#I love that this episode has more context than 2001 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

actualcoolbugfacts · 1 year

Text

✨cool bug facts's✨

It's Megatron's birthday!!!!

This is Megatron from Transformers: Micron Legend, the English name for the show is Transformers Armada. He is designed after a stag beetle. He kickstarted my spiral into obsession with entomology.

Technically, we don't know when his birthday is, but we do know that December 1st is the birthday of the Megatron seen below.

He is not designed after an insect, but he is very cool.

I want to talk about Micron Legend Megatron's design. Firstly, he is not a moose or reindeer. Thrust at one point says "I told you not to call me that, you stag beetle." and Hotshot refers to him as a 'stag beetle head' (they do not call him this in the English dub).

Secondly, his left hand resembles a female stag beetle's, being very large and having very sharp fingers, while his right hand looks like the rest of the character's hands.

Thirdly, he has an abnormally small head, like a female stag beetle, while he has the mandibles of a male stag beetle.

In the sequel series, Superlink (Energon in the English dub), he is entirely based off a female stag beetle (besides the fact that he doubled in height since the last series).

He is a very cool Megatron.

Other cool Megatron's include;

G1 Megatron 1984

Thoughts about him;

If I remember correctly, in 'The Secret of Omega Supreme', it's said that he was built to be machine of destruction, to think about nothing but destroying anything that stands in his path. Does that mean he can't properly think for himself?

In episode 16 of season 3 'Webworld', he goes to therapy, gets some awful therapists who are essentially going to kill him and then give him a new processor as it's the only way to cure him. He manages to escape and then blows up their planet.

Edit from several days later, December 9th 2022 (this was posted on December 1st 2022).

It was not the secret of Omega Supreme that said that, that was said in 'The Five Faces of Darkness', which is a 5-part series that starts off season 3.

G2 Megatron 1993

Thoughts about him;

Underappreciated. He's just a little bit ugly but he deserves some love too. He can't get any love from Kiloton anymore, as he's dead.

Also he's apparently in a relationship with this guy called Kiloton, you don't really see him much in the comics, his name isn't even said, but he caused Megatron to start a second war, this time on the humans, after they killed him. He also doesn't get enough love.

Speaking of Kiloton, the Megatron who's birthday it is? In one comic he was shown in a bar showing off his poetry to this guy called Impactor. It would later be stated that Impactor's old name was Kiloton.

Beast Wars Megatron 1996

Thoughts about him;

As much as it may have already been said about him, I would like to reiterate that he is Barney the dinosaur. If not, then a relative of Barney the dinosaur.

His voice actor (David Kaye) would go on to voice beetle Megatron in the English dub of Micron Legend. By voicing Optimus Prime in the 2007 series Transformers: Animated, He would become the first voice actor to have voiced both Megatron and Optimus Prime in their career.

He is also referred to as the Queen by a character called Inferno, which makes for one of my favorite lines from the franchise.

(For context, Dinobot left the Predacons at the start of the series, and has now returned to them for the time being.)

Megatron: Inferno, aid Quickstrike.

Inferno: Yes, my queen.

Dinobot: I was not aware you had given yourself a new title.

Car robots/Robots in Disguise Gigatron/Megatron 2001

I'm including him in the Megatron section, despite the fact that he's called Gigatron in the original dub, because the English dub is more popular than the Japanese dub, meaning he is more recognized as Megatron than Gigatron. I will be referring to him as Gigatron as I haven't watched the English dub.

Thought about him;

He's kind of plain? But I still enjoyed watching him do stuff. Just causing a little bit of mayhem for no good reason. And I also just love his personality. He has issues and I lowkey kind of relate. Not to the whole killing people to get what he wants, but him just trying not to lose it while broadcasting to a bunch of people about how he's going to blow up a dam but it keeps not working so he keeps having to call Gel-Shark (English name; Skyebyte) to find out what's happening.

Also, there was an episode where he put on drag and then got catcalled by an Autobot who didn't recognize him.

Unicron trilogy Megatron/Galvatron 2004

This is the same guy as beetle Megatron, from Micron Legend's sequel series Superlink, which came out in 2005. His new name is Galvatron. In the English dub he isn't called Galvatron until he gets an upgrade that turns him purple.

Thoughts about him;

As previously stated, he is designed after a female stag beetle despite being referred to as a man. I am in full support of this.

He also has this guy called Shockfleet (English name; Mirage) that nicknamed him 'Gal-sama'. 'Sama' being a Japanese honorific for someone you worship.

He's very silly. Goofy, might I add.

This is Master Megatron from the third series in the trilogy, Galaxy Force, which came out in 2006.

Thoughts about him;

He isn't a stag beetle. I am fuming.

He looks like he's wearing a crop top and cowboy pants with overalls. And he has these spiky goth knee-high boots on.

The reason why his left arm is so wack-looking is because he's powerlinked with Dark Ligerjack, who is essentially his cat that attaches to his left arm.

Dark Ligerjack's name sucks so I called him Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Ravenway every time I had to refer to him.

Transformers IDW1 Megatron 2005

That's this guy. Happy birthday my guy.

He is very cool. If you can, I would very much recommend that you read the IDW series, specifically the one that ran between 2005 to 2018. Just to differentiate because there is a recent IDW series that came out in 2019. The series is very long and therefore expensive, so there is a good chance that someone would not be able to read it. And if they can they will probably get lost trying to figure out which comic they're supposed to be on. Just skip Spotlight: Arcee, that story was retconned, and is very offensive.

Thoughts about him;

This may start a fight, but you are not supposed to forgive him for everything he's done just because he went to therapy and made a vow to never kill anyone again. He says this himself, that it may be cruel, but with everything he's done, and the billions of people he's killed, he deserves to be executed. You're supposed to feel sympathetic towards him though, and you are supposed to feel sad when he dies. But you never even think about the people who he killed because you never had a chance to get to know most of them, because even with how long this series is, it isn't long enough to tell the stories of billions of people. Someone's life is much longer than the amount of time it takes to kill them. Not to mention the brutal ways in which he killed them. The comics, I feel, make it known that you shouldn't forgive him, and frequently remind you about the things he's done, while still making you understand what his viewpoint and what his mental health was like to cause him to spiral.

And it all leads back to that the Functionist council should have never existed in the first place. While most people that the council ruined the lives of didn't turn out like Megatron, a lot of them died or were forced to live in awful conditions, and the one's that did protest would be greatly overshadowed by the actions of Megatron, essentially making it so that those people had to join his murder spree to even feel like they are free. But trapped in the echo chamber that was the Decepticon cause at this time, I would argue they weren't really free. Megatron could kill any of them at his whim, and he would, and he has.

He came to a point where all sentient live besides his own had no meaning to him. His actions eventually caught up to him, and with that, he realized that he isn't someone who can be expected to mingle with the people who he's hurt without them complaining or being scared of him.

And he somehow accepted that better than some people who read these comics.

Anyway very cool Megatron.

Transformers Animated Megatron 2007

Thoughts on him;

Haha jet go brr

To me, he just kind of feels like the default Megatron. I like him and all, but he feels a bit too generic. I really don't have that much to say about him.

Prime Megatron 2012

To be honest, Prime is one of the few shows I haven't watched yet.

He looks silly though/affectionate.

Earthspark Megatron 2022

To be honest I haven't watched that many of the newer shows/comics, so I'm skipping to Earthspark.

Thoughts about him;

Only 10 out of 26 episodes have come out, so I can't say very much about him. But I do feel hopeful that they are going somewhere good with his storyline.

I will point out, his storyline is a pretty heavy-handed jab at police brutality and jail conditions, but it is a nice surprise for the fact that this show aired on Nickelodeon.

Also, and this may controversial, but when I first saw him, both me and my brother (doux-mirages) talked about how he's the ugliest Megatron.

He is a very cool Megatron though.

76 notes · View notes

shihalyfie · 1 year

Note

Hi! recently I read your post about differences you had spotted in the japanese fandom and you mentioned how some people said that tamers wasn't female audience friendly. I don't know if you know why?

(Also I love your blog btw)

Thank you so much! I hope I didn't give the wrong idea (I can't find the specific post but I'm hoping I didn't word it wrong) but it was just one comment I saw that made me think about it a lot; I don't think this is necessarily an opinion beyond just that person, it's just that when I saw it it really stuck out to me and made me really spend time pondering why someone would think that way.

To be more specific, the situation was that an Adventure fan who'd gotten back into it and 02 because of Kizuna brought up Tamers and said they were interested in it, and the commenter said that it was a good series (they were still recommending it, they weren't trying to dissuade!) but warned that it was "more obviously oriented towards a male audience" than the Adventure series (the exact word was 一層男向け).

So I think some specific context about this incident also helps to explain further; it's rather significant that it was said to be potentially less female audience friendly than Adventure-branded works, which were used as a comparison point because the explanation was originally for someone who had never seen anything else besides that. In this case, I think it's less so that Tamers is that female audience-unfriendly as much as the Adventure series is actually considered to be surprisingly female audience friendly for a shounen series of its kind; of course, it still is ultimately made and marketed more for young boys, but it ended up infamously getting a much larger female audience than you'd have expected. The girls having their feelings fleshed out in detail and not constantly having a red arrow on them as The Girls™ of the Group (I think you know what I mean by this) -- something really not very common in shounen anime from 1999-2001 (even now it's not that common) -- made them very relatable to the female audience. And on top of that, you had things like Yamato or Ken infamously being a lot of girls' first love.

And then, well, let's put it this way: it is generally understood that most adult anime fans who made gay fan comics and fanart at the time were female, and so naturally Taichi/Yamato and Takeru/Daisuke got very popular among this crowd. Note the reason why it's Takeru/Daisuke in particular: Ken didn't join the group as an ally or even have a particularly deep interaction with Daisuke (other than episode 8) until halfway into the series, but by that time there were already people enthusiastically churning out gay fanwork with Daisuke and Takeru before anything significant in the series had happened because they were ready for them to be the next Taichi and Yamato. (Obviously, you know how the series actually went, but hindsight is 20/20.) So you had doujinshi artists making and selling gay comics at events, and magazines like Animage and Animedia (generally considered to have a high female reader population) were flooded with subtext-filled gay fanart submissions.

Even now, you can see the subtle acknowledgment that they know Adventure has a ton of adult female fans, given tri. stuff being in the female audience-oriented magazine Otomedia, as well as the tri. stage play even existing at all. (Anime tie-in stage plays are very associated with female audiences, and in fact the actors for the Digimon one even pointed out they had an unusually gender-neutral audience compared to what they were used to.)

So when you look at Tamers in comparison, it's not that it's necessarily giving a cold middle finger to its female audience as much as it's clearly got a lot fewer of the above factors and is more concerned about appealing to the main target of boys, hence the description "more obviously oriented towards a male audience". For instance, fundamentally speaking, Ruki was made to be a "strong" character because they wanted her to appeal to boys (presumably to include ones that wouldn't like "girly-girls"). Now, the good thing is that Ruki ended up becoming important representation for girls who also felt similarly out of place with being pigeonholed as "girls", and I'm not saying Adventure and 02 couldn't have also used some of that too, but keep in mind that the entire development of Ruki's state of mind in this respect has been credited to female writer Yoshimura Genki. I think it's very possible that, in the hands of a different writer, Ruki could have easily fallen into the trap of what I call the "Strong Female Character" Fallacy, which is when you make a female character who's good at violently beating things up but is portrayed more like an object to be cool and hot for the boys than she is a human being because they don't actually bother to pay any respect to her own feelings. (Unfortunately very common with male-oriented works.)

I'm getting off-track here, but my point is that while Adventure and 02 were fundamentally made for boys first, they did have a lot of elements that easily appealed to the female audience and seem to have been outright conscious of the female periphery demographic, perhaps unusually so for shounen anime at the time, whereas Tamers was much less conscious of that and focused more on elements that boys would like, such as plotlines about strength and less on more sentimental things (and there probably really could be something to be said about that kind of attitude's relationship with toxic masculinity, but I don't think we're ready for that conversation, nor do I think the final product went so far in that direction it has nothing sentimental going for it at all or anything).

