#why do i have to write an essay about a couple of dumb disney channel movie franchises?? dont ask me

[deliciouspirateangel]

I kind of wanna know but also DON’T wanna know so don’t tell me. What peoples opinions of Mal vs Addison are??

Like they obviously have polar opposite attitudes which is fine bc they grew up in polar opposite situations

But Addison grew up incredibly privileged and basically her only struggle was hiding her natural hair color. And she didn’t even know what that meant for her so ?? it’s literally just based on optics. She’s oppressed for being too blonde. Literally everyone - humans, zombies, wolves, AND aliens - love her and think she’s cool. And her conflict all the way to the third movie is feeling like she doesn’t belong when she seems to fit in wherever she goes. My sister compared it to Mamma Mia like the whole “learning who you are has to come from within YOU, it doesn’t come from who you’re related to” but that’s clearly not the direction the film decided to take

Meanwhile Mal was forced to grow up on this shitty little island of villains and crime and poverty all bc some man in a castle hated her parents. And she only managed to escape bc some little prince made it his pet project to save the kids four at a time and decided to send her a golden ticket to Auradon. And the fans hate her bc she doesn’t assimilate to castle life right away

When you look at Mal vs Addison’s response to leadership roles it’s the polar opposite again, and I think Mal’s is so much more realistic and relatable. She’s suddenly in the spotlight in a way she never wanted, just bc of who she’s dating. She suddenly has to be ready to be a ruler when she’s still in the process of adjusting to her new life. People are thrusting all these huge life changing decisions on her and expecting her to make calls that affect the entire kingdom which is totally unfair and not her fault for feeling pressured to make certain decisions lol but it’s whatever

Meanwhile every time a new group of Halloween monsters rolls into town, Addison’s ready to slap on a new Party City wig and declare herself their leader. The whole “you guys seem to be doing fine on your own but my relative was a member of this group so I guess I’ll be your leader” Elsa Daenerys white hair white savior unchecked privilege of it all

But also Mal is demonized by the fandom for being power hungry all bc she didn’t want to turn her back on her people or the Isle where she spent 16/18 years of her life :| Make it make sense

[novelelitist]

Update

The news about banning the “girls” tag on Tumblr made its rounds on Twitter so I thought I’d pop by real quick.

I often wonder what happens/happened to creators I like, and given my history, it occurred to me that some people might actually think I’m dead. Which is not an invalid concern, and I appreciate your long-distant parasocial concern. Thanks for not wanting me RIP in peace’d. Those who DMed me since I’ve been gone and as I continue to be gone, you’re acknowledged and I appreciate you, too. This one’s for you, chickadees.

TLDR: you can bother me on Twitter or ask for my Discord handle if we’re moots. I’m still awkward at conversation though so go easy on me.

Personal(?) Update

Life changes, legally changing my first name, legally changing my gender marker to M (because my state doesn’t offer X but I’m going to badger them about it so I can hopefully get X instead). Situation still suboptimal and sucky. Who woulda thunk? I should be able to start HRT once I move out, though, and that’s something to look forward to.

Video Essay Coming SoonTM

I’m working on a massive Omegaverse video essay project through the lens of cultural imports/exports through the medium of comics. (Manga, manhwa, and manhua specifically.) It’s absolute hell. You should watch it when it’s done. The script is over 16,000 words. The essay is informative, funny, and extremely thorough literary criticism discussing Omegaverse and the subjects within it that interest me. 

I’ll share the video here when I’m done, too, and I’ll be formatting the script in a way that others can understand so I can share it in a readable format as well. I seriously doubt auto-captions will do it justice.

Why Omegaverse? Because I am completely fascinated by it even though I don’t like it and nobody’s presented it in a video format the way I want to yet. Ez.

It’ll be on the same YouTube channel as my Barbie video essay once it’s done. Should be done by the end of January. Here it is in all its incomplete glory. 

Game Updates & Fandom

Immediate access to me is best found via Twitter. I only got into using it recently for fandom-related things. It’s a small personal/otaku-adjacent twt but I’m trying to use it to associate with people more since I know people have worried about me and I’ve worried about them. (Moots, give me your twt so I can follow you there.) If you ever thought about commissioning me for FGO stuff, message me over there. I’m probably down, since I’m all in on FGO and GBF brainrot lately.

