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adamfoolcry · 3 years

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i hate you, i love you (k.dy)

it's valentine's day and you try your hardest not to fall back in the arms of one kim doyoung - your former boss, recluse and closed off, your fuck buddy - whom you are completely in love with.

pairings: CEO!Doyoung x Fem!Reader, Johnny x Fem!Reader rating: 18+ genre: angst and smut warnings: swearing, explicit sexual situations - hate sex, dirty talk wc: 3k+ prompt: 'i hate you'

a/n: This is a part of Candy Hearts Collab hosted by @127-mile . Text in blockquote are text messages.Thank you for beta reading simmi(@sly-merlin ) and indi(@ncteaxhoe). Not proofread excuse the mistakes please contact me if you would like to do so. Enjoy! - xo aria

Doyoung:

I don't know if you'll even read this but if you do, I want you to know that what we have for two years was not a game for me. Maybe we can't start being honest with each other. When you make up your mind you know where to reach me.

Mina really knows how to dress you up to the nines, you'll give her that.

"It's not bad," you nod at your reflection approvingly as you examine the dress you wrestled yourself in, clinging to your body in the right places effectively enhancing your silhouette. The soft silky texture of satin feels exquisite against your skin however you can’t exude the confidence the dress might have channeled you with. You don’t feel grand in fact you feel the opposite;

You want to cancel the date.

"Oh for christ's sake, ______. Maybe try to put some enthusiasm into this," Mina spun you around to face her, your back to the whole body mirror where a while ago you two were examining the outfit she picked up from the back of your closet - where dressier clothing of yours reside not seeing the light of the day unless for special occasions.

Placing both her hands on your shoulders, "You were so excited when you called me to pick something to wear. What happened?" She further inquired.

You heave a sigh, "I don't know I am just not in a mood to go out on a date with a stranger," you admitted.

Mina pulls your eyes back to hers, gleaming with determination. "You are ______, an economics major who graduated on top of her class, who landed a new job as a senior financial analyst despite being in the industry for only three years. Now repeat it," Mina orders you.

"What does it have to do with -" you rolled your eyes, and whined dramatically.

She clicks her tongue on the roof of her mouth in displeasure, "Go on say it"

"I am ______, graduated on the top of my class and landed a new position as a senior financial analyst despite my tenurity," you mumble in a low voice.

"Good," Mina coddled you as if you are an infant who uttered her first word, "now add I am young, smart, and men want me."

You open your mouth to protest but Mina only pinned you with a hard look and you know you will not be getting out of this until you do as she says.

"I am young, smart, and men want me." You did as she told you.

Begrudgingly you did feel a lot better.

This is the third step of banishing Kim Doyoung in your life entirely.

First is to send a resignation letter - done.

Second, secure a new employment - done.

Third is to pursue a romantic relationship.

"Now let's get you ready for your date." Mina pulled you to the present, squeezing your bare shoulders to comfort you.

"I know that what you did is really hard. The sudden big change and all but today's Valentine's day you need to have a little fun today."

"I know Mina, now do my makeup." You pulled her to where your vanity table is located as you paste a smile on your face in order to placate her worries.

--------

If people were to know why you are doing this they might have called you silly.

After graduating from university you were offered the position of financial analyst in his company - a small but budding start up in Tech. Never would you have expected to land a job in your chosen field straight out of college. You are doing what you have envisioned yourself doing: analysing the trends and forecasting sales of the company's cloud solutions. You are comfortable with your current living situation, not what you have imagined after your parents cut you off no longer sending you an allowance. You thought you'd be working your ass off to make ends meet. Thankfully, the pay was high enough for you to live in an apartment in the city, pay your bills in time, and afford luxuries you knew that most people your age wouldn't have the money for.

Everything seems perfect right? A job that you genuinely love, good pay, living in the heart of the city but of course you just have to develop feelings for your boss: Kim Doyoung. And that complicates everything; enough for you to decide to completely start over again.

Kim Doyoung has managed to worm into every nook and cranny of your life.

Kim Doyoung is a magnetic man, of few words, stern straight brows, and wide shoulders swaddled in elegant suits. He runs the company based on data-driven decisions unafraid of taking risks that produces the highest profitable outcome. Working at his company where all ten workers directly reports and closely works with him, you and your colleagues have developed quite a personal relationship with him. It was not conventional per se but you guess this is how all start-ups operate with a slightly different work culture. Unlike big corporations there is no bureaucracy, filling for leaves can just be a phone call or a visit to his office.

As his only financial analyst almost never leaving his side. You'd like to think that Doyoung might have developed a soft spot for you, maybe not in a romantic sense but in a platonic friendly way. He values your opinion enough that he asks for your input in any pivotal decisions either in work or his personal life. Whether to facilitate the migration to cloud as external contractors of big corporations or to oversee the renovation of his penthouse. And in small things too honestly, after all he asked for your help to decide whether the decor should be a Bohemian vibe or modern minimalistic black and grey.

That was until you fucked after the in-office celebration of closing a big contract. One moment he is talking about the vase that serves as a centerpiece of his dining table that you helped him pick, the next he was pulling your arm leading you to a dimly lit room.

Yes, you did drink but you were sober enough to protest if you didn't want it; who are you kidding? Of course you wanted it to happen. Not one word of objection was uttered as he pinned you to the wall with your legs circling his waist. Instead of protests what left your lips was series of moans and his name in breathless pleas that he had to stuff your mouth with his fingers or else your colleagues will hear the two of you having sex two rooms away from them.

Doyoung slipped out of you stepping back to let you down.Your stilettos made a clicking noise as it came in contact with the tiled floor that echoed in your eardrums; deafening. Coming back down to earth and from your high is also the moment when you realized the mess you put yourself into by fucking Doyoung - your boss - in a storage room.

You righted both your disheveled appearances - to look as normal as possible - in order to go back to the pantry where the celebration was still in full swing. The tense silence that wrapped the atmosphere makes you want to shrivel in shame, both of you were aware of the line that you have crossed.

The unspoken words were hanging in the air -

It was a mistake. Let's forget this ever happened. - and you refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room, the stillness making you uncomfortable by the second.

"_______ -," Doyoung started.

"We don't have to talk about it Doyoung."

You moved for the door, not looking back to peek at Doyoung's expression. You just wanted to get out of the dusty storage room, the stuffy air and Doyoung's proximity, suffocating you.

You thought you were smart enough not to make the same mistake again but you seem to have a penchant for getting hurt because you did it again and again every chance you got. When the effects of orgasm are wearing off and you are left naked and vulnerable you always find yourself swearing that it will be the last time but you already knew you were lying.

You just can't get enough of Doyoung even though it hurts to pretend that each encounter was meaningless.

Sleeping with someone where you never knew where you stand at is excruciatingly painful.

You can't be jealous when you hear about the new girl he's with because you have no right.

It is painful when Doyoung gives you some false hope. Visiting you almost everyday in your small office bearing lunch for the two of you. He often spends half of his day loitering in your space, perching himself on the corner of your desk pushing around the knick knacks around your desk while you are busy with work.

Only to dash it when he tells you about the latest girl he's seeing which would mean your ears would bear the brunt of his relationship woes until it falls apart only for the vicious cycle to repeat again when he found himself in another one of his flings.

Everyday as he asks for relationship advice you feel yourself getting worn out and the green eyed monster roaring it's head, you try your hardest to tamp it down with your rational thinking.

What hurts the most is he started his series of flings a week after you hooked up, rubbing on your face that it means nothing to him at all.

So after countless hours, days, and months of anguish you started planning your escape.

--------

There are so many thoughts running through your head it starts with: Did I overdress? Is Johnny having a good time?

Then drifts into completely unrelated manners.

Did I manage to say goodbye to all of my co-workers? Clear out my desk in my office? Surrender my elevator pass to the friendly security guard? Retrieve my favorite mug in the pantry?

Will everything be ok? Will I excel at my new company? Will I fit in a big corporation?

Will I miss Doyoung?

Am I doing the right thing?

Johnny cleared his throat which broke your reverie, your eyes settling in his face but Johnny seems to find the table napkin worthy of his attention rather than maintaining eye-contact with you.

"I had fun today but I think -," You see Johnny hesitating to continue his sentence, linking and unlinking his fingers instead.

You get it and you can't blame Johnny for his lack of interest. You were barely with him today after the small talk had died down and the two of you had finished your meals. You didn't make an effort to get to know him, the conversation was one sided as you barely threw the questions back at him; replying in terse short sentences as if you would rather be anywhere but having dinner with him.

"Yeah me too but it's really nice to spend Valentine's with you though and getting all dolled up. Makes me forget I am single," You joked and flashed him a smile; relieved, Johnny finally met your eyes as his actions mirror yours curving his lips into a smile.

-------

You hailed a cab for a ride back to your apartment, settling in the backseat you instructed and gave the address to the driver as his radio blasted cheesy romantic songs in your ear, making you feel more disappointed with how bad your date with Johnny went.

As the cab speeds through the city, the citylights intermingle with each other creating a spectrum of colors that bounce back at the cab’s windows, the scenery of skyscrapers blurring past your eyes and your mind returns back to musing which you know is a dangerous territory because somehow your mind always returns back to him.

