy to come to understand exactly how much this studio that formed and disbanded decades before I'd even heard of them had impacted my tastes and, hell, my life.

So what is Moon, for those who don't innately understand what I mean by "a secret prequel to Chulip"? Moon is an adventure game where you explore a world with a day/night cycle, learn about that world's inhabitants, and eventually solve their problems. Think of it kind of like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, but if the sidequests were the entirety of the focus with no Groundhog Day time reset mechanic and none of the Zelda stuff like combat and dungeons. You play as a young boy who, after a late night JRPG binge session, is sucked into the world of the game he was just playing. Everything is off from the way it was portrayed while the boy was playing the game, though. The hero he had previously controlled is actually a silent menace, raiding peoples' houses for treasure and slaughtering every innocent animal that crosses his path in an endless quest for EXP. The townspeople seem more concerned with problems in their day-to-day lives than the supposed world threatening crisis outlined in the game's intro. It's up to you as the boy to investigate this world's mysteries, help the townsfolk, mend the damage the hero has done, and eventually restore love to a loveless world.

Speaking of love, I fucking loved Moon. I loved the story, I loved the characters, I loved the music, I loved the way it looks (even though the Switch port is a little crusty in that basic emulator-y kinda way), I loved how constantly bizarre and surprising and funny it was. Like I said earlier, it's the very definition of a game made for me. It was essentially the progenitor of a long line of games made for me, and of games potentially made for me but I don't know yet because I haven't played them due to not understanding Japanese (UFO: A Day in the Life translation next please? Anyone from Onion Games reading this??). For as similar as Moon and Chulip are in their systems and pacing, I think I might actually like Moon better despite it coming earlier? It's not as full force maximum impact absurd as Chulip is, but it is a lot more playable and less obtuse once you get a grip on the time limit mechanic. You don't need a full strategy guide included in the instruction manual for Moon, and you don't need to exchange business cards with every single character to get information vital to finishing the game either.

I truly cannot recommend Moon enough if your taste in games ventures anywhere off the beaten path. Maybe this is a little conceited of me, but I assume if you're reading this article, let alone this far down into it, you relate to my video game opinions at least a little bit? You should play Moon. Everyone reading this sentence should play Moon. Moon: Remix RPG Adventure is my game of the year for the year 2020.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Death Stranding (PlayStation 4, 2019): Death Stranding, much like Metal Gear Solid V, was a game I enjoyed for the gameplay and not much else. The story, characters, and writing were a huge disappointment for me, but man if I didn't enjoy lugging those boxes around and setting up my hellish cross-continental goon summer camp lookin' zipline network. Mr. Driller Drill Land (Nintendo Switch, 2020): I am a known Mr. Driller Enjoyer, and I enjoyed this Mr. Driller. Originally released for the Gamecube, Mr. Driller Drill Land is another long-time Japanese exclusive that finally came stateside this year and it's packed with new and novel twists on the Mr. Driller format. It looks super sharp, the music's great (also the credits music is the most impossibly out of place and extra as hell shit in the world and it's hilarious), and it's just a good ass time. The main campaign is pretty damn short, but if you're a post-game content kinda guy it has that and it's all super hard. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PlayStation 4, 2020): They finally made another good new Tony Hawk game, and all it took was perfectly remaking two of the best old Tony Hawk games! Plays exactly like you remember it with the added benefit of the best mechanics from up to THUG1, looks great, packed full of content, even has most of the music alongside some mostly crappy new stuff. It's the full package as is, but I do hope they end up adding THPS3 to it eventually. Mad Rat Dead (Nintendo Switch, 2020): Mad Rat Dead was a pleasant surprise that I only picked up because I saw a couple of people on my Twitter timeline constantly talking about it. A fun and inventive platformer where all your actions need to be on beat with the music. The gameplay feels great (aside from some not so great performance issues on Switch), the soundtrack is fun, and it's got a real good style to it. Demon's Souls (PlayStation 5, 2020): I love Demon's Souls and this is Demon's Souls. It plays exactly the same with some minor quality of life changes. I don't agree with many of the artistic changes, but there's no denying it looks incredible on a technical level. If you want to play Demon's Souls again or for the first time, this is a perfectly valid and fun way to do so. Groove Coaster: Wai Wai Party!!!! (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Groove Coaster is one of my favorite rhythm games, and they finally made an acceptable at-home version with Wai Wai Party. It's not a perfect replication of the arcade game control-wise, I have some issues with the song choices, and the pricing is frankly fucking ridiculous if you're not a Groove Coaster maniac like I am, but the same ultra satisfying gameplay is all there. You can even play it vertically in handheld mode! Flip Griiiiiiiip!

And we're done! Phew! Honestly didn't realize I played that many good games until I typed all this out. Thanks as always for reading this far. I'm gonna try and get back to regularly posting Breviews this year at the very least. Honestly don't know if I'll get anything else up on here, but we'll see. Here's to hoping 2021 is a little bit less of a nightmare!

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Thanks for bringing the racebending to my attention. I never considered that it was harmful towards the origin culture. I considered that it was kind of strong to claim that sort of race thing in a way, but maybe that comes from the more.. christianity? view of where there isnt a direct way that God looks, except any way the person perceives. That's probably what I thought, too, until just now reading your answer to someone else. So.. it's not okay? 1/?

I honestly want to understand as my perspective on this now changes. It makes total sense why it would be entitled of someone to do such a thing, and how it's inconsiderate of the actual origin culture that the deities come from now that I'm thinking about it in this way. So again thank you for bringing this up and answering that other anon. I have some things to revise in my head on this, as I honor Apollo and Hermes, I want to make sure that I get accurate and do my research.

I really enjoy being able to read your experiences and I think it's important as, someone outside the culture, gets to experience and understand more to be as accurate and non... whats the word... inappropriate with representing such a thing, I guess I can say. If that makes sense.__________________________________________________________

Thank you for sending a message and for listening to the opinion of Greek people. (I am not the only one with that opinion, many of my 500 followers also share the same ideas.) Anyways prepare yourself for a looooooong analysis! So, get under comfy blankets and take your tea/coffee next to you!

To begin with, there are Greeks that don’t mind but those are usually Greeks who have close contact with the American way of thinking through social media. Or some that don’t care because the approach our mythology in a kinda superficial way? I am not saying this to offend any Greeks who don’t mind the racebending. Every Greek has the right to have a relationship with their culture according to their own standards. Those people who think racebending is ok are usually no less patriots than the ones who do. However, those who don’t mind the race bending are extremely rare to find. 

If I go to my 50 y/o aunt and announce to her that foreigners depict Demeter as Black she is gonna lose her mind. I have also asked the opinion of Greeks who are not into social media or groups where Greek mythology is discussed by foreigners. When they were informed of the racebending the first thing they said was “but... why??” and they couldn’t fathom how this could help anyone. The second thing they say is “But the Gods are white!” explaining that our ancestor have depicted them as Caucasian for centuries and we, as Greeks, know no other depiction of them.