I’m still writing, though I’ve used most of my brain cells lately for the Omegaverse video essay. I have a conspiracy theory about Koyanskaya pinned to my twt right now that I’ll be putting on my AO3, too, probably, once it’s in coherent, complete sentences. 

I’ll also try to make myself share my other FGO writing I’ve been doing on AO3. It’s been rough since the whole “losing main friend group” thing. I still miss them and that environment a lot and it’s sore. My enthusiasm about my own work in all forms took a huge hit, as did my “ability to interact with others regarding things I enjoy.” (I made myself write today, here have my extremely thorough Koyanskaya theory.)

I’ve been totally stuck on this dumb Hello Kitty mobile game, too, Hello Sweet Days. My friend code there is djg2db. I’m not a whale, I just look like one, I swear. Sanrio is Japanese WDC and is therefore evil. Fuck Disney, btw.

Idk why Hello Sweet Days looks so weird when screenshots are saved to my comp when they were fine everywhere else but okay. Hello Sweet Days is a Sanrio-property qt outfit collector/community game someone else got me hooked on. Code is djg2db. 

And Granblue Fantasy is Granblue Fantasy. Which I still suck at. Use my support summons or do miserable 6D raids with me while I attempt to uncap Siete again. ID is 30825282.

Obligatory FGO Update

I have couple spaces on NA. If you want me to change supports for events etc, I have an extremely thorough Chaldea. Bug me via DMs here or on Twitter when you add me:

I have more spaces on JP because my account is still a sad sack. Again, bug me via DMs here or on Twitter when you add me:

Thorough update on all my Grailed servants because I have nobody to show off to:

Okay but will you ever exist again, 2D?

On here? Not sure. But I’m definitely not gone everywhere just yet. Come find me. :)

[dukeofriven]

Wither Tinkerbell? Part 1: Only 90s Kids Remember (KH liveblog)

I was doing a liveblog, wasn’t I, before the last week got so crazy I barely had the energy left to smash the reblog button. What was I liveblogging again?

*squints at hand* K... ka... Kangdamn Hats? Sure, I guess. Where did we leave off?

oh

Sora - for those who don’t remember, an idiot - surrenders to Captain Hook because Captain Hook has Tinkerbell in a lamp. That’s Tinkerbell, who Sora has had all of one(?) interaction with, if by interaction you meant ‘bystander’. Tinkerbell, whom Sora has no relationship with or reason to give a damn about. Sora, who has basically just been told where Riku has taken Kairi - his sole motivating factor for hours of this game - decides ‘Oh no not Tinkerbell of course I will surrender, even though there’s a paltry bullshit number of enemies here that I could take instantly.’

FOUR HEARTLESS AND ONE DUDE WHO IS JUST A DUDE WITH A SWORD AND A PROSTHETIC HAND WITH LIMITED FUNCTIONALITY! (”What about Smee you ask? Ha ha - Smee won’t do shit and you know it.) Sora, it must be recalled, has at this point fought an Ursula 1000 times his size, an Oogie Boogie the size of a skyscraper, Jafar imbued with ultimate cosmic power, and... some British dude with a  gun riding some kind of praying mantis? (It was not clear.) But here Sora’s like: “Oh, no, these are odds I cannot face. Not with poor sweet innocent... Tanker Ball, was it?” *Deep Breath* So I got a lot of messages over the last week, most of them about my Kingdom Hearts liveblog. Some of them were really complimentary and if I forgot to thank you personally please forgive me for doing so. Some were less complimentary. Some were what I might call, mmmh, ‘ornery’ or perhaps ‘snotty’ (Some messages were critical without being shitty - I’m not talking to you). You see, I had committed the grave sin of voicing an opinion about Kingdom Hearts without having first played everything in the series - indeed, I sometimes got the impression that I had committed some sort of sin by being born not already knowing the entire legendarium of Kingdom Hearts broader mythopoetic chronicle. At the very least, I was certainly not bringing enough nostalgic childlike wonder-reverence to the table to be able to judge the game ‘fairly.’ In this praxis, Kingdom Hearts - i.e. Kingdom Hearts I the first game - is beyond linear criticism: because any possibly flaw is explained or massaged away in subsequent works, any perceived flaws in the original are something on the order of temporal hiccups, mere quirks of chronological progression and best ignored. Like the Tralfamadorians, I should absorb Kingdom Hearts only as a holistic whole: as it is ‘complete’ in the future it is complete now, for all times are one time and past and future are only the observances of lesser mortals unenlightened enough to step without time. Let me offer a counter-proposal: THIS GAME BAD THIS IS A BAD GAME THE WRITING IS BAD, UNGOOD, AND BAD THE QUALITY I WOULD ASIGN TO THE WRITING OF THIS GAME IS ‘POOR.’ ON THE BADNESS SCALE OF NOT-GOOD, IT RANKS ‘BAD.’ IF ASKED TO OFFER A EXAMPLE OF A WELL-WRITTEN GAME, THIS WOULD NOT BE THE CHOICE THAT I WOULD MAKE