That said, I can't emphasize enough that this was ultimately one fan's opinion on the Internet, and the reason I ended up resonating with it a bit is that I did at least notice that Adventure and 02 do seem to have a much higher ratio of female fans than Tamers does and thought it would be worth considering why (in fact, even Frontier has come off to me as having a larger ratio of female fans than I've noticed with Tamers). While this might be a bit provocative of a thing to say, I also do get the impression that most of my bad experiences with a certain type of Tamers fan that gets super condescending about its superiority over every other series also does seem to have a suspicious amount of overlap with a certain kind of toxic dudebro fan. However, and I'll put this in bold because it's important, I do not personally believe Tamers being more oriented towards a male audience inherently makes it unfriendly to a female audience. There are a lot of female Tamers fans, including people who are likely reading this post, and ones who found deep connection and meaning with many of the elements in Tamers, and in fact it's a fallacy to conclude that a girl or boy would necessarily like or dislike something (that would be exactly the kind of sentiment that Ruki was trying so hard to work against, after all). Digimon is a shounen series, but at the time Adventure through Frontier originally aired, they aired on the same day as magical girl anime Ojamajo Doremi, so there were a lot of girls (and boys!) who would watch both. Female audience-oriented, male audience-oriented, that's all subjective, and in fact it probably only really matters when it comes to toy sales and capitalism, but that ship's sailed a long time ago. And meanwhile, here I am, as a female fan who likes Tamers myself, so it certainly hasn't turned me off!

#that-is-tat-o #shiha's ask box #I have gotten other asks that I need to answer but I'm prioritizing this one since I'm worried about potential misunderstandings #I'm sorry to everyone else and will get to those when I can!#digimon multi series talk

43 notes · View notes

adultswim2021 · 6 months

Text

Superjail #9: “Dream Machine” | November 23, 2008 - 11:45PM | S01E08

Everyone say hello to Superjail! This episode is a fun one, and I consider it “nice” as well. In this one, the Warden starts having a very scary nightmare that the inmates are going to overthrow the prison. So, he decides to attach his Wonderful Wubulous dream machine to all the inmates' heads in order to monitor their psyches. The Warden goes crazier and crazier, in part due to the mischievous twins being bad with it. The episode more-or-less devolves into a big old wacky dream-world battle, with dreams within-dreams, animation style changes (at least one, anyway!) and a fun ending that I couldn’t believe I forgot all about.

The Warden’s suspicions extend to his staff, featuring a memorable moment where he looks at Jailbot’s dreams, who just wishes he were human and that the Warden was his dad. Right? That’s what happens, I think. I didn’t take very good notes for this episode and then I forgot I didn’t actually finish this write-up, so I’m going off the dome for this, one day later. Anyway, Jailbot’s dream is in CGI. Jarred dreams he’s a big guy and that the Warden is little. …A little GAY that is! THE TWO DUDES KISS! Cool!! Alice’s dreams that the Warden is a bug and says “quit bugging me”. Alice's lines are a part of the show that I routinely forget to talk about as being good. Allow that last sentence to get me off the hook about that for a while.

The Dream Machine is based on The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the Women, a film I remember watching during the pandemic. It was a time when I literally would watch 2-4 movies in a single day, and I remember very little from it other than the iconic costumes and sets that I actually remember from before I saw the movie, when I'd randomly come across stills for the movie and think "that movie looks great. I should watch it", so it’s almost like I never watched it.

There’s probably a second-or-third-hand Luis Buñuel reference I could have jammed in here somewhere. Did you know that every time a person has a dream that is revealed to be inside of another dream it’s a reference to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie? Probably not really, but every time it happens in a movie, somebody on IMDB will edit the trivia section (under “connections”) saying it’s an intentional reference to this. At this moment, nobody has done this for the Superjail episode “Dream Machine”. Please don't!

This is a fun one, but I regretted not doing druuuuuuuuugs for it. I should have eaten one of those dollar bills covered in fentanyl that cops love so much. I wish I drank a big thing of poison for this episode. It would’ve been so badass.

MAIL BAG

@snusuwiwjs writes:

Have you read any of the Space Ghost comics released from 1997 to 2001? I found them to be pretty good, especially the one where Space Ghost and Brak get invited to an awards show.

I haven't, but I MIGHT! I think I have a couple. Every single comic book ever made is easily findable online, so maybe I'll give those a look soon, and MAYBE I will refer to them in some context during my next SPACE GHOST WEEK.

It is probably nice of me to remind everyone that when this calendar year of Adult Swim reviews is over, I will be tackling the 1999 episodes of Space Ghost, then when I finish 2009 I'll probably do the GameTap episodes. Haven't figured out what I'll do after that, but maybe it'll be nice?

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #superjail

6 notes · View notes

the-rewatch-rewind · 1 year

Text

New episode! Script below the break

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most-watched movies in 20 years. Today I will be talking about #38: MGM’s 2001 comedy Legally Blonde, directed by Robert Luketic, written by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith based on a novel by Amanda Brown, and starring Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, and Selma Blair.

Legally Blonde is the story of Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon), who thinks her boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) is about to propose, but instead he dumps her because he thinks she’s too frivolous for him. So to prove him wrong, Elle gets into Harvard Law School, which is where Warner is headed, but when she arrives she finds that he has already gotten engaged to another law student, Vivian (Selma Blair), who fits into the law school scene much better than Elle does, at least at first. After many setbacks, Elle starts to realize that she’s actually more interested in becoming a lawyer than winning back her boyfriend.

I still vividly remember the first time I was made aware of this movie. I happened to walk into the room where my mom was watching it, and she was at the scene in the restaurant when Elle thinks Warner is about to propose, and I thought it looked like the worst movie ever, and I immediately left in disgust. At some point around then I also saw part of the trial scene as an example of how courtrooms are portrayed on screen, but I don’t think I put together that they were from the same movie. Once I actually gave Legally Blonde a chance and sat down and watched the whole thing, I absolutely loved it. The first time I watched it was in 2006, and I saw it five times in that year alone, and then three times in 2007. After that I calmed down a bit, and watched it once each in 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020. So I’ve seen it 15 times, and over half of those were just in 2006 and 2007. I think it’s appropriate that my first impression of Legally Blonde turned out to be so inaccurate because that’s basically the theme of this movie: so many people misjudge and underestimate Elle, and she proves them all wrong in an extremely satisfying way, just as the movie turned out to be far more intriguing and powerful than it appeared from that one out of context scene. This was a good and important lesson for me to learn as a teenager, and I really do feel like this movie helped me become a less judgmental person overall.

Given my emphasis in the previous episodes on how much I love that Mary Poppins and Emperor’s New Groove don’t have romantic storylines, it may seem strange to immediately pivot to a romantic comedy, but Legally Blonde is no ordinary rom com – in fact, I’m not convinced it even is a rom com. Though the story begins romantically, with Elle focused on marrying Warner, as it progresses the romantic aspect becomes less and less important. Watching Elle realize that she doesn’t have to just be the trophy wife of a successful man, which was the only future she’d been able to see for herself before, is beautiful. And while there are some romantic elements to the rest of the story, the movie places just as much, if not more, emphasis on friendship than romance, something I personally would love to see more of.

From the very beginning, even when Elle thinks she’s getting engaged, we see her surrounded by her sorority sisters. And after the breakup, those same friends help her work on getting into law school. They don’t really understand her struggles once she’s there, but two of them do show up to her first trial, which I love both because they’re very funny and because it shows that you don’t have to fully understand a friend to support them. The first close relationship Elle forms after moving to Harvard is a friendship with manicurist Paulette, played by the fabulous Jennifer Coolidge. Granted, a significant part of their friendship involves dating advice, which I don’t love – I think my least favorite part of the movie is the whole “bend and snap” scene, it just never made sense to me – but there’s a lot more to it than that. Elle helps Paulette get her dog back from her ex, and Paulette helps Elle gain confidence in her new role as a law student. This relationship helps Elle through the toughest part of law school when all the other students disdain her, although eventually she befriends some of them. It’s awesome to watch Vivian and Elle go from rivals to friends as they both realize that Warner isn’t good enough for either of them. Elle also befriends David Kidney (Oz Perkins) – again initially by helping him get a date, but their friendship soon progresses beyond that. Also fun fact that I just relatively recently learned – Oz Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins, as in, the Anthony Perkins who played Norman Bates in Psycho.

And speaking of movie stars from the 1960s, Raquel Welch makes an appearance in Legally Blonde, as Mrs. Windham Vandermark, the first wife of the murder victim in the trial that is the main focus of the second half of the movie. One of Elle’s professors, Callahan (played by Victor Garber), is defending the victim’s second wife, who is accused of the murder, and Elle is one of the interns helping with the case. The team sends Elle to interview the first wife when they find out she’s at a spa because they assume she and Elle will get along, but they very much do not, which is another example of characters misjudging and misunderstanding her. Elle does, however, get along very well with the defendant, Brooke Taylor Windham (Ali Larter), who was in the same sorority as Elle, though not at the same time. Most of the legal team seems to think Brooke is probably guilty, but Elle knows she’s not, using the flawless logic that since Brooke is a prominent fitness instructor, and therefore exercises a lot, as I quoted at the end of last episode, “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands. They just don’t.” The rest of the team doesn’t exactly buy this, but Elle’s belief in her leads Brooke to trust Elle more than she trusts anyone else, and that, in addition to Elle remaining true to herself despite being encouraged not to, is what allows them to win the case.

So far I’ve neglected to mention Emmett (Luke Wilson), the lawyer who supports and believes in Elle, and apparently starts dating her after the trial. I personally don’t love that they end up together, I feel like it kind of undermines the message that she doesn’t need romance to be fulfilled, although it is pretty clear that this relationship is just icing on the cake rather than her whole reason for being, in contrast to her relationship with Warner. Elle and Emmett do have some cute scenes together, but we don’t really see them interact in a way that indicates they’re anything other than friends. The movie never really feels like it’s about their romance, which makes sense because originally they weren’t even meant to officially end up together.

The film was going to end with Elle walking out of the courtroom after winning the case. The scene of her dumping Warner plus the whole epilogue with her graduation speech and the words on screen explaining what happened to everyone were added because test audiences thought the story felt unfinished. While it is extremely satisfying to watch her telling off Warner and to know for sure that she excelled in her remaining two years of law school, it’s a little frustrating to know that in the original version I would have been able to cling to my headcanon that Elle and Emmett were friends. From a storytelling perspective, I appreciate the symmetry of beginning with Elle thinking she’s about to get engaged and ending with her actually about to get engaged, but from an aroace perspective, I’m irritated that marriage has to be part of the happy ending even in this otherwise romance-light film. I’m happy for Elle that she found someone who loves her for who she is, but I don’t like the implication that every close, supportive relationship between a man and a woman must necessarily be romantic and sexual. It also bothers me that the ending tells us that Warner has no girlfriend as if singleness is the worst possible fate, although that may be an unfair interpretation. We’ve seen that he doesn’t really treat women as people, so it’s probably good that he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and it also says that he graduated with no honors and no job offers in addition to no girlfriend, so it’s not like singleness is his only punishment. I just don’t like how often singleness is treated as the just deserts of the villain, as if being single is inherently miserable. But the ending doesn’t say anything about Vivian having a new boyfriend, just that she dumped Warner and is now friends with Elle, so it’s not quite as straightforward as the heroes get romance and the villains are single, which I appreciate.