I assure you, it has nothing to do with white superiority - which is a myth anyways. Greeks can be perfectly racist to people who are pastry white :P If you racebended the gods into any other race, we would still have a problem. It’s all a matter of respecting iconography and tradition. It would be ignorant of even us Greeks to change the depiction of the gods when our ancestors were very clear in their art about their race. It was also clear in antiquity that the gods had bodies. I am in another computer and I cannot access my files, but I had a file for a philosopher who tried to argue against the public opinion that the gods didn’t have bodies. But the majority of ancient Greeks believed that the gods had a physical presence.

Also, race matters for Greeks as it does for most of other cultures. You expect Nigerian deities to look like the average Nigerian, yes? Because they were created by a homogenous Black population. You think the same for Indian and Chinese deities, yes? It makes sense for deities and public figures from a certain culture to look like the people of that culture. I think it’s common sense. Turning an old Nigerian deity into a Chinese, would’t represent the Nigerian people any more. For similar reasons, we don’t want our important heritage figures changed. (In case a warrior was described as Black African in our ancient texts, then of course we wouldn’t have a problem with keeping that figure Black).

You are correct when saying that the race bending comes from a Christian point of view. I think many hellenic polytheists/pagans/wiccans haven't managed to escape the Christian logic. In Christianity we have accepted for many centuries that saints and important figures would be viewed with different races, so people can come closer to them. For example, there is a Chinese, Native American, Mexican (different tribes), Black Jesus etc. Most of the times they are also dressed in the traditional regalia of the respective culture. It's a thing for the last 200 years at least. 

Even Greeks depicted Jesus kinda white (he has an olive skin complexionand brown hair, which is closer to the Greek standards). And this happened since the Byzantine Empire. We even call the Virgin Mary "Mother of all Greeks" (apparently Mary has a particular interest in our nation xD) We have made her into a Greek mum. But we kinda have the freedom to do this because Christianity is an international religion which is alive for the last 2.000 years, so these changes come organically.

On the contrary, almost nobody has worshipped the Greek gods since 500 AC. The religion was been dead for almost 2.000 years, until Western classicists made it a popular. Now people who have no actual contact with the Greek culture start worshiping those gods. Don’t get me wrong, I believe any foreigner can worship the Greek gods! The thing is that most of the foreign worshippers don’t see the Greek gods as part of the culture that created them, because of the Americanization of the gods in the media and the complete stripping of the Greek elements from them.

But gods are still part of the Greeks’ heritage. Many ancient traditions and myths have kept from the ancient years, we have the names of gods and the gods are still used as symbols here. Our culture hasn’t died, as many westerners (perhaps subconciously) believe. It is alive and evolving, despite foreigners usually ignoring us. So, the ideas about our ancient religion have been involving with us, becoming part of our national identity in a unique way. 

After 2.000 years of the religion’s “death”, foreigners become enamored with Greece again. But not our Greece. They become enamored with a part of our culture that hasn’t existed in millenia. They study the culture only till the Roman years and then they skip 2.000 years of evolving cultural identity and go straight to the 21st century western (west Europe/America) ideals and societies.

You can only imagine how it seems to us Greeks, when foreigners suddenly remember us again and, on top of that, they don’t become part of our culture but they insist that a part of our culture (in its ancient form) becomes tailored to their own standards. And now foreigners ingore our own point of view, because, as they have done the last 2.000 years, they keep on ignoring us :P (I mean they as a people, greatly generalizing here). Please see that post for how disconnected a Greek feels about the modern Greek religion, and the analysis that comes with it. (Link)

Similarly, imagine if suddenly the Nigerian culture became a trend in Greece and now some Greeks become interesting in the old (almost dead to Nigeria) worship of Orishas. And now they want to depict the Orishas as White, because they, themselves are white and maybe white deities reflect better the racial situation in Greece. Wouldn’t that be disrespectful, though? Not only because the Black becomes White, but because we would take an inactive worship from the Nigerians and add our own politics to it.

Our situation is also kind of special because for the last centuries every country that has become interested in our culture has abused it. They have stolen antiquities from us and northwestern Europe but also in the US have no problem having those stolen artifacts and displaying them. There is a tradition of foreigners claiming to “love” Greece but they are really in love with our ancient aesthetic and they don’t give a shit about the Greeks who preserve the culture and even die to protect their antiquities. 

So we are used to this kind of treatment and it hurts extra when it’s happening again. But we are also desensitized. For some reason a person can be dressed as a Greek deity for Halloween and we won’t bat an eye. At the same time, I see people from other cultures defending the importance of their figures, when foreigners dress up as them for fun. 

I don’t understand how we consider this disrespectful for any other culture but if it’s the Greek we don’t care. Why could this be? Perhaps because many Greeks have come to see their own culture as public property. Perhaps because it is what the prominent international media tells us and maybe because we are used to selling our culture for profit (we are a tourist country) and we only see it as merchandise. 

Let me add I am not only fascinated by my own cultures but also cultures around the world. It makes no sense to me that people want Gods of color and their only solution is to make the Greek gods Black. Have we forgotten the numerous rich cultures of Asia and Africa?? There are a ton of deities there who, if you want to draw Afrocentric art for example, will be great inspiration! It reminds me of a publishing house which put POC in the covers of western classic books (thus kinda turning the white main characters into POC only in the cover) while not promoting books from POC or books featuring POC. I think it’s counterproductive.

I think that’s all I have to say for now! Feel free to ask more questions if I haven’t covered you! And if you have more thoughts you can drop them in my ask box.

Also, one question for you before you leave. You mentioned “I considered that it was kind of strong to claim that sort of race thing in a way”. Can you explain to me why? I would like to understand better people who think this way. Then maybe I could explain more effectively to them that their race bending practice isn’t as helpful as they think it is.

P.S. Even saying “races” of people exist is considered deeply racist in Greece (and Europe). I mention that as potential food of thought. For us there are only hues of skin colors, not races, so our social politics are different. 

