The World Food Program announced it is ending general assistance to northwest Syria. Syrians get little aid in general and are at risk en mass of food insecurity.

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Some prose for the Palestine strike.

if there is, against all odds, another sts movie, i sort of need aiolia lurking in the background throughout as a mild-mannered, friendly, helpful, soft-spoken, put-upon guy in clark kent glasses as an adaptation of his role in the series before he pulls loose the Rage Valve and reveals himself as the terminator. god bless the duality of his character

saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya saint seiya

this is where im at sorry

i fucking love saint seiya wtf

oh, i completely forgot that i actually managed to finish ep1 in that ancient, hilarious, doomed attempt to do a speedy reread of umineko. I Got Farther Than The Failure Associated In My Memory Sticker.jpg

overwhelming feeling as i half-consciously blarhgh my way through old posts to append tags: man i sure wrote a lot about pointless shit

word vomit

life

i guess this works

do you mind explaining exactly what's going on in episode 6 of umineko irt chick beato? reading it felt kind of icky bc of all the kinzo metaphors but im not sure if im reading it correctly? and when beatrice is talking to herself how does this relate to yasu? im stupid

no, the ick is the correct reading

chick beato is functioning in two primary ways: she herself, in a vacuum, is simply a compartmentalized, isolated personification of yasu's feelings of love for battler that happened in reality (so, this 'aspect' of beatrice that was born when yasu made the decision to shift the love for battler from shannon to beatrice to separate it from her daily human existence). however, on the level of the meta narrative in the 'present', what yasu 'created' in this way, so to speak, is also utilized to create a parallel to kuwadorian beatrice and kinzo with battler.

i get what ryukishi was trying to do, and there are elements of it that might have seemed clever on paper, but yeah, not a super big fan of that choice either in several ways. i get it, and i appreciate the temptation of seeing kinzo through a romanticized lens being a part of yasu trying to process everything and how agonizing it all was, but i also don't really need or want to see an obvious wink-wink parallel of a father-daughter abuse/denial of personhood situation that culminated in rape and death result narratively in celebration and happy marriage play out in the "real-time" story, either.

i'm totally willing to say that i think ryukishi goes too sympathetic with kinzo overall, especially in regards to this, unfortunately, and it's a scar upon the fabric of umineko as a whole.

i’m gonna do it. i’m gonna try to clena up some of my tags. i don’t even know what to use for a universal umineko tag though. something hopefully no one will actually find or stumble across randomly. or at all. i am not here

A... terrible question (sorry!): Between Hanyuu, Featherine and Eua, who do you think is the most compelling between the three. That being said, I'm willing to say that Hanyuu is probably the least compelling out of the three due to... how WTF her mentality is. I mean, "I want Rika to be saved from June 1983" but then says "why so sad about dying? you'll live in another loop" but when she finally lives through it, then basically says "the looping power is a mistake", for one thing.

hanyuu is a bad person and, i think, a pretty badly written character, but at least there's something there to sink your teeth into in terms of her personal selfishness and passivity, her true priorities versus her stated ones, and how truly toxic that wound up being for rika. hanyuu's flaws were not handled with the gravity and nuance i would have liked, but at least they are there and they can be discussed. she's still a character.

are... are featherine and eua characters? what am i looking at. what are their thought processes. what are they dealing with. b-boredom as a witch. well, ok.

featherine and eua aren't characters so much as they're demonstrations for us to better understand the power of authorship and the boredom of witches, respectively, i think.

so i guess it'd still have to be hanyuu!

In EP 4, when Lambda says meta-Ange is not the real Ange, but just a witch's pawn, you suggest this is Ange learning that she's a fictional character. I know you chalk a lot of the meta up to being very fluid, but could you elaborate more on how it works and what the characters inhabitating it are really? Souls in the afterlife, fictional constructs, or something else?