Doyoung

What exactly did you want to be with Doyoung?

You want him to like you? No, You want to mean something to him, to be the special person he runs to whenever he's devastated, to be the first person he calls when he's completely utterly bursting with joy. You want him to be completely aware of your presence that even just a mere mention of your name will evoke something in him, make his heart beat a little faster and cause some flush to bleed through his cheeks.

You want him to be endeared with your habitual tics - how you drum your fingers in every surface when you are in deep thought, a line maring your forehead between your brows and make his lips itch to kiss it. You want him to be captivated with your idiosyncrasies and find it charming, you want him to adore everything about you that made you, distinctly you.

You want him to want you.

Your phone vibrated and interrupted your stupor and upon seeing Doyoung’s name attached to the notification. Your fingers quickly unlocked your phone, fingers ringing from an adrenaline rush just from the sight of his name.

Doyoung:

Come over?

And just like that you inform your cab driver to make a detour and drive to Doyoung’s instead.

Doyoung opened the gigantic door of his penthouse where he found you on the other side of the door, shifting your weight from foot to foot, nervous to be in the same perimeter as him. When the gap was big enough to see you his eyes roved over to your body and noted that you were dressed up nicely for a date. His eyes then turned into slits as he glared at you.

“Have fun with your date?” He questioned and you can see his jaw set - the muscles clenching tight.

You didn’t answer, you don’t want him to know the pathetic evening you spent with Johnny as your mind drifts to thoughts of him; instead of actively participating with Johnny’s effort of back and forth.

As if knowing that you wouldn’t answer, his arms went to grab your forearms pulling you inside and leading you to the stairs up his loft where his bed is, you followed meekly behind him. Reaching his loft you look around and try to commit to memory the layout of the room; promising yourself that this will be the last time you will set foot in this room.

Doyoung attached his lips to your neck which drew a soft moan from you, spurred by your sounds he continued to ravish your neck oscillating between harshly sucking and peppering soft kisses on the expanse of the skin of your neck. His hands running at your sides smoothly and gradually getting closer to the underside of your breasts with each pass, when he finally cupped your mounds you arch in his palms further pushing yourself closer to him, greedy for his attention from all the teasing that he has done.

When he spoke again it fanned over the nape of your neck making your skin tingle from the warmth, “Why can’t you understand that I am the only one who can make you feel this way.”

You can smell the residue of whisky on his breath and you wanted to taste it on your tongue even though from all the times you have slept with him you two have never kissed. You have drawn the line there for kissing is much more intimate than slapping bodies againsts each other for satisfaction. Kissing can be done without sexual notions but a simple act between couples and it is a glaring truth that you two were not.

You found yourself naked and sprawled on his queen size bed where you have lain your back many times but never spent a night in. Even the off white color of his ceiling is familiar to you as if mocking you for all the times you said you wouldn’t see it again. As he slips your dress down your body, your eyes water and it pooled in your eyes ready to spill over. ‘This is the last time,’ you tell yourself again, 'this is the last time that I will be Doyoung’s beck and call.' When he was finished trailing his lips down and also discarding his clothes at the other side of the bed you managed to swipe the tears that gathered in your eyes and look at him.

Towering over you he was a sight to behold and you trace the line of his body with your eyes, caressing the dips on his collarbones and the line that leads down to his cock as his face coil into a smirk smug with the knowledge that he can turn you into a whimpering mess.

“What do you want?” He asked while splaying his hands on your stomach, his thumb drawing circles on your clit which made your moans even louder and your pussy clench on nothing. You hate that he was the only one who can make you feel this way, reducing you into a pleading mess as you move your hips to the rhythm that he has set.

You don’t have to tell him your guttural whines already told him what you wanted and he obliged inserting his length into you slowly, while you gripped his sheets until your knuckles turned white. You loved the way he filled you and the burn that accompanies when he stretched your clamping muscles on him.

So you let all your reasoning go because Doyoung’s cock pumping inside you felt good, too good.

He knows your body like an instrument, putting the right pressure and hitting the spots that makes you throw your head back repeatedly. You can feel the falter in his quick thrusts and knows that he is near his end. Doyoung makes this one sound at the back of his throat when he orgasms … and you follow suit too as he falls apart.

It took a few seconds for him to untangle his legs and arms from your figure and it took you a couple of minutes of staring at the walls, waiting until you felt your legs can support you before you stood up and searched for your dress and undergarments. You can hear the rustle of the sheets as Doyoung sits on his bed watching your back as you slip on your panties and pull your dress back in its place.

“So tell me why did you leave the company?” Doyoung asked, his voice ringing loudly in your ears.

“I told you already I want to work in a big company,” You try to answer nonchalantly.

“Really? Or does it have something to do with me?

“Oh for fuck’s sake Doyoung. The world doesn’t revolve around you!” You shouted at him as you turned around to face him. Your ire rising as you see the cold stoic look on his face - unaffected by your outburst.

“Then why does it feel like you are running away from me?” He stood up from the bed and warily approached you as if you will lash at him any moment.

“I hate you,” (I love you) you whispered under your breath the words not meant from his ears but he heard it anyway. Disbelief painted his features he cannot grasp the reason why you are suddenly acting like this.

He reached out to touch your arm but you swerved his hand like a hurt animal nursing a wound and Doyoung then noticed your bloodshot eyes and defensive stance.

“Don’t touch me. Whatever destructive thing this is Doyoung, I am done. We’re done,” You stated bluntly your voice devoid of emotions a complete contrast with how you hugged yourself tightly with your arms.

“You don’t mean that,” Doyoung said adamantly as color drained from his face, making his pale complexion - paper white.

“You can’t just walk away,” He added more to convince himself than you because he can see that hard look in your eyes - already set in the decision of walking away from him.

“Watch me Doyoung,” your lips curved into a cruel bitter smile.

You leave him with those words as he watches your retreating figure until it completely disappears from his line of vision.

--------

That night when you received a text from Doyoung, you never bothered to open it, opting to delete it and completely block all communications with him. You need to move on and in order to do it you need to sever all ties that might delude you to come back in his arms again.

You need to escape from Kim Doyoung for it's been due too long.

a/n: Read more of my works for NCT here:masterlist

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devilsskettle · 2 years

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so i’ve been thinking about this for a hot minute since watching scream 5 and i think i finally know how to verbalize it: i think the reason why scream 5 satirizing horror “re-quels” falls flat for me is that. okay. think about how the original scream movie is working with almost 2 decades worth of classic slasher movies plus another decade of proto-slashers, it’s released just after the horror genre starts being taken seriously in film theory (men, women, and chainsaws was published just 4 years before scream came out) so it’s one of the first pieces of media to engage in this conversation about slasher genre conventions and acknowledge the fan culture around low budget “low brow” horror movies as a space that is also actively engaging in film analysis in a way that’s valuable to think about (which is why the criticism of “unrealistic dialogue” because people don’t talk about movies like that feels like. weird to me i guess lol hardcore fans of any particular piece of media talk like that about that media. gets a bit heavy handed in the sequels but randy talks about movies the way a lot of my friends in high school talked about movies). and it creates an entirely new genre with the meta horror meta slasher shit, which basically every slasher movie since tries to be, with varying degrees of success.

anyway that’s a long winded way of saying that there’s a large body of work that the original scream is working with. even the second movie is working with plenty based on conventions of horror sequels. scream 3 loses me with the trying to pinpoint conventions of third movies in a horror franchise, which doesn’t seem to have as many shared tropes or the same kind of “rules” for survival. scream 4 doesn’t even try to figure out some kind of universal 4th movie structure, because it doesn’t exist, and instead focuses on fan culture and social media (which works imo). it also satirizes remakes, which we’ll get back to. and by scream 3, the franchise is satirizing itself already. scream 4 and 5 take it to the next level. in scream 5, they’re at the point that they can use the pop culture memory of who the killer is in scream the same way they do in the original with friday the 13th (both “who was the killer” questions for these movies respectively seem like trick questions even though they’re really not). it’s like meta x3

