#guess what video essay I attempted to watch
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whoah oh my goodness you think succession is racist because it centers white characters who are racist that's such a hot take dude I'm speechless I never thought of it that way and you're so correct that show is morally Bad to make you as the audience feel sympathy and relate to the characters at times for sure yeah that's the case totally it was absolutely Bad that the Roys experience no consequences because we all know that's the exact same thing as framing actions as aspirational yeah your take is so based for sure....it's not that these were very specific and meticulous creative choices that were made as part of a very specific style of political satire - no you're right racism in show = racist show thank you yeah so true.
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Objectively yes five pebbles deserves most of the blame for every problem in rain world but I think seven red suns does not get near enough flack for knowing five pebbles wanted nothing more than to end it all, knowing he shared resources with moon, knowing 5P trusted and looked up to him and STILL choosing to send him the information on the very risky plan to die that requires constantly utilizing every drop of water at your disposal and requires complete perfection in execution to avoid giving yourself super turbo mega cancer. & then going Omg I can’t believe five pebbles has done this :( why is he so mad at me now :( my iterator in Christ you literally gave him step by step instructions on how to ruin his life and accidentally kill his sister what did you think was going to happen.
#rain world#moon deserves none of the blame btw I stand by this. her forcing the message was a last ditch attempt to get 5P to stop literally killing#her. how was she supposed to know what he was up to.#i also stand by the fact that 5P is an incredibly tragic and complex character who shouldn’t be exclusively viewed as bad. i could write an#essay on that but I don’t want to do that and you don’t want me to do that#i think more people agree with the 5P thing but accept him trying to blame moon as fact#rather than intense denial that he put himself and her in this situation and can’t fix it#& I think people also view 5P as he is during the events of the game as his entire personality#instead of watching someone at rock bottom grab a shovel go ‘I can fix this’ and keep digging#because I think up until rivulet he’s in such deep denial that he can’t help himself or reverse what he did to moon with a simple solution#i can’t remember who said it but I think one of the devs said ‘do u think moon would still care so much about 5P if he was always like this’#sighs. he is unfortunately just like me. self recognition through video game character that ruined everything.#rain world spoilers#i guess?
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JJBA PART 5, VENTO AUREO IS THE UNDERBAKED MESS I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT FIXING...PART 1
imagine you are celebrating your big promotion at the pigeon crushing factory (in this world you make a living crushing pigeons into a cube, this isnt important) and decide to treat yourself to a delicious hibachi feast at the local grill. as you sit down, your chef introduces himself to you; to your surprise, the chef is reknown mangaka hirohiko araki!
"wow, amazing!" you think to yourself, "i can't wait to see what delicious treats he has waiting for me, especially after that scrumptious part 4 i had last time". araki smiles knowingly, seeing the recognition of his talent in the gleam of your wide eyes. with a dramatic flourish, begins his work. a wild and frenzied solo performance begins. ingredients are chopped and flung with dazzling accuracy, speed, and showmanship until you are presented with the fruits of his labor: a new dish, just for you.
there's one problem. he forgot to turn on the grill. or maybe he never meant to. his confidence leaves you unsure of what to do when he starts flinging raw onions into your mouth and encouraging you to chew. like the tragic chef from the clickhole video, he has served you a plate of raw chicken and vegetables and is now looking at you with his arms crossed over his chest waiting for you to dig in.
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its not all bad. you can eat some of the veggies as long as they don't touch the chicken, but the majority of it is inedible. you didnt even get to see him do the cool onion thing. you push the plate back unfinished and hoping for an explanation for what the fuck just happened but when you look up, you realize araki has already left. his big chef hat and coat are lying on the floor where he shed them on his new journey to start a raw foods store having discovered his passion for organic veggies. next time you crush so many pigeons you get another promotion, you try the new store and its delicious. can't fault him, i guess!
this is the experience of watching jojo part 5.
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and LOOK. i'm not lacking in perspective here. its presumptuous to say "i can do better" or "i could fix this" when it comes to anyone's work, let alone the work of someone singular like hirohiko araki. no one's brain operates the way his does, as evidenced by the paltry and weak attempts by the spin-off artists who struggle to recapture that same magic; they all lack whatever je ne se quoi araki has tapped into that's off limits to every other human on planet earth.
straight up, my approach to storytelling is too conventional to be a good replacement for araki's (who seems to be just completely unhinged both on and off the page) so my suggestions to "fix" part 5 are going to be broad strokes and not finely tuned fanfictions. there are just...things i would have like to see happen. and the list is long enough that i think it necessitates that this essay be done in parts. but everything you need to fix it is right there within the existing text. much like the bad meal, the manga (presumably, i only watched the anime. no! stop booing me!) has all the ingredients, the passion, and the skills to create a satisfying end result, its genuinely just missing the ability to bring it all together in a satisfying way. and it is so, so frustrating to watch unfold from the comfort of your couch.
however, for people not in the jojo know-know (who are just reading this bc it started with a pigeon crushing metaphor and you wanted to see where it was going), i do have to explain the historical lens we have to consider with part 5: it wound up being the first evolutionary step of araki's change in art style and story-telling conventions. the fashion aesthetics are wilder, the stakes are bigger, and the stands (WAY) more esoteric. with hindsight, we can look back and understand that it turned out to be weird because he was experimenting in real time (as artists who work serially have to due to the nature of the job) with what he was interested in and what he wanted to explore. so there's nothing WRONG with part 5 in the cosmic sense. and it wasn't without entertainment. and most of the characters were great!
it just that this whole thing causes me enough mental anguish to think about day in and day out to the point of writing what will turn out to be an embarrassing amount of words about my objectively least favorite part of a body of work i've come to adore. its fine. whatever.
come with me...join me whether you know jojo or not, as i try to stay sane tonight and many other nights. watch with concern and glee i rant incoherently about things that will make me seem like an absolute raving lunatic to anyone who is only barely familiar with the franchise and loosely understands it, as i only did, as a series about people who do pokemon but with ghosts who punch people.
first up, i need to do some comic work, and then we can talk about AHHH
OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT OF HERE! GET THAT BEAST AWAY
AHHH
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With the risk of striking a nerve, and getting someone mad, and I've been terrified to say this cause I see Harry's fans praise him a lot for everything he does: I don't think that at the moment Harry is that good of an actor as some people claim him to be.
If Harry wants to continue acting I pray and hope to God he takes it seriously. His last two attempts were far from good (More like My Policeman, than his role in DWD was far from good). Don't Worry Darling was alright I guess but his performance compared to the others was lacking in some places. I bet Olivia's direction and badly written script also contributed in him not looking so great on screen. The woman chose controversy over quality and even released that stupid video where everyone criticized Harry's accent as a promo for people to talk about, even though I'm sure she knew he'd get made fun of. Everyone waits to see Harry's acting and then this is released as a first glimpse.🤦♀️ My Policeman was painful to get through to the end cause I could already see the headlines and essays on how he's not a good actor. Personally, I think both of these directors didn't care as much about the movies they were making in terms of quality (or if they did, then in my eyes as an audience member they failed), but rather its financial success and they just got Harry because well, Harry = money. (Yes, even My Policeman with that story I don't think was of great importance because similar stories have been told on screen already and in better ways. There was nothing revolutionary about it and it was boring)
I don't even know, does Harry take acting lessons? He has something in there, it just needs a lot of practice, and practicing on a movie set in a movie that's gonna come out for people to watch at the beginning of his acting career is not it. (I've seen some fans excuse him and say that he's new to acting and doesn't have much practice, but I don't think that should be excusable. If it was somebody else with no clout, they wouldn't have been hired and granted the permission to 'practice' their acting skills on a set where a lot of money are at stake. Instead, they would choose a better actor. The fact that he is Harry Styles plays a big role and he probably realizes it, but it didn't seem like he took it serious enough to where him being picked for a leading/co-leading role so early in his career would be justified. It looks bad and for his own good just throwing himself into this like that was the wrong professional move. On top of saying at Venice that he has no idea what he is doing when it comes to acting was screaming privilege and ignorance. He's not media trained as an actor) Because now it's going to be harder for him with 2 not well critically acclaimed movies under his belt. Eternals flopped too, so it's still a mystery if there's going to be a sequel...
It's just hard for me to watch him get ridiculed by people who are not his fans and are not perhaps as biased as his supporters to where they would be willing to gloss over the truth and pretend like he's perfect. If this was Taylor, she would've been shamed by her fans and they would let her know that it's not good. So, all that Harry can do no wrong talk is also getting a bit annoying.
I think with HS acting is that people had set very high expectations on him. So if he doesn’t deliver an Oscar worthy performance he failed. Do I think someone else could have played the roles better? Yes. But for literally his first acting gigs I thought he did very well. Do I think there is room for a lot of improvement? Yes. I think HS has a lot of potential when it comes to acting but he should start taking lessons if he wants to continue. I do think his performance in DWD was way better than My Policeman.
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hey what up w the spiky sunglasses guy?? he crazy
guess we're gonna find out together (ive read the comic nearly 3 times - not enough to understand anything tbh) since i just found a 10 minute video essay attempting to explain what the fuck is wrong with him and remembered this ask. i havent watched it yet
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WARIO WARE - the only good video game franchise
I'll have seen some yt comment make the same point, but they had some edgelord name, so I guess I'll have to do it again here:
I think to demonstrate my point I'll describe my experience of having to play the latest entry under non-ideal conditions: This one uses motion controls in a very extensive and involved way, so having a tv screen and space seems like a must have - but I played through the whole "story" (basically the tutorial before the fun begins) by just putting the console-screen on my lap and trying my best to balance it why having to deal witht the motion controls while sitting (even though many require full body movement) - hell the console isnt even mine so I couldnt even be flippant on how I treat it so it doesnt break.
But the point is, that the game both does things to accomadate stupid people like me who try to do it that why (by basically giving unlimted continues the first time you try to beat a stage) and is so fun, charmring and creative that you put up with it - like a few bosses that seemed impossible with the way I did it and that I only beat after many attempts were piss easy when I finally got an opportunity to play it on a big screen with full movement space and all.
So yeah that sums it all up - what other game is actually this fun to play, what franchise besides it doesnt just devolve into grinding, wasting time on endless skiner boxes, what franchises has the childish yet charming humor that actually makes one laugh out without it feeling either forced or drenched in to much cynical irony?
I basicaly played all the instalments of the franchise (besides the Wii U one, but many even dont count that one, or the Gamecube one,but that is seemingly a port of the original game with some multiplayer modes added so +-) and I can say that they all have something to offer and the fact that theyre gameplay is so rare yet evergreen doesnt make it feel like some zombie franchise that should just die - from the orignal that introduced the concept, to DIY that actually made you create micro games and comics and music yourself, to the previous release "get it together" which had an gimmick that even if controversial I absolutely appreciated for actually trying to do something new and give a twist as it should - to this, which revists and expands the concept of "Smooth Moves" - a fan favorite.
So yeah, guess what I'm trying to say is that even if I kinda dislike Video Games as they are these days and how they are treated as some faux "identity", with people defending their favorite skinner boxes as if they were they're religion, I will allways apreciate this one little series, no matter how many "true gamers" that watched to many video essays cry about "We want WarioLand instead!!!!"