Even with this ending, Legally Blonde is very clearly a movie about identity and friendship and integrity that also includes some romance, not a romantic film. So it’s very interesting to me that it is often categorized as a romantic comedy. It’s almost like the fact that it’s pink and has a female protagonist and was written by women leads people to assume it must be a “chick flick”, and obviously all chick flicks are rom coms because all women want is a fluffy story about a woman falling in love with a man, right? I want to make it clear that I’m not disparaging rom coms or the people who enjoy them; what I’m criticizing here is the all-too-common practice of shoving rom coms along with any other movie marketed toward women into the same inferior category. The funny thing is, by seeing these movies this way, people are making the exact same mistake Warner makes at the beginning of Legally Blonde (and admittedly the same one I made before I’d watched the whole thing) of equating femininity – or at least, a certain type of femininity – with frivolity. But just as Warner turned out to be the loser when he dumped Elle, people who dismiss this movie are missing out. It is delightful and powerful, and Reese Witherspoon’s performance in particular is fabulous. Her comedic timing and sensibilities are flawless. And the feeling of watching her in the courtroom after Elle takes over the case, start off floundering and unsure of herself, and then seeing that lightbulb go off when she figures it out, is so elating. A big part of what makes that moment so satisfying is how realistically and sympathetically Elle has been portrayed throughout the movie. It would have been easy to make a character like this too over-the-top and ridiculous, but the writing and acting keep her grounded and real while also portraying her as quirky and unique, and the movie is worth watching for that alone.

However, I must say that certain aspects of Legally Blonde have not aged particularly well. For example, it bothers me more and more that, with Brooke’s alibi that she doesn’t want to reveal, they get so close to addressing the harm of placing impossible body standards on women, but don’t quite go there, portraying Emmett as unreasonable for pointing out that she made her fortune by telling women that they’re too fat. The movie also has a few gay characters, but the representation leaves much to be desired, as one might expect from a film made in the early 2000s. They’re basically reduced to stereotypes, and the public outing of a gay man against his will, based on his knowledge of shoe designers, is played for laughs – although, while outing someone is horrible, I would argue that lying about sleeping with someone to get them wrongfully convicted of murder is worse, so…it’s complicated. But, like forcing the happily ever after to include romance after emphasizing that romance is not the most important thing, the movie again undermines its own message here. It’s odd that it puts gay people into stereotypical boxes when the whole story is about how people are so much more than the way society sees them. As a queer teen who didn’t know I was queer, just that I was somehow different from most of my peers, it was incredibly satisfying to watch Elle learn that she didn’t have to fit into a pre-existing mold and could just be herself. But in some ways now it kind of feels to me like it’s saying, “Be yourself and don’t care what other people think of you – as long as you end up in a heterosexual relationship” and I don’t love that. So that’s probably part of why I don’t watch it as much anymore. But I don’t mean to imply that these problems completely ruin the movie; it still has a lot of great moments, and I would still recommend it. I should also mention that I’ve never read the book this movie is based on or watched the sequel, and I’ve also never seen or listened to the musical adaptation, so it’s possible that some of these issues might be at least somewhat rectified in one or more of those versions.

Overall, despite its flaws, this is a movie that encourages people to embrace the parts of their identity and personality that others dismiss, and that was a message I desperately needed to hear as a teenager. There are certainly other movies that portray this even better, but Legally Blonde happens to be one that I latched onto, probably at least partly because I had such low expectations and was then pleasantly surprised.

Thank you for listening to me discuss another of my most-rewatched movies! Remember to rate and leave a review if you want, and subscribe or follow to hear more. Next up is another movie I watched 15 times while keeping track that is only two minutes longer than this one, although unlike Legally Blonde I had seen it multiple times before 2003. As always I will leave you with a quote from that next movie: “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

#rewatch rewind #legally blonde #spoiler alert

13 notes · View notes

twwpress · 1 year

Text

Weekly Press Briefing #36: February 26th - March 4th

Welcome back to the Weekly Press Briefing, where we bring you highlights from The West Wing fandom each week, including new fics, ongoing challenges, and more! This briefing covers all things posted from February 26 - March 4, 2023! Did we miss something? Let us know; you can find our contact info at the bottom of this briefing!

Challenges/Prompts:

The following is a roundup of open challenges/prompts. Do you have a challenge or event you’d like us to promote? Be sure to get in touch with us! Contact info is at the bottom of this briefing.

@thefinestmuffin and @JessBakesCakes hosted a casual Josh/Donna Rom Com Fest that revealed fics on February 14. Submissions are still open and fics can be read here.

Photos/Videos:

Here’s what was posted from February 26 - March 4.

Allison Janney posted photos of herself with Kristin Chenoweth and Katy Perry at Carol Burnett’s 90th birthday special.

Amy Landecker posted photos of some of her and Brad’s pets.

Bradley Whitford posted a selfie with TWW cameraman Dave Chameides.

Josh Malina posted a selfie (with friends) and another photo from the NY Knicks game.

Kim Webster posted a video of herself drinking tequila from the bottle and chasing it with lemon juice.

Melissa Fitzgerald posted a photo of herself with her family in honor of her mother’s birthday.

Rob Lowe posted a selfie with his dogs.

@janelmilfoney: February 26 | February 27 | March 1

@JanneyUpdates: March 2

This Week in Canon:

Welcome to This Week in Canon, where we revisit moments in The West Wing that occurred on these dates during the show’s run.

Season 2, Episode 16: Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail aired on February 28, 2001.

Season 4, Episode 17: Red Haven’s on Fire aired on February 26, 2003.

Season 5, Episode 16: Eppur Si Muove aired on March 3, 2004.

Season 6, Episode 17: A Good Day aired on March 2, 2005.

Editor’s Choice:

With the anniversary of the airing of Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, here are a few of our favorite fics featuring or centered around Sam Seaborn!

consider this a gift (as you taste him on your lips) by sam_writes_fics for thefinestmuffins | Rated E | Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn | Complete | Sam’s eyes dart down to Josh’s lips. “You really think you could’ve done better?”

Josh hesitates for a second, then sets the unopened beer bottles down on the counter.

“I know I could’ve.”

Friendship, Rings, and Heartstrings by JessBakesCakes | Rated G | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | Complete | Sam feels sort of like a whack-a-mole at the arcade with how quickly and intensely the epiphany hits him. Maybe this is it. Maybe they’ll finally get it together. Behind all the flirting and banter is an incredible devotion they have to each other; one that possesses them to eat only a bite of a granola bar for nearly twenty-four hours or to hop on an international flight with whatever nonsensical items would fit in a backpack. He’s seen it for years now; he’s just been waiting for them to see it too.

are you still the same soul i met under the bleachers by singingaboutwishingx for claudiasjeancregg | Rated T | Will Bailey/Sam Seaborn | Complete | Will, on a decade of love, saying goodbye, and Sam.

sam and will, to the tune of “dorothea” and “‘tis the damn season”.

Unlikely by eowyn_of_rohan | Rated G | Ainsley Hayes/Sam Seaborn | Sam. Ainsley. Unlikely. (Or, part one in a series the author has challenged herself to wherein she plays songs at random via shuffle, picks something from the lyrics, and writes a one-shot drabble/short fic inspired by that lyrical phrase or a single word.)

More Than Just A Word by Sophie [archived by westwingfancentral_archivist] | Rated G | Sam Seaborn & Toby Ziegler | Complete | Sam tries to come to terms with his father's infidelity.

Fics:

Presenting your weekly roundup of fics posted in the tag for The West Wing on Archive of Our Own. If you are so inclined, please be sure to leave the authors some love in the form of kudos or comments. Be mindful of posted warnings/tags for each story.

Josh/Donna

we finally got it all right by mikaylawrites | Rated T | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | Complete

where you go, i go (so jump and i’m jumping) by neilix for turtlse | Rated G | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | Complete

I Wish I Was by Shinyrosa | Rated M | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | In Progress

tunnel vision, tangerine tongue by dusktillmidnight | Rated E | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | Complete

of the united states by violet_storms | Rated G | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | Complete

Domestic Days by spooky_spacegirl | Rated G | Josh Lyman/Donna Moss | In Progress

Other Pairings/Gen Fic

A Different Life by PreppyPrincess5103 (JAG crossover) | Rated M | Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie/Sam Seaborn | In progress

it started off with a kiss... now it ended up like this by imawkwardlysoc | Rated G | Sam Seaborn/Original Female Character | In Progress

CJ/Danny Drabbles by krazykitkat | Rated M | Danny Concannon/C. J. Cregg | In Progress

Wait For Me by imperfectirises | Rated M | Abbey Bartlet/Jed Bartlet | In Progress

THE WEEKLY PRESS BRIEFING TEAM CAN BE REACHED VIA THE FOLLOWING METHODS:

Twitter: @TWWPress

Email: [email protected]

Feel free to let us know if we missed something, if you have an event you’d like us to promote, or if you have an item that you’d like included in the next briefing!

xx, What’s next?

13 notes · View notes

ultraericthered · 2 years

Text

Anime Update V2 24

Noragami Aragoto - I didn’t really see what the point was of Hiyori and Yukine’s skirmish with Kuguha in the woods other than to pile on more anxiety about Yato for Yukine, but I do so enjoy seeing Kuguha get trounced so I can’t complain too much. Yato and Hiiro also had a pretty sweet sibling moment before getting captured by Izanami, but Bishamon comes to save the day and fight back, also motivating Yato when she reveals that Hiyori and Yukine are waiting for him on the other side. But according to Ebisu, the only working solution for bringing back Yato and Bishamon will require a human sacrifice!

Hunter x Hunter - The Heaven’s Arena arc engaged me at first and I do like the whole aesthetic of the place, but the more it goes on the more dull it becomes and it’s on the whole just a massive step down from the Hunter’s Exam arc. Too often I find it’s turning into Naruto where we’re treated to sensei lectures about how techniques and Nen energy works and I just don’t care - condense it and get back to the good stuff already! In both versions, the one consistent good point has been Hisoka. His fight with Kastro, the magic tricks he pulled off to win, and his exchanges with Machi were all gold, and we even learn that he’s been a member of the Phantom Troupe the whole time...sort of! And then we get the fight we were waiting for, Gon VS Hisoka, which honestly makes this arc worth sitting through just to see it. Gon finally gets to strike Hisoka and make him hurt, and while he’s still unable to defeat him at his level, Hisoka is now absolutely certain that the boy is a worthy adversary for him to kill.

Fruits Basket - How the Sohmas spent their Summer Vacation:

2001 - I think a lot of the comedy worked better here than in the later adaptation, a time when this version going more broad, slapstick and cartoonish has advantages. The more serious stuff with Hatori near the end didn’t land as well, and I was confused and uncomfortable with how Ayame seemed to take a victim blaming stance about Kana for daring to get married and be happy with someone else. Does he somehow not know that Hatori wiped her memories? ‘Cause if he knows what happened, he can’t act like this is some “betrayal!”

2019 - Why Yuki and Kyo were pretty quiet at first and took a while to get back into their usual argumentive swing actually had context this time given how last episode ended, whereas it was given no reason in the previous version. The talk between Shigure, Hatori, and Ayame was also phrased much better here, with Ayame being petty about Hatori missing out on happiness and wanting him to find a woman who’ll make him far happier than Kana portrayed as just that: petty.

Rozen Maiden - Kanaria, the second Rozen Maiden who I saw in the OVA at one point, finally gets into the Sakurada residence. The dolls staying there while both Jun and his sister are out find evidence of the break-in and disturbances around the house, making them think a burglar has broken in. Mayhem ensues. It was funny and all, but Kanaria really doesn’t do much for me. I’d normally love the heck out of a character like her, but here...doesn’t “clumsy troublemaker with an inflated self-image” kind of already belong to Suiseiseki?

Fate Zero - The premiere episode of this prequel anime was a whole hour long, like the second season of Sound! Euphonium’s premiere, was this just something they did back then? But in any case wow, this show is immediately superior to Fate/Stay Night not only in the production value but in practically everything. My problem with Stay Night is that it mashed a whole different aspects into the Saber route and didn’t do it as well as, say, CLANNAD did, and pretty much all of the plot action was centralized by Shirou. Not even Shirou and Saber - just Shirou, who’s a great character and all, but I don’t think he needed to be the only viewpoint protagonist when other great characters like Rin Tohsaka were right there. Fate Zero has four different POVs in four different stories (Kiritsugu w/ Irisveil, Kirei and Tokiome, Kariya Matou, and Waver Velvet) interlinked by the coming Holy Grail war, which is a lot more the kind of thing I enjoy seeing.