so what’s my point? what’s the problem? thanks for asking, i am just thinking that the decision to satirize “re-quels” as the next phase of slasher movies doesn’t work for me that well, like it’s fine i guess, i get what it’s trying to do, which is return to the old format of satirizing the specific kind of film they’re making (the first movie = slasher films in general, the second = sequels, the third = well, you get it, so the fifth is a reboot/sequel satirizing reboot/sequels. re-quels). but the problem with this is the same as the problem with the third one: there just aren’t enough similarities between “re-quels” to deconstruct them as a genre in the same way scream deconstructed slasher films. the fact that people are “split on the terminology” indicates to me that this trend isn’t set in stone enough to have genre conventions of its own. the only two horror re-quels that they name drop are saw and halloween, which were rebooted in 2017 and 2018 respectively. i can think of some others (evil dead 2013, the craft legacy, candyman, texas chainsaw 3D seems to inform scream 5 quite a bit but who knows if that was intentional, apparently the netflix tcm also? but i really don’t want to watch that lol) but what do any of these have in common with the others, other than the very basic premise of linking the reboot to the original movie instead of the sequels? even the “book of saw” has very little thematic or artistic consistency, jigsaw and spiral being very different kinds of films, and a lot of the conventions they try to define for re-quels aren’t in either of them (and the saw movies aren’t slasher movies anyway. they’re slasher adjacent, jigsaw gets lumped in with slashers a lot, but they fit almost none of the genre conventions of a slasher movie). there’s no indication that scream 5 is even thinking about these specific films at all, i just can’t think of any other horror re-quels. and if they’re only looking at a sporadic trend in horror sequels over the past (not even the whole) decade, which includes non-slasher horror and specifically name drops non-horror re-quels, they’ve made a very shallow aimless meta horror movie that has moved away from what the scream movies are trying to do and what the movie itself purports to do. i also think it contributed to how fang-less and kind of trite the killers end up being, partially because they don’t spend enough time with the main friend group to meaningfully set them up as compelling suspects, partially because their motive is too similar to mickey’s in scream 2 and jill and charlie’s in scream 4, partially because the whole film is aimless and can’t seem to figure out what makes sense by “re-quel logic” — in fact, sam being the most logical suspect to our horror expert character is the exact opposite of the re-quel logic i would use given the types of protagonists most common in the movies mentioned above. doesn’t work for halloween. doesn’t work for saw. doesn’t work for evil dead. doesn’t work especially for the craft legacy or texas chainsaw 3D. arguably works for candyman but only to a certain extent. so how is this a convention of re-quels? it just doesn’t work! because it’s not an established genre with established conventions. you can’t do the same thing with it as scream did to slashers. it just doesn’t make sense

and anyway, since scream 2 covered sequels and scream 4 covered remakes/reboots, scream 5 seems.... redundant? if they could’ve done remakes, reboots, and re-quels all in one, maybe that would’ve been more effective? maybe. i guess changing it would necessitate changing the whole premise of the film, so i don’t really know what they could do to fix it lol - i was onboard when the rules were “how to survive a stab movie” because what this movie does understand perfectly is its own franchise, i’m even onboard with discussing the fan reaction to shitty remakes/reboots (with mindy as a character and how she talks about other horror fans, i even think they do understand contemporary horror fans, even if they don’t really get contemporary horror). but the meta in this movie doesn’t hit because it isn’t true to what’s actually happening right now in the slasher genre. they’re trying to bring the scream framework into contemporary horror without realizing that the 90s killed the traditional slasher film, and scream was the final nail in its coffin. you can’t write about the genre the same way because it doesn’t really exist anymore

#horror #scream #scream 5 #name one slasher movie after 2000 that 1) is actually a slasher movie and fits the genre conventions of a traditional slasher movie #2) isn't dripping in sarcasm satire and genre self awareness #and it is because of scream! scream can't do scream in the 2020s because of what scream did in the 1990s #it was still a fun movie and i enjoyed it and the one thing that needed to happen for me happened so i was happy with it #but it doesn't pack the same punch. it's desperately hoping the audience doesn't see through it. it's disingenuous #it understands the scream franchise. it understands what modern horror fans are like. but it doesn't understand contemporary horror #i will also say that maybe i am disconnected from a certain kind of fanbase but i'm pretty.... online in terms of horror fan spaces #like this is basically a horror blog. i follow almost exclusively people who post about horror.#it's the main thing i look at think about and discuss. i read articles and shit lol i'm on letterboxd i'm on here i am aware of things #i feel like i'm in touch with popular opinion about a wide range of horror movies. and i have never heard the term 're-quel' in my life lol #like seriously look up re-quels on letterboxd. it's not the phenomenon that scream 5 acts like it is #like if you can only think of 5 horror movies that that term fits? there's not enough there to base an entire scream movie on #it's not even really part of the main movements in contemporary horror. or in slasher/slasher adjacent films

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zosonils-art · 3 years

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Do you have a robot master OC (of the eight plus Drum) that you’d say is your favorite? If you haven’t done an infodump for them yet then you should do that one next

i couldn't choose a favourite if i tried, i love them all, but since you mentioned drum i thought i'd give her some new art and a proper dedicated post too! infodrump [ayyy] under the cut

drum, serial number SWN-002, is my take on the popular [????? i'm still a bit of a mega man fandom newbie i don't know hjdfn] 'wily equivalent to roll' oc template! she keeps things running at the various castles and fortresses and hideouts and whatever else her dad holes up in, whether that's by doing housework, planning schemes, or dodging taxes. whenever wily is trying to take over the world, drum acts as his second-in-command, ensuring that everything goes according to plan and ordering around the latest group of robot masters

she's every bit the edgy mid-00s teenager she looks: sarcastic, apathetic, and always talking back to her dad. she's more obedient than bass is, but she doesn't care for her job at all and will resort to any flimsy excuse or act of malicious compliance she can come up with to slack off. due to her purpose as an organiser and commander, she's a bossy control freak who's quick to anger when things don't go exactly her way, although when she's off work the worst of these traits recede in favour of more conventional teenage apathy. she sees herself as above the time and effort it takes to go out of her way to be mean to people like wily and bass tend to do, but she's equally uninterested in being nice on purpose and her default attitude is squarely on the nastier side

when she doesn't have work to focus on - and sometimes when she does anyway - drum is the lead vocalist and guitarist in a garage band, of which she is [currently - a friend's ocs get involved later, but that's a whole different post] the only member. i'm not good with music terms but she's into whatever genre stuff like wake me up inside and crawling in my skin is [i know those aren't the names hdfjf it's just the words i know people will recognise]. the sort with the crunchy guitar and the very loud lyrics about being sad and/or angry. playing or blasting music helps her to calm down when she's in a bad mood, which is pretty much all the time. the first warning sign of a new wily plot is a spike in search popularity for my chemical romance

i haven't gotten around to designing it, but drum has a non-armoured form like most of the other more explicitly kid-like robots, which she mostly uses for loitering around malls when she has an excuse to not be at home. she rarely buys anything, just hangs out and radiates an aura that makes suburban white women hurry their three kids into the next shop. drum often ends up hanging out with like-minded teens in the same vague area of the goth/punk/emo venn diagram she occupies, and makes a bit of a game out of seeing how honest she can be about her life without revealing that she's one of the world's most wanted robots. she tells herself that it's just something she does out of boredom and curiosity towards humans, but it mostly stems from loneliness and the desire to have literally any friends that aren't her brother's dog

as a sort of contrast to the healthy and positive relationship between their lightbot counterparts, drum and bass absolutely DESPISE each other and make no secret of it. each of them thinks of the other as an insufferable prick and they'll get into petty arguments over just about anything, from whose turn it is on the xbox to who treble loves more. [for the record, it's drum. she lets him hang out in the kitchen while she's cooking and sneaks him food scraps when bass isn't looking. he's the only family member she has an even remotely positive relationship with.] pretty much the only thing that can get them to stop fighting is mutual hatred of a bigger prick, and so far the only person to consistently get them to put their differences aside like this is wily himself - as much as the wily kids hate each other, they hate their dad just a little more, and have a history of teaming up just to mess with him. sometimes mega man can spark that spiteful cooperation, but drum's total apathy towards the light-wily family rivalry means she usually sees him as not worth her time and just finds bass' obsession with beating him even more annoying

drum wasn't made for combat, and as such she doesn't have a signature weapon or any fancy tricks like the copy chip. usually she just orders other robots to do the fighting for her. however, she is equipped with a standard arm-mounted buster, and can hold her own in battle with a 'fight smarter, not harder' approach if she has to. she's also outfitted with the same treble adapter that bass has, so if she's backed into a corner she can call on him for a power boost. treble is capable of supporting both adapters simultaneously, so as an absolute last resort they can all combine into treble-boosted drum & bass, who theoretically has all the combat power of bass plus the strategic thinking from drum and the boost in power from treble. in practice, though, drum and bass are so at odds with each other that they can barely hold together in the same body without either fighting for control or outright splitting apart to argue harder. again, it takes a lot of spite to get them to work together, but if something draws their combined ire and convinces them to cooperate they're an utterly terrifying force to be reckoned with

the game idea i vaguely have in my mind would feature drum as the final-not-final boss before wily reveals he was the mastermind behind it all and surprises absolutely nobody. she was put in charge of the latest world domination attempt, probably as the result of a 'why don't YOU take over the world if you're so smart' conversation, and in true drum fashion she follows a standard wily plot outline to the letter - including the blatant flaws, like all eight of her chosen robot masters forming a rock-paper-scissors wheel just begging to be exploited by the copy chip, and making a clear path from just outside the death fortress to her base of operations. after she's defeated in combat, she sarcasically wonders aloud how mega man could have possibly bested her plan and then helpfully points rock directly to wily's castle. she didn't wanna do the stupid scheme in the first place

again, i love all my ocs too much to possibly choose a favourite, but i'd say drum was the most fun to come up with if only because i had the help of some mates in a discord server. someone was like 'hey if there's bass is there a roll equivalent called drum or something lol' and i SPRINTED to microsoft paint to rough out a character design and the next entire day was just a constant stream of all of us bouncing ideas off each other and creating the meanest girl in the universe. her design changed a little bit from the initial sketch, most notably she used to have the half-shaved hairstyle that every gay person tries at some point before that changed to a midpoint between phoenix wright and sonic the hedgehog, but overall everything about her as a character flowed really well from the start. while she's fallen mostly into my hands since the initial brainstorm, she absolutely wouldn't exist without those friends' input and i feel that that's important to mention!

i'm very tired and i've been working on this on and off for the past day so i'm gonna call the infodrump finished here - thanks for giving me the excuse to talk about her! unfiltered and transparent versions of the art below as always

#i already talked about drum in my first post about her long long ago but i think she deserves a new infodump #zos draws #mega man #mega man oc #robot master oc #drum wily #zos talks #zos answers #aprofessionallurker #man there's so much art i gotta do of her. gotta draw her civilian form and her treble boost AND treble-boosted d&b eventually

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fatehbaz · 3 years

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Scientists and naturalists in Britain and the US (holding prestigious positions with allegedly esteemed institutions or publications like Scientific American, MIT, American Naturalist, Kew Gardens, and elsewhere), especially from the Victorian era through the 1920s, were just like: “OK, time to describe women and non-white people as insects and carnivorous plants in hyper-sexualized ways that cast them as oddly-alluring threats to established hierarchies, colonialism, and Empire.”