#wario#warioware#wario ware#warioware move it#move it#wario ware move it#wario ware move it!#warioware move it!#smooth moves#move it!#fun#gamers suck#only good#ok im being hyperbolic#but just play it#its fun#motion controls#gamer rights#lol#idk#gotta stan the only commercial product I still love lol#diy#gold#twisted#nah all are good#I bet even that wii u shit is fun
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Wrestling with female identity and Ernest inspiration
Ok, I'm going to be real here: feminist critique fucks with me big time. Everytime I write something and then watch some feminist film critique, it makes me second guess myself and start to feel very confused and have lots of reservations about my own work.
What specifically?
Well, most recently the thing that's been eating me alive is the concept of the Male Gaze. I watched a video about how the male gaze is present in many depictions of lesbianism. I guess I had assumed by being a lesbian myself I will make the good depictions of lesbianism because why not? But then I saw that people were very critical of a depiction of lesbianism I hadn't seen much of a problem with. Upon examination, yes I agree it is basically p*rnographic. Yes, I agree that it is catered to a male audience. The video went on to say that there is a different gaze, the lesbian gaze, and that this is based around the returning of the gaze. This made me real paranoid about my own work as a writer.
Do I centre men too much? I mean, I have scenes with no male characters but I do have scenes which focus on male characters. Do I see men as the default? Have I been poisoned by the patriarchy into thinking male gaze is good and that my gaze is not male gaze because I'm a woman? I honestly don't know and I get frustrated and angry with the criticism for making me think this.
Not me personally, but so what if a woman writes something that is kind of straight up p*rnographic or has posed nudity. Are we all just brainwashed by the patriarchy to enjoy that? I am starting to wonder if "male gaze" is really "male" and that we just call it that because men have been the ones doing it. I mean, I feel like the whole "male part" isn't intrinsic, you can have male gaze without men probably, or can you? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, I haven't downloaded the latest feminism patch so please forgive me if my beliefs are out of date.
I keep telling myself maybe I'm just getting too into my own head about this and I should just make what i make and not think too damn much about it then. But then again I also like to think critically about my work and constantly improve. BUUUUT then again, what am I doing now but trying to cater my art to the views of someone else. I'm constantly looking for approval and by becoming so wrapped up in self-evaluation on this particular topic I feel like I am just attempting to fish for the approval of feminism. And for what? So I can get praise in some nerds video essay about how I did sexuality and gender good?
Fuck that, I'll be bad, I'll fuck up. I'll make gross bad yucky things that is for MEN apparently. I'll download the new feminism drivers when I get to it. Until then, I'll just keep trying. I doubt being so inside myself with this is good for my creative process.
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Animation Night 136: The Zagreb School
Good afternoon everyone! Welcome back to my odd little... column I guess, in which I infodump about animated films (or topics only tangentially related to animated films, like the history of the samurai) and attempt to, in some sense, curate a big collection of all the great animation in the world that I can find? That’s kind of what this ended up being, huh.
Writing about animation is tricky. After avoiding some of the most obvious clichés - it’s so smooth! - you’re left with some slightly less cliché phrases like ‘strong key poses’, ‘graphical’, ‘sense of form’, ‘energetic’, ‘weighty’ ‘strong character acting’... or maybe you throw open your mental dictionary of production terminology and praise the ‘boards’ and ‘LO’ and ‘sakkan work’ and ‘genga’, which has the great advantage of making you sound like an industry insider even if you’ve never worked a day in animation (*cough*).
To get further you need to get very specific, and start pausing on specific frames and drawing bright red over things, and pull out your deck of animation principles and artist words - timing, spacing, arcs, line of action. This is the specialty of the Twitter account Frame by Frame. A useful type of analysis but also one that is very easy to parody...
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‘course you might say this is less a parody and more a perfectly legit “animation” analysis with an unusual subject.
But the real reason for all of this is that animation is something you feel more than process in words. When you create an animation, you can plan it out carefully with keys and breakdowns and arcs and timing charts (a skill that was all the more necessary when you couldn’t hit a ‘play’ button in your software) and apply concepts you might know about like ‘hand accents’ and ‘overshoot and settle’ and so forth, but even with that you are going to spend a pretty long time flipping between drawings, erasing and redrawing bits, and shifting the timing to and fro until it just looks right. And then when you watch an animation, it evokes a feeling that can’t just be broken down into all those applications of technique. And describing feelings in words is its own entire art form...
Anyway, that’s a roundabout way of... partly self-reflection, because for a series of essays about animation I don’t do a ton of actual animation analysis so much as biographising, but also to say, today’s subject is a pretty tricky one to approach!
Tonight the plan is to look into the Zagreb School of Animation - not a literal institution but a (loosely defined) artistic tradition that began in the 50s in what was then the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, centered around (you’ll be shocked to learn) the city of Zagreb, capital of Croatia.
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(Tumblr is only gonna let me post five videos in here so, I’m gonna have to spread them out a bit...)
The occasion for this is the appearance of the Zagreb Film channel on Youtube, which has been uploading clean, HD releases of dozens of old Czech films. But it’s also heavily indebted to the blog Animation Obsessive, who wrote about the Zagreb Film channel, and before that, a great deal about them and specific films made by artists associated with the Zagreb School.
OK, these guys are from Zagreb, but what makes them a big deal? We can say their influence is a unique graphical style influenced by the once-renowned UPA in America, all an overt and conscious break away from the ‘full animation’ of Disney. We could talk about their influence in Eastern European animation and worldwide. We can perhaps quote a certain manifesto, from an art show in 1968...
Animation is an animated film.
A protest against the stationary condition.
Animation transporting movement of nature directly cannot be creative animation.
Animation is a technical process in which the final result must always be creative.
To animate: to give life and soul to a design, not through the copying but through the transformation of reality.
But that doesn’t actually tell you very much, and also that’s where it gets trickier, because the Zagreb School - especially in their earlier years - were crazy varied in their output. As AniObsessive put it...
The Zagreb School is a tricky thing to pin down — scholar Ronald Holloway said it best when he called it “a loosely fitting group of artists in open competition with each other.” Many of its key figures were art-school graduates. Even more had a background at Kerempuh, something like Yugoslavia’s answer to MAD Magazine.
It was never just one thing. Zagreb School cartoons are wild and anarchic until they’re sad and serious. They’re cartoony and geometric until they’re loose and painterly. It’s less of a style and more of a “protest,” per a manifesto signed by some of the key members.
So to get more concrete, we’ll have to narrow our scope to particular artists and films. I’m not going to be able to do the Zagreb School anything like justice - there have been massive books written about them, and even when AniObsessive boil it down, that gives several long articles - so take this post more as a signpost, to explore further if you’re curious...
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Here is Kod fotografa (At the Photographer’s) by Vatroslav Mimica, with lead animation by Vladimir Jutriša. I’m leading with this one because AniObsesive have written an extensive breakdown of the animation style, which is a great read. But here let me put in a little background...
Traditional animation is usually divided into two broad strands. To start with, there is the famous ‘full animation’ pursued by Disney, spreading to Warner and later carried on by Disney offshoots like Don Bluth and Dreamworks. It’s a style which really came into its own in 1937, with The Old Mill (1937) and Snow White. Inspired by studies of live action film using the rotoscope (see: Animation Night 65), ‘full animation’ pursues what Disney called ‘the illusion of life’, when the drawings cease to seem like drawings and appear as a living, breathing character.
To this end, ‘full animaton’ places drawings on 2s and 1s (12 or 24fps) - mostly on 2s, speeding up to 1s for rapid actions, and applies a body of techniques summarised by Disney’s ‘Twelve Principles of Animation’ to create a sense of continuous motion: arcs, overlapping action, overshoot and settle, lots of dangling bits to shake and wobble. A huge emphasis is placed on acting, with the animator conceived of as an actor inhabiting that character and lending them unique mannerisms, drawing initially on the ‘broad’ acting of vaudeville performers but later splintering into more reserved styles suitable for more dramatic stories.
‘Full animation’ traditionally avoids certain techniques that will break the ‘illusion’. It will rarely use hold frames, or shots that are just multiplane effects. The extreme of full animation is the work of Richard Williams (Animation Night 119).
Then there is ‘limited animation’. This is mostly associated with TV animation, both in the States and in Japan, where the need to make a lot more animation in a much shorter time necessitated production shortcuts. These include
animating at a reduced framerate anime will usually animate on 3s i.e. 8fps, or even 4s i.e. 6fps, and drop to 2s for fast action
hold frames the same drawing stays on screen for a long time
partial holds when most of a drawing stays still, but a small part is varied, e.g. a character’s mouth and maybe jaw moves to indicate speech while the rest of their face stays still
moving holds a single drawing is moved across the screen without changing. can be used to, for example, make a very cheap walking shot by shooting a character from the shoulders up and moving them up and down while scrolling the background
bank shots repeated footage that is reused, sometimes every episode - e.g. henshin (transformation) sequences in old-school magical girl and super robot anime
multiplane effects/animetism when animation consists of sliding ‘book’ layers passing over each other, without trying to create an appearance of 3D space
loops particularly for repetitive actions like walking, but also sometimes for background animation - a handful of frames can be cycled repeatedly
As anime envolved, animators like Yoshinori Kanada (AN 62) and directors like Osamu Dezaki (AN 95) appeared who found ways to make animation that turned these limitations into strengths. Anime started to emphasise the storyboard and layout, with increasingly elaborate camera moves and a very cinematic approach to the animated ‘camera’. And viewers got used to animation on mixed 2s and 3s, and even started to come to recognise the special value of its ‘snappy’ feel - which is incidentally part of the reason for animators’ loathing for AI interpolators.
It’s not strictly that one is the ‘Japanese style’ and one is the ‘American style’ mind you. Indeed, ‘full animation’ has mostly been practiced in just a handful of studios, mostly in America, and almost exclusively in films, because it is kind of insanely expensive.
Then we come to the slightly more obscure terms for ‘hybrid’ styles, such as the ‘full limited’ of Mitsuo Iso - although this is subject to many misconceptions as @why-animation noted for this translated interview. But to briefly summarise, ‘full limited’ refers to mixing the techniques of full animation - constant movement, strong sense of weight and overlapping motion - with the reduced framerates of anime (typically on 3s). The iconic example is Iso’s animation of Asuka fighting the Mass Production Evangelions in End of Evangelion.
I mention this because I’m about to talk about a very different sort of ‘full limited’. The ‘reduced animation’ - a term coined at UPA - practiced by the Zagreb School is a form of ‘limited animation’... yet one that paradoxically often involved extended sequences on 1s, as you can also see in this brief ad...
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The way this is still ‘limited’ is that these ‘smooth’ sequences are one of two extremes. Characters slide with uncanny smoothness from pose to pose... or they remain perfectly still, moving our attention around the frame. As AniObsessive note, the spacing is very even, where conventional animation wisdom would say you should use a slow-in or slow-out, overshoot and settle. It’s consciously extremely unnatural, in an arresting way.
So returning to At the Photographer’s... (link, again) - this film builds on that into a fascinating string of visual gags, morphing pespective, playing with shapes... it feels in some ways like Flash animation, way ahead of its time. The film’s soundtrack is entirely musical, timed with the animation in a way resembling the ‘Mickey Mousing’ of Disney, but here used to create an uncanny distancing effect. The photographer struggles to get the boy to create a proper smile, an expression represented by hyperdistorted photo collages, a technique also used (along with painted elements) in the background.
I won’t try to itemise every gag, but I think it is cute how the kid’s mouth floats around his face like a little fish.
Czech animators at the time of this film, and honestly pretty much throughout the existence of the ‘school’, were working with truly limited resources. Pavao Štalter, director, background artist and lead animator of The Masque of the Red Death (1969) once described it...
