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figmentjedi · 8 hours
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TODAY IS A HOLY DAY
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figmentjedi · 10 hours
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"Christ on a cracker" well actually I think you'll find Christ is the cracker. And also the wine. But you wouldn't know that you fucking protestant heathen
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figmentjedi · 15 hours
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Clifford (1994)
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figmentjedi · 1 day
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figmentjedi · 1 day
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the problem with mainstream fictional media today is it is predominantly made for people who don't like fictional media all that much
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figmentjedi · 2 days
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i'm sure people have sent you the answer 293 times already too but just in case, the water texture is a default photo filter on the tumblr photo editor!
WE HAVE A PHOTO EDITOR?
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figmentjedi · 2 days
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I think one of the things that gets lost in the big, endless internet conversation about whether or not heroes should kill their villains is the fact that killing villains off robs you of a lot of story-telling potential. The Joker died at the end of his debut story in Batman - imagine what Batman would be if he stayed dead. No Joker in Batman 66, no The Killing Joke which means no Barbara Gordon as Oracle and no The Dark Knight, no Mark Hamill Joker episodes of BTAS (so many of them were based on his comic appearances, after all - the laughing fish is a direct adaptation of a comic), which means no Harley Quinn and no Return of the Joker, on and on it goes.
Like, you can argue the morality of heroes sparing their villains till you turn blue - god knows this site does it at least a thousand times a day - but on a purely pragmatic story-telling level, the minute you kill ANY character, you kill all the story potential they had. And yeah, it's fiction, you can bring them back from the dead if you really need them, but that's a pretty hard story beat to pull off without hurting your story. You don't want to fill your tale with "Somehow, Palpatine has returned" moments.
And you can just make new villains, sure, but again you have a problem with that - a new villain has to establish themselves and has to stand out from who came before, which means you can't go directly to the storylines you could have had with a villain who stuck around AFTER their introduction. A recurring villain is capable of doing things that one-off villains can't.
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I'm going to illustrate this with a character from a fandom I'm not even a part of - I never played the Ratchet and Clank series and am only vaguely aware of it, but one day I saw a supercut of scenes starring one of its recurring villains, Dr. Nefarious, on twitter, and I was like "Oh shit, that's the guy who plays Quark on Deep Space Nine, isn't? This guys a hoot, let's see if we can find more clips on youtube." Which brought me to this hefty video here from one of the more recent games in the series.
And, like, as a person who "doesn't even go here," it's obvious this goofy little fucker has a history. His opening scenes have him ranting about how much it sucks to lose repeatedly - a lampshade on the "flaw" of a recurring villain, i.e. that their threat diminishes the more they come back because, by the nature of their role in the story, it means they've suffered a lot of losses. So how cool is it that as this supercut chugs along you can clearly see this is a theme of the game - that this is a story about the virtue of losing, a story that is enriched by having an antagonist who fans of the series know has lost a LOT?
The true antagonist is an alternate version of Dr. Nefarious who's won every fight in his life so far, apparently with little effort, and I love how they differ on a design aspect. They're both technically mad scientists, but notably, Emperor Nefarious, the winner, has a more imposing and "heroic" build, but a smaller brain-dome for his robot brains. Because winning may make him look strong, but if a mad scientist's real power is their mind, well, which Nefarious is really the strong one here then?
Dr. Nefarious gets this juicy arc about realizing the virtue in his repeated failures that corresponds with the heroic characters struggling to find a way to win against a seemingly invincible opponent, as well as contrasts the true villain, Dr. Nefarious's explicit counterpart and foil Emperor Nefarious, who has never once lost and is a total piece of shit for it. Again, not my fandom, I don't go here, not an expert on Ratchet and Clank, but even as a relative stranger to it who's just watching a big supercut, I fucking love this. This is an excellent story.
And it's one you can only tell with a recurring villain. Without Dr. Nefarious, this story works significantly less. You need a villain with a history the audience has seen to really sell this.
Anyway, I made this post because, ironically enough, I saw another tweet talking about how some fans think Dr. Nefarious should have been killed off in his first appearance, and, like... that's just fucking baffling to me, as a person outside this fandom looking in. Recurring villains deserve more love, man, they give us so much.