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Carnivorous or insectivorous plants have long induced fascination [...]. There are many amateur botanical societies that focus upon them. The first living specimen of Dionaea muscipula Ellis ex L. came to the attention of the populace of London in 1768, an event that ‘caused a sensation throughout Europe’ [...]. Prior to this event, John Bartram had sent Patrick Collinson, a London botanical collector, several plant parts, after the specimen sent by Governor Dobbs of North Carolina had failed to arrive (Magee, 2007). Bartram used a popular name for D. muscipula, tipitiwitchet, a somewhat ribald Elizabethan term for vulva (McKinley postscript to Nelson, 1990). This connection between female sexuality and carnivorous plants continued into 19th century England and may have had something to do with their popularity and continued public fascination. [...] These ‘queer flowers’, as Grant Allen described insectivorous plants in 1884, reached a zenith of popular and artistic attention during the mid to late 19th century. Allen’s essay demonstrated the lure of the insectivorous plant as a floral femme fatale and in richly descriptive language described its ‘murderous propensities’ [...].

Source: Mark W. Chase; Maarten J.M. Christenhusz; Dawn Sanders; Michael F. Fay. “Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory.” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 161, Issue 4, December 2009.

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And while Gothic monsters can express a multitude of alienations, the particular anxieties evoked by botanical monstrosities at this time were tied to imperialism [...]. Like the corpse flower, perilous plants were closely associated with the tropics in the Victorian imagination. This was a deliberate manufacture: in 1874, the American Edmund Spencer (not to be confused with his more famous, earlier English namesake) presented as fact a fictional explorer’s encounter with an African tribe that offered human sacrifices to a man-eating tree. [...] Such plants therefore became part of the imperialist mythos about the bizarre and dangerous recesses of the so-called primitive parts of the world, there to test the mettle of white explorers. [...] An entire genre of imperial gothic literature evolved to deal with the perils of foreign elements invading English bodies and English lands, as the colonizers had themselves inflicted on distant countries. Either out of provocation or opportunism, the once safely remote monsters of the colonized world retrace the explorers’ steps back to the metropole. Such monsters range from Kipling’s heathen curses to Haggard’s sorcerous queens, but also includes potential ecological threats such as H. G. Wells’s “The Empire of the Ants” (1905), in which organized, aggressive ants establish themselves as potential rivals to Britain’s global dominion.

Source: Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” In The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. October 2017.

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[Extreme content warning for this one: child abuse.]

A comparison of the personiﬁed “European” ﬂowers with those from the other continents in The Temple of Flora reveals some of the Orientalist, racial, and gendered conventions that connected plants to colonial experiences or aspirations. In The Temple of Flora, Thornton deploys images and texts based on both the iconography of the Four Continents and the Linnaean sexual system to emphasize the productive yet dangerous sexuality of Europe’s others. These personiﬁed images of plant life embody British attitudes toward colonized people and resources, and the tenuous boundaries between personiﬁed plants and objectiﬁed humans become blurry. [...] Dr. George Shaw (1751-1813), the keeper of the natural history section of the British Museum from 1807 to 1813, personiﬁes this plant [stapelia] for Thornton in a commissioned poem, describing the stapelia either as a “hag” with a “gorgon shape, rough arms, and scowling eyes,” a “dire enchantress” who casts “horrid spells” in her “magic rites,” or a cannibalistic, bloodthirsty “mother” who bears maggots and lures poisonous animals like toads and snakes close to her and eats them […]. The cannibalistic female allegories of America ﬁnd their counterparts in Thornton’s ﬂesh-eating American plants. For male botanists in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the venus ﬂytrap deﬁed classiﬁcation as a specimen on the boundaries between animal and plant. Naturalists such as John and William Bartram, Benjamin Rush, Peter Collinson, and others attributed humanlike passions and sensitivities to the plant […]. The object of peculiar fascination, of both scientiﬁc curiosity and eroticism, the venus ﬂytrap was named in Latin after the goddess of love and was later commonly referred to by the salacious nickname “tipi-tiwitchet” or “twitching fur stole.” Botanist Peter Collinson (1694-1768) exclaimed that he was “ready to Burst with Desire for Root, Seed, or Specimen of the Wagish Tipitiwitchet Sensitive.” He hoped to obtain one from the botanist and North Carolina governor Arthur Dobbs (1689 -- 1765) but lamented that it would probably not be possible because the seventy-three-year-old man had already married a fifteen-year-old bride, whom Collinson referred to as a “Tipitiwitchet,” for him to “play with.”

Source: Miranda Mollendorf. “Allegories of Alterity: Flora’s Children as the Four Continents.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. 2016.

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“The transformation of cleaning from a matter of dilettantish dusting to a sanitary crusade against ‘dangerous enemies within,’” in Ehrenreich and English’s words, placed women ideologically (though never materially) at the center of a new discourse of national health oriented around the home as an ecological space. This scalar revisioning of the domestic – what Jennifer Fleissner calls the dis/course of the “the great indoors” – proved a kind of mirror image of the Rooseveltian Wild West, with women at the front lines of a new frontier harboring both danger and the promise of revitalization. “Our enemies are no longer Indians and wild animals,” writes Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female professor and founder of the American domestic science movement, “[t]hose were the days of big things. Today is the day of the infinitely little. To see our cruelest enemies, we must use the microscope.” [...] During the latter half of the nineteenth century, developments in the fields of public health and domestic science transformed the modern home into a space of dangerous multispecies entanglements. In response, state-sponsored hygiene initiatives aimed at the reproduction of white futurity recruited housekeepers as domestic guardians against nature's encroachments. [...] By the turn of the century, the highest level of insect research in the country, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology, had fully absorbed the emergent cultural discourses around women’s newfound proximity to their domestic co-inhabitants. A widely circulated public memo titled “The House Centipede” written by Bureau Chief Charles Marlatt, begins with the assertion that “the house centipede, particularly within the last 20 or 25 years, has become altogether too common an object in dwelling houses in the Middle and Northern States for the peace of mind of the inmates.” It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation. Posing as a practical, informative tract “of interest to housewives throughout the United States,” the memo in fact deploys a complex rhetorical vocabulary that figures housekeeping as kind of psychosexual drama between woman and insect, the stakes of which are nothing less than the security of both home and nation. “The house centipede is a Southern species,” the memo notes, “its normal habitat being in the southern tier of States and southwestward through Texas into Mexico.” [...] To be sure, the Bureau’s memo fits neatly into a familiar [...] historicist narrative whereby domestic discourse – understood as a kind of “soft” or “maternal” power – works toward the consolidation of American empire and the reification of sexual difference. From this perspective, the document’s recourse to the logic of [...] the unreciprocated love of centipedes for women [...] can be said to link what Kyla Schuller calls the “biopolitics of feeling” with what Amy Kaplan theorizes as “manifest domesticity,” such that the (white) woman’s heightened capacity to be affected by her environmental milieu consolidates her authority “to police domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness both within and without.”

Source: David Hollingshead. “Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century.” Feminist Modernist Studies. August 2020.

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Considering the broader selection of newspaper hoaxes alongside the dozens of botanical fictions that appeared around the same time, one will also notice certain repetitive themes and settings accompanying the Darwinian unease. For one, we can observe the pronounced influence of the so-called “orchid fever” that still gripped Europe in the later 19th century, a time when orchid hunting in exotic locations had become a pastime for the more adventurous gentlemen of means, and, in fiction, the most common excuse to write a tale of a monster plant. ]...] In fact, in America during the late 1920s and early 1930s, we see another surge in the popularity of monstrous plant narratives, precisely around the time that the evolution controversy had come to a head during the national media sensation that was the Scopes Monkey Trial. This was also the dawning of speculative fiction’s pulp era [...]. The monster plant narratives of the pulps no doubt inherited this tension from their turn-of-the-century forebears, a simultaneous recognition that these animal-like monsters must be somehow natural, like the real carnivorous plants so carefully anatomized by Darwin, and that their very existence also threatens to destroy distinctions between the animal and plant kingdoms – as well as the hierarchy that those distinctions support.