The dub is great, too. Matthew Mercer is a better Kiritsugu than Kirk Thornton, Mela Lee is still on as a younger Rin Tohsaka, Crispin Freeman kills it as the younger, less villainous Kirei, Lucien Dodge is perfect for Waver, and Michael Donovan is so skin-crawlingly creepy and sinister as the vile Zouken Matou. Only issue is Liam O’Brien as Kariya, which distracts me a bit since I got used to him as Archer. Got chills at the ending where the servants are summoned, spotting not only Gilgamesh there, but Saber, voiced now by Kari Wahlgren!

Revolutionary Girl Utena - Yet again after two episodes of the arc, we’re given another weirdo Nanami filler episode, which I’d not mind as much if we hadn’t just had that Nanami recap two episodes ago! This one’s the ever notorious “Nanami’s Egg”, which isn’t quite as dark and freaky as the cowbell episode but still bizarre all the same, like the egg is a metaphor for more than one thing and because Nanami’s just gotten stupider she believes that she lay it, but it turns out it was Chu-Chu who’d died offscreen and got reincarnated. Huh?

Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club S2 - A breather episode for Cute Girls To Do Cute Things, including a blatant Pokemon Go! reference with the “find the kitty cats” phone game. Lanzhu and her two gal pals are easing themselves into the club, but the star of the show here was Kasumi, more adorable, diabolical, and hapless than she’s ever been. And yeah, it’s a blatant repeat of Nico from that old “Who gets to be the Center?” episode, but Kasumi has always made stuff work by being this oddball blend of Nico’s personality and her “persona”. Sweet friendship song, montage, and group photo at the end too. Post-credits was an uh oh, though. Love Live, perhaps?

MAR - Round 3 of the War Games begins with the surprise re-appearance of Alan, who fights against Ali Baba of the Chess Pieces in the volcanic terrain. He doesn’t just beat him even easier than Dorothy beat her opponent, he claims the second casualty by dropping Ali Baba into lava, killing him! And unlike Dorothy’s fight, there was no real reason for him to do so! He just felt his pride was insulted and wasn’t gonna take that! Scariest guy on Team MAR!

AMC: Yuki Yuna Is A Hero - How the Hero Club spent their Summer Vacation, a more typical beach outing that gives way to more Cute Girls Do Cute Things antics. Not a whole lot of plot here other than Karin being gay with Fuu, Yuna being gay with Togo, and reminders of what the girls have (temporarily?) lost thanks to their battles with the Vertex. Then at the end we learn the missions ain’t done yet...

AND

Talentless Nana - Finally got back to this one, though in hindsight maybe I should’ve waited for October to do so since it was the creepy “Necromancer” two parter. A creepy boy named Shinji who can reanimate the dead and is going out with a really hot tomboy with super strength named Yuuka becomes Nana’s next target for elimination, all while Kyouya is still skeptical about her involvement in the recent deaths...and then it turns out that Shinji is himself a living corpse and Yuuka is the true necromancer, with her own horde of zombies that she can control only at nighttime! Since Part 2 was notably lagging in a lot of places, Yuuka was the aspect that kept me interested and made it all work - she’s the first of Nana’s talented victims or adversaries (who aren’t Kyouya) who I actually enjoyed watching. Her voice acting coupled with the depths of her depravity gave her a sort of Junko Enoshima vibe, it was impressive how well they pulled off a DOUBLE Twist Villain with her, and she’s the first to give Nana a really serious challenge, with Nana only besting her through proving a theory with so many variables to it that it could’ve just as easily not gone well for her. The very end was a bit weird, though. Why did Nana even care about a victim’s morals and sins? She’d kill the talented regardless, as she even said, so why even?

#Anime Update #Anime Update V2

2 notes · View notes

impossiblelibrary · 3 years

Text

Today's rant brought to you by: Queer Eye Japan, can we all just try to be as kind as they try to be?

After watching the Queer Eye Japan super short season, I wanted to google to see the overall reaction to the show, make sure that my western eyes were correct in seeing the care that was given to the culture. Were cultural taboos, other than being outwardly gay, crossed? So I find this article in the top results and other than the perspective, why tho? Tokyoesque.com had an article with a higher reading level, with surface level appreciation but at least better written.

I can't get over this hate article though. Unfounded, dumb, wrong and incorrect. Do not go forward unless you like that blistering kind of anger from me.

But the reasons just get weaker as the article extends: "Hurts the country it set out to save?" Looking for white savior much? They did not go to save Japan, they gave some free shit to like 4-5 people, think smaller.

Their culture guide wasn't gay enough.

You want to suggest any lgbt insta models or celebrities, use your platform to raises some up?

"There is a growing sexless culture in Japan for married and unmarried people, and it is perilous watching Queer Eye present this without any context behind what is driving this behavior."

Sexiness is what the fab 5 embrace, unfortunately and it was probably discussed behind the scenes of how much talking about sex was allowed or polite and the conversation of not having sex is closer to the tip of the tongue rather than the feeling of sexiness. The West is not the ones blasting that information. It is across multiple Japanese printed newspapers and online stories by now and the "context" is still being discussed and debated amongst Japanese. So I don't think any outsiders should be weighing in or "explaining" this phenomenon. We can repeat what we have been told but guessing at the reasons is not our place. The reasons illustrated by the author of the article seem lacking, a take but not the only one, but who am I to speak on that being in a sexual relationship with someone who pulls from that culture?

Kiko begins to lecture Yoko-san on how she “threw away her womanhood” (referring to a Japanese idiom, onna wo suteru) by going makeup-free and wearing drab, shapeless clothes.

The mistranslation by the subtitles fixed by this author was necessary information. But Kiko didn't lecture her on it, it was brought up by Yoko before any of them arrived, that was her theme, that was what she had decided to focus on. Meanwhile, if you watched Jonathan, he understood there was no time to spend on makeup and skincare so provided her a one instrument, 3 points of color on the skin to feel prettier. That and the entire episode being the 5 treating her like a woman on a date, not trying to hook her up, which is what they did in American eps.

"In teaching a Japanese woman, who already struggles to find time for herself, how to make an English recipe, Antoni is making great TV and nothing more."

So Antoni shouldn't have taught her apple pie because it's too exotic for a Japanese woman. (Can you smell the sexism?)

He didn't make an apple pie, altho Yoko did mention her mother made that for her when she was a kid. He made an apple tartine after going to a Japanese bakery who makes that all the time. Then highlighted the apples came from Fuji in true Japanese media fashion. Honey, American television doesn't usually highlight where the ingredients come from. A Japanese producer told him to do that. So all worries handled within the same ep. She got Japanese ingredients, had the recipe shown to her and then made it for her friends in her own house. Did the author actually watch this show or nah?

"beaten over the head with his western self-help logic. “You have to live for yourself,” he says."

The style of build up the 5 went for was confrontational but in a "I'm fighting for you" way. It's hard to describe, but the best I can say is, a person has multiple voices in their head, from parents, siblings, society, and maybe themselves. By being loud and obnoxious, American staples right there, they are adding one more voice. You deserve this, you are amazing, you are worth it. I know this is against most Japanese cultural modesty, but maybe it shouldn't be.

Sarcasm lies ahead:

Apparently: mispronunciation is microaggressions, not just someone who had a sucky school system. Yea okay, They're laughing at the language not at how stumbling these monolinguals are with visiting another country. Mmhm. Japanese don't say I love you and don't touch and that should stay that way instead of maybe, once in awhile, feeling like they can hug. Yeah, let's just ignore Yoko's break down that she had never hugged her lifelong friend after hugging strangers multiple times. Maid cafes are never sexualized in Japan ever, just don't go down that one street in Akihabara where the men are led off by the hand sheepishly blushing. Gag me. And Japanese men love to cry in front of their wives and would never break down once the wife leaves. I have never seen a Japanese movie showcase that move. Grr.

"I identify as many cultures."

So you're a Japanese man when it's convenient for you to get an article published? Are you nationally Japanese or just ethnically or culturally?

Homeland is an inherently racist word?

"After the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Republican consultant and speechwriter Peggy Noonan urged, “the name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now.”

Yes, let's use a Washington Post article rather than a etymology professor. Yes, the google search results increased after 2001 Homeland Security was used but the word has been around since the 1660s and I've read multiple turn of the century lit on white people returning to their homeland, i.e. the town off the coast they were born in.

"But" is not disagreeing. I think the repeated offender for the author is the not acknowledging the makeover-ees feelings. But, that is how LGBT have decided to deal with the inner voices that invade from society. They are just that, not our own, they are the influence of society, and we can choose, we have to choose, to be influenced by someone, anyone else.

Karamo can't speak about being black when an Asian is speaking about being Asian, even though the Asian gay man was feeling alone. It's called relating bitches, and I'm done with people saying that is redirecting the conversation, it's extending the conversation. That's how we talk, the spotlight is shared, especially when someone's about to cry and doesn't want to be seen as crying, time to turn the spotlight.

The gay monk wasn't good enough, you should have invited the gay politician.

Yeah, causes I'm sure a politician has all the time in the world for a quick stint and cry. They picked a Japanese monk who travels to NY because they had a guest who travels to the West too. Did you want him to stop traveling back and forth? Did you want a pure, ethnic and cultural Japanese gay man who has no ties to the west to talk to this Western educated young man? Seriously?

This is just not how it works in Japan.

Being in a multi-cultural marriage between two rebels, discussions on facets of culture are plenty in my household. Culture should be respected enough to be considered but not held on a pedestal like we should never adjust or throw some things out. LGBT being quiet and private for instance. "Being seen" was Jonathan's advice, and a good one especially for a Japanese gay man that was called feminine since he was a kid. Some gay men can hide, but as Jonathan said, he couldn't hide what he was, he couldn't hide this. So fuck it. Don't hide. It's actually more dangerous for a feminine man to come off as anxious rather than gay and proud. It makes you more of a target if they think you won't fight back. Proud means, Imma throw hands too, bitch.

This is also from the civil rights playbook going back to Black America: never hold a protest or a fight without the cameras, without being seen. LGBT have found the more seen they are, in media, in the streets, the better off we are. When LGBT Americans were being "private" about our lifestyles, we died, a la 1980s. They won't care if you start dying off if they never saw you to begin with.

And hence why I think the author's real anger is from these 5 being seen dancing flamboyantly in Shibuya, in Harajuku, afforded the privilege of doing this safely because of their tourist status, cameras and very low violence rate in Tokyo, loud and obnoxiously. Honestly, they wouldn't have been invited or nominated if they didn't want that brash American-ness coming into their home, just for a taste, at least.

Here's my real anger, my own jealousy: Japan's queer community currently does not have marriage or adoption rights. US does, so we have progressed further. But we are also not that many years from being tied to cow fences with barbed wire, beaten with baseball bats and left for dead overnight. If things are so bad over there, maybe take a few pages from the civil right playbook we took so much time to perfect and produced by the Black Americans who fought first. But so far, I only hear loss of jobs and marriages, which we still have here too. Stop trying to divide us, we are one community, LGBT around the world and we are here to try to help. Take it or leave it, it's not like we're going to go organize your own Pride parade for you.

Rant over? I guess. Is this important enough to be put in the google results along with his. Hell no, anyone with half a mind can see he's reaching more than half the time. And any argument about: this wasn't covered! There are a shit ton of conversations that are not covered in the 45 min they have. They are not a civil rights show, it's a makeover show, doing their best in that direction anyway. Know what it is.

Next blog post, what research I would guess was happening behind the scenes for each of the 5? I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan doing Japanese style makeup there...