This is the scene that comes next:

Sora is made to walk the plank, Hook shits himself about the presence of the crocodile and buggers off, leaving Tink with Smee the Useless One. Peter then snatches Tink from his hand. It takes all of 10 seconds, and makes the entire point of the previous ‘surrender or Tink gets it’ moment as ephemeral as it is inconsequential. This game has a problem that I am starting to call ‘tension cul-de-sac’ - it’s when a scene introduces a problem or crisis that is resolved within the same scene, sometimes within the same cutscene. Tension is not allowed to grow or develop or have any impact beyond the moment - and frequently it’s undermined further by the game’s long and awkward pauses, it’s bad eyelines, or the intractable problem of lugging Goofy’s dumb ass across an entire game and trying to pretend anything can be given dramatic weight with that fucking clown. You know what, no, that’s unfair - let’s talk about A Very Goofy Movie for a moment. I wasn’t much of a Disney kid - to be a Disney kid generally required money, which we Did Not Have. The Disney channel sure didn’t air with any of the basic packages we could only sometimes afford, and you sure as shit didn’t get it as ‘the only channel we sort of got’ when we couldn’t afford it and had to rely on the aerial (look it up, children.) So I didn’t grow up watching the Disney channel. I am pretty certain that those times we did have the basic cable package it didn’t come with it - the Disney channel only came with the super fancy package with the 200 channels for middle class people with La-Z-Boy chairs. (Guys, you should know that I am old enough to remember the day when cable came to this country and the TV went past channel 29 for the first time - it was a literal event. The whole country had free cable for the first month or so, and for a least a month before cable went live the channels aired non-stop trailers of their future content, and it was so wild that you could could scroll for channel after channel and see something other than static. I feel so old.) Anyways, I wasn’t a Disney kid. As noted earlier I had a couple Disney movies, but I was taught pretty early on what a gross and shitty company Disney is - my mother was a poor progressive who did what she could to keep me woke, and I think it also helped her blunt any enthusiasm or ill-will I might have for never being able to go to Disneyworld. If I didn’t give a damn about Disney as a brand then that was a whole lot of merch we couldn’t afford that I didn’t want. (One day I will right a big old essay about how capitalism hurts poor kids with materialism, and why Pokémon, Disney, POGs™, Crazy Bones, and a whole lot of other 90s franchises predicated on mass purchases did so much to harm my self-esteem as a kid. But that’s not today.) No, I was a Looney Tunes kid, because they were A) Actually funny and had bite without being saccharine dribble B) aired on cheap channels, and C) outside of a weird trend of Looney Tunes in Hip-Hop clothing and that brief blip that was Space Jam, not highly marketed. But I did see A Very Goofy Movie. More than once - the library probably had it. I remember having righteous indignation about that movie. Goofy, who just wanted to have fun with his son, was treated like garbage, because Max was the worst kind of eye-rolling 90s teen who did not want to give a shit about anything that wasn’t ruthlessly contemporary. This scene?

MAN FUCK YOU, MAX! His dad was trying so hard and all Max could do was be a shit. I mean sure, I got what was getting under his collar: Roxanne was sweet and cute and who wouldn’t want to take her to a dance, and Pete had the world greatest god-damn RV, and Goofy’s verbal ticks can be somewhat grating - but for fuck’s sake, Max. As someone who often felt mortified by his father (my dad was the guy who would go tell older kids off if they were being BAD and kull wahad was that squirmingly mortifying) you’d think I’d have empathized with Max more but no - even as a kid I saw Max’s in-the-moment coolness desperation for the sad peacock display it was. (CONTINUED IN PART 2)