Source: T.S. Miller. “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies.”

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Imperial dis/course constructed India as a land of white ants, held India and its inhabitants responsible for the white ant problem, and reinforced the civilizing rhetoric of imperial ideologues by defining white ants as a hallmark of the lack of civilization. [...] Insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate non-humans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterize colonized landscapes, peoples, and cultures. [...] Contemporary writers in the imperial age, many of them British, appropriated the question of white ants to assert civilizational differences. [...] An article published in the Scientific American in 1891 entitled ‘White ants in India’ implied that in consuming white ants, ‘the Africans’ shared the eating preferences of lizards, toads, and birds’. [...] Before he acquired his notoriety as the pioneer of eugenics, Francis Galton had written a travellers’ manual, first published in 1855, in which he argued that natives of ‘wild countries’ (as distinct from ‘civilised and partly civilised nations’) dug holes ‘in the sides of’ white ants’ nests and used them as ovens for the purposes of cooking. These writers believed that unlike what was to be expected in contemporary ‘civilised England’, white ants were integrated within various social practices [...] of West Africa, in the so-called wild countries and in ‘the east’. An article in the American Naturalist in 1876 argued that advancement of ‘culture’ was antithetical to the proliferation of white ants. It claimed that in Africa and India, ‘where a century ago massive ant-hills were to be found near the shore, now some days’ journey inland have to be made to find them’. This period, according to the article, coincided with the ‘step by step…retreat of white ants…in front of a rapidly advancing culture’, when ‘mankind’ took control over white ants, forcing this representative of ‘nature (to) step behind’. Therefore, the hundred-year period that marked among other developments the advent of colonial rule in Africa and India, this article implied, went hand in hand with ‘the advance of culture’ and the ‘retreat of white ants’. Meanwhile, in India, white ants were described by British naturalists like EHA as ‘the foe of civilization … the Goths … of Indian life’.

Source: Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” Cambridge University Press. 2 October 2019.

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dropintomanga · 3 years

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The Evergreen Shonen Story

A short while ago, there were some online conversations about the popularity of shonen stories. Almost all of them are based around the experiences of youth and some adult fans wanted action-oriented stories based around their life experiences as adults. Reading stories centered on teens and kids as the main characters isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I’ll admit that. But sometimes, I think shonen stories are somewhat of a reflection on what adults have been telling kids for years and how some/most of their advice has failed youth.

Life begins in the womb. We come out to a world of many possibilities. As children, we’re immune to bias until adults decide to tell us about the many differences of various people out there. Some adults may not care and have trouble dealing with their own pain, They may resort to substances like drugs and alcohol to cope. Under the influence of drugs or alcohol, these adults may start to abuse children and/or neglect them entirely.

There’s a term that relates to the overwhelming negative experiences of children growing up. It’s called ACE - “adverse childhood experiences.” Examples of such experiences include physical/sexual abuse, parent separation, physical/emotional neglect, and living with an adult with substance addiction. I look at a bunch of shonen flashback stories and many of the traumatic ones revolve around physical and emotional neglect.

Why is this important to acknowledge? Because some adults do a bad job in raising their children or guiding kids to become responsible individuals. We’ve seen examples of bad parenting in anime and manga. There’s also the fact that adults have been full of dreams themselves when they were kids, but have been fed advice on how the “real world” works. They’ve been told that they can’t make their dreams come true and/or they need to behave a certain way to get by. It’s a vicious cycle. A colleague of mine told me that when she sees young people with vision and a desire to smash the status quo end up being a part of the status quo themselves, she wondered if that’s due to those individuals seeing how hard it is and how long it takes to generate the change they want to see.

One of my favorite shonen characters in recent memory is Satoro Gojo of Jujutsu Kaisen. He was a student of Jujutsu High and ends up becoming a teacher there. Gojo is considered to be a prodigy, but he remains humble. He’s also willing to speak up to authority as he has gotten into disputes with upper school management over the fates of cursed students (particularly Yuji Itadori and Yuta Okkutsu) whose potential have yet to be realized. Gojo has once said that he needs to remind himself not to be a bitter old adult as he ages.

A good number of shonen stories drive the point that adults shouldn’t be bitter old ones. Or maybe more importantly, don’t be dismissive about teen experiences. I listened to a podcast a while back about loneliness and how much it affects mental health. There was a discussion point about adults ignoring teens that feel lonely with regards to dating. Here’s a quote from that discussion.

“The number one way that we do this (being dismissive of loneliness) in America is every single 30-year-old up completely dismisses the loneliness that a teenager feels about not having a significant other. Because once we hit 30, we realize that your 16 year old significant other is nonsense. It’s just nonsense. You’re gonna be in love so much in your life. You’re gonna love everybody. You’re going to date a million people. It’s gonna be fine. You’re going to realize how insignificant this relationship is.

The key word there is you’re gonna realize it. It’s a future thing for them. So when every 30, 40, 50, 60 year old looks at the 16, 17, 18 year old and says, oh, you just broke up with your boyfriend? Yeah, who cares? That’s a meaningless relationship. I don’t care. That exacerbates the loneliness. It exacerbates the disconnected feeling because it really, really, really, really matters to them.”

I honestly think adults being dismissive towards teens’ current experiences is one reason why shonen stories still resonate with many. We’ve all been through those times where adults just shut us down because ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Yes, there comes a point where we have to move forward. But a good amount of emotional pain stems from adolescence and it lingers. Most mental disorders begin to happen around those years. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to give back in ways that stop the cycle. I do think mangaka are trying their best to give back the way they know how.

Yet I think the biggest reason for the enduring popularity of shonen stories is friendship. We all know the Shonen Jump tropes - friendship, hard work and victory. All three are important, but friends are what really keeps us alive. The harsh truths are that hard work doesn’t always get you where you want to go and victories do come at the cost of important relationships. Over the years, I noticed that in my neck of the woods, friendship is frowned upon. When you’re ranking important relationships in life, first is your mother, then maybe your father, then your romantic partner, followed by your children. Friends are last. There was a nice read I found that listed a good amount of studies on the importance of friends (especially for those who are LGBTQ+ and faced stigma from immediate family).

We don’t live on an island, contrary to what neoliberalism says. Families aren’t enough. Friends are what keeps us alive and helps build our sense of identity.

Maybe the fans who want more mature/adult-centered stories with shonen action just want to see more nuanced stories about friendships in adult settings. Friendships are so hard to make and maintain as adults. There’s some glimmers of hope for those kinds of stories - in video games. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a great example of an adult hero in a genre dominated by young protagonists, the Japanese RPG. The story is about a 42-year old ex-yakuza who gets exiled into a unfamiliar city and manages to make something of himself with the help of new friends he made there. It was refreshing because the whole cast were adults who were unemployed and/or stigmatized due to underworld ties. They managed to save Japan from a vicious political alliance with action elements that felt shonen at heart.

I’m all for more adult-centered mainstream shonen stories because seinen material can be a bit too blunt for some tastes, but there’s a lot of focus on the mindset of youth lately than in decades past since there’s concern on how they will manage in a world that continues to disappoint them.

I love shonen because I honestly don’t feel like I’m an adult due to my depression. My development felt stunted. I feel that I have more in common with 20+-year olds than people my age. I want to be around people who are youthful at heart. I wonder about those who still enjoy shonen past the target demographic - what still draws them to it? Is it due to them embracing their inner child more likely than most people? Or do they just like to follow simple action stories that have a lot of heart (something that some people don’t have)?

Looking at shonen’s enduring mainstream status does make me think about the the feedback loops between adults and teenagers. I’ll end this by talking about an incident that happened a couple years ago where a somewhat prominent Anitwitter figure (I am NOT going to mention their name here, but you may know who I’m referring to), who made a lot of friends with people in the anime/manga industry, was outed be a sexual predator who went after young naive anime fans at fan conventions. One of the reactions from someone that was once close with them was how can older anime fans better connect with younger anime fans when needed. I know from personal experience, I sigh on seeing the behavior of teens at conventions at times. But I learned that by saying things like “Kids are so dramatic,” “Boys will be boys,” “She’s being emotional.” gets harmful in a hurry where proper context is warranted. Maybe they are being so-and-so, but it doesn’t hurt to ask and give validation to their concerns. Teens are the lifeblood of anime conventions right now.

Shonen is a gateway introduction for youth on how to process pain in a way that helps themselves and other people with the help of said people. It’s an escape from the distress and trauma of reality. That reality, which has situations like the incident I mentioned, is controlled by adults who don’t always have it together, can’t admit their flaws, and sadly take it out on the world. That’s why shonen is still so powerful today despite all the criticism the genre gets. And that’s the evergreen truth.

#shonen #shonen manga #manga #mental health #youth #psychology

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Streaming on Plex: Best Horror Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in October

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This article is sponsored by Plex. You can download the Free Plex App now by clicking here!