#queer eye #Queer eye Japan #original #rant

38 notes · View notes

shirlleycoyle · 3 years

Text

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

7 notes · View notes

minnarr · 3 years

Text

Don’t Talk to Me About Naboo’s Moons

Last month, I had a little too much time on my hands when I ran out of things to do at work, so I made a Powerpoint. I did not expect to have 20 slides worth of yelling about Naboo’s moons, but here we are.

[ID: PowerPoint slide. The title, in big letters, reads “Don’t Talk to Me About Naboo’s Moons.” In smaller letters, the subtitle: “(Star Wars Writers Sure Didn’t Talk to Each Other About Them, Either)”. /end ID]

And now I’m adapting it to a Tumblr post, because why not.

How many moons does Naboo have?

I'm glad you asked

Three

Inside the Worlds of STAR WARS Episode I (2000) stated that they had one moon, and from TPM footage it’s hard to claim for certain there’s any more than that. Apparently taking their cue from Secrets of Naboo, a supplement to the WOTC Star Wars RPG, later sources have run with three moons

Source: https://www.theforce.net/swtc/orbs.html#naboo

Thrawn: Alliances (2018) compares another system’s moons with Naboo’s: “They were small moons, smaller than any of Naboo’s three…” (Ch. 15)

Nexus of Power (supplement to the Star Wars Force and Destiny Roleplaying Game) says Naboo has “three small moons”

[ID: Moonlight over Theed, The Phantom Menace. One obvious moon shines in the sky over Theed palace. Another bright object in the sky may also be a moon. /end ID]

[ID: Amidala’s starship passes a moon of Naboo, The Phantom Menace. The moon in question is tan and barren-looking. /end ID]

So, we have designations for three or fewer moons, right?

Wrong

There's five candidates: Ohma-D'un, Onoam, Rori, Veruna, and a “nameless mass”

Sources and Canon in Star Wars

Before we go on, let’s look at how we get information about the Star Wars universe, and how I select from contradictory information. If you’re familiar, obviously, feel free to skip ahead to the next section. The imaginary audience for the PowerPoint might not have been.

The old EU passes into Legends

On April 25, 2014, in the leadup to The Force Awakens, Lucasfilm announced that all previous Expanded Universe material would now be published under the Legends banner. All six previous movies plus The Clone Wars series “are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.” Novels, comics, and other expanded universe material published after the changeover to Legends is now known as New Canon (or Disney Canon).

Every fan ultimately comes to their own arrangement with what they consider canon — which pieces of New Canon and Legends they stitch together to come to a satisfying understanding of the Star Wars universe.

Canon status of roleplaying game materials

The canon policy of Wookieepedia is fascinating and I have not even scratched the surface, but the section on roleplaying games makes for especially convoluted reading. Both the West End Games and Wizards of the Coast licenses for RPGs ended before the Legends changeover; these are firmly Legends.

Fantasy Flight Games, however, gained the license to card, board, and roleplaying games in 2011, just three years before the switch to New Canon. Lucasfilm Story Group has made no public stance on whether their material is canon.

For this reason and because their publishing time for the RPG sourcebooks stretches before and after the changeover, Wookieepedia has gone case-by-case and selected which books apply to Legends, Canon, or both for article-writing purposes.

Mainstream solutions to the three-moon problem

[ID: A quote from Nexus of Power: “Three small moons - Ohma-D’un, Rori, and a nameless mass that is little more than an overgrown asteroid - house small colonies as well as a handful of offworld and orbital shipyard and factories.” /end iD]

Nexus of Power is an FFG sourcebook that was determined by Wookieepedia’s standards to apply to Canon as well as Legends articles. Its entry on Naboo, however, differs from the later sourcebook Rise of the Separatists, which Wookieepedia deems canon and cites in its selection of moons.

The Rise of the Separatists entry reads:

Three moons—Ohma-D’un, Rori, and Veruna—orbit Naboo. They host small colonies with shipyards, orbital dockyards, and factories.

So even within one publishing license and one context, different moons have been attributed to Naboo.

Wookieepedia

Wookieepedia’s Canon page for Naboo lists Ohma-D’un, Onoam, and Veruna. Each of these comes from a different source:

Ohma-D’un cites Rise of the Separatists

Onoam cites Leia, Princess of Alderaan

Veruna cites Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia

They’ve made a choice—but it’s definitely not the only plausible choice. Each of the four names we’re given for Naboo’s moons has at least some backing in New Canon.

Onoam

Onoam is the only moon on this list that is fully and non-dubiously canonical, as Leia spent some time there in the 2017 novel Leia, Princess of Alderaan. It is, however, the funniest name choice: someone recently pointed out to me that it’s just an anagram of “a moon”

I love this, but Claudia Gray sure muddied the Naboo Moon Name Waters by making this the only choice it is impossible to reject. No shade, though. I loved the LPOA Naboo crumbs.

Onoam has both mines (plagued in the Imperial era by corrupt leadership and miner safety issues) and luxury housing. Before his assassination, Moff Quarsh Panaka resided in a chalet on Onoam, and Queen Dalné had a home there.

Sidebar: The Mining Moons

When discussing the assassination attempt on Padmé in Attack of the Clones, Mace Windu says, “Our intelligence points to disgruntled spice miners on the moons of Naboo.”

Leia, Princess of Alderaan establishes that Onoam was one of these moons; it mentions strikes and minor political violence a generation before Leia’s. It also establishes that Onoam is mined for medicinal spice, which by law can only be mined by humans, not droids

In Queen’s Shadow, which takes place in 28 BBY, the mining moons “struggle to maintain the balance between the rule of Naboo and their allegiance to filling their quotas”; the mining jobs are much less lucrative than farming on Karlinus

Veruna

[ID: a rather barren, tan-colored moon /end ID]

Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia (2017) identifies the moon pictured above as Veruna. The same moon was identified as Ohma-D’un by The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (2008), according to Wookieepedia. I have access to neither, but it looks like the moon the ship passed in TPM. For being one of Wookiee’s choices, the evidence for this name is astonishingly thin, but the same can be said of some of the others

Sidebar: King Veruna and his moon

The likelihood is that Veruna (the moon) was named for Ars Veruna, Padmé’s predecessor as Naboo’s monarch in Legends novels Darth Plagueis (2012) and Cloak of Deception (2001)

It is very probable that Veruna is no longer canon, and it is certainly impossible that he served a decade-plus term that ended shortly before Padmé’s reign:

Padmé’s immediate predecessor, according to Queen’s Peril (2020), was Queen Sanandrassa

Sometime during Eirtaé’s childhood, Réillata served a single two-year term, according to Queen’s Shadow (2019)

Even if he’s placed somewhere before Sanandrassa, there’s not really room for him to have reigned that long unless there are two monarchs between him and Padmé

Rori

Rori was named and fleshed out in the 2003 game Star Wars Galaxies, which is now Legends. While it is one of the names given in the Fantasy Flight Games sourcebooks, it doesn’t seem to have a source anywhere else in New Canon.

Ohma-D’un

Ohma-D’un has one New Canon source outside of RPG sourcebooks: the 2018 reference book Star Wars: Smuggler’s Guide. In Smuggler’s Guide, Tyro Viveca (one of the owners of the in-universe book) mentioned seeing bursa-baiting on Ohma-D’un. Bursas are bear-like creatures originally from Legends material, where they were known to attack and destroy Gungan settlements.

I had a picture of a captive bursa for illustrative purposes, but honestly it made me too sad so I deleted it. Nevertheless, that’s stronger detail and evidence than we have for either Rori or Veruna.

Bonus fact: Naboo officially has no such thing as prison. When Panaka mentions this to Rabé, she says, “Only because we send everyone to the moon” (Queen’s Peril). Enjoy those implications!

TL;DR

While Onoam is definitely one of the moons, what you call the other two is up to each person’s discretion until something else is stated. Personally, I prefer Ohma-D’un and Rori, rather than Veruna. This partly because I don’t like Veruna the Legends figure (petty) and partly because Rori has some interesting Legends lore that could be drawn on in a pinch, which as far as I can tell Veruna does not.

#star wars #naboo #star wars meta #my headcanons #the subtitle isn't like. a real dig.#there isn't a lot of info about them! kudos to gray and johnston for picking up on mace's comment abt miners #there are so many little details i miss in the movies they've made interesting in books

28 notes · View notes

definitely-not-karen · 3 years

Text

My unnecessary and irrelevant reviews about the transformers media I have consumed.

Please let me have this. I was doom scrolling and transformers is my comfort fandom.

G1: I have not watched all of it, I do plan on doing so but I did watch it when I was younger and does invoke nostolgia. I watched it on Teletoon Retro (does that even exist anymore?) ((just googled it, rip teletoon retro)). For some reason I really like the episode The Ultimate Weapon. I am a huge fan of First Aid and it was because of this episode and I have no idea why. Rodimus is the main character of that episode with First Aid just having a very prominent role in the side story of that episode. I really liked the Aerialbots and their storyline with the time traveling and the not knowing if they’re on the right side was really cool. Honestly the animation errors and weird inconsistent story are part of the charm I guess.

RID 2001: another show I’ve only seen tidbits of. I watched this one via random episodes illegally uploaded to YouTube in the early to mid 2010s and now all those videos are taken down. As a lover of camp, this is camp. I love it. Transformers as a concept is pretty camp (which is why I adore it) and I definitely will watch all of this one day. Though Sideburn is cool and all, I do wish he didn’t chase a red sports car every episode. Otherwise he’s one of my favourites cause himbo rights I guess.

Transformers IDW 2005: So... I read the entirety of the idw comics purely because I found out Thundercracker was a screenplay writer and I wanted to read the entire story so I got the complete context of his development from scary fighter jet to an Oscar winner. I was not disappointed, I was met with queer and trans representation of all sorts, a diverse storyline with action filled parts, comedy elements, slice of life, political drama, adventure, horror, and the best road trip through space. Honestly I was not expecting transformers of all things to have queerness represented so casually and quite well in my opinion (though technically they are guilty of bury your gays, I don’t count it cause there was a clear reason for that death) Thundercracker was marked as one of my favourites cause of this series. I did experience a wonderful story because I wanted to see how he got his happy ending. My biggest criticism of idw transformers is that I love their interpretations of characters and sadly I know I’ll probably never get to seen them like that again. But if I want to experience those characters like that, I’ll just re read it I guess.

Transformers Animated: I have watched the entirety of this great show twice and it still love it. Funny characters, a human character that has a purpose, and a fun change to the formula, Transformers Animated has one of my favourite Optimus and made a Bumblebee so lovably loud they had to take away his voice so he wouldn’t become too powerful. Loved all of the characters except the human villains, Headmaster did not age well and I wasn’t in love with Ratchet’s design but his personality more than made up for it. If you want more animated, I love Transformers ReAnimated the void is filled by that series and channel. While I wish it got another season, it’s ending was satisfying enough I guess.

Transformers Prime: Smokescreen is great and was underutilizes -100/10. Just kidding, kind of I really enjoyed Prime. I’ve only watched through it completely once cause when I was a child I did not like the designs since apparently as a child I was a G1 loyalist I guess. Though now Prime has one of my favourite styles that still holds up today. Dramatic story with actual character development, I can over look that the plots a tad slow. I wish Breakdown was utilized more and it also could have benefited from an extra season but the movie wrapped it up much better than animated’s ending. Knockout is an amazing character and I was spoiled while I was watching it that he turns Autobot though I didn’t realize that wasn’t until the literal end of the series. Would’ve like a completely fleshed out Breakdown and Knockout or at least Knockout redemption arc but there’s always fanfiction I guess.