[rosethornewrites]

Fic: The Rebellion of Adrien Agreste, ch. 11

Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Juleka Couffaine/Rose Lavillant, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Luka Couffaine, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Kagami Tsurugi, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Luka Couffaine, Lila Rossi/karma, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/aneurism, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi, Plagg & Tikki

Characters: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Lila Rossi, Jagged Stone, Plagg, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Luka Couffaine, Penny Rolling, Anarka Couffaine, Rose Lavillant, Juleka Couffaine, Kagami Tsurugi, Alya Césaire, Chloé Bourgeois, Wayhem, Nadja Chamack, Nathalie Sancoeur, Sabine Cheng, Tom Dupain, Tikki, Fang, Principal Damocles, Caline Bustier, Ms. Mendeleiev, original minor character, Alec Cataldi, Lila Rossi’s Mother, Sabrina Raincomprix, Roger Raincomprix, Mylène Haprèle, Le Gorille | Adrien Agreste’s Bodyguard, Nino Lahiffe, Nooroo

Tags: Lila Rossi salt, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Teenage Rebellion, Swearing, Bad Parent Gabriel Agreste, Crack Treated Seriously, Lila Rossi’s Lies Are Exposed, Cuddling & Snuggling, Luka Couffaine Needs a Hug, Paparazzi, Parentification, Marinette Dupain-Cheng Needs a Hug, Gabriel Agreste Needs an Aneurism, Uncle Jagged Stone, we’re all queer here, the spirit of punk is sometimes just being allowed to be yourself, Kagami Finds Her Groove, punk rock fashion, Savage Kagami, Marinette protection squad, Good Parent Sabine Cheng, Good Parent Tom Dupain, Protective Kagami Tsurugi, Protective Luka Couffaine, Bisexual Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Pansexual Luka Couffaine, Sharing a Bed, Pet Names, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Instagram, Bullying, Social Media, Anxiety, Makeover, Hugs, will cure your acne, Face Punching, Bad Ass Juleka Couffaine, Rumors, Protective Juleka Couffaine, Protective Adrien Agreste, Lawyers, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Holding Hands, accountability, mental health, Jagged Stone’s well-paid pet shark, How to Make the Evening News, Sexy eyeliner for days, one fish two fish Lila is a screwed fish, How to have fun and piss Gabriel off, Fuckery, sweet litigious karma, Alya sugar, lawyer shark doo doo doo doo doo doo, Schadenfreude, Bad Ass Alya Césaire, Gaslighting, abuse denormalization, Jagged likes his lawyers like he likes his pets: toothy af, Blood in the Water, Everything you didn’t know you wanted and some things you did, Gabriel Agreste is shark bait, Denial, Consequences, Principal Damocles salt, caline bustier salt, the impotence of Gabriel Agreste, snarky Nooroo, lies and the lying liars who tell them, Lila’s brain is a narcissistic hellscape, Lila’s mind is built like an Escher piece, Alec Cataldi salt, Adrien Sugar, wholesome salt, Fu Salt, Kwami Shenanigans, Nooroo is a little shit

Summary: Snuggles and Pastries: An Interlude

Notes: Jagged ships it.

AO3 link

Chapters 1-2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10

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Adrien woke to find that he’d moved close enough to Luka in the night that they were snuggling, one of Luka’s arms over his chest, and Adrien’s head tucked against his chest. Their legs were tangled together. He’d never experienced this sort of thing before.

And it was wonderful.

Luka was warm and soft, and while Adrien was worried he’d be offended or embarrassed, he wasn’t inclined to move.

He was halfway back asleep when Luka’s phone alarm went off, and the other boy stirred.

Adrien felt him grope for the phone and the alarm silenced… but Luka didn’t move further, just settled back with a soft sigh.

Adrien figured it was only a matter of time before Luka woke further and pushed him away. He felt selfish as he stayed still and tried to enjoy the closeness.

Nino had once called him “touch-starved,” referring to how he liked being close to people, and he wasn’t wrong; having been starved of people and with an unaffectionate father did that, apparently. He craved it. An arm around the shoulder, hugs… anything, really. This, though, was a special sort of torture—accidental instead of on purpose, the sensation without the meaning.

“Why so tense?”

Luka’s voice was so unexpected Adrien couldn’t stop himself from jerking back, gasping.

“Shit.” Luka propped himself up on one elbow. “Didn’t mean to startle you. You okay?”

Adrien nodded. “Y-yeah. Sorry. I guess I snuggle in my sleep.”

That got a soft chuckle. “You aren’t the only one. Don’t worry about it.”

“I know, but…” he sighed. “I don’t want to cross your boundaries.”

“Hey, I like cuddling. It doesn’t have to mean anything sexual unless the participants want it to.” Luka smiled. “And anyway, it’ll give everyone the idea we want them to have.”

Adrien nodded. “Yeah. I just hope I’m not inconveniencing you. I mean… I know you’re interested in Mari, and if you’re fake-dating me, you can’t real-date her.”

Luka sighed softly. “Marinette’s heart is elsewhere, Adrien. And she may never see me the way I see her. And, anyway, I want to help you.”

“I know… but last night you said Mari does what you do—hides her feelings,” Adrien bit his lip. “I just… let me know if anything bothers you. Your feelings matter, too.”

The soft look Luka gave him made his heart flutter a bit.

“Thanks, mon étoile,” Luka murmured, pulling him into a warm hug. “It’s… not easy, but I’ll work on letting you know.”

This snuggling was real, and Adrien let himself relax, snaking one arm around Luka. He was drifting off again when Luka’s phone alarm went off again.

“Secondary alarm,” Luka told him. “We’ll have to get up if Jagged’s going to have time to do your kohl.”

Adrien grumbled, but grudgingly extracted his limbs from Luka’s. “Do you think it’s okay to wear the jeans I wore yesterday for photos?”

“Probably not. Wear one of the distressed pairs—it’ll piss your dad off more, you wearing clothes with holes in them.”

That got a giggle from the blond. “‘We are not paupers, Adrien. You will dress appropriately,’” he mocked, using an approximation of Gabriel’s voice. “That’ll be perfect for the media frenzy.”

After they’d gotten video of the three of them jamming and posted it to social media, Jagged had sent hotel staff to get pajamas for the two of them. Fortunately Chloé hadn’t started pounding on the door until after those were delivered, so they had all ignored her. Adrien hasn’t been ready to face her, or to put Luka through that. She could see him in the morning like the rest of Paris.

It didn’t take either of them long to dress, and then an espresso-chugging Jagged demonstrated on himself how to apply kohl before doing it for Adrien.

“Decided less is more for you,” the rocker said. “Just enough to make your eyes pop. Makes you look like… I dunno. Otherworldly or whatever.”

In the mirror, Adrien could see what he meant. The kohl lining his eyes contrasted the green in a way that made them almost gem-like, giving him a fey appearance.

“I like it,” he said. “Should I wear the leather today, or the hoodie?”

“We want to sneak you into school, so the hoodie might be better,” Luka said. “So we don’t get intercepted.”

Jagged grinned. “You’ll both be in the limo and we’ll pull right up to the school. The leather gives a bigger statement.”

Adrien pulled on the leather.

“And we’re picking up Marinette, as well,” Penny added. “I’ve called her, and asked her if she’ll dress up for effect.”

“Are you sure?” Adrien asked. “Father might go after her.”

“He does, he has me to contend with,” Jagged muttered. “And anyway, we gotta get you in some of her designs. Even if your bullshit underage contract—which I bet wouldn’t hold up in court given the fact that it was forced on you by your shithead dad—says you can’t model for anyone else, Instagram isn’t a modeling gig.”