When October hits, the folks at Den of Geek almost exclusively consume horror content. Any spooky story that has ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or any chill-inducing monster that doesn’t start with a G is fine with us. Whether it’s a campy B-movie or “prestige horror,” we embrace all horror subgenres and relax with old favorites and new cult classics in the making alike. Now that Spooky Season is in full force, we are grateful that Plex TV is here so we can stream all of the creepy content that our black hearts’ desire for free!

Plex is a globally available one-stop-shop streaming media service offering thousands of free movies and TV shows and hundreds of free-to-stream live TV channels, from the biggest names in entertainment, including Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, Lionsgate, Legendary, AMC, A+E, Crackle, and Reuters. Plex is the only streaming service that lets users manage their personal media alongside a continuously growing library of free third-party entertainment spanning all genres, interests, and mediums including podcasts, music, and more. With a highly customizable interface and smart recommendations based on the media you enjoy, Plex brings its users the best media experience on the planet from any device, anywhere.

Plex releases brand new and beloved titles to its platform monthly and we’ll be here to help you identify the cream of the crop. This month, we’re keeping things strictly scary, but view Plex TV now for the best free entertainment streaming, regardless of genre, and check back each month for Den of Geek Critics’ picks!

DEN OF GEEK CRITICS’ PICKS

The Ninth Gate

Though director Roman Polanski is a horrific figure himself, this 1999 neo-noir horror film, The Ninth Gate is superb. Thirty years after Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski conjured the devil once again and injected it with some of the pulp from his noir classic Chinatown in a movie that finds Johnny Depp as a man in Satanic Detective mode. Depp is a classic book authenticator hired to authenticate De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis (The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows), a book believed by cultists capable of raising Satan to Earth.

The Ninth Gate doesn’t provide cheap thrills; it tightens the suspense like a noose. Polanski subtly creates an uneasy atmosphere using minimal effects. The director knows where evil lives and lets the settings and sound make the invitations with subliminal references to recognizable horror and cinematic danger, using framing and music similarly to Stanley Kubrick. The Ninth Gate packages its scares with classy style that the characters deliver with sexily provocative intelligence. Dean Corso may be Johnny Depp’s greatest spiritual transformation, from odious to ultimate evil and the audience cheers on his descent, happy to ride with him straight to hell.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Perhaps the world’s first horror film and a go-to example of early German Expressionist filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been unsettling audiences for over a century.

The film’s main story centers on two young friends, Francis and Alan (Friedrich Feher and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who, while jockeying for the affections of Jane (Lil Dagover), visit a local traveling carnival. There they take in the act of the mysterious, top-hatted and wild-haired Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). As they watch, Caligari awakens his somnambulist subject, Cesare (the great Conrad Veidt), who under hypnosis answers questions from the audience. When Alan jokingly asks when he will die, Cesare responds “Before dawn.” We’ll let you guess the rest.

The film isn’t remembered much for its story, but for its arresting visual style, featuring painted backdrops that make the entire production feel like a fever dream. The painted townscape is filled with curved and pointed buildings teetering at dangerous angles, almost as if they were alive and shrieking. Roads twist and spiral to nowhere. The perspectives are deliberately mismatched and inconsistent, with the props and sets sometimes being too large for the characters, and others too small. The result is a transgressive, deeply influential film that has been unsettling audiences for over 100 years.

The Exorcist III

Based on his 1983 novel Legion, writer-director William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III arrived 17 years after William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Despite the still-looming pop culture presence of the original, The Exorcist III is sneakily the most interesting film in the series. Less a horror movie than a psychological thriller with supernatural and spiritual overtones, The Exorcist III takes place 17 years after the events of the first film, and with no reference whatsoever made to the events in the second. It finds Lt. Kinderman confronted with the apparent reappearance of two figures from his past who had supposedly died. The first is father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who had died after bouncing down an endless flight of steps while performing an exorcism in the original movie, and the Gemini Killer, a serial killer loosely based on the Zodiac Killer that had been executed 17 years prior. However, there’s been a new string of murders around town carrying all the hallmarks of the Gemini.

While the studio famously mangled Blatty’s original cut of the film, there’s still a lot to like here, including a terrifying performance from Brad Dourif. Blatty is fantastic at creating dread-inducing atmosphere and has a keen attention to character and detail. It may not be as exciting as the original, but it’s a smart-slow burn film worthy of the Exorcist mantle.

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The Devil’s Rejects

An homage to sleazy ‘70s C-movies, Rob Zombie’s sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses will leave you in the need of a shower, but it’s delightfully demented and the musician turned filmmaker’s finest effort. The shock-fest finds the Firefly clan, Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) – on the run from die-hard determined sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). What unfolds is a nasty thrill ride full of twists, turns, and more gore than most audiences are comfortable with. How Zombie still manages to make such repulsive content entertaining, how he manages to get you to almost root for the despicable Firefly clan, is inexplicable magic trick, but indebted to Zombie’s use of black humor and deep knowledge of genre conventions that he sometimes subverts, but often gleefully leans into.

Train to Busan

The overused and increasingly predictable zombie genre got a shot in the arm with Train to Busan, a South Korean film from director Yeon Sang-ho about a young father desperately attempting to get his little daughter to her mother via train as a zombie pandemic breaks out all around them. Even if it veered close to outright sentimentality at times, Train to Busan differed from most of the films and TV shows we’ve seen in this genre due to its genuine bond of love between its main characters, and the flickers of empathy and humanity found therein.

And on a technical level, Yeon crafted his film with a kinetic energy that had been missing from the genre as of late. Train to Busan was not just a monster hit in its native land but amassed an international following as well, along with critical acclaim across the board. It’s easy to see why given the film’s well-drawn characters, subtle social commentary (some on the train feel they are more worthy of survival than others) and frightening action sequences that add up to a thrilling and emotionally powerful ride.

More Horror Films Available to Stream FREE on Plex TV

The Descent

Train To Busan

The Ninth Gate

Rec

Coherence

Night Of The Living Dead

The Host

Hannibal Rising

The Devil’s Rejects

Nosferatu

Monsters

I Spit On Your Grave

Eden Lake

Wolf Creek

Day Of The Dead

The Collector

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

Red Lights

The Wailing

Grave Encounters

Colonia

Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse

Diary Of The Dead

Black Death

Alone In The Dark

The Descent: Part 2

Maggie

Teeth

Ginger Snaps

After.Life

John Dies At The End

Black Christmas

The Last House On The Left

Nosferatu the Vampire

Splinter

The Void

Deep Red

Phantasm

The Changeling

Feast

Hatchet

The Prophecy

Pulse

Fido

Open Grave

Cell

The Blob

The Exorcist III

Vanishing On 7th Street

House On Haunted Hill

Penomena

Eye See You

Cooties

The Werewolf

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud

Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

Sugar and Fright Collection

Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies

All Cheerleaders Die

Another Evil��

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Bad Milo

Better Watch Out

Bitter Feast

Cooties

Corporate Animals

Crimewave

Dead Snot 2: Red vs. Dead

Deathgasm

Deep Murder

Drive Thru

Excision

Fear, Inc.

Feast

Fido

Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked

Hatchet

Hell Baby

Hellboy Animated: Blood & Iron

Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms

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importantlovecolor · 3 years

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Zoids Saga Fuzors

Go to the Zoids Research Facility, and take the Core Active Ion Small from the left Chest, and the Hellcat Data from the right Chest. Go to the Item and Weapon Shop, and take the Emergency Retreat.

Zoids Saga

Zoids Saga Fuzors

Watch Zoids Fuzors

Zoids Saga Fuzors for Nintendo Gameboy Advance/GBA is a RPG game published by Tomy.

Game Boy Advance Zoids Saga: Fuzors. Tags: Zoids View.

Zoids Saga III: Fuzors (sometimes just 'Zoids Saga III' or 'Zoids Saga: Fuzors'), is set in the Zoids: Fuzors fictional world, and follows the actions of 'Will'. A good portion of the storyline parallels the Zoids: Fuzors anime. Similar to Zoids Saga there is one city (Blue City) which the player returns to after each segment of the story.