Robots in Disguise 2015: I didn’t hate it? It definitely helped that I watched this before Prime for some reason. I liked the designs, Sideswipe... himbo rights. Biggest flaw is the lack of character growth. I just want nice things for Sideswipe, Strongarm and Fixit. Grimlock was fun, I like Bumblebee trying to be a good leader and Optimus should have stayed dead. The crossover and referenced to Rescue Bots was fun and Blurr and Sideswipe was the rivalry I didn’t know I needed. But the one I really needed was Smokescreen in there too. The ending arc was interesting though not executed the best and Steeljaw did a lot of the heavy lifting for the villain side to a point where they over utilized him and his character suffered as a result. Windblade was not as bad as people online said she was, splitting the group up into two was stupid cause I’m bitter and still don’t want Optimus there. Also long list of underutilization: Denny and Russel Clay, Jazz, all the characters from prime except Optimus and Bee, Jetfire and Jetstorm, More Rescue bots, and many more! Like that girl that’s Russel’s friend that I literally don’t remember because I’m pretty sure the writers forgot about her! Anyways, in retrospect the show probably wasn’t great but I liked it I guess.

Rescue Bots: This show is way better than it needed to be. I actually love the no Decelticons and war. I’m a sucker for slice of life and especially slice of life with a twist. Human villains that were actually interesting, actual character development, continuity (somewhat), great human characters all while being target for children. I’m so happy I watched this show while I was kind of the target age and rewatching it for the third time was great cause some of the science jargon actually made sense to me. Satisfying ending too and honestly it can just appeal to everyone. Love all four of the main rescue bots and constantly wish they made evergreen designs and toys for them so they could at least make cameos in other transformers media. Sometimes it’s nice to have transformers being wholesome I guess.

Rescue Bots Academy: ... I was not the age democratic for this show and I somehow still liked it? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been gravitating to more wholesome content due to current events but it was actually good? Love all the students, I do miss the old crew and characters like Doc Green and Frankie are under utilized and the Burns family is almost nowhere to be found :(. Once again there’s some actual character development and Hot Shot’s mentor relationship with Heatwave is super sweet. Also actually having positive post war Decepticon and Autobot relationships in this children’s show? Woah. Biggest issue is like RID 2015; the lack of continuity and characters completely disappearing. Perceptor was fun and I was not expecting him to appear. And I love me some microscope dude. It was a good send off for the aligned continuity I guess.

Cyberverse: ending too soon. I was about to be upset that bumblebee didn’t have his voice but he had his voice in his head which was great. Episodes like the velocitron one was really good and it definitely got better with each season and peaked in the Quintesson arc and then rolled to the cancellation date. Thundercracker shouldn’t have been killed off but I’m very biased. Seeing the rebuilding of Cybertron was cool. Windblade and Bumblebee had a fun relationship. I really liked this iteration of Grimlock. Perceptor was super interesting but then they did nothing with him after the Quintesson arc which was a shame and I would have liked to see better relationships between the Autobots and Decepticons after the team up. Also wholesome Whirl was fun. Honestly this needed one more season so bad. I just think it could have been great if it got one. But it’s still good I guess.

War for Cybertron: ...let’s see how I feel after Kingdom comes out but right now, meh. For me my favourite transformers characters usually end up being side characters due to me wishing they had more screen time so in this case, Red Alert is great please show me more of Red Alert. I get what all the people are saying about the voice acting and whatever but I can look past it (though please give us Peter Cullen or let the current VC make his own Optimus voice). But one thing is that all the YouTube reviewers be saying that I completely agree with is that it’s dark. Like lighting wise. I occasionally had trouble making out what was happening because it was dark. Honestly my biggest issue isn’t a fault of the show. I like development of multiple characters to be shown so I can fall in love with a multitude of characters but due to short seasons, it makes sense to focus in completely on one character at a time. Siege in my opinion at least let me see more of the background characters rather than Earthrise but I’d probably like Earthwise more if I was a bigger fan of Optimus. I’m going to watch Kingdom but I’m not expecting to be wowed I guess.

In conclusion, I should watch Beast Wars, I’m going to re read the ending of Lost Light again and revel in the melancholic ending I adore and I really like Thundercracker and First Aid. One great thing about transformers and other franchises that have been around for awhile, if you don’t like the current thing, there’s plenty of last media and you probably won’t need to wait too long for the next piece of media you’ll hopefully like.

Please be good idw 2019, I’ve read a bit of you and I have a scrap of hope. Oh please please please be good. Give some characters the Thundercracker treatment.

#idw transformers #transformers #transformers idw #transformers rid2015 #transformers rescue bots #transformers prime #transformers cyberverse

42 notes · View notes

bigassheart · 4 years

Text

Updated TUA Timeline

A little over a year ago, Aidan posted a timeline for the events of the Umbrella Academy on his Instagram. I posted it on this blog at the time and promised I was going to update my TUA Timeline post with that info. Never did. But I am now! So, here it is. The updated TUA Timeline.

Also, there will obviously be spoilers, so don’t read this if you haven’t watched season 1.

October 1st, 1989 - The Umbrella Academy kids are born.

1993 - Grace Joins the family. This is according to Aidan’s Timeline. Depending on the time of the year, the kids would be 3 or 4 when this happens. This may or may not be when the kids get names.

1993/1994 - Vanya forgets about her powers. Vanya also trains with Reginald and is subsequently made to forget about her powers around this time. Though we don’t get a specific date or length of time that Vanya trains, the flashbacks don’t appear to show her training for a super long time. I think a good guess would be less than a year for this training, putting Vanya’s age at 4. (This also matches up with the casting for the young Vanya and young Allison roles, which I used previously to estimate this age/date)

1997/1998 - Klaus is locked in the mausoleum for the first time. I am basing this on the casting for the role of young Klaus, which has him at 8 years old. However, it’s not quite that simple, because when Klaus is talking to his dad in episode 7, he says that his dad locked him in the mausoleum when he was 13. Complicating matters even further, there is a post somewhere out there that took a screen shot of Reginald’s journal with notes about locking Klaus in the mausoleum. (I have not been able to find that post again, so if anyone knows the one I’m talking about and has a link, I would love to put it in here). The date recorded on those notes is 2001. (I don’t remember the month, but I think it was summer) That would have made him 11 years old. It’s possible that this was just an inconsistency in the writing. Or it’s possible that Reginald locked Klaus in a mausoleum on at least 3 different occasions at age 8, 11, and 13. Possibly more.

2001/2002 - The Umbrella Academy stops a Robbery I’m basing this on the fact that all the same actors were used for these scenes as were used in the scene where Five leaves, so they can’t be much more than a year younger than that.

November 10, 2002 - Five leaves the Academy According to Pogo in episode 1, Five has been gone for 16 years, 4 months, and 14 days. The date in that episode is March 24th, 2019 (according to Vanya). That means that Five disappeared on November 10th, 2002, a little more than a month after the Umbrella Academy kids all turned 13. (This date is also confirmed on Aidan’s timeline)

(Side-note. Remember when Klaus mentions being locked in the mausoleum when he was 13? That means it probably happened not too long after Five disappeared. Holy Fuck Regi!)

2006(?) - Ben Dies OK, this is only a guess, BUT it’s a good one and if you scroll down to the additional notes at the bottom, you’ll see why.

2014 - Vanya publishes her book In episode 3, we learn that Vanya wrote her book 5 years earlier. (when they were 24) At this point, Ben is already dead and Luthor has not had his accident yet.

2014/2015 - Luther has his accident We’re not sure how long it takes Regi to send Luther to the moon after his accident (days? weeks? months?) so all we really know is that the accident happens sometime between Vanya publishing her book and the moon trip.

2015 - Luther goes to the moon In episode 6, Luther says that he was on the moon for 4 years, making him about 25 years old when he left. Aidan’s timeline also confirms that Luther went to the moon in 2015.

March 24th, 2019 - Reginald’s Funeral We know this because they tell Five the exact date.

April 1st, 2019 - Apocalypse (Dear Commission: Worst April Fools joke ever).

This Brings us to the present. The members of the Umbrella Academy are all 29, except for Five, who is 58, and Klaus, who spent 10 months in Vietnam and is therefore 30 now.

Additional Notes on the Timeline:

Five in the Future Five finds Delores pretty soon after the apocalypse (again, same actor, so I’m figuring a year leeway at most). He tells Klaus that he was with Delores for 30 years. That would make him about 43 when The Handler shows up. When Five gets back to the present, he gives a very specific amount of time he has been gone: 45 years. This means he spent 15 years working for the Comission, making him 58 at this point. Five also traveled through history extensively while working for the commission. His last mission had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, which would put him in 1963. (Quick note on this one - Someone commented on this post a while back with a correction and I was going to go back and do more research so I could correct these numbers, but now I can’t find the post and it’s been so long that I can’t remember what the correction was. So, if these numbers look off, let me know and I will fix it)

1968 - Klaus travels back in time to the Vietnam War Historical Context: This is 3 years after the first American troops arrived in Vietnam and 5 years after Kennedy was assassinated. Nixon was elected in 1968. This was also the year of the Tet Offensive, a massive campaign by the North Vietnamese Army to push the US troops out of the country and ferment rebellion among the South Vietnamese people. This was the big turning point in the war and marked the beginning of the US troops’ defeat. This was also the year of the My Lai Massacre, where the US Army murdered more than 500 civilians in the city of My Lai. This incident was covered up for a year before the American press found out about it.

Finally, the reasoning behind my guess that 2006 is the year Ben died:

Klaus mentions that Ben died “young and tragic”

Everyone left the house after Ben died, according to Vanya.

In episode 3, Alison says that they left their mom alone for 13 years. (13 years ago, they would have been 16) We don’t know how quickly everyone left, if it took days, weeks, or even years, so it’s possible that 13 years ago was when Alison left specifically. It could be that everyone was gone by that date. Or it could be that this is when everyone started leaving.

Diego mentions moving out at 17. Again, everyone left after Ben died, so it would have happened before that.

Ben’s statue does not have a date on it, but obviously he would have had to be at least the same age as he is depicted there.

We also have the following portraits sequence in episode 1 that was used to show Five’s disappearance and Ben’s death. Here are all 4 portraits.

Portrait 1 is done when they are all 12 or 13 years old. Everyone looks about the same age in portrait 2, so I’m assuming it Reginald had it commissioned right after Five disappeared. It would therefore make sense that portrait 4 was done right after Ben died. There are clearly several years age difference between portraits 2 and 3. It also looks like there may be another year or so age difference between portraits 3 and 4. Because of this, I would argue that the children are at least 15 years old in the final portrait. Therefore, Ben dies at age 15 or 16.

Last bit of evidence is Aidan’s timeline. Now, the year for Ben’s death is blacked out, BUT we can see the general shape of the numbers. The first number is clearly a 2, so we know that it’s not just a bunch of 0′s as a place holder. The last two numbers are rounded at the top and the bottom. In the font they are using, that gives us these possible years: 2003, 2006, 2008, 2009.

The placement between 2002 and 2015 is just a little past the middle point, so at first I figured that would mean the year was 2009. HOWEVER, that would mean he died at age 20. The other kids definitely don’t look 20 in the portrait after Ben dies and this doesn’t match up with the comments Allison and Diego make about leaving when they were still in their teens. Also, if you look at the timeline for earlier years, the same space between dates is used across the board, whether those dates are 4 years apart or 9 years apart.

Conclusion: I think Ben died in early 2006 (making him 16).

And that’s all I’ve got so far.

If anyone else has more clues for the timeline, please add them to this post.

#TUA Timeline #The Umbrella Academy #tua #klaus hargreeves #ben hargreeves #five hargreeves #Allison Hargreeves #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #vanya hargreeves

156 notes · View notes

adultswim2021 · 2 years

Text

Cowboy Bebop #23: “Brain Scratch” | April 3, 1999 | S01E23 Adult Swim premiere: November 12, 2001 - 12:30AM

Okay, so way back when Adult Swim started I immediately turned my back on Cowboy Bebop for being anime and especially for not being 4 more repeats of Space Ghost Coast to Coast. So I didn’t really on-purpose watch it at all. But the closest I got after turning the first episode off after five minutes was when I watched the last stretch of this episode, context-free. I saw an old man’s face on a bunch of TV screens smugly saying things like (insulting, slightly gayer mimic) “do you know why man believes in god? (long pause) because he wants to.” or “god didn't create humans... it is humans that created god!” while ominous music played. “You see TV has become the new religion” SHUT UP! SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU PRETENTIOUS FUCKING ANIME BULLSHIT.