All of our cameras are made from aircraft scrap from landfills. We are madmen who work with abnormal effort. Instead of making a film in three months, it takes us a year. Everything is done by hand. … Here in my little room in the studio, it is 45 degrees Celsius in the summer, and we work ten hours a day! I really don’t know how long we can say, “Tomorrow will be better!”
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Masque shows a very different face of the Zagreb School, with the gloomy, textured, bleak world of expressionist paintings. Its animation is a mix of cutouts and traditional animation in paint. Its process was discovered experimentally, Poe’s story is presented without dialogue, though there are some really choice screams and there is a song with lyrics. But mostly it’s an incredible atmosphere piece.
Masque, writes AniObsessive, was also unusual in its funding: while Zagreb Film received funding from Tito’s government, in an unusually hands-off arrangement, it didn’t go very far. For Masque, a large part of the money instead came from the American company McGraw-Hill, primarily an educational publisher, a serendipitous connection made by a display of the film’s storyboards at MoMA. You can read more about its story here.
That is also the end of my video limit for this post, and I haven’t even begun to cover more than a fraction of the Zagreb school’s important films. So please hold on for part 2, where I’ll write about a few more in the next hour before we begin our film night...
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Hello internet!
It’s officially been over a week since the release of the ‘Moon’s DEATH in VRCHAT’ episode and I am FINALLY done with this essay on the show. IRL stuff be damned, this was important lol.
Not really sure how to explain what this post is, so I guess it’s just my thoughts on some stuff from the show overall, focused in around this specific episode. It started off as a why I liked and didn’t like the idea of Moon’s “death” and kinda spiraled into something more as things tend to do for me sometimes. It’s a collection of opinions and observations from my perspective, so if you do happen to read this, uh, hi! Thanks!
I began writing this about five minutes after I finished watching that episode on the 15th of April, and have spent the last couple days doing most nothing BUT writing. I held off on watching the most recent lore episodes, (after Lunar’s death) because if I didn’t I’d just have to keep rewriting it and rewriting it and then it would just never get done. There are many things in this post that have been resolved at this point, but I chose to keep writing it anyway because I was having fun (Like, Moon’s been resurrected at this point and I have NO IDEA if he’s got his memories back. Which is a… large portion of this post lolol). There’s also references to some of the stuff I did see and while I did go through and read it through several times, some stuff still got through I’m sure. It’s a bit all over the place. So keep that in mind if you do choose to read this!
I wanna make clear really quickly that these are all my personal opinions and insights, based on my experiences of the show. I like this show, and doing stuff like this is fun for me. It’s a way for me to show my enjoyment, and at the end of the day this is a silly role play show featuring characters on the internet, that I like to watch. Please don’t come into the comments of my posts or my ask box trying to start fights over stuff I’ve said. I’m all about hearing people’s opinions and I’d love people to give me their own insights about the stuff I’ve talked about (if I didn’t my ask box would be closed.), even if we don’t see eye to eye!
My own opinions may change in the future. I’m open to that. Welcome it even! There’s so many different interpretations and likes and dislikes about different characters and I love that so many people have been brought together by their enjoyment of SaMs, even thought sometimes there are bumps in the road. It’s genuinely my favorite part, that we all enjoy this show for such varied reasons. But I won’t entertain outright hatred, insults, or attempts to start discourse with me. I will simply block people who do so.
Now that it’s out of the way, though, LET’S TALK! Prepare for sloppy thinking and many lots of words below the cut because my brain has been all over the place for several DAYS and I’ve been super excited to deep dive into this. I’ve been vibrating thinking about all this and trying to get this done!
!SPOILERS FOR THE SUN AND MOON SHOW BELOW!
So.
They killed Moon.
(Porbably. 2% chance and all that but let’s… let’s be real folks cam’ahn. Ya know? Ya know.)
I’ll be honest, this decision took me completely by surprise. I was not expecting the death of such a titular character, after all it is called the Sun and MOON Show. But, taking a look back on stuff that’s happened in the show, specifically with Moon himself, it’s not all that much of a jump that this happened.
Let’s talk some meta first. I’ve been somewhat worried about it, and I know other people have asked both here on Tumblr and in the comments of many of the recent lore videos about the show possibly ending or the VA’s moving on to other things.
META/ Behind the Scenes Word Vomit
So there was another show, called the Mommy Long Legs and Daddy Long Legs Show and I’m pretty sure there were others, but I know about this one for certain. They have the Huggy Wuggy and Poppy Playitme show listed in their Home page and as of writing they still have 2.33k subscribers. I know at one point the Huggy Wuggy and Poppy Playtime Show was listed under the channel page of all the FNAF Reacts shows. It isn’t anymore.
Whatever used to be on the Mommy Long Legs and Daddy Long Legs Show is gone. If there were videos on that channel, they are no longer there. If you are actually worried that they are going to end the Sun and Moon Show channel, be aware of the possibility that eventually they will probably do the same as they have done to the Mommy Long Legs and Daddy Long Legs Show. Same for any of the FNAF Reacts channels that you enjoy.
THIS IS NOT MEANT TO CAUSE PANIC! Even if the show were to end, I don’t believe they would delete all the videos right away or anything like that, and most likely we will have confirmation that that is the intended path for the show. But take those facts as you will. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Huggy Wuggy and Poppy Playtime Show, just to be certain. I won’t be surprised if at some point those videos get erased too.
HOWEVER!
I don’t think they’re ending the Sun and Moon show, for several reasons.
One of the reasons I saw someone call out as for why they might cancel the show is views and subscribers. So I went and pulled some numbers from various channels. As of today, (April 19th, 2023) here are the subscribers counts for some various shows in the FNAF Reacts verse as well as the Huggy Wuggy and Playtime Poppy Show, a show which was made by the same company but which HAS ended. The last episode of that channel aired on the 23rd of February this year and still has all their videos up, but it appears they have stopped uploading.
Huggy Wuggy and Playtime Poppy Show: 193k
Sun and Moon Show: 422k
Circus Baby and Glamrock Freddy Show: 238k
Funtime Foxy and Glamrock Chica Show: 113k
Roxanne Wolf and Gregory Show: 348k
As you can see, the Sun and Moon Show still has the most subscribers of all the channels. I didn’t include the Monty Gator and Foxy Show because that show is so new, and I didn’t include the Springtrap and Spring Bonnie show due to the recent re-branding which I feel would have messed up the numbers. I didn’t include the Freddy and Funtime Freddy show because I forgor. But each of those channels also has less subscribers than the SaMS. I also went and looked at the view counts for the past thirty days of videos (not including todays) and pulled an average view count from those episodes.
Huggy Wuggy and Playtime Poppy Show: 21.5k
Sun and Moon Show: 59.5k
Circus Baby and Glamrock Freddy Show: 35k
Funtime Foxy and Glamrock Chica Show: 9.9k
Roxanne Wolf and Gregory Show: 23k
The Sun and Moon Shows still got higher view counts than any of the other shows too. From a, I guess, business stand point, I really don’t think their highest performing show is the one they’re going to give the boot. Besides, people love this show beyond the numbers. I went and watched that most recent QnA video again recently and like… just the sheer love from them scrolling through all those comments and questions people had? Fuck guys. Makes me emotional.
On a somewhat related note, which stems from genuine curiosity about behind the scenes stuff and because I need to just word vomit for a second, I wonder if they’ve lost a bunch of subscribers or if their view counts have been affected by the death episodes? I don’t really surf the tags on Twitter so much, but in the comments of the videos and here on Tumblr I’ve seen quite a lot of people say they’ll stop watching or that they’re taking a break from watching. I also wasn’t paying attention to the subscriber counts before and after so I don’t know! Did people really leave?
I wonder what the reasoning, the thought process was behind the decision. They had to know there was going to be backlash! Did they not care? Killing two major characters back to back? Maybe they thought spreading out the deaths would be too much and decided to drop all the bombs all at once? Maybe it really was just to set up for the next plot line? Like, it’s a HUGE thing to kill one of your main, load-bearing characters! (I can’t particularly articulate why but, like, this is really big? It’s HUGE? Especially in the middle of so many separate story lines?)
How long have they been planning to do this? How far in advance is the show planned? We don’t really know anything about the behind the scenes for the show. Who writes plot points and ideas? The VA’s? Someone else? Whoever did, they’ve been setting up for it! It felt really sudden to me, and in a really weird place, but it had to have been in the works for some time! With everything else going on all at once, it just felt like a really sudden wrench in the gears, caught me by surprise for sure! It’s gonna throw everything out of whack! I like thinking about things like that. Yus yus yus.
Anyways, it doesn’t seem to be the path the creators are taking from a story standpoint either. If they were planning to end the show they’d be wrapping up plot threads, and instead they’ve been setting up for new stuff. If they were planning to end the show, why have Moon leave a message for Sun? Why even suggest the 2% at all? Why introduce Earth? I think it was in the ‘Killcode and Moon’s Final Conversation in VRCHAT’ episode where Kill Code suggested Eclipse might seek out the Creator since their goals aligned. But, like, that’s the introduction of a new character motive as well as setting up for a team up between two main show villains.
They’ve done character building on Sun, they gave the Creator motives for his plans, they’re building Eclipse up to be even more threatening. Hell, why even suggest there was a possibility to save Lunar if they were just going to end the show? Monty wouldn’t have found a nanomachine, and they wouldn’t be teasing us about it in the description. Lunar would just be gone. Like, you don’t make cliffhangers for a piece of media you know is going to end, that you intend on ending, that’s not very good in any aspect. And these folks know what they’re doing, they’ve been doing it for awhile.
I think the more likely option is one or both of the VA’s are taking a break from or leaving the show. For those who don’t know the two voice actors for the Sun and Moon Show are InvisibleDavis Studios (Who plays Sun, Eclipse and Monty) and EC_Universal Productions (Who plays Moon, Lunar, and Kill Code).
Both actors have their own channels and their own projects outside of the Sun and Moon show. Invisible Davis has Bonnie’s Adventures, another FNAF RP series, and his Undertale series and EC_Universal has the Punkrocks FNAF RP, which is part of TheFamousFilms greater FNAF MC RPVerse (also known, I believe, just as the FNAFverse) and has also recently been previewing another new and upcoming RP series based on Danmachi or Is it Wrong to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon. Invisible Davis also just started the Monty Gator and Foxy show.
This wouldn’t be the first time this has happened in the collection of FNAF React shows. The Funtime Foxy and Glamrock Chica show “rebranded” to the Funtime Foxy and Lolbit Show for a while, but that was in the titles inside of the videos themselves only. As far as I can tell, the voice actors did not change nor were the cast credits changed during that time. There’s also been several times where main characters were “replaced”, as with Freddy and Shadow Freddy or the different variations of Roxy, Circus Baby and others (Shattered Roxanne, Lovesick and Scrap Baby, Eclipse and Lunar).
However, many of you, if you keep up with the other shows, are probably aware that recently the Glitchtrap and Glamrock Bonnie show recently completely re-branded to the Springtrap and Springbonnie Show. They changed their banner, their channel name, as well as their cast credits in their most recent videos. This is a full on channel re-branding, which has not happened to this degree before, except maybe to the Freddy and Funtime Freddy show, as the original videos on that channel actually didn’t have Funtime Freddy at all. The cast credits are now the VA’s for the characters on the Freddy and Funtime Freddy show and the previous VA for Glamrock Bonnie is no longer listed. I am not in the Discord for any of the FNAF Reacts shows, so I do not know if there was an announcement for this change.
