tragictaleofshikyou

[tragictaleofshikyou]

I'm late to this argument trend, but as for public art and its relation to public opinion, I believe that a certain amount of state-funded antisocial behaviour is morally necessary and good

[tragictaleofshikyou]

I feel sorry for the person who has this opinion because I can imagine becoming emotionally damaged and messed up after reading something and then getting resentful and angry that it has so much cultural merit and prestige, like the thing that made you feel like that is an overwhelming force that everyone bows down to

it's not a good outlook, but I think I understand it

every morning i'm forced to read some of the worst takes known to man. what on earth is this. where do i even begin with all the problems with this take?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

This has been repeated ad nauseum by now, but it keeps happening, so one chokes back the vomit and spits it out again: There's no guarantees in life except that a visual novel advertising itself as "unlike those other sex pervert oriental visual novels, this one actually has a plot and characters that feel like real people" and it's just Class of '09 three degrees to the left.

[tragictaleofshikyou]

This idea that "anything bad that happened to Japan" is its own 'fault' not the USA's is obviously a platitude that is made to sound nice rather than a real opinion, it's not as if the Enola Gay was staffed by Kwantung army officers. Committing repeated mass murder is always the killers' responsibility even if they had some kind of extenuating circumstance. They even decided not to strike Kyoto with a nuclear bomb to preserve heritage sites... how can you act like they had no autonomy?

You're the kind of thing that would have seen IJA massacres as "just a means to an end necessarily to defeat white imperialist colonialism" if you were there in that time

gee i wonder if fujimoto is trying to say anything political by having the statue of liberty turn into a grotesque gun-wielding monster in order to shoot a gigantic city-destroying bullet at japan

actually chainsaw man is just about some dude that really wants to touch boobs. dont read into this!

[tragictaleofshikyou]

Every star wars post is a reminder that copyright does nothing but oppress real art. Can you imagine what it'd be like if you could make your own star wars movie, if we had every idea fans had instead of the endless slop provided by the "owners" of an idea?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

for aesthetic reasons, I dislike the headline format that's two sentences packed together like "x is y. z happened"

the way the two sentences play off each other creates a really annoying kind of clickbait effect

[tragictaleofshikyou]

its like megalophobia but aesthetic

Maiden Outlook

[tragictaleofshikyou]

Seeing people heel-turn on the Fair Access to Banking Act because it's republican-sponsored and has text indicating that its intention is to make assorted far-right causes (or dogwhistles for them) more viable, but like as far as I can tell the actual provisions of the bill are straightforwardly good? Like, forcing credit card networks to be ~common carriers seems like a Good Thing. I have less intuition on what the provisions for banks and credit unions etc. would entail. What's the vibe, my assorted policy-brained mutuals?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

Yes, I think the inevitable conclusion of the uniqueness of chattel slavery is to make it harder to condemn other things/helps things 'escape the harshest judgment'

Using the same base word for chattel slavery as non-chattel slavery really papers over how qualitatively monstrously different they are

[tragictaleofshikyou]

Amnesia (the Otome game series) has fulfilled this! He's even an actual fairy-type being

I recognise that this may be a controversial opinion on the "everything is better when girls" website, but I feel like making the action-adventure game protagonist's obligatory tutorial/exposition-providing bratty little fairy companion a boy is underexplored territory.

[tragictaleofshikyou]

funny in a bad way that people behave exactly the way they do in all the robot oppression sf even after consuming the sf

this kind of attitude is genuinely frightening to me. the idea that humans have some special *humanity* inherent to us is most useful to people trying to justify violence to some kind of dehumanized Other. like who the fuck show up to a post about a trans allegory, one infamous for its visceral depiction of transmisogynistic violence, and start fantasizing about which fictional minorities they want to to kill. trans women are women you're ALLOWED to hit. we're women YOU'RE allowed to hit. do you fucking get it?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

I think Mishima saw the concept of the Tennō and the individual person of Hirohito as distinct, not in the way that an institution is distinct from an individual, but in the way that an embodied Kami is distinct from the human who embodies it on some level. I should probably look more into it, though...

I saw your reblog from a post talking about Yasunori Kato, and I've wanted to ask somebody who seems more familiar with Teito Monogatari about it since there's not a ton of talk about it in English-speaking spaces, the most I've learned about what was in the books comes from bits and pieces on TV Tropes.