Luka patted his shoulder. “And she wants to, anyway. You know how stubborn Marinette can be.”

Adrien smiled, thinking about that. “She really is. It’s endearing.”

“Sometimes. Other times you just want to help her, but she won’t let you.”

He felt his smile fade, reminded of what Lila had done, how Marinette had shouldered it all herself.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Definitely. She does do that.”

Luka offered a wry smile. “We’ll help her. And we know Jagged and Penny will too.”

“Damn straight,” Jagged said. “And we best get going.”

Adrien blinked. “Um… Shouldn’t M. Dupain and Mme. Cheng also be part of this?”

“Penny called them earlier, while you two were still cuddling, and they are. They got part-timers who’ll cover while they go to the collége with us. Lawyer’s at the bakery already. Tom and Sabine have breakfast waiting for us, even.”

Jagged chuckled. “Oh, and I’ll send you lot the picture I took later. Cute as hell, you two are. Might be good for Instagram, eh?”

Adrien felt his cheeks heat, and Luka had a blush that he was sure matched his own.

“Anyway, Penny’s waiting in the limo with Fang. Got André to clear the route through the hotel to the limo, so we’re good.”

He handed each of them a pair of sunglasses—replicas of the ones Marinette made for him. “Ready to do this in style?”

They made it to the bakery without issue, and were joined by Marinette, Tom, Sabine, and a stern-looking woman in a skirt suit.

Marinette was wearing ripped fuchsia leggings and a pair of black high-waisted shorts with two rows of silver buttons. Her top was a crop-top, a long-sleeve black fishnet over a pink sleeveless shell that matched the leggings. All were obviously her own design.

She blushed when she saw Adrien and Luka staring. “Um, I designed this but hadn’t had a reason to wear it yet. Though I put the rips in the leggings last night before bed. Figured it was more rock ‘n roll, and I can make another pair later.”

“Definitely,” Jagged told her.

Tom handed out pastries from a large box while Marinette passed around coffee. Jagged showed Sabine how to pet Fang—who was pleased with the attention.

“Kagami’s meeting us in front of the collége, too,” Marinette told them. “We’ll be able to greet her and then she’ll confirm our story to the press.”

Jagged turned to Luka. “After your public goodbye to your boyfriend, the limo’ll take you home. Anarka knows what’s going on, too. Been harassing the paparazzi—she’s good at that. Bet she’s run some of ’em off.”

Luka nodded, then pulled Adrien and Marinette in for a hug. “We can do this.”

A flash surprised them, and Sabine lowered her phone. “You do. And we have your backs, kids.”

Adrien took a bite of his pain au chocolat, glad Marinette had thought to bring his favorite breakfast. He was ready for this—as ready as he could be.

It was time to meet the press.

[adamrevi3ws]

Jedi: Fallen Order

When I finished playing DOOM, I told myself that the next game I would play wouldn’t be one that pissed me off. Unfortunately, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order did not live up to those expectations.

While the source of my frustration with DOOM was mainly growing pains with its intense gameplay and action, Fallen Order mainly drew ire from me due to its unfinished and unpolished nature. Its publisher, EA, is in the same club as Ubisoft, Bethesda, and apparently now CD Projekt Red, often releasing games as broken glitchy messes when they first come out to meet quick deadlines. I’ve seen and heard how unplayable this game was at launch, and while it isn’t as bad as it was then, it still has enough subtle mistakes to ruin my gameplay experience. The main source of this and my frustration, in general, was the extremely finicky and unresponsive controls, particularly found in its two main selling points: platforming (and plot but I’ll talk about that later) directly lifted, if not plagiarized from the Uncharted games, and Dark Souls-esque combat gameplay. Nothing really lines up or “clicks” when it really needs to. Regarding the platforming, it feels like it takes a miracle to properly grab onto something and takes a thousand tries for a jump to work. When the double jump gets introduced, it really only works when the game, in its divine ignorance, feels the whim to let it work. A lot of reviewers complained about the difficult and unwieldy ice slide sequences in the game, and while I had my fair share of annoyance on a very specific ice slide, I think it’s just a symptom of a much larger problem. The combat shares this similar “the game only works when it wants to” problem. You don’t always dodge or block right when you want it to, but I think its biggest problem is healing. Instead of pressing a button and having part of your health restored, pressing said button instead “calls” your robot companion, which needs to do a special little animation and THEN you get healed, which takes a long 15 seconds. Not only does this waste a good amount of time in a game where time is absurdly precious in its hardcore combat, but every other time I tried calling the damn robot it straight up ignored me. I don’t know if this is a glitch, or it needs a cooldown period, or you can’t heal while being hit by an enemy, but it made the fights a lot more unnecessarily grating than they already are. Speaking of straight up screw you moments from the game, whenever I hit the “target” button in close combat with multiple enemies, it’d always target the farthest away enemy, for no reason. All of this is a shame because these main gameplay components are actually quite fun when they aren’t broken? A lot of the level design allows for really fast and exhilarating platforming that is absurdly fun when it syncs up, but that’s only, like half of the time. The combat can be enjoyable too, allowing for some great lightsaber duel boss fights, which can feel pretty cinematic when the combat actually works.

Outside of gameplay, the game’s unfinished nature shows itself a lot in its cutscenes. Its graphics just straight up dip and fail to fully render for 90% of these moments, often also feeling extremely choppy and cutting off a bit too soon. There was even one time an enemy was supposed to show up in a cutscene to initiate a boss fight but they just weren’t there and it was quite confusing because it felt like the main character was speaking to an empty wall. Around the middle of the game, both cutscenes and gameplay sequences would just freeze, and this is probably the first game I’ve played in a while to straight up crash on my PS4. If the developers took an extra, idk six months to actually fix this game a bit more I’d rate it a lot higher than I am now. I was actually warned about the game’s poor performance before playing, with a friend mentioning its horrible load times, but I didn’t know it’d be this bad. As my unopened copy of the infamous Cyberpunk 2077 waits on my mantlepiece for the developers to actually make it a playable game months after its release, I fear it may have the same fate as Fallen Order, still being quite a bit buggy and annoying over a year after its messy launch.

With its buggy and incohesive gameplay in mind, Jedi: Fallen Order’s strongest element is its plot. To my surprise, this is much less of a Star Wars game and more a game that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Taking place between episodes 3 and 4, I kind of expected it to be an epic quest detailing the rise of the rebel alliance, but instead, I got a more generic treasure hunt storyline heavily reminiscent of the Uncharted series. Although this sounds quite disappointing, the game’s plot still soars in its great character arcs and setpieces interspersed the vague framework of its less-than-original overall plot. Combine these great individual moments with an absolutely bombastic ending and it almost makes trudging through the glitchy gameplay worth it. This is elevated by some great voice acting performances, particularly from Cameron Monaghan, who gives a movie star performance to the main character, even in a lot of moments where he doesn’t have much to work with. The setting is also a high point. Disney’s milking of Star Wars has led to a variety of media set between episodes 3 and 4, this game feels particularly special because it is more focused on the aftermath of Episode 3 rather than the buildup to Episode 4, which I think the rest of the media in this era is focused on. It’s clear that there are so many parts of the game that the studio put a lot of love in, ranging from the plot, to the memorable soundtrack (Mongolian throat singing, anyone?), to even the hilarious enemy dialogue, I just wish they put this amount of effort to make the game fully playable.