Zoids Saga

ScreenShots:

GBA ROM’s are Playable on Android With My Boy GBA Emulator

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Zoids Saga Fuzors Info:

Release Date: February 23, 2005 Genre : RPG Publisher: Tomy Region : USA Languages: English Platform : Gameboy Advance Rom Type: .GBA

Download Links: Size – (4MB) ———————————————————— Direct

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Notes:

Zoids Saga Fuzors

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Status:Eps Seen: / 26Your Score:Add Detailed Info

Alternative Titles

English: Zoids Fuzors

Information

Type:TV

Status: Finished Airing

Premiered:Fall 2004

Producers:Tokyo Kids

Studios: None found, add some

Genres:AdventureAdventure, MechaMecha, Sci-FiSci-Fi, ShounenShounen

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Ranked: #61362

2 based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Members: 9,624

Reviews

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Preliminary

26 of 26 episodes seen

slax(All reviews)

21 people found this review helpful

Overall1Story1Animation1Sound1Character1Enjoyment1

Ok, I'm a big Zoids fan, and as such, this review focuses on the differences between the styles of this and the preceding series, rather than an more general overview (I won't use Genesis as an example since that is of a vastly different style). Unfortunately, it is very negative. Firstly, let me start with the Story: Fuzors basically has no story whatsoever for the vast majority of the series. In the final few episodes, a backstory gets fleshed out and some continuity established, but as this only happens very late-on, it feels more like a justification for why the series occurred in the way it did, rather than an actual plot that naturally developed. Furthermore, the story it does eventually manage to establish is rushed, this, along with the generally poor translations, makes it difficult to draw any praise from the story. Now, this brings me to draw parallels with Zoids Zero, which also had a very skimpy plot at best. However, the biggest difference with the two series is that Zero is built around battles and comedy, and as such tries to give the viewer fluid fights and funny lines rather than a deep plot. Fuzors does not, and as such has no excuse for the lack of story. To continue with the story theme, I'll next discuss the Characters: While Zoids shows are not renowned for their characters, the development of the cast is not handled well in Fuzors at all. For instance, in the first episode, the character 'Amy' walks in to Mach Storm's headquarters and appears to anger some of the main characters. What the show doesn't tell you is that Amy is actually a member of Mach Storm herself. This fact makes it very confusing (to say the least) when she shows up unannounced in later episodes. This is probably the best way of describing the problem with the characters in Fuzors, it simply assumes you know who/what everyone/thing is -rather than actually take the time introduce them. This is especially true for the Zoids themselves. Many of the Zoids, such as Arosaurers and Gorhecks are totally new Zoids that fans of the previous series would not know anything about -and yet they appear on screen without any kind of introduction at all. To make matters worse, old Zoids that fans would be familiar with from other series are changed abruptly and without reason. For example, the Blade Liger is depicted in the other series as a very rare (if not unique) Zoid. In the first episode of Fuzors, three of them are shown. Another prominent example is the Fuzors variant of Gunsniper, which are all customised to be the same as Leena's heavily modified (and thus unique) Zoid featured in Zero. No explanation for either of these is ever given. This kind of 'thrust the viewer into the show' serves to confuse new watchers and disenfranchise fans, and is a great detriment to the series. Toward the end of the series, some of the cast's backstory is explained, however this is done in a very rushed manner and fails to justify the terrible job done in the first three-quarters of the series. Next up is the artwork. Well, the most important aspect of a Zoids show is the Zoids themselves, so I'll start with them. The models are all done in 3D, but the style is different to the previous series. The models themselves are very detailed, and try to stick closely to the real toy range, with small things like feathers and antennae being included. While such attention to detail may sound good, this is actually a detriment, as it severs to clutter the screen with needless 'wriggly bits' that only serve to distract the viewer. Furthermore, the models are all done in a very bland color scheme, with everything appearing 'cloudy' and dull when compared to the crisp, bright, colors of the previous series. Compounding this is the fact that most of these included features are simply never used. For example, the Liger Zero Phoenix never fires the bomb or guns that it has on it's back, instead RD usually uses his claws to attack from a distance, which is a big departure from the realism the highly detailed models try to emulate. While this might be excusable if everything in the series were done in the same style of graphics, this is simply not the case. Bullets and explosions are done in conventional anime style and as such stick out like a sore thumb. They just do not blend at all with the Zoids they are fired from or hit. But the most noticeable feature of the animation is the movement of the Zoids. The Zoids move in a very awkward and robotic fashion. All of the Zoids featured are extremely rigid and inflexible, thus their movements seem entirely unnatural and unrealistic. This is especially prevalent when the Zoids 'fall over', wherein they appear to do a backflip on the spot rather than actually collapse or stagger. This is easily the biggest complaint I have with the series, especially when comparing with the extraordinarily fluid animations of Zero. The backgrounds are bland and uninteresting, with very little stand-out features, and as such, the only positive thing I have to say about Fuzor's artwork is the character's design. However, considering that the characters are very unimportant (as they are usually obscured from view inside Zoids) this is largely a moot point. Finally, is the sound. Almost all weapons have high-pitched sounds, regardless of what they are actually shooting. As any mech fan could well appreciate, it sounds a bit ridiculous when super-heavy artillery makes a 'pew' sound. Furthermore, RD's voice actor has a very high-pitched voice, as do most of the supporting cast (such as Sigma and Sweet). As the viewer's ears are bombarded constantly by all these high-pitched sounds, it honestly gets annoying. Other: Well, there is no section for this, but the quality of translation is very poor. The names of Zoids are often mispronounced or downright wrong. Overall: Quite simply Fuzors is a very poorly made anime when taken from the viewpoint of a Zoids fan. The animation is awkward, robotic and dull, the sound effects are annoying and inappropriate, the translations are poor and the story only picks up toward the end of the series, but this simply come along far too late to salvage the series.

26 of 26 episodes seen

sylvanelite(All reviews)

11 people found this review helpful

Overall1Story1Animation1Sound1Character1Enjoyment1

This might sound like a harsh thing to say, but this is one of the worst series I've ever seen. The plot is terrible, and the voice actors are outstandingly bad. The fights are poorly strung together and are terrible to look at. This series was cancelled from US airways for good reason. Although it does get better in the latter half, it's not enough to recover from the terrible first half.

26 of 26 episodes seen

Daniel_mugen25(All reviews)

7 people found this review helpful

Overall7Story7Animation7Sound6Character6Enjoyment7

Zoids fuzors, just like Zoids new century, have teams who uses Zoids to battle each other for entertainment purposes in my opinion. It has been a good series especially when their Zoids combine with each other. Unfortunately, the story is a bit cliche. Teams battling each other for no explained reason(I might have missed it in the series though). I have only watched the English dub so far and the voice actors are good. Animation is a bit different from previous Zoids series but then impressive when they combine. All in all, it was a good series.

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bettsfic · 5 years

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socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data.

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated:

there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.

pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.

shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself.

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories.

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing.

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies.

fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template

ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.)

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or

a potential template:

introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)

accomplishments (degrees, personal history)

fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)

fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)

spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)

find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)

policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

#socknography #fanfiction #ao3 #otw

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purplesurveys · 3 years

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1105

surveys by seachaange

What do you do when someone is talking to you about something you don't care about? I listen and try to ask questions or add my own input so that they can see that even though I personally don’t care about the thing they’re talking about, I’m invested in them.

What is the best pizza place in your neighbourhood? Erm, we don’t really have a lot of independent pizza joints, actually. Most of the ones I see are chain restaurants like Pizza Hut and Domino’s. The best pizza I’ve had is from Vu’s at Marco Polo, but it’s been a whileeeee since I’ve had their food. Mama Lou’s pizza is also good.

Do you have Photoshop installed on your computer? I do but I only had it installed for school. I have no personal interest to learn it.

Are there any teachers you have that you are close with? I wouldn’t say that. I’m kinda chummy with one of my English teachers from high school - like he knew about me and Gab and supported us, I show my support for his art, we greet each other every now and then, etc - but we’re not ‘close.’

Do you have friends that play field hockey? No.

What about soccer? Not friends but I do know a number people who play football, yeah.

Do you think homosexuals are leading a bad lifestyle? This question aged like milk, didn’t it...

What do you think of the iPad? I remember when it blew up like crazy. It was such a revolutionary thing back when it was new, so much so that my dad even felt the need to buy one. It was fun when the hype lasted; but nowadays I don’t know people who would still seek out an iPad other than artists and law/med students, lmfao.

Do you put lotion on after you get out of the shower? I don’t.

Do you have any concerts on dvd? A lot, but they’re of concerts from a time when DVDs were still a thing. I haven’t had a new DVD in around 7-8 years.

Do you still have a VHS player? I think my parents have thrown theirs out already.

Has anyone ever given you a promise ring? No.

Do you send postcards to people when you go on vacation? I don’t. But aw, this made me remember when Jo did a summer exchange program in London and she sent postcards to Aya in the few months that she had been away. I thought that was sweet.

What do you think is the most comfortable shoe? Out of the pairs I have, my Onitsuka Tiger shoes for sure.

Have you seen Lady Gaga's music video for Telephone? That was suuuuuuch a big deal when it came out. Yes, I definitely have and I must’ve watched it a thousand times. Also rude, Beyoncé was in there too lol

If so, what do you think of it? It was so creative and a lot of fun to watch, especially for 2009 when artists weren’t exactly daring with music video concepts yet. I can’t believe they never collaborated again since.

What do you think of the septum piercing? It’s great.

Do you frequently skip class? Depends on my interest in the class/the professor, OR how tired I am that week. I skipped my psychology elective a lot because I didn’t think the instructor was all that great; and as much as I loved every single one of my history classes, there were a few sessions I voluntarily had to skip because I wasn’t doing mentally well. It really depends.

When you're really thirsty, what do you enjoy drinking most? Water. Anything else wouldn’t be able to quench my thirst as well.

What do you find inspirational in the world? I think it differs based on what I need to see at a given time, I guess. At this point in my life, I like hearing from people who have risen from their trust and abandonment issues, because it’s what I’ve been going through as well. I probably never would’ve found something like that inspirational, say, 6 months ago, so it really depends.