It’d liken it to the time when I was under the influence of a COOL ADULT I knew who said All in the Family was lame and preachy and completely overrated. I sampled a single episode on TVLand and it was exactly those things, with an overly simplistic MONEY CAN’T BUY HAPPINESS message that was constantly punctuated with Rob Reiner furrowing his brow thoughtfully at Archie being too STUPID and CONSERVATIVE to understand it all. I drew this comic about it:

Later I downloaded all of All in the Family in MP3 form and listened to them instead of podcasts and you wanna know what? I fucking LOVED IT and thought the show was brilliant and hilarious, all because I didn’t have to look at Rob Reiner scowling. My point is my impression of anime was that it would be exactly as pretentious as this episode is. I happened to catch the one single scene from the show that would reinforce those ideas THE MOST.

Well, I appreciate this show more now. This episode is fine, I guess. I do still think it’s pretentious. I think there was an episode of Duckman that was more insightful than this that had the same message. TV controls people, they worship it like a religion. Sure. But it’s also cheap hedonistic fun, and what am I gonna do? NOT WATCH IT? Hell, I have TWO TVS going right now as I speak. One is a B&W dailies monitor I bought at a yard sale for 5 dollars. I had to buy an RCA adapter that was 6 dollars to hook up a VCR to it and now I play random tapes on it. I just think it’s cool looking. Sorry, I just realized I haven’t used my tumblr to brag about my B&W monitor yet. I could sell it on eBay for $50 bucks, easy, but I’m not gonna. What was I talking about

This one is about a guy who is selling a religion where you can allegedly upload your soul into a computer or something, and live digitally. 1000s have seemingly committed suicide for this process. BUT COULD IT BE REAL? And why is the head of this religion unreachable? He appears on TV to hawk his cult on a daily basis. It turns out he’s using the brainwaves of a comatose guy, basically using him like a battery and he’s just a max headroom on a screen. I think. Then he says pretentious stuff to Spike while they kill him. Obvious reference I didn’t realize until this very moment: Heaven’s Gate. That guy. Remember that shit? I do, because I was just becoming an extremely online guy at the time and I remember that being maybe one of the most famous websites out there. I remember the official Monty Python website redesigned their site to parody it, and thinking it was so funny. I recall going to the actual site out of morbid curiosity and my mother freaked out and thought I was going to become a cult member, and I remember feeling like insanely insulted by that and getting into a big fight with her. I don’t even believe in Christian god, you idiot!!!

I like the first act, where they are flipping through TV channels and stuff. All this stuff is strong. But I still think this episode is a little lame and goofy, the same way I did when I stumbled on it in 2001 and s’d my damn h. At it. But, it didn’t piss me off, and that’s worth something.

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #cowboy bebop

8 notes · View notes

recentanimenews · 3 years

Text

FEATURE: How I Got Into Sakuga

Kaiba, Directed by Masaaki Yuasa

If you’re an anime fan, you’re likely an animation fan in general. But how do you know when an animation is “good”? How do you learn to identify an animator by only what you see, or tell when their drawings are better than usual?

English-speaking anime fans have adopted sakuga as a general catch-all term for exceptional animation. While the word sakuga itself means “animation,” in this context, sakuga has come to mean something very specific: Not just animation that looks cool, but the deliberate handiwork of specific animators with specific artistic aspirations. For example, a single-animator project might have a lot of “sakuga shots” because it has a personal, highly-refined style. Meanwhile, a television series might have an entire team of varying specialists for a larger narrative. Some of this might be attributed to specific key animators, while some might be credited to an entire studio — transformation sequences, explosive missiles, robots — that’s all fair game to be called sakuga. But how do you really know if what you’re looking at really is this so-called “sakuga?”

Like most art, it’s almost entirely subjective. Here’s my story.

Project A-ko, a high-energy 1986 OVA series best remembered for its exceptional animation staff

(Image via Retrocrush)

All’s Fair in Love and War Games

When I was a kid, I got my hands on the English-dubbed Digimon: The Movie on VHS. This notorious release was a three-part recut of Mamoru Hosoda’s Digimon OVAs released from 1999 to 2000, heavily featuring his second film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game. Of course, I didn’t experience this package as a “Hosoda anime” at the time. Besides the inspired inclusion of Barenaked Ladies’ "One Week" to the soundtrack, I strongly associate these films with Hosoda’s signature interpretation of Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru’s original Digimon Adventure character designs. Compared to the Toei-produced television series, these renditions of the Digi-Destined are charmingly off-model and move with awkward intention, like actual kids up against terrifying monsters.

In a sense, that’s what most people mean by sakuga — animation that makes us lean in and notice traits about the world and characters that can’t be communicated otherwise. Sakuga, in particular, places special emphasis on an individual animator’s keyframes, or the drawings used as a basis for in-between frames during movement. That’s what I mean by the phrase “Hosoda anime.” If you watch Summer Wars or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time enough times, anyone will notice a stylistic palette of idiosyncrasies.

Digimon Adventure “Home Away From Home” directed by Mamoru Hosoda

(Image via Hulu)

An Emerging Style

When I got older and realized there was more anime than what was on cable, I kept returning to “flat” style animation with films like Tatsuo Satō’s 2001 Cat Soup and Shōji Kawamori’s 1996 Spring and Chaos. Around this time, contemporary artist Takashi Murakami also began developing his own “superflat” style (coined in his 2000 book Superflat and later in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture) we’ll return to. Once I got a taste for the experimental, I never turned back.

But back to Hosoda. Less focused on the details of models and more fixated on a “flat” or fluid style of movement, the key animation in Hosoda’s films makes body language a priority. This is perhaps the best thing about good sakuga — its potential to express deep emotion even under production constraints. My favorite example comes from the first Digimon short film Hosoda directed, the simply titled Digimon Adventure from 1999.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Directed by Masaaki Yuasa

Originally conceived as a standalone for Bandai’s then-new Digital Monsters virtual pet toys, this version of Digimon is less loud, more atmospheric — and sincerely preoccupied with the question: “How would little kids actually handle a giant monster of their own?” The result is an unforgettable shot of Kairi, Tai’s little sister desperately blowing her whistle, stopping to catch her breath, then spitting and coughing in an attempt to calm down their newly evolved kaiju Greymon friend.

For the television series, Hosoda directed the episode “Home Away From,” depicting the two siblings clinging to each other as the other slowly drifts back to the Digital World. In both scenes, characters don’t constantly move, but only act when necessary via careful manipulation of the frames. This technique not only makes everything seem more “realistic,” but also acts as a visual cue for the anxiety Tai and Kairi feel. In other words, painstakingly controlled animation serves both form and function, especially when you’re selling an emotional climax of another kid-meets-monster plot.

Tomorrow’s Joe, 1980 film adaptation of the 1970 TV anime series directed by Osamu Dezaki

(Image via Retrocrush)

A Little History Lesson

After Digimon, Hosoda and Nakatsuru collaborated on films like Summer Wars and the Takashi Murakami-inspired pop art short Superflat Monogram. Hosoda is no doubt inescapable to sakuga fans today thanks to the ubiquity of his feature films. Still, Hosoda obviously wasn’t the first sakuga animator. Animators like Yasuo Ōtsuka, known for his cinematic work in a pre-Ghibli era of anime film with Toei, documented the growth ‘60s and ‘70s of Japan’s animation industry in his 2013 book Sakuga Asemamire. When the demand for films lowered in favor of anime television during that era, animators took risks. Classics of the era like Tiger Mask and Tomorrow's Joe literally held no punches, and Osamu Tezuka’s own Mushi Productions dove headfirst into experimental adult films. Animators, and especially keyframe animators, had creative control. In this perfect storm, the advent of sakuga was inevitable.

Everyman Ken Kubo is taught the ways of eighties anime in Otaku no Video

(Image via Retrocrush)

Why Bother With Sakuga?

In 2013, animation aficionado Sean Bires and company hosted an informational panel titled “Sakuga: The Animation of Anime” at Anime Central Chicago. Uploaded to YouTube that same year, this panel informed my younger self’s understanding of not just the “how” of sakuga, but the “why” it even needed to exist in anyone’s vocabulary. Accessible, meticulously researched, and full of visual references, Sean’s two-hour panel-lecture does the heavy lifting of contextualizing anime not just through a historical lens, but within the broader project of expanding cinematic techniques. This primer might sound heady, but considering the popularity of Masaaki Yuasa’s series like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, and references to animator Ichirō Itano’s “Itano circus” missiles in American cartoons like DuckTales, it’s hard to say sakuga isn't relevant. Nowadays, it's practically a trope to parody one of Dezaki's most iconic shots. Supplemented by a rich community of blogs and forums, it couldn’t be easier to learn about animators like Yasuo Ōtsuka or the early days of Toei if you want a bigger picture. Blogs like Ben Ettinger’s Anipages and the aptly named Sakuga Blog are a good place to start, not to mention dozens of dedicated galleries of anime production and art books published by studios themselves. Now couldn’t be a better time to vicariously live your art school dreams through anime masterworks.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, a 1989 film featuring animation by Yasuo Ōtsuka best known for his work on the Lupin III franchise

Sakuga Is For Everyone

Fans have always been obsessed with the technicalities of animation, even if they weren't artists. As early as 2007, uncut dubbed collector box sets for Naruto came with annotated booklets of episode storyboards. More recently, critically-acclaimed series like Shirobako further explicated this love for animation as a team effort — people love attaching other people to art. In contrast, psychological horror series like Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent features an episode about an anime studio’s production going terribly wrong. Not to mention the endlessly self-referential Otaku no Video Gainax OVA and its depiction of zealous sakuga otaku. Anime fans adore watching anime be born over and over. It’s that simple.

Digimon Adventure “Home Away From Home” directed by Mamoru Hosoda

(Image via Hulu)

Today, I’d comfortably call some shots from Hosoda Digimon films great sakuga. But Koromon is still weird. Sorry. The love for sakuga isn’t a contest to one-up fans on production trivia or terminology. It’s about taking the time to appreciate the fact that anime is ultimately a collaborative artistic endeavor. From tracing back the lineage of animators like Yoshinori Kanada to Kill la Kill, to appreciating the visual sugar rush of Project A-Ko alongside slow-paced Ghibli films, “getting into sakuga” isn't a passive effort, nor a waste of time. Besides, wouldn't it be fun understanding how your favorite animator achieved your favorite scene? The phrase "labor of love" is cliché, but maybe that’s a good synonym for what role sakuga inevitably plays for artists and fans alike — work that brings you joy, no matter how you cut it. Who is your favorite animator? When did you get into sakuga? Let us know in the comments below!

Blake P. is a weekly columnist for Crunchyroll Features. His twitter is @_dispossessed. His bylines include Fanbyte, VRV, Unwinnable, and more. He actually doesn't hate Koromon.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Blake Planty

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

10 notes · View notes

twinkledadwa · 3 years

Text

Home is Where (a ghost nest #1)

november 7th, 4:47 am pst.

in all sincerity;

this interview was birthed from the innate fear of death. for what it is to ‘be a ghost’, beyond having the ability to slam doors after your passing, isn’t truly defined. a trait consistent throughout the many interpretations of angels, spirits, paranormal and such is the presence felt being an essence lost in time. ‘who’ a person is stops at their death. all human aspects stripped, ghosts work as an echo of a fading past; something more akin to a message in a bottle than an entity still living.

so, in our lives, do we strive to create essences that continue to build after our deaths? or do we attempt to capture our essences well enough at the moment to make our ghosts stronger? the latter has been adopted for ‘a ghost nest’. i hope, for everybody’s sake, that it isn't explained again. context felt necessary to clear up why these interviews are in a hybrid, ‘Dear Sally’-esque format. what this should be considered, at most, is an exercise in essence on a minuscule scale.

and on november 7th, at approximately 5:10 am pst, brandon macdonald expressed a similar sentiment. ‘tantrum provider’ for Palm Coast-based emo band Home is Where, they noted the name’s function as a subliminal advertisement; so that whenever the proverb it takes from is used, listeners at any moment in time will harken back to sound bleeding with vibrancy. ‘the scientific classification of stingrays’ (topical cover art) carries an urgency somehow familiar, symptomatic of the band stretching their foundations into their own monument. for ninety minutes, unknowingly breaths away from a new president-elect, we had a conversation.

this is Home is Where’s ghost nest.

youtube

So, how long is too long for us not to have a presidential assassination?