The one elephant in the room regarding this game that I haven’t mentioned so far is the game’s worlds/levels themselves. They aren’t annoyingly unpolished like the gameplay but aren’t really a labor of love either. Instead what we get is an admittedly gorgeous maze of areas within a few planets, constantly getting more twisty and confusing as you go on. It may visually resemble an open world, but it is very much a series of paths that make you go “hmmmm, should I go back to that other branching path to see if there are any healing upgrades or character customization options I can collect?” There’s nothing wrong about this MetroidVania style format, but frankly it’s not my type. A lot of the areas look visually similar so it’s quite easy to get lost, and despite each planet’s map being absurdly big, there’s no way to actually fast travel between areas, just between planets. Finally, the incentive to go back and explore isn’t particularly convincing, where the healing upgrades are a bit too well concealed and the character customization options are like, absurdly mid. This is the one time I actually wished an EA game had its own in-game currency so I could buy something cooler than “the same damn poncho you’re wearing except a slightly less boring color combination.” Come on, man! The one good thing I’ll say about the overall game world is that the in-game map highlights which paths you haven’t explored yet, making it much easier to get on track. While the game’s maze-like level style isn’t necessarily my thing, I think if the developers tried to make it a bit more interesting a lot of people would get a kick out of it.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that finally made me understand my college professors that went a bit too hard on my grammar mistakes when grading papers. The central content and ideas this game presents have a lot of potential, but they’re heavily weighed down by an infinite number of fixable mistakes. I give this game a 6.7 out of 10 stars.

[writing-in-mermish]

The Romances of Journey to the West

I have not read Journey to the West.

I know the basics of the story and from what I am aware it isn’t really romantic. At all. Sure it’s got some side plots where romance might be an element, but not in the main plot.

So why are there so many stories based off of it that one of the main focuses is Romance???

I do not know the answer to that question, and wont be trying to answer it (sorry????). Instead, I’m going to talk about the media I’ve consumed based of off Journey to the West and their romances. Enjoy!

I thought it might be fun to do them all in order of when I consumed them (especially because I plan to add to this when I realize something new is also a JttW remix), but I don’t actually remember what order I started them in so we’re just going with obviousness. Starting with the most “Well, yeah.” and ending with the most “wait what?”.

first...

The New Legends of Monkey

I actually never finished this one (how many times can I say that in this post, ha ha ha....), and it’s probably the one I’m least likely to finish (but I’ve got a compilationist in me so we’ll see).

It’s basically a straight forward retelling from what I watched, the main difference that I could see being Tripitaka’s characterization and gender. They made him a girl which felt like an excuse to add a romance between the monk and the Monkey King, though it only ever hinted at things as far as I got, so maybe it never happened (the tags on this gif suggest otherwise though). Tell me in the comments if you watched it I guess.

The acting wasn’t great and I dropped it pretty soon in, so I don’t have much else to say. They also made Sandy a girl, so maybe they were just trying to make it more diverse or something. IDK.

The Epic crush of Genie Lo

This book was freaking amazing and I totally recommend it (and the sequel, it’s a dualogy so both books are out, no need to wait!). It’s the only one I’ve finished at the time of making this post.

It’s kinda the outlier because instead of a romance between Tripitaka and the Monkey King it’s a romance between the Monkey King and Genie Lo (who I won’t explain her character because of spoilers). It’s super fun and interesting.

It’s set in modern day after all the events of JttW took place, which also makes it different from all the rest, and definitely not a retelling. It uses all the same characters instead of just the character dynamics and plot.

They could have nixed the romance because it’s not the main thing but it’s really enjoyable so I ain’t mad (but it’s kinda more important in book 2). Also a different take than all the others so, props to the Author.

A Korean Odyssey

This is the only K-Drama in the mix and I had to watch a few episodes to realize what it was. I’m nearly done with this one (started it in October and was zooming through but have slowed down due to NaNo). Another one I’d recommend (in fact, all the rest of them I probably recommend, tNLoM is the outlier here).

Out of the ones that are more obvious and use the same names, this one is the most different since it’s Korean instead of Chinese. Instead of Tripitaka they just use Samjang, and they use the Monkey’s title, The Great Sage Equal to Heaven, a lot more.

This one is also modern, but with the lore that they’ve dropped, is not set after the JttW but is the JttW, without all the traveling though. Also, instead of moving scrolls from point A to point B for The Merciful Goddess Guanyin (who hasn’t seemed to show up at all), they’ve been shoved together by The Devil King (who wasn’t as big of a player in JttW from what I know, but is one of the main characters in this). It’s very funny and emotional, like most K-dramas I’ve watched.

the romance is integral to the plot because instead of being trapped with a circlet that gives him headaches, The Monkey has a bracelet that makes him fall for Samjang and hurts his heart when she’s in danger. This causes much shenanigans which range from annoying to funny to heartbreaking. Good stuff.

Inuyasha

Into the Shojo! You may have heard that this one is Journey to the West-esque (If you run in those kinds of circles) and it’s definitely the most obvious of the ones I’ve encountered. I’ve only watched the anime (still working on it), so if the manga’s different, I didn’t know.

It’s got the five man band, the non magical Trip. character who sets free the Monkey character and the circlet analogue (aka “sit boy!”). Also, we’ve got an actual journey and a magical item that they need to protect and get to a specific place.

It’s both modern and set in the past (portal fantasy!) which is fun. Especially since her family gets to know, and she goes back for school every once in a while.

The romances in this are also semi integral to the plot (it’s shojo, what did you expect), and it’s quite enjoyable. It’s got comedy, action, drama, and cute romance. (Also, it’s randomly getting a squeal after a decade I think.)

Kamisama Kiss

I didn’t realize that this was JttW until after starting the manga, which I picked up after I finished the anime because it ended on a cliff hanger (I have some thoughts about that phenomenon too, but that’s for different and much shorter post). I really liked the anime and am making my sibling read the manga with me now. (they just corrected me and said I offered and they said yes, but saying I made them is funnier so whatever.)

Instead of being a cool monk or having the reincarnated soul of someone special, our Trip. for this one is just a nice girl, down on her luck who is given the divinity of a deadbeat kami who she saved from a tree. And instead of a magical item to bond her with the Monkey character (who is a fox spirit) they are sealed with just a kiss. (Hence the title)

The romance is semi integral, but oddly enough, I’d say less than in Inuyasha. Sure it weighs on their minds a lot, but the main plot is about Nanami trying to be a good kami and take care of her shrine, not her perspective love interests.