I mention this re-branding for two reasons only. The first is to establish that this is a possibility for the Sun and Moon Show. A decision could be made to replace Sun or Moon or both with new characters as it has already been done. These are most likely different scenarios, it is simply a possibility. The second is to establish that if there IS a VA change or if the channel is being re-branded, however they approached doing so with the Springtrap and Spring Bonnie show they will probably do again for the Sun and Moon Show. Whether that be no announcement at all or what, again I didn’t see how they advertised the GtaGBS/StaSBS switch over, regardless it will most likely be approached the same way.
To be clear this possibility is pure speculation based on already accessible information about the on goings outside of the show, mixed with my own personal experiences to theorize what may happen in the shows future. I will admit, I had several more paragraphs written detailing why I thought this might happen, but I decided against putting it in because I think it was inappropriate to make theories on the real life people behind the scenes. I don’t know anyone who works on the show, and it’s not my place to speculate about anything personal the real people behind the show may have going on to affect decisions. Don’t take my word as fact on anything. It is ONLY speculation.
Please be respectful to the voice actors and the folks working on the shows. They put in a lot of work to create something that we all love and enjoy in our own ways. Be mindful and don’t bug anyone. Until we are given explicit facts from someone who works on the shows, or an announcement from a trusted and related source, we just need to trust the process as they say.
(As a quick plug, because I truly do enjoy the content these folks put out, if you like the Sun and Moon show or the FNAF Reacts channels, especially for their lore I recommend checking them out! They’re really fun, I have been personally enjoying the hell out of the Punkrocks series. That series specifically is only on episode #69 so there’s not a ton you would need to catch up on this point and while I haven't had time to watch the Undertale series as regularly as I want, the stuff I have seen is fun!)
:)
Now, with that out of the way let’s move on into the good sauce.
Les talk about the storrry.
STORY
What happens now? Where do we go from here?
There’s kinda three big paths I can see this taking at this point,
The first is that 2% comes into effect. Moon comes back with all his memories in tact and he’s (relatively) fine and is reunited with Sun.
Second, the 2% does not come into effect, but Moon does eventually regain his memories!
Third, the 2% does not come into effect, Moon is reset and does not ever regain his memories.
There are other options of course! Maybe a Moon from a different dimension pops in, maybe he doesn’t come back at all and another character takes his place (there’s plenty of options), but these are the three main ones I can think of. There’s also the option of there being a recent backup of Moon somewhere, but I see that being too similar to the first option, just with an additional fact of he would probably be missing memories of all the things that happened in his mind, if not a little more.
OPTION 1
I see the first option as the most ideal outcome of the three, at least for the characters, because it comes with the least amount of consequences. Moon comes back, and he and Sun are reunited. Moon meets Earth. Kill Code is alive inside of Moon’s computer. AI1 is restored, as they themselves stated a backup of them was made pre-entering-Moon’s-mind, and they are reunited with AI2 (though I would have LOVED to see AI2’s reaction to AI1 being gone. Do you think he would have been sad? Do you think he would have missed him?). Everyone is ‘fine’ and we move on with the story.
At this point, we just head on and start dealing with all of the plot points in the same manner we would have if the 2% thing had never been a thing at all. There are a couple things that need to be addressed, that were established after Moon’s “death” like Lunar and getting Kill Code a new body and all that but it’s pretty much all the same problems and no new added ones that come from Moon losing his memories.
Eclipse is the big one, of course! His obtaining of the Newton Star is something they’ve been trying to prevent since practically the beginning of the show. With Kill Codes added suggestion that the Creator might try and seek Eclipse out or the two might join forces due to similar wants, we have an incredibly interesting threat on the horizon.
By the way, I was going to mention Eclipse resetting the world as an option since that seemed to be his original plan, and it would be a really easy way to ‘reset’ the channel to 0, but he himself stated that he didn’t want to do that anymore. Just thought I’d mention it!
Some other stuff they could build stories around:
- Sun’s powers and Moon’s loss of magic, which includes the circle being destroyed
- Monty Gator and Foxy having their own show and what led to that happening (people picked up that there seemed to be something going on between the Celestial Siblings and Monty that required them all to take a break from one another for a bit)
- Earth! Moon hasn’t actually met her yet! Also, I made a separate post about this, but the Creator has outright stated that Earth was made to be better than the boys in EVERY aspect. Which, considering what we now know of the Creators motives, most likely includes killing humans. I cannot WAIT to see where they go with her. (Her reaction to learning that Sun killed someone clicked some switches for me, it struck me as weird. Little details from the last couple episodes are striking me as really interesting and I’m getting more and more excited.)
- Lunar. Monty dealing with Lunar, the nanomachine, Lunar’s trauma, all sorts of stuff with Lunar. (Maybe he’ll become a major side character on the Monty Gator and Foxy Show!)
- Puppet???? Mentioned, like, twice? This is 100% a personal thing but GIVE ME MAH WIGGLY OG CHILD CARE TAKER. They’ve set up for the character, also excited to see where they’re gonna go with them.
- Solar Flare. It didn’t seem like he was actually dead, but instead fighting back inside Eclipse's systems. Maybe he’ll be the final puzzle piece to taking the down the long cheeto.
- Blood moon and Sun dealing with his first murder still.
As well as:
- The last time Sun saw Moon, Moon had trapped him in a small, magical barrier in a bunker by himself and left him.
- The message Moon left for Sun and dealing with the repercussions of that basically being a suicide note.
- Sun dealing with having Kill Code around, especially when just recently they were talking about killing him.
- A whole bunch of other things I can’t even remember right now
And of course.
Sun and Moon themselves, and their relationship with one another.
If Moon does not get reset, we’re still dealing with the same Moon we’ve had for the past year and beyond the beginning of the show, and he has a lot to atone for.
This isn’t to say that Sun doesn’t have things he’s done that need to be addressed, quite the opposite. He’s not 100% in the clear here.
I believe both of them are flawed and complex characters who have both made mistakes and done ‘bad’ things. I believe both of them deserve to have a spotlight put on them so we can see how they react and evolve afterwards. I do not want anyone to think I’m demonizing either one, by the way, or think that I’m infantalizing Sun as some weenie baby who’s never done anything wrong. Nor do I want anyone to think I’m excusing either of them for their actions farther down in this post. They both have growing they need to achieve, things they need to answer for, and diminishing them to singular character traits is to do the character’s a disservice.
But, right now, this is about Moon and I DO think between the two Moon has many more things he’s done that he needs to answer for and I do think that a lot of it revolves around Sun.
I’ll get into that, because there’s a reason I feel this way about Moon that actually has nothing to do with his character but rather with the show itself, but not here, because I’d like to address both of them separately and I’m still talking about possible outcomes. We’ll get there.
Point is, if they don’t actually kill/reset Moon, there are still so many stories to go with! That’s only stuff I remember, stuff that was established and can be built on from the most recent lore episodes. And I didn’t even touch on possible episodes with character interactions (Monty hasn’t met Earth! Earth and Lunar haven’t met anyone! Eclipse and Earth! The Creator and Earth! Moon and Monty after Lunar’s splosion! GOOD EcliPSE LeaRNINg AbOuT LUNaR. So much s tufffffffff!)
Buuuuuut
I’m pretty sure they are not going to go with option one.
OPTION 2
Option two and three are more likely and we won’t know which for awhile. Like, I mentioned up in the meta section, they probably wouldn’t have set up the 2% at all if they were ultimately not going to do it.
So, option two! Also known as Moon’s Amnesia Arc!
Moon appears in his own body, back in the daycare. Kill Code is in the computer, AI1 has yet to be restored, for any various number of reasons. Sun and Earth are there and they either find Moon or are contacted by Kill Code/ one of the AI.
And Moon doesn’t remember anything.
I’m trying to think of all the things a reset would encapsulate. It was a total reset and all his memories, so probably anything you can think of that wasn’t part of his base programming. He probably doesn’t remember any of the other characters, unless those names were a part of his initial known information. Which would include Sun.
(Fuck. Do you think Sun would think he was messing with him at first? As like a really awful prank?)
Like. Sun. Jesus. It’s going to be so bad, if it happens. Sun’s already dealing with SO much, I don’t even know if Earth could pull him back from the spiral. He’s already blaming himself for Moon getting trapped in his own head because of the destruction of the magic circle. He’s already feeling guilty and dealing with the Bloodmoon hallucinations. If Moon loses his memories, and like, doesn’t even remember Sun (which he’ll probably see as a consequence of his running off to fight Eclipse alone and destroying the magic circle) this is going to fucking BREAK him.
Followed by the message. “Sun. I don’t know if I’m awake already when you’re gonna hear this or if I’m gonna be still repairing myself. I had to do something. I had to do this. In order to not feel responsible for killing another person. Kill Code’s getting better. He WANTS to live. He wants to be his own person. But he needs help. He needs your help. And I’m gonna need it too. In order for Kill Code to exist one half of my AI’s have to delete themselves, which they can be fixed. That’s easy. But I… I got reset. More than likely. There’s about a 2% chance I didn’t, so maybe you got lucky. But I… I can’t kill another person. I love you brother. I know you understand what I did. And I know why you left. I know you wanted to help me. Now’s your chance. Just be my brother. That’s all I’ve ever needed.”
Just. The emotions that will come with having a memory-less Moon show up and see Sun. Kill Code in the computer. Do you think Sun will blame him? I don’t even think he’ll believe Kill Code until he hears the recording. I wonder if he’ll believe him even after! I’ve already written about how the two of them, Sun and Moon, don’t really know each other in a different post. I DON’T think Sun will understand this decision at all. Like, deep diving into that message could probably constitute another essay all on it’s own. I’m excited. I’m dreading it. I can’t fucking wait. Arghargharghargharghnamnamanamnomm
His memories about magic. His memories about the daycare. All his experiences, gone.
Think of all the other characters who are going to have to deal with the effect’s of Moon’s death, too! This is going to have blow back that reaches to other characters who knew him! All the different opinions. There’s going to be characters who did like Moon, who did NOT like Moon, who were helped by him. He wasn’t unloved in the FNAF Reacts Verse, people came to him for help and advice a lot, enough that, an entire other universes Pizzaplex failed without him. Fucking Monty, guys. KC having to live on with the realization of what exactly Moon saving him cost and what that actually meant. When he sits and thinks on it, what really happened. LUNAR.
And on top of all of that, every plot point I listed above, is still open to be addressed. Every single one is a loose thread still, except now Moon doesn’t remember anything. He can’t help with Eclipse or the Creator as well as he could before, because he doesn’t remember. He won’t have any reaction to hearing Lunar is dead, because he doesn’t remember who Lunar is.
And he can’t attone for the things he’s done to Sun and the other people he’s hurt, because he doesn’t remember doing those things.
However, with option two, eventually Moon remembers! I saw a couple suggestions for how this could happen. Backups somewhere. Maybe the AI’s can find them, maybe they were in Lunar and when (if) he gets ‘resurrected’ they’ll get Moon back too, I think I saw someone say that Moon outright said he had backups somewhere, maybe he put them somewhere and one of the side plots will be trying to find where they’re hidden since the only one who knew where they were was Moon himself.
I think, if they do go this route, there will probably be more severe consequences for the message and the choices Moon made in his head. Because, unlike in the first path where nothing ‘bad’ came from the choice, in this path there were severe consequences for people other than Moon that happened because Moon lost his memories. Especially to Sun. But there is once more room for growth, because now he can face those consequences, possibly even with a new perspective! I saw someone suggest that Moon with no memories (and no trauma!) watches the show and realizes he was an asshole, and it helps him take strides to making amends as best he can and growing as a character even after he regains them.