"what the characters inhabitating it are really?"

i actually really truly can't! as soon as you say "what are they really" the question becomes self-defeating and basically unanswerable.

i think i've elaborated on how i basically regard the meta before, ten million years ago and beyond, as being largely intuitive and impossible (and undesirable) to truly concretely pin down, though it has its own space and its own emotional continuity, but if you put five shotguns to my head, i'd say - they're figures of narrative, which i would distinguish from simply being "fictional constructs."

it doesn't feel right to me to say they're "souls of the afterlife" because there's an underpinning of umineko about a person's genuine soul, a genuine personhood, being impossible to capture in a single narrative or linear perspective, and this informs how their roles vary according to the needs of the gameboard, even down to the golden land itself, an obviously idealized space for everyone involved. but "fictional constructs" also feels too dismissive and belies the emotional weight and struggle we see even "piece-Ange" wrestle with. narrative shapes reality and all that - i think it's almost impossible for most humans to not filter reality through a narrative lens on some level, and in the case of ange, much of her struggle with lambda's temptation was about the option of sort of. the word escapes me. taking over beatrice's gameboard to center herself, or accepting her role in the "narrative" as a sacrifice to emotional spur assigned-protagonist battler onward.

the genuine internal life and sometimes agency of the pieces as such, struggling with their places within narrative, is what allows rika who is described as originally being a piece under the control of a game-master to ascend as a witch. but, that's still different from suggesting they're literally the souls of the real breathing human beings who died in the rokkenjima explosion, somehow actually literally put under the control of yasuda sayo in a magic purgatorial space.

even struggling to describe it as such feels insufficient and reductive, though. very deep and complicated, i tell you. lights pipe, kicks back in chair. falls over in chair and gets concussion, never speaks again.

Have you played Higurashi Mei? Umineko collab story just came out for some time now, so it's kinda exciting... though I'm not really expecting much from a gacha game collaboration story. ...At least I got to see Kanon and Beato in the game's artstyle, I suppose.

i honestly have not really paid attention at all to higurashi mei beyond glancing at bern's cameo and smiling a little at the dialogue text unnecessarily cementing the rika-bern link further, but kanon-kun content is always Extremely Welcome

So, this whole bit about Beato needing to be acknowledged as a witch in these games, do you think when the pieces go against Beato on the gameboard that she's written them to act like that, or does she genuinely have to convince them to acknowledge her before she can control them?

the acknowledgment rule is less about the pieces directly all acknowledging her and more, how to put it, about the general rule of her existence she's trying to make battler understand. the pieces themselves don't actually matter to beatrice anymore, they're all dead, and whatever happens to them and whatever they decide, the laid rule is that everything gets reset after two days anyway. however, beatrice's existence depends on the wider world acknowledging the possibility of her as a witch causing the wider rokkenjima incident.

so i think it's better to think of the acknowledgment rule as less about a concrete goal in regards to the gameboard on rokkenjima and more understanding yasu's mindset about her desperation to be validated and cover up what she sees as her ugly, unacceptable truth with a preferable fantasy.

Can you talk about Beatrice's character development? I feel like that often gets overshadowed by Yasu, even though how she changes throughout her games with Battler is super fascinating as well.

beatrice's development through the meta arc is golden but i'm not sure i'd really separate it from yasu, per se, since i at least see meta-beatrice proper as basically a relatively straightforward continuation of yasu. it's pretty clear that she's basically Just Yasu On A Higher Plane (however you want to translate that for yourself: fiction, purgatory, meta, what have you) who has immersed herself into the power and persona of the beatrice role for battler's benefit, still trying to reach him.

but yes, the roller coaster she goes through in her approaches to battler and her temptations to abandon her goals in favor of a shallow, fantasy-based relationship with him, and then struggling with the reality of her defeat, are wrenching and fascinating and deeply human. it's just that when we get a sense of her internal struggle and genuine emotional processes behind the bluster, i usually associate it/assign it mentally to 'yasu' as opposed to a separate category for beatrice. but that's just my mindset!

Higurashi characterization that I honestly missed aside from Tatarigoroshi Keiichi is Meakashi Shion, Watanagashi/Meakashi and Tsumihoroboshi Rena. They were the absolute best, but hardly around in later eps. GouSotsu reduced Rena to being the "crazy killer" or the screaming innocent helpless girl. Shion... well, anyone seen her these days? Also the Mion killing Shion by choking scene was extremely in Wataakashi was so out of place to me given the sheer rage Meakashi Shion had towards Sonozakis.

wataakashi was the absolute funniest shit in terms of a golden chance to properly develop mion's character and mindset (which have always been ripe with incredible potential) falling into the writers' lap and then that is what they come up with. yeah, could have missed the incomprehensible "shion crying and shaking so hard she somehow drops her weapon and trips straight into mion's chokehold" though.

sonozaki mion, not even once

What are your thoughts on Onikakushi-hen?

really genuinely excellent self-contained horror experience