I've heard that in the books, Kato was more of an affable character, capable of holding pleasant conversations and having more actual allies, whereas in the movies and anime he's far more serious and brutish, is that the case? Was he a more sympathetic character in the novels, or was the difference between his personality and actions meant to make him more of a monster in the eyes of the audience, since you say that the politics of the novels are far more reactionary than the adaptations? Either way, I would've liked to see Shimada's version have that personality, he's been the Japanese dub VA for Disney's Hades for a long time, so I think he could have pulled it off.

And about his backstory: On one hand, I've heard he's descended from the Ainu, but on the other I've also heard he's descended from Abe no Seimei or he's a reincarnation of Masakado, so which is it? Is it a Joker situation where he has an ambiguous backstory, or is it that multiple things are true?

When you said that Kato is sort of like Killmonger, that's exactly what I thought when I first learned about his novel backstory, I was like "oh he's like an 80's Marvel movie or DC villain who probably raises good points but then the character does something really heinous so the audience doesn't have to think about it too hard". His defeat by incest literally being wincest (albeit only being defeated temporarily) is so embarrassing I can't help but feel a little bad for him.

Hi! So (with the caveat that I have read a lot about the Teito monogatari novels in both English and Japanese, but have never been patient enough with my own Japanese reading level to get all the way through the series itself), I definitely wouldn't say that he's a completely unsympathetic characters in the books. The series is difficult to assess in part because the reader is supposed to like him more as a person than in most adaptations, yet his grudge against the Japanese state is also presented as less justified. In adaptations the sense is that Katō is almost an inexorable force rather than someone endowed with personality and volition, like the Furies in Classical myth or something; implicit in that is the acknowledgement that there are some pretty good reasons why Japanese history would produce something like this! With book!Katō the depiction is of a polite, principled, committed political extremist; the reactionary quality of the narrative is in the assumption that Katō's views are extreme or that they would naturally tend to produce the level of vindictive cruelty he shows. That, at least, is my interpretation.

(This also isn't to say that the books' politics are uninteresting; they differ from bog-standard Japanese rightism in some really arresting and shocking ways, such as--I am not making this up--depicting Hirohito as a cannibal who manages to stay Emperor for so long by eating human organs. (Mishima as well had an oddly poor opinion of Hirohito for someone who ostensibly died trying to restore power to him.) Also, to be fair to Aramata, I've heard in various places that he's become a lot more moderate with age.)

I think the backstory is indeed supposed to be a Joker-esque multiple-choice thing, and is vague and inconsistent on purpose; as you say, sometimes he's Ainu/Emishi or something similar, sometimes he's Taira no Masakado, sometimes he's trying to summon Masakado (who therefore has to be an at least partially different being), etc. Other characters openly speculate on where exactly he comes from. It might be worth mentioning in this context that before Aramata wrote the series he worked translating English fantasy literature into Japanese and was a protégé of the guy who translated Dracula; Stoker has a very similar way of writing about the Count's background and the nature of the threat he poses to British society.

[tragictaleofshikyou]

did I reblog this already> idk

precure deep fried

[tragictaleofshikyou]

after learning about The Accursed Share I see being a 'burden on society' as a good thing

saying “you are a burden on society” is just such a weird framing of priorities It’s like saying “wow, think how much better gas mileage your car would get if you weren’t sitting in it” or “think how dry that umbrella would be if you weren’t holding it in between you and the rainstorm”. the things we create? they’re for us. they are meant to carry us. they are meant to protect us. we are meant to hold them up to keep us dry. 

[tragictaleofshikyou]

Yeah this video is really hypocritical and stupid

it focuses so much on how it's bad that churches are spending money on spectacle and showmanship, not addressing that these aspects have always been part of religion and services, it's just like, this is inauthentic worship because it's modern and chaotic, unlike the real pure traditional worship. It's angry that churches aren't purely devoted to charity work, which has been a consistent thing since the middle ages (stained glass windows, stone carvings for example... look at Chartres)

also, why don't you make this complaint about movies and musicals etc.? The answer is definitely not because you're skeptical of religion. In that case, you would say, 'it's bad they are using these tactics for a bad cause!" It seems more like you are reverent towards one specific kind of religion and are intolerant of the other kinds.

it's exactly like when someone who did bad stuff gets people saying 'and they're also cringe' even tho its irrelevant

I might watch this youtube video about megachurches and their over the top theatrical stuff, but it presents it as being cringe, which seems like an untenable perspective. Isn't this just a modernized version of Baroque interior decoration?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

I might watch this youtube video about megachurches and their over the top theatrical stuff, but it presents it as being cringe, which seems like an untenable perspective. Isn't this just a modernized version of Baroque interior decoration?

[tragictaleofshikyou]

the song in the room with these blue entities is one of the best in the OST even though its so simple