Which now brings me to the third and final path I see this entire thing taking.
OPTION 3 (Kinda)
The 2% comes into effect and Moon loses his memories.
And he does not ever get them back. A true reset.
Maybe there are no back ups. Maybe there are backups, but Eclipse finds and destroys them all and with it any chance of Moon coming back. Maybe they find the backups but they’ve been corrupted somehow. Point is Moon is forever the way he is now, with no memories of his past beyond the recordings provided him and anecdotes from the people who knew him.
I don’t particularly love this option. I don’t hate it, I can see reasons for why it could happen, and also reasons why it would be a cool path to take! But I think, of the three I listed, I want this option the least.
I’m going to veer for a moment, twice. We’ll get back to that topic in a little bit, but I’d like jump to what I mentioned before and talk about Sun and Moon themselves, and their relationship with each other as well as another kind of major opinion I have for the show.
I’m going to talk about Sun first, because I think my opinions on Sun are a little different than other peoples. I’ve never actually seen anyone talk about him like this, so I’d like to get it out of the way because it does kind of lead into what I think about Moon.
SUN
Initially, while I was writing this piece I couldn’t quite figure out what to write about Sun. So I started off this section with ‘Sun is boring’. Which I don’t think that so much anymore. I spent some time while I was writing this, going back and watching some older lore episodes, ranging from all the way back at the beginning of the channel to more recent episodes.
And I think a better description for how I feel about Sun is that I think Sun has been very overshadowed over the course of the show. And because of that, until recent episodes where the show has started to focus on him, I just didn’t really care about him all that much. I realized this while I was trying to figure out how to characterize him, because I was trying to think of specific moments where he did something that jumped out to me, that put his character on display and or story arcs where he has been an active focus and, besides the most recent stuff, I couldn’t think of any. Which is weird, because I can think of a TON of stuff for Moon.
I’d like to clarify quickly that I am not a religious watcher of the Sun and Moon Show. I don’t always have time to watch episodes day of, and I often don’t watch gaming episodes, so I don’t get the little tidbits of characterization and character information that happen in those episodes. I started watching the show regularly sometime after the Interview episode way the fuck back in July of last year because I saw an animatic or something that got me really interested, but I never went back and watched anything before now. I’ve also missed lore episodes so I’m most likely coming from a place of less understanding than someone who has watched the show regularly, seen every episode, or watched and paid attention to Sun’s character specifically. I don’t know everything, and I don’t want anyone to think that I think I know everything, I very much do not.
Eventually I hope to watch the show in it’s entirety (which I know is a huge undertaking, but I want to do it anyway at some point because I just really like this show). Even with the few episodes I’ve been re-watching so I can find little details for my writing, I’ve discovered so many more cool little things so I’m sure in the future once I’ve re-watched it all, my opinions will change (for sure!).
But from my perspective (which is, again, very limited. I will outright admit that), Sun is a very overshadowed character on the show despite being a title character.
The basic character points I know about Sun are:
- He’s anxious
- He’s hot headed/ impulsive
- He likes things being organized and clean
- He’s very much a caretaker, good with kids
- He tries very hard to be optimistic and cheerful
- He’s very often the butt of jokes
In the early days of the channel, Sun was much more joyful than he is now. He’s always been optimistic and back then nothing ever really got him down for long. This early show version of Sun actually comes back in the ‘How Sun and Moon FIRST MET in VRCHAT’ episode. He’s super happy, cheerful, super excitable, singing to himself. His voice is FULL of joy. He comes across a problem (trying to figure out where nap time is going to be) and he bounces back from being confused about it and not finding an answer immediately. He’s not unhappy about it at all, nor is he unhappy about not being able to figure it out, he decides not to dwell on it, optimistically stating he’ll figure it out in the future.
That optimism and impulsive decision making has remained but he’s less cheerful, less excitable. He’s anxious all the time and he questions himself a lot, which has been focused on often in response to his actions with Bloodmoon. A really good example that I personally like is in the episode ‘Sun LEARNS Moons SECRET?! In VRCHAT’, the way Sun reacts to finding out to Moon telling him he has no plans to stop Eclipse, that he tried everything and that he’s failed, is to say, “No. No. There has to be something. Like, like literally anything. There has to be something!” Even when Moon is telling him that this is it, they’re out of options, Sun continues to hold on to that hope. Of course, right after he starts to panic because he doesn't want to die, but the point is that his initial reaction was that hope!
Even after he starts to panic about dying, about Moon possibly dying, he’s still trying to come up with options. He says, ‘Maybe we can be stuck together!’ still looking on the bright side! And when Moon starts panicking, Sun assures him that he’s not a virus, he’s not a mistake. It’s very good.
But that’s it. That’s where my, even with all of my re-watching and reevaluating, understanding of Sun ends. And that’s not a lot. It’s paltry in comparison to what I know about Moon.
Which brings me over to talking about Moon.
MOON
In the same way that I started talking about Sun with a less-than-accurate description, I’m gonna start off with a less-than-accurate description of Moon. Contrary to my description and personal understanding of Sun’s character, I’m gonna say something I have seen a ton of people say about Moon’s character.
Moon is an asshole.
I actually very much dislike this summation of Moon’s character because while it is true, Moon IS an asshole, it’s only a fraction of his full character. There are other things that supply his characterization.
The basic character traits I know about Moon are:
- He’s generally rude and mean to other people
- He’s apathetic
- He’s emotionally closed off
- He often resorts to threats and violence as an answer to his personal problems
- He has a lot of unresolved trauma stemming from his time under the virus/ Kill Code and being stuck in a body with Sun
- He has incredible technological and magical prowess
- He dislikes kids, and taking care of them (also not very good at it)
- He has a lot of self loathing
- He has a need to protect the people he cares about at all costs
We’ve heard often about how Moon was trapped in a body with Sun for the longest time. The breakdown he has about not wanting to be stuck again just before October started always sticks out in my mind, it’s one of the clearer moments I always remember from the show. But we never really got a look at that time, despite it being so important to the both of them, until the flashback episode ‘How Sun and Moon FIRST MET in VRCHAT’ and, from their first moments, Moon has always been an asshole to Sun. Their very first interaction with one another was not good, and it came from Moon.
But that was a VERY different situation. And I think it was a very normal response.
Not okay. But normal.
He’s stuck in a body he has no control over. He has no control over himself. He may even feel that he doesn’t have a self. Nobody can hear him (and considering the events of Security Breach are canon in the show, it’s possible nobody cares either). Trying to wrestle control is impossible, and trying to do it anyway is painful for both him and his counterpart. So, he responds to it by taking his anger out on the only other person he can take it out on, the only other person he can reach. Sun.
Sun even tells him in that episode that it’s not his fault they’re like that, he knows it’s not fair, he doesn’t have any control over it either (and in typical Sun fashion, Sun tries to offer solutions, he tries to come up with something that works for both of them) but Moon doesn’t care. He’s mad. He’s not thinking straight.
Different people react to different situations in different ways. Feeling trapped, being stuck in an abusive or awful situation changes people in different ways. Some people become very timid and submissive. Some people get angry and violent. You do things in the name of survival and sometimes these things aren’t good or reasonable. These are completely normal responses for this type of situation, even with the fantastical nature of it in the show.
I don’t know how long they were like this. I do remember a line at some point that they had been separated for a year before the first episode of the channel. They’d had some time apart from each other, so we didn’t get to see much of the immediate backlash of finally being separate, nor have we gotten to see any of the time they were together besides their very first interaction. We got long after. There had to be some reconciling for the two of them to be calling each other brothers by the beginning of the show.
This is Moon’s big traumatic incident, which has never actually been addressed on the show. This is the thing that so much of him revolves around, that fuels so much of him on the show, this powerless situation he was trapped in for years, being stuck in his own head. His need to take care of his siblings, his apathy and issues dealing with personal and emotional issues, his self loathing which stems from his actions (he feels like if he isn’t fixing things, making things, solving problems for people, he doesn’t serve a purpose, he’s worthless). All of it can probably be traced back to this.
It is the thing that a lot of his character revolves around, is this time where he was stuck in his own head with no power. He never wants that to happen again. Yes, he’s an asshole. But in character context, there is an explanation for him to be.
I think regardless of your opinions on Moon, most of us can agree he is often mean to the people around him. Sun, Eclipse, Monty, he doesn’t really pick favorites when it comes to being rude to people, though he is more/less/ mean in different ways to different people. Except for maybe Lunar, in fact he seemed really nice to Lunar even with that small section of episodes where Lunar took over Moon’s body in mid September. He certainly wasn’t as harsh with Lunar as he was with Eclipse. And he’s certainly not as mean to Lunar as he is to Sun.
Though he has made decisions for Lunar in the same way he’s made decisions for Sun, without his consent or understanding. With Sun of course I’m thinking of the trapping episode, because Faffers is incapable of shutting up about the trapping episode lol. For Lunar, I’m thinking about the Good Eclipse stuff. Moon lied to him about needing Lunar to scout a dimension, a dimension he told Lunar right after he “would enjoy” and then sent him to the Good Eclipse dimension without any information. He knew where he was sending Lunar, he most likely knew what was waiting for Lunar there.
Ultimately, it ended up fine. Lunar made a new friend and he started visiting Good Eclipse often. But the issue is that Moon made that decision FOR Lunar without communicating with him and I think also without quite understanding what was wrong, because Lunar has a lot of unaddressed trauma when it comes to Eclipse. Lunar panics when he gets there and sees Good Eclipse. It might not have gone the way Moon wanted and it could have made the situation worse.
It’s just another example of Moon making a decision that wasn’t as well thought out as it should have been, because Moon thought he knew better than the people he was making the decisions for. However, these decisions GENUINELY STEM FROM MOON’S CARE FOR THE PEOPLE HE DOES IT TOO/FOR.
One of my favorite quotes about Moon actually doesn’t come from an episode of the Sun and Moon Show, but from an episode of the Freddy and Funtime Freddy Show. Some quick context: On the FaFFS they introduced a character in August called Shadow Freddy. I’m not so caught up on the lore of FaFFS but I believe Shadow Freddy is a manifestation of Freddy’s magic, which gained corporeal will and form due to Freddy’s lack of use of it. Shadow Freddy’s purpose was to protect Freddy or something. This eventually manifests as Shadow Freddy completely taking over Freddy in maybe early/mid October and he was actually on that channel all the way up until either mid December or mid January (I’m not sure I was just looking at thumbnails rip).
On the 11th of December FaFFS aired an episode called ‘Moon SAVES Ghost Freddy in VRCHAT’ and on the 12th of December, FaFFS aired an episode called ‘Moon VS Shadow Freddy in VRCHAT. Both videos canonically take place in time before the ‘What if ECLIPSE had won?’ episode on SaMS. In these episodes Freddy has escaped his body in ghostly form and run away from Shadow Freddy to try and figure out a way to get his body back. Freddy explains the situation, Moon and Lunar help him out, giving him a temporary body made out of magic and then send him on his way.