Brandon: Um, that’s a good question. I was on a local podcast recently and, funny enough, I didn’t know going into it that they’re sponsored by a financial magazine? I lost my shit finding that out. I was laughing my ass off. I was like, “your financial magazine, right now, is supporting an artist who is a dedicated Marxist. A communist who sees these people on the street and knows that I represent exactly what they’re against”. The song isn’t meant to be about an actual assassination or about Orange Man himself. I wanted it to be a comment on the structure itself, you know, how long living within it does it take before everything builds up and we eventually bite the hand that feeds us?

Protest music that names specific presidents does not age well. Look at 80s punk, besides Dead Kennedys, mentioning Reagan. You know, what was the name of that compilation against Bush? The intention was to write a protest song that lasts longer than a presidency. Also, it was easier from a lyric-writing perspective, although there are plenty of words that rhyme with Trump. I don’t know about McConnell [laughs].

Videos of ‘stingrays’ live date back to January. Was all the material off the next record written pre-quarantine?

All of it. We were sitting on this material for a while, and we went into the studio in early April. We wanted to pump something out before, you know, the end of the world happened. So we got those done, it was mastered around May, and now we are waiting for a few more parts to be sent in. That’s no worries, it’s been a difficult time for all of us. The original plan wasn’t even to drop a single for ‘i became birds’. 2021 was coming up and we hadn’t released anything this year, so ‘stingrays’ felt like the most direct and obvious choice.

In the world, how do you see both your personal presence & Home is Where’s presence?

You know, I don’t leave the house much. If I do, I wear a mask. I go to work. I spend time with my cat. I hang out with my girlfriend when I can, as we’re pretty much on opposite schedules. The band hasn’t been up to much. We haven’t met since May and we’ve all faced changes in our individual lives, but at some point, when or if the chaos comes to an end, we’ll be playing together again. In terms of Home is Where? We’re an emo band from Florida. There’s plenty of those. This might be a pretty trash take, but a lot of the bands in the scene comment on liberalism, and you can only gain so much by listening to it. You should spend your time reading theory, doing something actually important, so you’d be able to make a change in the world. So, in the grand scheme of things, Home is Where is not important. However, it is something I love and am fortunate enough to do.

Dear Brandon, of Home is Where. I’m having trouble finding my own space when stuck home with my family. What should I do?

Charley, in Pennsylvania.

------------------------------------------------

Brandon: Is this referring to COVID?

I’m pretty sure it is.

. Okay, I think I have an answer for this.

In terms of finding your own space, just find something you’re passionate about and, fucking, dive headfirst into it. A few years back, around the time we started to get serious with the band, I was in a position where I didn’t have a job but I had enough saved up so that it was a few months until I had to worry about rent. With all the time I had, I wanted to buckle down and get really into something I wanted to learn everything about emo. You know, I knew Rites of Spring were the ones who started the genre and some of the stuff about the 90s, but I wanted to know all of it. There were 2000 emo albums that I downloaded and I listened through all of them. Everyone inspired me. Not all of them were good, no. Some were bad, but by listening to them, I knew exactly what I didn’t want to do. It helped clarify what I wanted Home is Where to sound like.

Find something you’re passionate about. You know, reading theory, making art, do something that makes at home in your home. You can do so many great things.

Do you have any song recommendations for this situation?

I have two! The first is, well, you can never go wrong with Cap’n Jazz. Pioneers, truly some of the greats. Tim Kinsella is a genius; I do my best to take what I can from him. It’s him and Bob Dylan. The song is We Are Scientists! (by Cap’n Jazz). I believe some of the lyrics do touch upon that feeling of being stuck around other people. Like, “starchy product scripted people I never asked to care about”? “you can’t look at the sky without looking right through it”? Those lines are, mwah, chef’s kiss!

The second is H.S. by Plunger. Let me pull up the lyrics to this. It’s another one that comments directly on feeling isolated from those around you. Here it is; “All these old faces/Smiling and laughing/But you’ll never leave fourteen”. Yeah, that seems to sum up the emotion this person expressed.

Dear Brandon, of Home is Where. Things recently ended with a person I had been seeing. I hurt them, didn’t communicate my feelings properly, and I feel like garbage for it. I leave the continent for 5 months in a few weeks, and I want to reach out before I leave, but also I want to give her space? Should I wait and see if she reaches out? I’m a dumb stupid idiot. Dumb stupid idiot, in Maine.

------------------------------------------------

‘Dumb stupid idiot’ [laughs]. That truly is an emo question. I am sorry to hear that you’re going through that. That sucks, man. Heartbreak sucks. I wish you the best in leaving the country during COVID times, seeing as that might be difficult, and hopefully, it opens your eyes to new things.

My one piece of advice is to give it time. I know a few years seems like a lot of time, but it really isn’t. There are moments where I, too, indulge in being derogatory towards myself. Home is Where has lyrics about feeling alienated, being hard on yourself. A few years ago, I moved back to the town I grew up in, and even though it was considered ‘home’, I didn’t feel that. It was tough. Eventually, over time, everything came together. You just gotta wait and look back when you’re in a better headspace,

You’re going overseas, you have so many new experiences ahead of you. Who knows, maybe you two will end up working out, we’ll see. You got this. I’m rooting for ya.

Do you have any song recommendations?

I came up with three, actually. One isn’t emo or anything close to adjacent, so I added another to compensate.

I Love You Too by Rainer Maria is the first one. It’s hard to find emo that deals straight up with a break-up, there isn’t much out there, but Rainer Maria stuck out. This song is killer. That entire EP is killer. One of the best emo bands ever.

Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan is my second recommendation. Which is not emo, but in terms of break-up songs, it doesn’t get much better than this. Blood on the Tracks is fucking brutal; Dylan puts blame on pretty much everything.

The other emo song is from, I want to say, around 2000 or 2001? Near the end of that 90s, ‘second wave’ emo, whatever it is considered. The song is For Meg by On the Might of Princes. It’s about Meg Griffin from Family Guy. No, it’s not. Actually, I am not sure, but this track has just about everything; it’s lo-fi, has some screams, and the lyrics seem to discuss a heartbreak;

”This is for you. to hold you close, to keep you Close to my heart. I'll scream it til your ears bleed You'll always have a friend in me”

Great, great emo that gets heavy. They’re the only emo band that Brave Little Abacus cited as an influence on their sound. You should definitely check them out.

Home is Where’s visual ghost nest (collages & mixtape visualizer) consists of: Modern Times//Halloween: Resurrection (”Busta Rhymes beating the shit out of Michael Myers is a 10/10 for me”)//Blood Diner//Simpsons: Hit & Run//City Lights//Woody Guthrie: Hard Travelin’//The Horror of Party Beach//Peanuts//Zippy the Pinhead//Fritz the Cat//The Enfield Haunting//Twin Peaks//Wayne’s World 2//Synecdoche, New York//Japanese Woodblock Prints

Home is Where can be found on twitter, facebook, and bandcamp. ‘i became birds’ out 2021 on Knifepunch Records.

their ghost nest is on spotify. questions for future ‘episodes’ can be asked under the advice tab.

this now exists. bless to brandon, Home is Where, and you all.

#what would be a good hashtag #interview #Home is Where #diy #emo #college #ghosts #ghost nest #florida is in stage 4. isn't that concerning?#bob dylan #tacoma

5 notes · View notes

abri-chan · 4 years

Note

Araki stated that Bruno’s kindness was inherited from his father, what did he inherit from his mother then ? She was a lot smarter but why does araki make look selfish ? (In the bad way I meant. Is not bad to be but jeez). He makes women move easily and remarry.

(I made some posts about this back when the episode aired, but tumblr is bad at letting me search my own blog. I’ll try to recapitulate all here.)

Some people have argued that physically Bruno looks like both parents, but it seems to me he mostly looks like his mother. So Bruno inherited everything from her: from looks, to smarts, to grit. Grit is very important because whatever morals Bruno held scared, he could only follow through tenacity and willpower. And despite the mother being kind or not, her character and will were definitely strong, and something Bruno inherited.

His father was kind, but in a simpleton kind of way; he was happy with a simple life because he cared little for ambitions. I think Bruno and his mom were ambitious (”there must be something more than this provincial life” kind of way), and from the backstory the mother was the center of Bruno’s intellectual life (she read him stories, he loved to talk to her, etc). This makes me think Bruno’s morality probably came from both parents; his father guiding with kindness and his mother through smarts and book knowledge.

The character of Bruno’s mom is tricky because it cane be read in two ways.

First, Araki doesn’t have a good track record with female characters (i’m talking up to Vento Aureo only). He has the “not like other girls” trope with Lisa Lisa, but let’s not forget the annoying classmates in SDC and DiU. It could perhaps reflect Araki’s views that women do tend to remarry more than men, and maybe it’s easier for women to do so. (Sexist stereotypes and misconceptions in my anime? It’s more likely than you think!) He may not have done so consciously, but rather subconsciously, and a lot of mangaka fall (and everyone) fall prey to the culture they are raised into.

The second take is that it’s not Araki who’s looking down on the mom, but rather Bruno. Araki is simply describing how a child in 2001 Italy would respond to his mother’s divorce (and it’s not like Italy wasn’t sexist back then. Isn’t the world sexist still?). So it is culturally correct that a male child would believe his mother will remarry, and the one to suffer mostly would be the father. In some ways, it is true, because if the mother was a housewife (and even if not), she would do most of the chores. A divorced man would not have a “servant” to take care of him anymore, so obviously he would suffer. Social context is something kids pick up on, even though they may not understand the connotations or biases that come with it. Bruno probably also understood that his mom was strong and could survive on her own; his dad not so much (he had a weaker personality). A reason I like Purple Haze Feedback is that through Sheila’s character and her words, we get to explore how men or boys in Vento see women/girls, and how sexist and unpleasant that is at times. So even a likable character like Bruno is not free of guilt.

I personally didn’t see the mom as selfish, and it was unhappy with how the divorce was portrayed. I loved the part with both parents solving it in private, and not blaming one another for the failure of their marriage. I also liked that they involved Bruno in deciding whom to stay with. But the part about “I will stay with dad because mother will remarry and forget us” was uncalled for. I think it’s likely the mom was a housewife, and in a position where her intellect and deep inner world was wasted. She probably followed a social script all her life, about how women of her social status should behave; she finds herself married to a man she loves, but can’t comprehend why she’s unhappy. She can’t comprehend there’s more to life than love, and she suffers. And her husband doesn’t understand her suffering; not because he’s a bad man, but because they’re on different wavelengths. So they grow apart. I really think she left to figure out herself, and she’s not selfish but a victim of the historical time and culture. Men do the same all the time, but somewhat people only raise their eyebrows when women do it; because the expectation is that women are motherly and should care not for themselves, but for others.

I only have HCs as to why she and Bruno lost touch after the divorce, and why she wasn’t there when her ex-husband died. The story (anime) never talks about it (i don’t recall the manga well, it was a while ago).

#anime manga rambles #Bruno Bucciarati #Bruno Buccellati #jojo #jjba #Jojo's Bizarre Adventure #Ougon no Kaze #Golden Wind #Vento Aureo

41 notes · View notes