Fun show (and manga). Very goofy, cool world building, compelling characters, and good drama when it showed up.

and finally...

Yona of the Dawn

this one might be more believable than the last one, but I realized it later and feel it’s got slightly less similarities with the original source material. Another one that I watched all the anime and now have started reading the manga with my sibling due to the cliff hanger. (I’ve noticed more differences between anime and manga in YotD than KSK, not important, but interesting to me).

The monk is a princess in this one, and her and five man band are mostly reincarnations of dragons, which is why they join her party, to protect her like their counterparts did. They’re all compelled by ancient blood. Strangely, the character I’d ascribe to Monkey king is not a dragon and is only compelled by loyalty (and love).

It’s got the epicness, historical-ish setting, and the journey, but instead of getting a MacGuffin to it’s destination, they’re escaping death and trying to restore a kingdom.

Romance is very complicated in this one. Very compelling and I’d say on the more integral side. Affection and it’s many forms are explored along the journey. There are many dynamics and they all have their own complications. It’s good.

(also, I hope to cosplay Yona some day)

So... yeah. That’s it. If you got all the way through this, thanks.

[megwhiteviscom]

YCN; Art Fund

For this brief, I have been through many, many different ideas. I found this brief particularly hard to come up with an idea that fully encompasses every problem and challenge outlined in the brief. It was a good challenge for me however, as it forced me to appeal to an audience that I was not familiar with and did not know how to relate to, and therefore had to research extensively.

I begun by doing research into why people did not go to museums. I asked and used lots of surveys, and the two most common problems and issues I discovered by people who do not visit them were:

1. Museums are not interactive enough.

2. A museum is not thought of as somewhere to go in free time.

In order to tackle this brief, I needed to address these two problems. The first idea I came up with was an interactive app, called 'In three words'.

I was inspired by listening to friends recount their experiences in museums using one sentence. The idea behind this was that, in hearing just a sentence of their experience, I was really intrigued and inspired to go. Using the idea of word of mouth, this app would be similar to a social media app and users would post reviews and recounts of their experiences at museums and galleries. The problem with this first idea was that it was accidentally already aimed toward people who already attend museums and galleries; it would heavily rely on users that already go to inspire others to go, and the only people it would really inspire would be those who are already interested in galleries.

I revisited the brief on the YCN website and tried to really take it apart for my next idea. The main tagline of the brief given by YCN were the words “All museums together in a rich tapestry”. My vision for my next response to this brief was to bring this idea to life and come up with an idea that would bring all our museums together, whilst drawing the attention of people who wouldn't normally consider a museum for a day out. Each museum is a puzzle piece, and the pieces fit together to make a picture of history, culture and the arts in Britain.

My research for this project included projects such as the ‘Animals with Attitude’ project which took place across the Gold Coast of Australia. Artists competed for the chance to decorate giant koala sculptures which lined city streets, parks, buildings, and public open spaces, while reacquainting the community with the City's native wildlife. The purpose of the project was to “excite, inspire and encourage public exploration of the city via visiting each of the wonderfully decorated sculptures”.

A similar project I also included in my research was ‘Wallace and Gromit’s The Grand Appeal’, which took place in Bristol. The trail of artwork, named “Gromit Unleashed”, was a collaboration with the Bristol Children’s Hospital Charity and, obviously, Aardman Animations. The project “set out to capture the imagination of the public by adorning Bristol’s streets with 80 giant Gromit sculptures for 10 weeks”, and the pieces were later auctioned to raise money for the charity.

The last piece of research integral to the puzzle piece project is the the ‘Nike Air Max Graffiti Stores’ by AKQA São Paulo. The pieces were inspired when the local government ordered graffiti art to be painted over and erased, and one of the most interactive ad campaigns ever was born as a fight back. Previously erased graffiti characters in the city were repainted, wearing Nike trainers. How it worked was that you could only buy through unlocking the purchase with geolocation activation. “It was what Nike called a ‘phygital’ experience,” said Luiza Baffa, Managing Director at AKQA São Paulo.

The main idea for the puzzle piece project is this; to entice people who would have never previously thought of venturing into a museum using local and striking art, and a fun competition.

Firstly, local artists will be chosen by each museum participating to install a ‘puzzle piece’ into a museum in any way they like; be it a sculpture, painting, larger than life, small enough to have to search for. The ‘piece’ could be personal to them, personal to the location or personal to the museum/exhibit itself. This is a really integral and special part of the project; through Covid times not only have museums been suffering, but local and smaller creators and artists have too. Through this project both can help and uplift each other in the initial stage.

Secondly, using the puzzle piece project website on a smartphone, people who go into the museum and see the piece can scan it with their cameras, unlocking a competition entry with their phones (using geolocation activation, like the Nike Graffiti project, so that entries can’t be forged!). This competition will be very special as the project would be partnered with big brands such as Nandos, Pretty Little Thing, Resturant Choice, National Trust, etc, so there is a chance to win prizes chosen by the enterer that are unique and exciting to them. This is really important as this captures a very wide audience, and those who would not appreciate normally anything a museum could offer them. The brand endorsement is also important as it draws attention to the project and makes it widespread to the target audience who follow those brands.

The more puzzle pieces you scan and collect, the more entries you have into winning vouchers and prizes. This means it is beneficial to visit as many museums as possible, and every museum entry is the same; meaning you can enter by walking to your small local museum on your doorstep, which many might not realise is even there.

After having feedback on this idea I actually realised that, although I included the competition in partnership with the bigger brands, it still doesn't really account for those who would not ever consider visiting a museum as you would have to step into a museum first before being able to participate. I realised also that having something interactive, like an app, competition or game, doesn't directly appeal to the audience I am trying to communicate with.

After scrapping yet another idea, I took it straight back to the beginning again and tried to really strip it back to the very, very basics of trying to solve the problem. I came to the conclusion that an interactive app or competition does not capture the attention of those who would ignore an app or game already about a museum or gallery. I decided on designing an advert campaign - this would immediately capture the attention of people just passing by. Immediately I thought of the idea of collaborating and using the names and images of big brands, as this would also provide a selling point and make the idea of visiting a museum more 'mainstream' and well known. The final idea I came up with was to create billboard adverts comparing every day activities to visiting a museum, for example, 'entertain the kids for less than a happy meal'. I wanted the adverts to really instantly capture the attention of those who would never normally consider a museum as somewhere to go, and put it on their radar.