The quote in question comes from the second episode here. Shadow Freddy has tracked Freddy to the Daycare, broken in and gives Moon his tragic backstory. Moon is being patronizing the entire time, calling him an idiot and clearly not giving a fuck. Shadow Freddy tells Moon a couple of things about the four wellsprings of power, and about how if Freddy dies Golden Freddy will get mad (which Moon says sounds like fun). Shadow Freddy of course gets frustrated that Moon doesn’t care about any of these really important repercussions he’s telling him about and Moon goes, “Listen here buddy. You don’t understand. Hi! I’m Moondrop! I don’t care about anybody aside from my brother.”
Which is such, it’s such, it is such a good fucking line! It is such a good line to describe Moon! He cares very deeply about Sun, he truly does love Sun! His actions towards Sun stem from a genuine place! A lot of his actions in the show stem from wanting good things for his brothers!
But you can want good things for people and still mess up. You can do good things and still have bad outcomes. You can have good intentions, but they can still be wrong. Different situations call for different solutions and not every answer is the right answer for certain problems. Moon falls into this a lot. He thinks he’s doing the right thing, he’s convinced he’s doing what’s best for people! He’s does things out of the kindness of his heart, doing his best. But he doesn’t have a correct understanding of what the right thing is.
Moon never gained the social skills to effectively deal with problems like this. These skills were warped by his time trapped with Sun and he never got help for it. I saw someone describe it as ‘socially incompetent’ and he himself stated at one point that he doesn’t think he’ll ever understand it (I could not find said quote but I do remember it being said). Which is that self loathing coming back. So he resorts to what he knows.
(It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy that idea someone else had where he watches the show and realizes he was an asshole before he lost his memories. He’d be coming at it from an unaffected angle, with no pre-established effects from that traumatic time which could help him grow those skills without any interruption! There’s no trauma that he has to push past, so it’ll be easier.)
He has good intentions, he wants to fix everything for the people he cares about and he does care very deeply about his siblings and the people that he loves. They’re very important to him, the most important to him. But taking away other people’s agency, making choices without their consent, even if you’re doing it for love? It’s not okay.
There’s more to all of this, but now I’m going to switch over to that second thing I mentioned before, that major opinion about the show.
THE SUN AND MOON SHOW
So, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been re-watching episodes from different times on the channel. As of now there are 134 episodes in the VRCHAT playlist, with most of them being ‘lore’ episodes. I skimmed through most of them, taking a look at the different arcs the show has been through and watching episodes I didn’t remember very clearly or hadn’t watched at all.
And I kind of realized that there hasn’t really been a Sun-centric story lines until recently, with the Bloodmoon death arc. Let me try and explain what I mean by Sun-Centric. With the Bloodmoon arc we are looking at a choice Sun actively made and the direct repercussions of it, which still revolve around Sun’s actions. Sun’s killing off Bloodmoon and his subsequent decision to hunt down Eclipse by himself have affected more people than just himself. There is a reverberating effect to his actions, something I don’t really think we’ve had from Sun before. This was the hardest thing for me to explain, so my apologies if it doesn't come across well.
Like, I can’t remember any arcs where Sun has been the primary focus of the story in this way. There’s plenty of them for Moon. For Eclipse. For Lunar. Hell, even Monty has had a couple of episodes dedicated to him on the channel. But for Sun, like, maybe there were some episodes at the beginning of the Eclipse stuff that focused on him alongside Eclipse and I’m sure there was some focus on the Roxanne stuff at one point. ‘Sun Goes on a DATE with ROXANNE WOLF in VRCHAT’ was about Sun and his feelings towards Roxanne, with Moon playing a supportive role in that episode! But none of those really stuck, there wasn’t any butterfly effect from Sun buying Moon a room in space or Sun visiting Golden Freddy for advice after the first fight.
Like, what important events can I think of that might have related to Sun?
July 16th? That wasn’t Sun’s fault, that was Eclipse and Bloodmoon. Sun had no hand in that at all. The Witherstorm? He helped solve it, but he was with Moon and again that was caused by Eclipse. Roxanne’s maternity chip stuff? Eclipse. Sun broke Moon’s computer? Sure, he caused it but then we flipped immediately to Moon and the resurgence of his Kill Code.
Shit! Sun barely even had anything to do with the pre-October stuff. Moon was the one doing all the planning then. He dragged Lunar back to switch him out with Moon that one time, but most of September was about Moon and Lunar. And he was literally GONE for all of October! I remember we saw him one time at the beginning and then he was literally just gone for a month. At the end of the episode ‘The Future of ECLIPSE and LUNAR in VRCHAT’ we see Sun get transported to a strange mindscape away from Moon. That episode aired on the 2nd of October. The next time we see Sun is in the episode ‘Moon REVIVES Sun in VRCHAT’. That episode aired on the 25th of October. 23 days! We were missing a title character for 23 days in October! I remember it, I remember people wondering where he went, being so happy he was back because he’d been gone for so long.
And I want to say that I’m blowing this out of proportion a little but, like, I’ve scrolled through EVERY episode in the VRCHAT list and the only stuff I can find where Sun has had a primary focus in the story is the last couple months. Please, please, PLEASE talk to me about Sun if you like him because I wanna be wrong about this. I want someone who loves his character and knows a lot about him to tell me all about how Sun’s actions have actually been driving the show alongside Moon and tell me all about their favorite Sun episodes where he’s been a driving force in the series. But as of this point, with all my research I just don’t see it!
So. Here’s that big ‘ol opinion I mentioned before.
The Sun and Moon show is a show that’s all about Moon.
Or at the very least the story is! There are, of course the gaming episodes which usually feature Sun and Moon, which I’ll touch on in a bit. For now, I’m just talking about the story/lore stuff.
Moon is an extremely powerful character in two fold. He’s super intelligent. We get examples of this all the time, either just from him being knowledgeable about various things or solving problems with his inventions. He created his AI’s, he’s upgraded the other animatronics, he regularly offers solutions to problems with ideas and inventions and he’s been doing so in the show for a long time. In fact, he’s so integral to the world of the show that they literally established in the ‘What if Moon didn’t exist in VRCHAT’ episode that the daycare was shutting down and the entire building was being closed because Moon wasn’t there to do tech work, which I brought up before.
He’s also a magical prodigy, to the point that Golden Freddy (who is, like, THE magic guy) said both he and Sun have huge destinies in front of them. Even recently, in the FaFFS episodes I mentioned earlier in the post, he gained access to another tier of powerful magic (PRIMORDIAL FIRE BABEY!). He may focus on his technology, but he has solved problems before with magic and has access to very powerful forms of it. When people have magic problems, they go to Golden Freddy or they go to Moon.
I think that, from a narrative standpoint, this makes Moon a weaker character in all of the stories he’s in. By being so powerful, he renders most regular problems moot. There isn’t really any threat behind threats because Moon has proven over and over again he can just solve them with his intelligence and technology or his magic.
I mentioned this in a post back in mid March, around the trapping episode, that I believed the only person who could reasonably contend with Moon is someone with incredible magical power and intelligence to combat his abilities. Which is why I was so excited when Sun got his own magic! Moon, with no context, compared Sun’s magical outburst to Golden Freddy. Again, like, THE MAGIC GUY, Golden Freddy. It’s possible that Sun’s natural abilities will surpass even Golden Freddy’s.
Now, you think this would be held back by the fact that Moon doesn’t like anyone other than his siblings. In fact, bringing up that FaFFS episode, Moon reveled in the idea that Golden Freddy would get pissed off if harm came to Freddy. He was excited about it! Considering his actions in that episodes you’d think he would have sent Shadow Freddy off on his merry way with no help at all, right? Except he did help Shadow Freddy! He still helps people he doesn’t like! Even when he’s expressed that he would enjoy the alternative. Like, he butts heads with Monty all the time but he still assists Monty when he could just do nothing. He helped Lunar, despite Lunar’s participation in Eclipses plans.
This is also the reason why I like the October episodes and the Kill Code resurgence stuff because those were problems that Moon couldn’t solve and we were outright told that. He needed outside help to ultimately solve the problem in October, which came from his connections with Monty and Lunar’s own separate development which didn’t involve Moon at all really. But even with all of his skills, he couldn’t initially fight off Eclipse. He lost.
And in the case of Kill Code, we were told over and over and over again that there was no way for Moon to remove Kill Code without killing Moon! All of Moon’s skills were useless in that scenario, and he had to make a compromise with Kill Code.
But Moon ultimately intended to use magic to destroy Kill Code. And at the end of October, Moon was the one who escaped first and told Sun how to cast the magic. I was expecting Sun to be the one to ultimately solve the problem, because he and Eclipse were so entwined, they were trapped together in the same body for months before October. I still liked how they did it, with Lunar recognizing that what was being done to him wasn’t good and him choosing to betray Eclipse. But at the end of the day, of the two main characters, Moon is the one who figured everything out and gave Sun the tools to fix the problem! Sun didn’t do any of the work to get there, he just cast the spell.
Eclipse was the first big thing that happened. Like, SaMSs first episode aired on 3/24/2022 and they introduced Eclipse barely a month and half after the first episode, possibly even before that because I’ve seen it theorized he was around in some gaming videos I haven't watched (Two months later, in June, was the wither storm battle. 2 months after THAT, in August, they introduced Lunar and it hasn’t really settled down since it started. This show came out fuckin’ SWINGING.). He’s been a main player since the beginning.
After Eclipse showed up, Sun didn’t really get anymore episodes that focused on him until recently, where he took charge and went off to find Eclipse by himself. It was always about him AND Eclipse or about Moon and Eclipse and, like I said before, I can’t really think of any episodes that just focused on Sun.
I think a lot of Sun’s characterization was also built alongside Eclipse, focusing heavily on the similarities and differences between them, without ever focusing on just Sun. They shared the same body, and their story lines were so threaded together that I remember one of the main plot lines between the two was ‘How much different IS Sun from Eclipse?’. Like, Eclipse was Sun. Eclipse was also Moon. Eclipse was also Kill Code. Whereas Suns character is who he is not, and who he is not is Eclipse The main differentiating factor between Sun and Eclipse before now was that Sun did not kill people! And then he killed Blood moon! And his demeanor has shifted enough that Lunar straight up told Sun he was turning into him. I know that whole explanation is confusing. It’s very confusing for me. Hard to articulate well.
(Actually had Eclipse actually killed anyone in the show before Bloodmoon died? I’m sure it was mentioned. Did we visually witness Sun kill someone before we saw Eclipse do so?? I can’t remember and now I’m really freakin’ curious.)
He feels like a main side character in his own show, at best. I think this show has very often over shadowed Sun in favor of Moon, and other characters to a lesser extent, even when Sun probably should have been an integral part of whatever was going on. Moon is often in the center of the plot, a focal character in almost every single arc on the show, and of the two main characters, the Sun and Moon Show is very much a show that has been about Moon.
Which finally leads me into the final stretch of this post where we bring it all together.
OPTION 3
I like the idea of killing off Moon. For a couple reasons.
To start, I think it was just done really well. Like I said, it may have been planned, but for me it was very sudden and took me by surprise. Which is fantastic, because sometimes that’s how death is. Sometimes it’s sudden and it leaves things forever unanswered. When someone dies, that’s it. There are things that will never be resolved, words that will forever remain unspoken, explanations that will just never be received. It leaves characters reeling, and opens up paths for interesting character developments and scenes.
This was also completely in character for Moon. His personal self loathing, which has only been exacerbated in recent episodes as he’s had to face his past mistakes over and over in the last couple weeks, mixed with his regrets over killing people and hurting them making him not want to do so anymore makes his decision to spare Kill Code a perfect decision.
Jumping back to Moon’s message to Sun, he told Sun, “I had to do something. I had to do this. In order to not feel responsible for killing another person.”