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figmentjedi · 2 days
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downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
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followed by
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is such a funny sequence
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figmentjedi · 2 days
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figmentjedi · 2 days
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love leopard seals. they are so dragon coded. that is an entire mammalian marine wyrm
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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ITS THIS THING TUESDAY
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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Kaiju Week in Review (March 17-23, 2024)
Mere days to go before a new Godzilla movie... didn't we just do this?
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Before we welcome that latest entry, let's look back on one that just commemorated its golden anniversary. With Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla turning 50 on March 21, every member of Toho's Big Five has now hit the half-century mark. The company didn't mark the day itself with much; as has become typical, the celebration of Mechagodzilla (and presumably King Caesar) will be spread throughout the year. I wrote a bit about the magnificent machine, who I consider the best Godzilla antagonist, here. The film itself is one of Teruyoshi Nakano's masterpieces, an onslaught of animated rays and gorgeous explosions. The humans are forgettable, but they keep the pace brisk—and the alien commander Mugal is almost as devilish a villain as Mechagodzilla itself, especially in the English dub. Speaking of that dub, you can watch a video breaking down the entire voice cast here, thanks to the tireless work of the Save All Dubs! group.
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Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong #6 finally gets to the good stuff, with Lex Luthor piloting Mechagodzilla and commanding an army of Titans to raze Metropolis while the heroes counter with not one but two giant robots. It doesn't quite measure up to the Godzilla: Rulers of Earth finale, but like that double-sized issue, it required two artists (Christian Duce joined by Tom Derenick) to draw all those characters, and the results are impressive. The story hasn't grown any more complex, but I'm at least interested to see how it all wraps up.
In other Godzilla comic news, a Godziban manga by Sakuju Koizumi has started up, hosted by Telemaga, a tokusatsu-focused Kodansha site. The first installment was pretty short, so I'm guessing these'll be updated weekly. It isn't the first comic version of Godziban, as one called Godziman ran during the 1st Season, but this one's actually illustrated.
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Tokyo's Ikebukuro district made Godzilla the honorary chief of police on March 16 to take part in a parade promoting traffic safety. The stunt made international headlines and generated no small amount of angst over Cop Godzilla. I think Gamera would've been better-suited to this campaign myself.
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Here's the trailer for Season 2 of Chibi Godzilla Raids Again, revealing Gabara, Gigan, and Titanosaurus's designs. Looks as funny as the first one. Maaya Uchida, who sang the ending songs in SSSS.Gridman and SSSS.Dynazenon, will voice Chibi Minilla. It's gone weirdly neglected by English Godzilla social media accounts, but X user @MakoMattari translated it.
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The Music Box Theatre in Chicago has a Godzilla program for the ages scheduled for June 7-13, in honor of his 70th birthday. There's not a weak day on the schedule, but the clear highlight is a 24-hour marathon of the entire Showa series on the 8th, which I don't think has ever been attempted before.
G-Fest has also started announcing guests: Ayako Fujitani (Asagi in the Heisei Gamera trilogy) and Rie Ota (Baragon in GMK), both first-timers. Frankly, they could carry the con themselves if they have to; not sure who I'm more excited to meet!
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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The crew of a massive container ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday warned of power issues before the collision, which caused the bridge to collapse into the frigid Patapsco River, officials said.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the warning from the ship’s crew likely saved lives.
“We’re thankful that between the mayday and the collapse, that we had officials who were able to begin to stop the flow of traffic so more cars were not on the bridge,” Moore said. He called those officials heroes.
Moore noted that the bridge was up to code at the time of the collapse. He said the collapse was a “shocking and heartbreaking” event for the people of Maryland who have used the bridge for 47 years.
(continue reading)
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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On the third anniversary of the Suez Canal incident, no less.
(Source)
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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Godzilla Minus One sent the Godzilla Attack Truck roaming the streets of Japan, now Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has Godzilla swimming through the River Thames (and Kong... attacking a phone box). One of the best stunts I've seen for any of these movies.
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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COME ON AND SLAM!
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figmentjedi · 3 days
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I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and "Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. "And as a rule," said he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever.... Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow--fzt!--wow!"
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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