[allmyevilplans]

Cyberpunk 2077: Thoughts Partway Through

If you dig all the way back into my tumblr history, to the first few posts I wrote, you’ll find some musings on the genre of cyberpunk and how we’re really living it (and the future is boring, which is a trope). I’ve read and watched and mulled over the different ways to look at it for over a decade - probably longer. Suffice it to say, when I heard that CD Projekt Red was making a Cyberpunk game - a huge open-world mess of an RPG at that - I was excited.

Self-admittedly I have not played nor do I know a lot about Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG. I’ve read some lore and the source books, and there’s this definite feeling that it’s something I would have found really edgy and cool at 12yrs old.

I’m a big chunk of hours into the game. Here’s my two biggest  (non-spoiler) takeaways:

1) Cyberpunk 2077 is simultaneously far too serious and nowhere near serious enough. There’s this tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of American problems, silly gangs, slightly carnival-esque violence everywhere so let’s have fun, goofy slang and this slight air of camp that’s hard to escape. But it’s all played po-faced, straight and committed, there’s no wink or crack of a smile. Pushed farther this game would easily be cyber-GTA (a comparison it should get anyway) - a farcical almost Idiocracy style send-up. I think this would be fine route to take considering the source material has a gang that genetically alters themselves to look like circus clowns.

Simultaneously, it could go even darker - no silly anything, death and blood and everything horrible in your face and unrelenting. No heroes to meet, no fun in gun fights - only pain and survival. AKA leaning more into the Deus Ex frame, though without all the whack-job illuminati conspiracy theories. Considering how ‘high technology, low life’ cyberpunk is at its genre roots, this sort of where I’d like it to go, all blood and guts and life-is-nasty.

In either case, the tiptoeing between silly and serious, while kind of refusing to acknowledge the silliness, sort of doesn’t work for me. It’s got a very odd Evil Dead vibe where you’re wondering if it’s supposed to be funny but nobody is laughing.

2) CD Projekt Red is a studio that was given a bit of a gift with the lightning in a bottle of the Witcher. Comparing against their past work, Cyberpunk 2077 is simply not as good a game as The Witcher 3 is. They are markedly similar games in a few respects - particularly how they drop you in medias res into the world and don’t hold your hand, and the loosely explained character optimization.

But the fact is that the things TW3 excelled most at - deep characters, gentle but deep world-building, a brutal and frequently fatalistic theme in a trope reversal from normal fantasy, incredible quest design, and meaningful consequences to your choices... well, only two of those made it Cyberpunk for sure, and another is yet to be determined. The quest design has been outstanding so far, and the world is brilliantly brought to busy and chaotic life. Whether my choices matter... will be determined later.

Something about TW3 and it’s characters felt organic, lived in. And Cyberpunk hasn’t managed to do that.  Some of it is that it is very much the opposite of a trope inversion - cyberpunk is built on stereotypes. Some of it is that the characters don’t have history or pre-existing relationships with V, and that they feel... simpler, more one-note. Some of it is that V is far more of a blank slate than Geralt, more of an unknown to Night City. The life-is-cheap-and-nasty vibe I adored about TW3 doesn’t feel as serious here (see above). It’s a living world, absolutely, but it just doesn’t feel as... lived in, I guess. What this screams to me is that the source material MATTERS, and that the Witcher is just better source material.

There’s also less variety to the gameplay, sort of. There are many more practical ways to build a character than in TW3, but they also demand far more specialization. Some of the most interesting things in TW3 were the monsters and the different ways you could choose to deal with them or had to approach them. In Cyberpunk, to be effective, you have to pick your build early, and since a lot side quests basically amount to “go to the place and neutralize the dudes who are hostile to you,” you end up approaching most missions the same way. TW3 at least forced you to mix things up. It could also be that I’m spending a LOT of time doing radiant world-quests, which would also explain my out-of-balance high street cred rating.

Cyberpunk 2077 is and will be an important game. A huge, sprawling, delightful mess of an RPG with so much to do it astounds, a gorgeous look into excess and dark futurism.

I’ll have more to say once I finish things, I’m sure of it.

[olderthannetfic]

It’s International Fanworks Day and also the 30th and final post in this series. If you follow my tumblr, you know that my true fandom isn’t buddy cops or Highlander or any of those things. No, my true fandom is...

WANK

No matter which bitchy piece of fujo-course nonsense you’re looking at on tumblr, no matter which debate about WNGWJLEO or women in slash or fanfiction vs. media you're reblogging, your grandma was having that fight in a zine somewhere in 1985 and at Escapade in the 90s.

Here’s a vid review from 2002:

"History Repeating," [...] was an Amanda vid. In-fucking-credible. Who knew? Who knew I could like Amanda? Who knew there were fresh HL clips I hadn't seen a thousand times before in HL vids? (Of course, as someone pointed out, she had her own spin-off.) This rocked--sharp, fast cutting and pretty, pretty shots, with a hot bisexy vibe running through it. And, you know, people like to say that there's all this self-hating misogyny in fans--you know, that women hate shows about women, hate women characters breaking up the OTP, etc. But when you see a femme-centric vid like this bring down the house, you really have to wonder. Is it misogyny, really, or is just that we usually see a bunch of crap representations of women in media and resist them?

So on the theme of There Is Nothing New Under The Sun, here is a selection of past Escapade panels on gender, representation, and problematicness:

1993 - Anti-Feminism in Slash Fandom (Or, how 'it was never this good with a woman' syndrome... where are the women, and why do we care?)

1995 - Why Lesbians Read Slash - (What's the attraction? Why do they care? Why do they write it?)

1996 - Character Bisexuality: Convenient fiction or character trait? (Is this a good compromise between "We're not gay, we just love each other" and "I was gay all along and just faking it with women"? Or is this too easy? Special mention for the stereotypical bisexual villian who's evil, sexy, and can come on to everyone.)

1996 - Female Heroes: Female Empowerment, or male power in women's bodies? (Give a woman a gun and make her really tough. Wow, cool! yes, or no? Are we celebrating women, or are we merely putting breasts on male action heroes? Heroines under discussion may include (but not be limited to) Sara Connor, Ripley, Vasquez, Thelma & Louise.)

1997 - Gender Astigmatism (The Gender Continuum: in what we read, in what we write, and what we are, there is always a connection with a point on the gender continuum. How do our definitions of "feminine" and "masculine" influence our creativity? Where do bisexual characters fit in? (besides there, you dirty-minded person!)

1998 - Xena: Does Girl-Slash Get Us Going? (Xena is the first show with a feminine couple to be really popular. What kind of slash fans are interested? Does gender orientation matter? Or do slash fans love slashy couples regardless of their gender? Can m/m fans be 'converted' to f/f fans?)

1998 - Bastards & the Women Who Love Them (When Methos says, "you live to serve me," any normal '90s woman says, "I don't think so!... or does she? A happy contemplation on the virtues of handsome thugs.)

1998 - Slash: a Continuation of Women's Writing, led by Constance Penley (In case you didn't know, in her recent book NASA/TREK (yes, the slash is intentional), she addressed slash as a continuum of women's writing, combining women's romance, and the male quest romance. Join her for a discussion of slash -- where it was, where it is, where it might be going.)