“Kill Code’s getting better. He WANTS to live. He wants to be his own person.”
“I can’t kill another person.”
Kill Code had changed. He no longer wanted to kill. He was making the ACTIVE decision not to kill and was then forced by the Creator to do so. He was making the choice to get better, he tried to fight it, he tried to fight his own programming. And Moon saw that. He knows what it’s like to kill, and he doesn’t want to kill anyone, especially someone he believes doesn’t deserve it and Kill Code did not deserve it.
Also throwing this in at the end here, AI1 also straight up told Moon this was the only option. Moon built the AI’s to assist him, they ARE him. He has a lot of faith in them. So when AI1 told him that, Moon trusted them.
It was a fantastic choice on the part of the people who run the show and it’s completely in line with what we know about Moon.
We’ve also removed Moon as the dual-wielding powerhouse he was in the story. Without his magic or his memories, problems that he could have easily solved before with a flick of his wrist or a new invention now have to be solved by the other characters without him as a support net! Also, with him momentarily down for the count, we’re going to get more Sun-centric content!! We’ve already started! It’s already happening and I’m so, so happy about it! I’ve been living for the Bloodmoon stuff. I’ve loved seeing Sun have to deal with the repercussions of what he’s done. I love seeing, well, Sun!! Sun finally feels like a main character in his own show, he’s finally gaining agency in a show about him!
And there’s so many things we could focus on!
Personally, I’d love to see a focus on helping Sun with his own trauma of being stuck in a body with Moon. Because as much as I’ve talked about Moon being stuck in his own head with Sun, you have to remember that Sun was stuck with Moon too! On top of that, Sun was also stuck with Eclipse! Two characters who went out of their way to make Sun’s life ‘a nightmare’, ‘a waking hell’ for something that was both not his fault and out of his control, there is no way in hell that didn’t have some sort of effect on him!
But I also don’t like the idea of this option.
Because I want Moon to have to stand for the things he’s done.
I mentioned above that I felt that Moon has more to answer for than Sun and the main reason I felt that way was because Moon has had so much more focus, he’s had more opportunities given to him to be mean to Sun. The gaming episodes also tie into that! Like I said before, the gaming episodes are where a massive amount of little characterization moments happen, and tidbits of information are dropped. Almost every gaming episode on the show features Sun and Moon so we have seen them interacting a TON. There literally is just more content for us to pull from as examples, for both of these reasons.
Don’t get me wrong! One of my favorite tropes to read about, watch and write about is memory stuff. I LOVE that shit. I think it’s one of the most fucked up things you can do to a character. Loss of memory, the threat of memory loss or theft, memories as a cost, amnesia arcs, because I feel as if memories are such an important part of ones self. Your memories are what make you you and what direct your decisions.
(I also literally JUST SAID that was one of the reasons I like that it did happen this way. But I like that more because it’s very realistic and can bring about interesting things in a story, not because I necessarily want it to happen.)
I’ve also been referring to this as a death this whole time. This is why. To take someones memories is akin to death to me. Death without death. In my mind, if they take his memories, they have effectively killed Moon. Just so folks see where I’m coming from here.
If they truly are planning on replacing one of the VA’s or reset the series somehow, this ‘reset’ is a really easy and quick way to do it! Makes sense!
Narratively? In this instance? I don’t like it at all and I really, really hope they don’t go with this option.
I, personally, have been waiting for catharsis from the trapping episode. I have wanted Moon to answer for that SO badly. And I have seen post upon post upon list from other folks about the things Moon has done and about his actions and the way he treats Sun and the people around him. Moon has effectively spent his entire life, from the moment he woke up trapped in Sun’s body, lashing out and causing harm to the people around him, and while there’s more to it than that the harm has been done.
Wouldn’t it just be so great to see him have to stand for those things?
Learn from them?
Grow as a character?
I want THAT more than anything.
Instead, he’s now become Bloodmoon.
In Moon’s own words, “He couldn’t change. He’s DEAD.”
If the reset goes through, if Moon loses his memories, whoever comes out of it WILL NO LONGER BE MOON. There is no room for character growth, the Moon who did those things will never be able to repent for his actions or face consequences, he will never be able to atone for the shit he’s done because THE MOON WHO MADE THOSE ACTIONS IS GONE. Any apologies he makes beyond that point will be hollow. There won’t be any weight behind those apologies because the memories of what Moon did will be gone and he won’t actually understand exactly what it is he did. He would be apologizing for the actions of somebody else. The Moon we get back will be a completely different person forever. This is an easy escape from his multitude of problems, whether he knew it or not.
And that’s tragic.
And that’s unsatisfactory.
To quote Earth from a couple episodes ago “The choices we make, we have to live with”.
Moon hasn’t really taken steps to get better towards Sun. There’s a lot of unresolved conflict between the two. And he’s never taken steps, that we’ve seen, towards tackling his trauma and the effects it had on him. Maybe he never would have. Maybe he would have never gotten better.
But I don’t think that’s the case! Moon recognizes he has issues, which is the first step towards fixing them! And if Kill Code, an AI designed in his code explicitly to kill things, can decide against his own coding, then Moon is capable of change too. He’s already started! We’ve already seen he’s capable of kindness, and he’s got a ton of love to share. I truly believe he could extend that towards Sun and begin to heal fully.
YIPPEE
RIGHT.
THAT’S IT.
After 10 days, several late nights, and… ohlord 11,500+ words I am finally done with this thinggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
That felt like an adequate amount of ggggggggs. I think I earned that.
I kind of don’t know what to say. If you did get to the end of this, thank you again for reading the ramblings of a mad man! I’m not one much for interacting in communities online, so this is a new leap for me and I’m very nervous about putting this out there. I’m still so nervous I didn’t even tag this post under the Sun and Moon Show tag lol. Oh well.
Buuut, I spent a lot of time on it and like I said waaaaay back up at the top, if I didn’t I’d just regret it. So yeah! I’m off now to watch the checks watch six episodes I’ve missed over the last couple days and listen to some goofy music! Farewell! Have a nice day.
:)
Some Final Notes:
- Need bean bag factory lore. Head canon that it’s just TF2.
- Wanna see Eclipse before and after Lunar’s death
- Earth being evil? Who knows?
#fafferchat#here it is!#im not going to tag it unfortunately#i've sat with the post open waiting to press post for like 20 mins now#and I'm just too nervous#it's enough for me to just get it out there#if you do read thanks again!#enjoy!
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Blade got the batsignal so here I am lol. Mind you I'm only like halfway through season 5, but to attempt to explain Riverdale would both take like 1000 words minimum and be ultimately useless—because it defies explanation. It's like a neverending porn setup that never gets to any actual porn. Every scene feels like it was written by a different person locked in a sealed room. It has no continuity, no logic, no direction. It is unknowable. The writing is like it was done by actual aliens. I have watched Riverdale while absolutely shitfaced on mead with a friend (for six hours and then for like 8 hours the day after), and we both agree that when we started to sober up, the experience was identical. It takes place in 1950, 2017, and 2023 simultaneously. It is the worst show I have ever seen in my life, and it is the best show I have ever seen in my life. I have no idea what's going on in season 6, but I can't wait to find out. I recommend supereyepatchwolf's video essay on YouTube. It does a really good job at explaining the insanity, but don't watch it if there's any chance you're going to watch the show yourself. Just boot up season 3 cold and let it ride; you won't regret it. Season 4 is kind of sane for my taste but it does have its moments. Season 5 is nuts too, though, and season six I guess. If you want a confidence boost in your writing or to see what an AI-generated show might look like, Riverdale is it
I don’t even know how to respond because I am now only more lost in the sauce, but you’ve intrigued me enough to want to watch it
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alright. i need help with something ;-;
there's this short video essay i've been meaning to watch for a while, right?
however.
it is about analog horror. and it's made by the same dude as the other video on analog horror that i watched the other day, which sent me into a whole paranoid delusion-filled breakdown, in which i thought that these terrifying Things were after me. which i would not particularly like to repeat. (like, for a sense of scale: i was only able to calm myself down by having the "realization" that they couldn't come in my room, so as long as i ignored their attempts to get me out of bed i would be safe).
really don't want to ruin my night, so it seems like it's easily avoidable, right?
WELL HERE'S THE THING
horror is one of my favorite fuckin genres, if not my absolute favorite. i cannot just abandon it. and so i've been TRYING to test limits and figure out what is versus isn't okay for me, and what won't cause me to spiral. so far, we've figured out that:
A. regular horror movies are okay, even late at night
B. distracting my Breakdown Brain with my phone allows me to calm down, even if i'm still sure that Things are there
C. analog horror Fucks Me Up (but it's unclear as to whether or not this is only an issue at night, and how much time after that type of media is required to prevent me from GETTING fucked up
D. it's not always triggered by watching something, sometimes it's just a stray thought that gets immediately accepted as fact
anyways i guess what i'm asking is does anyone who's experienced similar things have any suggestions for me to be able to figure out what is versus isn't okay WITHOUT triggering,,,,,, All Of That ;-;
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I’m always so irked by that old “MCU is military propaganda” take because you don’t even have to watch very closely to see how untrue it is
Multiple characters leave the military/quit doing business with them at great personal cost because it doesn’t allow them to actually help anyone, the military getting its hands on certain technology is just about always framed as a bad thing, and the entire US Department of Defense is never portrayed as anything but an obstacle to doing actual good. This precedent was set IN THE FIRST MOVIE, and has continued through to the present. Like, just... Isaiah Bradley, guys. Isaiah Bradley.
I think many of these people are just annoyed that there are multiple good characters who were, at one point, soldiers. And that’s not even necessarily on the MCU; the comics are mostly responsible for that. It’s an easy way to explain why a character has combat experience/speaks a different language/has traveled a lot, plus the Golden Age spanned two large-scale US military conflicts so military service was a relatable thing for a lot of readers when several classic characters were created.
As for Tony’s vision of a “suit of armor around the world that might impact people’s freedoms”, it’s a huge leap to call that military apologetics or whatever. The context is pretty different, the idea is shown to be full of holes, and his attempt to enact it created ULTRON, of all things, which caused the destruction of a foreign city that the movies often hearken back to as a senseless tragedy. So I wouldn’t say that’s a great endorsement of US “peacekeeping” efforts, either. And no, Thanos does not mean Tony was supposed to be right all along, as it’s plainly obvious no earthly defense system could have stopped him. Tony is speaking out of fear and frustration when he brings the idea up again in Endgame; there’s nothing to suggest it would have helped in the slightest and that’s kind of the entire point of that bit of dialogue.
Nobody has any media literacy anymore.
I blame the overabundance of video essays, partially. Like, hey guys, guess what, there’s a good chance that early 20-something with an undergraduate finance degree who one day on a whim started making Youtube “deep dives” about 90s cartoons probably doesn’t actually have the skill set to be analyzing things critically with any real depth. It really doesn’t matter if their heart’s in the right place; good intentions aimed the wrong way are useless and just give ammunition to people with bad intentions. And just, idk, not everything is a conspiracy, guys. Oversight is far more common than outright malicious intent. Writing movies is hard. Go focus your efforts on real problems.
As far as the MCU goes, it actually needs:
- More prominent female characters (the goofy-but-well-intentioned “She’s got help” bit in Endgame required a few too many side characters)
- More queer representation
- More non-white representation
- Less emphasis on America (though it’s not necessarily wrong to center your franchise on a particular region of the world)
- Etc
And it’s actually getting better at this stuff! Slowly. Far too slowly. But it’s happening and it’s always so exciting when those boundaries expand just a little more. Like, Moon Knight is a Jewish Latino dude and Ms. Marvel stars a Pakistani-American Muslim girl. Even if it was really, really on the nose, that kid asking Scarlet Scarab “are you an Egyptian superhero?” in the last episode of Moon Knight made me smile. And these are series, not just 2.5-ish hour movies! And the movies are getting batter at this, too! It’s all very encouraging.
But military recruitment/apologetics? Not supported by the text. Like, what the fuck?
#i tend to approach literary/film criticism from very odd angles myself and seize on very specific things most people don't care about#but most of my college education was devoted to this stuff and i recognize when it is done poorly#and people are really really bad at analyzing the MCU
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reading log attempt 2.0 where i don’t go off on essay-long rants
In The Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado: absolutely one of my all-time favorite ever books now, beautifully, amazing written, truly cathartic to read as Machado puts down all of the ugliest feelings of an abuse victim and survivor that society at large tries to shame people out of expressing. So much more than a memoir. I want to shove it into everyone’s hands.
Drag King Dreams by Leslie Feinberg: Love Feinberg, love her non-fiction, love her politics, love what she did for early trans literature, HATE THIS BOOK SO GODDAMN FUCKING MUCH. I deleted the huge essay I wrote about it but i have so many (negative) thoughts lmao. I can imagine there are people out in the world who could really, really use this book in their life, but I am definitely not one of them. Couldn’t actually finish it, dropped 85% of the way of the through and skipped to the end was just :|
Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, edited by Alison Peirse: I enjoyed this for the most part, but I went into it expecting something other than what it was, I guess more general film theory about the genre as a whole and how society reacts to it and women creating/partaking in it. A lot of the essays are about very specific movies, and so if you have not watched those moves (which I mostly haven’t, because film-media is hard to me due to attention span issues and hearing issues), then it’s kind of hard to get into it? Which is to say, this is an amazing book but I need to do a lot of studies (watch more horror) to truly appreciate it lmao. (Also I wish the line-up of films explored was more... diverse? In terms of creators, because it’s focused largely on white women, but.)
I will say I enjoy how many of the essays are concerned with exploring trauma via horror and taboo themes that are not sugar-coated! And may even be eroticized without a blaring “this is morally repugnant!” statement (because we should all know these things are morally repugnant but that survivors can have complicated relationships to them anyway.)
Essays I really appreciated:
Stephanie Rothman and Vampiric Film Histories by Alicia Kozma
Personal Trauma Cinema and the Experimental Videos of Cecelia Condit and Ellen Cantor by Katia Houde
Self-Reflexivity and Feminist Camp in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare by Tosha R. Taylor
Gender, Genre, and Authorship in Ginger Snaps by Katarzyna Paszkiewics
Women-made Horror in Korean Cinema by Molly Kim
The Transnational Gaze in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night by Lindsey Decker
Gigi Saul Guerrero and her Latin American Female Monsters by Valeria Villegas Lindvall
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever: I hate this book so much lmao I am all down for unlikable protagonists but jesus fucking christ at least make their horrible internal monologuing fun to read. I REALLY want more pro lit fiction with both LGBT leads and this kind of unhealthy, fucked up, obsessive dynamic that ends in horrible things committed by this horrible couple (and things like noncon, incest, etc but i digress.) That are not YA or focused on teenagers. The opening pages that show the end point of the story really grabbed me! But then you find out the protags are both these... prodigy 17 year olds who feel special and superior and like no one can understand them because they’re too smart and see through society’s lies. Which is understandable for teenagers, and also for teenagers who are gay and Jewish and have to navigate living in a society that’s unwelcoming. But lord. The author tried really hard to make everything out of Julian’s mouth witty and scathing and intelligent but it never landed for me. The witty repartee between him and Paul never sounded like more than non-sequiturs or just lines that fell flat, disconnected, like they’re not really talking at each other. I gave up 30% of the way in.
Currently reading The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate (enjoying a lot! exactly what i’m looking for!) and Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller (short story collection that isn’t really grabbing me at all)
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Time is moving at such an odd pace today as we descend backwards in time zone from NYC to Honolulu. The day stretches and elongates as we gain back a few hours at a time.
It's been 10+ hours of our butts glued to the seats of our flights. I spent most of the first leg passed out, groggily awakening to the almost blinding daylight of Phoenix outside the window, the jagged peaks of dry desert mountains jutting into the sky. "Phoenix is pointy," I expressed. "Between round and pointy, it's on the pointy side." As a joke, we measure things in degrees of Wavelength spectrums sometimes.
We drank surprisingly delicious airport coffee and I lunched on orange chicken from Pei Wei during our layover. I recalled that Aidan used to work there a long time ago, and I think that's why I gravitated there. The second leg of the flight is longer, but time is passing by fairly quickly between music, naps, a book, and a movie. I finished reading Thin Places, a book of illuminating and sometimes poignant essays that John gifted me. The last short story ruminated on the evolution and meaning of tattoos, and I read with my own permanent shapes and doodles in mind. The essay that stuck with me the most though was the one reflecting on our transition from life to death, from corps to corpse, from a person to a piece of property, either the state's or next of kin's, depending on how you went. Something about forensics pathology, this niche and unpopular but ever so important subset of the medical field, was morbidly fascinating.
I finally watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" and learned things about Freddie Mercury's life that I honestly never knew before, despite always bellowing out at least one Queen song during karaoke sessions. I guess there's always something new to learn. Or maybe I knew this fact and the other at one point in time, and it's escaped my brain since. Lately, I've been thinking about my lack of a strong semantic memory - I don't have the natural ability to hold specific facts and details like dates and events in my head without great effort. Oh well, this is simply how I am.
They just handed out plant and animal declaration forms since we're approaching Oahu. I scribble in 30 as my age for the first time. I still can't stop thinking about how beautiful my birthday weekend was. Some moments will just stick with you forever, and I snuggle in between the photos and videos in an attempt to relive those feelings over and over and over again. The passage from 29 to 30 is always heralded as this monumental milestone, this end of an era and the start of a next. Scraps of societal pinnings on what it means to be 30 drift in and out of my headspace, from "your 20s were the pivotal decade, it only goes downhill from here" to "your 30s are actually your best years." All I feel when I look in the mirror is that I look exactly the same as I looked yesterday, a little different from how I looked four years ago, and markedly different from how I looked eight years ago. And I suppose these changes will inevitably continue, perhaps in an accelerated manner from here on out. There's a quote that I keep returning to, and it goes something like "the days pass by slow, but the years go by fast."
We're landing soon. Chris and Rachel K are getting married in less than 48 hours. Ah, life is such a thrill.
-T
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- I recently watched a ‘Youtube essay’ (?) on New Found Glory’s third album ‘Sticks and Stones’ with the thesis being that it was their most important album in their 25 years(?) as a band. It was certainly a very important album to me, and perhaps my first real experience of the (old?) music fandom pipeline of ‘getting into band -> being excited for, then enjoying new album -> seeing them live’. It definitely left its mark as did many of the band’s music videos.
- I could go off on one about how it blew my tiny teenage mind that Rachel Cook was in the Dressed to Kill video, or I could rant about how I dislike the weird ass steampunk / carnivalesque treatment of the All Down Hill From Here video or the general off-key, mid 00′s aesthetics of It’s Not Your Fault, but in a bid to not let too many posts on this thing be some nostalgic, rose-tinted look back on my teenage years, I thought it worth checking out and reflecting on some of their more ‘recent’ output with this video for Greatest of All Time.
- As someone who, it’s safe to say, has grown apart from the band in the past decade or so, it’s kinda comforting to hear that their sound is largely unchanged. In fact, musically it seems a lot more in line with their early 00′s, Self-titled album era of, fast, melodic-hardcore influenced pop-punk rather than their later 00′s bouncier, hardcore, or should I say ‘Easycore’, style on Catalyst and Tip of the Iceberg. Honestly speaking though, whilst somewhat comforting, I don’t love the song. It feels a bit cynically constructed and doesn’t have that nervous, youthful (unsurprisingly) energy of a newer band like Anxious.
- The video is perhaps more intriguing than the music. Some classic NFG video motifs are still there even 20 years down the line: rambunctious, direct to camera live performance, crowd surfing, young (hetero / cis gendered) romance storyline, etc. However, the band probably playing a secondary role to the young and diverse looking characters doing all the classic, cool subcultural things: skateboarding, graffiti and tattoos, albeit in a very Gen-Z guise. It seems like there was more of a concerted effort to make this video, and by proxy the band, seem ‘cool’ to a younger audience. A risky decision given the age of the band and also quite odd given that, even in their early years, the band was more likely to come goofy or silly, more so than cool, in their videos.
- I guess what I find interesting, and perhaps cynical, is the quite obvious attempt by the band to reconnect with the renewed mainstream popularity of Pop-punk. The title of the song is obviously paying homage to the band’s deep credentials within the genre and the video seems like a clear play to connect NFG with a younger audience; those coming to this new wave of Pop-punk via Machine Gun Kelly rather than Blink 182. In this way the video is perhaps pitching for the kind of crowd the band wants, rather than the (ageing) one they perhaps still have.
- I guess when you’ve been a band long enough to have made it though a twenty year pop-culture cycle (albeit a guitarist down for some pretty creepy behaviour with underage girls), why shouldn’t you be allowed to reap the fruits of your labour? Also, maybe ditching the goofiness (which often times could turn into or read as sketchiness - another reason the band is now a four piece instead of a five) is a pretty smart move for guys well into their 40s. I just feel bad for any 16 years old who watch this video expecting a NFG glory show to look like they this, when in actual fact it’ll be ageing Millenials like me and my secondary school mates that I see once a year, muttering along, drinking over priced beers, standing a safe distance back from the stage and groaning about how bands aren’t as good as they were in 2002.
#new found glory#greatest of all time#music video#pop punk#sticks and stones#catalyst#blink 182#nfg#drive thru records#epitaph records
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Every so often I get The Urge. The Urge is somehow both nebulous and concrete when it arrives. Concrete in that I know Exactly What I'd Like out of the experience, nebulous because it's never been clear how to do the experience in the first place.
This has manifested in ASMR videos, Reading Aloud videos, attempting to capture gameplay video (with in-the-moment commentary), concept development re How Best To Share Me Playing Video Games and doin a Talk, concept development on me not talking ever, so on and so forth.
You may have guessed by now that The Urge is to Make Youtube Content. I've decided to start actually like...whittling down what would be *feasible* of me to talk about at length for enough time to make A Video, as well as the crossover between that and what i'd like to watch a video about.
So far the only theme is that there is no theme and likely it'd all be done video essay-style. My background of information is specifically fandom-based and rather diverse but not deep. The deepest I got into knowing about anything, the creator of said thing is Actively Horrible and thus that will be a topic I cover with a *lot* of caveats, if it gets covered at all.
The only other thing I know with any great expertise are...my experiences with things. And I've been known to be quite lazy about research because I think I know everything already (which is part of *yet another* idea I had about Potential Videos). Admittedly there is a market for this, which I am uncomfortably aware of, but idk. Feels uncomfy to present no facts and just opinions even if I'm pretty sure I'm right.
Anyway wanted to ramble about this somewhere - the list will stay up so i can add to it, if you think of something i've gone on and on about at length that you think I'm some kind of Voice Of Knowledge on, lmk cause that'd help narrow down a focus maybe.
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