1998 - The Trauma of Slash Fans in Het Fandoms (Or, what to do when find women doing all that cool, tough-guy stuff you love.)

1999 - Male Slash Fans - Welcome Voice, or Infringement? (Slash is written by women for women — or is it? The Internet has attracted new fans, including the "male slash fan". Who is he? What does he think of what "we" do? Do we care?)

2002 - Femslash (General discussion on female/female slash fiction. If Buffy wanted something cold and hard between her legs, why didn't she just choose silicon?)

2003 - Slash: Feminist political act or really good porn?

2005 - Where have all the lesbians gone? (When some slash lists explicitly state m/m only, where do you go for femslash? Are there any hot femslash couples? Pimp your femslash fandom here, or bemoan the lack of strung female characters in the current conservative social climate.)

2007 - Femslash: The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Femslash. It's a work that makes some of our hearts leap for joy and inspires complete and total disinterset—or even dislike and disdain—in others. Where can we find the good stuff? What makes it good? And what's up with the haters?)

2007 - SGA: The Women of Atlantis (What do we like about how the women of SGA are written and portrayed, and what makes us wince? What do we think about how their issues are being woven into the show's narrative?)

2008 - Gay is Not Slash (...even though slash is sometimes gay. The current argument about m/m romances by women as taking recognition *away* from male gay writers, depends on m/m writing being intended as gay lit. And slash, for one, isn't, even if there can be overlap. What overlaps? What doesn't? What examples do fans like?

2009 - Female Character Stories: Halfamoon, Full Moon or Just Moony (F/f slash, and other stories centered on female characters, are gaining visibility in fandom. Are there things fens will write about women that we won't about men? (Given MPreg, *are* there?) Should f/f be like m/m, or is it unavoidably different?)

2011 - My ***** is Not Ideologically Driven, But is it Homophobic (Slash fandom often sees itself as a mostly liberal community. IDIC, right? But recently there's been a slash backlash: it's anti-feminist, a 'symptom' of internalized misogyny. We're 'erasing' the women characters after all. Is slash homophobic? Does slash fandom appropriate gay culture? Is it awesome and ennobling as it makes us happy in our panties, or is all that self-hatred bubbling just beneath the surface of our porn?)

2012 - Natural Woman (We've lamented the lack of strong, believable female characters (who dress appropriately). But now we have them: Gemma Teller and Audrey Parker; Salt and Haywire; we've got Bechdel-passing women who look like they can throw a punch. Still, most of them are in the sci-fi or action genre, so are we really seeing progress? And what are we doing with them, as fans?)

2012 - Don't Call It a Bromance (It's Just Canon) (TPTB are increasingly aware of slash, and bromance is regular fare on TV canon these days. Does overt bromance make the fic and art hotter or just vanilla? Is there an anti-slash backlash in our shows? Is the emphasis on men's relationships making women disappear? Inquiring minds want to know. If you have answers, theories, or just want to squee, join in the fun!)

2014 - (The End of?) Ladybashing in Slashfic (Slashfic used to regularly feature bashing of female characters. Now, blatant bashing seems less fashionable. If you recognize this trend, let's talk! Were most ladybashing fics ones for juggernaut pairings in megafandoms, or were they everywhere? What's causing the change: more women in leading roles/ensemble casts, fic writers being more conscious to avoid bashing ladies even if they're not their favorites, more willingness to blame show writers' bad writing (instead of the character being just bad/evil/stupid) for bad female characters, or something else entirely?)

2015 - Fifty Shades of Fandom (Fifty Shades of Grey has become the representation of fan fiction in mainstream culture. It’s bad fan fiction, and it’s being used to ridicule women while making millions off women readers and viewers. Can we connect with these women: proto-fans who would love to read, and maybe write, great fan fiction if they found it? Can we use the FSoG phenomenon to expand our community? Does keeping our doors closed and our mouths shut perpetuate both monetization of our fan culture and misogynist scorn?)

2016 - Who Are We? (How do we define ourselves in this age of so many OT3s and team orgy pairings? Does m/m/f count as "slash"? Is slash-only space slipping away? (And would that be bad?) Do m/m and f/f belong together more than they do with m/f? Is "Media Fandom" a valid term any longer? Who are we if we start shipping het?)

2016 - Ladies Loving Ladies. (There would seem to be enough queer women in fandom to write/want more f/f. Do lesbians write f/f, m/m? Both? Do straight women? Or are we still missing the iconic female characters and relationships that create a great slash fandom? Did they figure out the answer to this question at TGIF/F and if so, what is it?)

2016 - By Us For Us (Fic, even kinky slash, is practically mainstream these days. The ebook revolution puts publishing within reach of almost anyone. Sundance hits have been filmed on iPhones. So why aren't fangirls making more media? Or is it happening right under our noses? Is this a place where our women's gift economy does our community a disservice? Discuss what's out there, what we'd like to see, and what's holding us back.)

2017 - LGBTQIA+ in Slash Fandom (Queer fans have always been here. In a subculture often defined as "for" straight women, what do we as fans have to say about non-straight, non-cis, and non-conventional sexuality and gender in fanfiction, in fandom, and in the larger culture?)

2018 - Confronting the Tensions Between Slash and Queer Representation (Slash fandom thrives on homoerotic subtext. Many queer fans are unwilling to settle for this quasi-representation. Part of every slash fandom seems loudly invested in their ship becoming canon. Some are queer fans who want actual textual representation in their favorite shows, and some are fans using queer politics to fight ship wars. Then the “slash is not activism” posts make the rounds. Is slash activism? Is advocating for slash ships in canon the same thing as advocating for queer representation?)

2018 - Representing Slashers (What does "representation" in the media mean to us? We know what more gay or POC representation means, but what about slash fandom, which is largely female and focused on bodies that don't resemble our own? Would better female characters in media better represent us? Or male characters written for a female audience? Come talk about the intersection of slash, personal identity, and media representation.)

2018 - Anonymity in Slash Fandom: Choosing to Hide (Why do the majority of slash fans hide their hobby? Is it fear of blackmail? Embarrassment? Fear of losing employment? How does this affect your happiness? How does this affect your security? What would an ideal world look like? Who would/have you told about your interest in slash? Who would you never, ever, tell?)

2019 - Fandom Post-Slash? (In an era of "ships" and #pairing #tags on Tumblr and AO3, has the "slash" label lost its meaning? Same-gender pairings are as popular as ever and fans still ID pairings with a virgule between the names, but how many fans still call m/m and f/f slash or femslash? How many fans identify as "slashers?" Het and slash were opposing binaries which few fans crossed. Are these barriers breaking down? What purpose has the term "slash" served? Has fandom moved

past it and, if so, what does that mean?)