When hanging out with your bf or gf, what do you like doing most? I’m a very ‘let’s spend time in silence’ type of person. I cherished it the most when my ex and I would go to a coffee shop and work for hours, in complete and comfortable silence; or when I would be driving and no words would be exchanged for nearly the entire ride. Even though I stay quiet, in those moments I’m actually very happy. Of course new experiences are great too, but I personally enjoy the conventional ‘boring’ stuff the most when with a partner.

What do/did you think of your high school? Teeming with homophobia, bigotry, and just your typical Catholic gatekeepy judgmental environment. I look back at high school fondly because of the friends I made, not because of the toxic environment they nurtured in there.

What is the dirtiest rap song you have ever heard? I don’t listen to a lot of rap. But as an 11 year old listening to Nicki Minaj’s Itty Bitty Piggy, I was immediately traumatized lmao. I still can’t listen to that song.

What about a dirty song in any other genre? Uhhhhhhhhh probably Drunk in Love?? Lmaoooo I’d die for Beyoncé a million times but I always skip that song. My asexual ass just can’t deal.

What is a genre of music you simply can't stand? One of them is techno.

What is, in your opinion, the best way of dealing with a break up? Being kind to yourself.

What flavour of Doritos do you like best? I’ve only ever tried the nacho cheese flavor, but I love that one.

Where do you do your grocery shopping? I don’t do the grocery shopping in the family but my parents usually do it at SM or at this local store we have nearby.

Would you ever go to a comedy club? Yes, with a friend so I’d be more comfortable.

Do you think Victoria's Secret is overpriced? I haven’t been in one of their stores in a while, so I can’t really say.

Do you still have a VHS player? Again, I don’t think so.

Do you have a tumblr? :))))))

Why is it that photography is becoming a trend? So this survey was made in 2010 and I can definitely confirm it was a crazy huge trend lol. Even I got into it and asked my parents to get me a DSLR back then. Anyway, I think it was because during this time, DSLRs had been slowly becoming a thing? and they were kiiiiiiiinda cheap - at least cheap enough to be accessible to a large amount of people - so it allowed people to play with different styles that were very unfamiliar at the time, like light painting, fisheye, close-ups, etc. And then at one point everyone had DSLRs and it just wasn’t as enjoyable anymore because everyone was doing the same kinds of trendy shots lol.

What is the funniest movie you have ever seen? I’m gonna go with The Proposal - Sandra Bullock was gold in that movie.

Did you watch American Idol this past season? No. Do they still air new seasons of that?? I stopped watching when the same guitar-playing, country-singing white men kept winning.

If so, how did you feel about the winner? It’s been more than a decade since I last cared for the show.

Don't you hate it when one of your earbuds stops working? Sure.

Do you have a normal landline, or do you use MagicJack? Holy shit I have not heard of MagicJack in a goddamn WHILE lmao, what a throwback. We had one, I’m pretty sure...but I never knew what it was for.

Do you even use a house phone anymore? Landlines are still common in the Philippines. Are they not in other countries? Hahahaha.

Would you ever consider dating someone who lived across the country? If I loved, trusted, and was committed to them enough, yes.

What was the most expensive restaurant you've ever eaten at? I wasn’t able to track the name but I’m pretty sure it was the fine dining restaurant in our cruise trip that my parents treated me to for my birthday.

Do/did you take foods classes in high school? My school didn’t offer such a class, but we had home economics and we were occasionally taught how to cook and bake certain dishes.

Do you have a tattoo? No, not yet.

If you do, describe the pain you went thru when getting it done. Eugh this is what I’m scared of :((((

Do you enjoy making hemp necklaces and bracelets? I’ve never tried.

Have you ever watched the show Strangers With Candy? I’ve never even heard of it before, I’m sure.

What is your favourite bookstore? Fully Booked, because their collection is expansive, always complete, and they let you take a book of the shelves and read it if you’d like.

Have you ever used torrents? Mostly throughout high school. I did use a torrent to download Midsommar recently, though.

How can we tell if you are in a bad mood? I go quiet.

How are you when you're in a really good mood? Complete opposite - I will be bubbly and chatty, especially in instances when I’m not really expected to be.

Are you nice to everyone, even people you don't like? Yes.

When you're bored in class, what do you do? I seldom found myself bored in class because I’m constantly furiously taking notes. But if the prof themselves are very boring and there’s nothing to take notes about, I go ahead and check my social media either from my phone or laptop.

Would you rather go to Lollapalooza, Warped Tour, or Bonnaroo? As a teenager, I had always wanted to go to Warped Tour. As I’ve gotten older, though, the lineups for Lollapalooza have appealed to me more. Plus it’s in Chicago, soooooo a million more brownie points for that.

Do you have anything that is autographed? By who? Yeah, I have an autographed poster of AJ Lee. It was my most prized possession and I even placed it on a big picture frame and had it up on my wall for yearsssssssss, and then my mom had to take it down because of course it’s my mom and of course she had to do it.

Can you sleep when it's really hot? Welcome to summer months in the Philippines.

Do you know anyone who works at McDonald's? I think Carley does, but idk if that’s changed in the last few months. I don’t stay updated about her life, haven’t been for years.

Do you have a debit card? Yes.

What bank do you (or your family) use? I am not sharing that lol.

Would you ever hitchhike? I think I’m mostly open to it, though I will say I’ve read enough stories about murders that involve hitchhiking that make me a little scared of the idea, hahah.

Have you ever been kayaking? We did a boat thing in Palawan a few years ago but I’m not sure if that was kayaking or canoeing. Anywho, the experience was breathtaking.

Do you have a problem with swimming in a pond or lake? In the context of my country, yeah, because our natural bodies of water aren’t exactly...the cleanest, lmao. I’d feel much more comfortable swimming in a private beach.

Does anyone in your family go hunting or fishing? Nope. But maybe some of my relatives living in the US do?? Idk for sure.

What do/did you do when someone you barely knew asks you to sign their yearbook? We don’t really practice that. Only the really expensive, bougie, international schools here that have foreign students to begin with do that, I think.

In high school are you/were you in the plays and musicals? No.

Do you have a birdbath in your yard? No, we don’t.

Is the house you live in old or new? It’s fairly new; we had it first built in 2005 and we officially moved in 2008.

Where do you go when you need a new pair of sneakers? Depends on what brand I’m in the mood to buy.

Do you make New Year's Resolutions, or do you not even bother? I typically don’t.

Most annoying commercial? Haven’t been paying attention to them lately.

What does your favourite bathing suit look like? It’s just a simple black bikini but its overall shape and design is super cute and chic.

Do you like Silly Bandz? No.

If you do, how many do you have and what are your favourite shapes?

What do you think of My Super Sweet 16? I never watched it because I feel like I’d only get stressed if I did.

Do you have mini-blinds in your house? I have pull-down window shades in my room, not blinds.

Do you rent your home or do you own it? My parents own it.

What is your favourite song right now? Trigger by Hayley Williams.

Do you use Firefox? Nope.

Do you have a pool in your backyard? We don’t.

Do you have a gym membership? No.

Favourite field trip you've ever been on? Freshman year of high school when we went to two museums :)

#survey #surveys

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tvlovesfandom · 4 years

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Mandalorian Season 1 Finale predictions

Or: how all those ‘Filler Episodes’ are foreshadowing the end of Season 1.

(Take 2 because tumblr ate the original)

Contains so many spoilers for The Mandalorian, Episodes 1 thru 7.

Aight, so.

Episode 7 of The Mandalorian walks up to you with a baseball bat and beats you over the head. It opens with Mando receiving a ‘plea for help’ from Greef Karga that raises more red flags than a Soviet Convention. While our protagonist can clearly see every single one of these red flags, the idea of getting the heat off his tail is just too tempting. Who can blame him?

Mando, proving to be Genre savvy, heads out, looking for backup.Of course, it all goes to hell anyway.

In Episode 7, we bring back characters from previous episodes and we also bring back certain aspects of Mando himself.

Hoo boy this is a long one. I’ll give you my best guesses for what goes down in Episode 8.

Episodes 1-3: The main plot line of course.

1-Greef Karga is a man of honor, same as Mando. His personal sense of honor is different than that of a Mandalorian of course, and it’s built around the Bounty hunter’s guild. But the honor is there, and it comes out in Episode 7.

(I find it really funny that Greef hasn’t repaired the hole in his jacket, FYI. Looks like he still has the beskar plates in there too.)

2-Kuiil and IG-11.

3-Episode 3 showed us that Mando can go on a rampage of destruction when he feels the need. It was not a heavily planned out rampage, clearly the plan was made up as he went along, but he is clearly a good improviser.

4-We were introduced to the Mandalorian clan on Navarro, even if it is pretty clearly stated that they’ve moved after Ep 3. Or were planning to before the Imperials rolled in.

5- Mando does have a short temper when he’s been having a rough go for a bit, look at him using his flamethrower to ‘negotiate’ with the Jawas.

6-He hates droids, but he is willing to work with one and can form something of a bond… not enough to let the droid kill a child though.

Episode 4: Hey look! It’s Cara Dune!

1-Episode 4 introduced us to Cara, and the fact that she and Mando can go toe to toe. The brief scene of her and Mando talking after their initial fight tells us a lot about her: She’s a shock trooper for the new republic, she was part of strike forces meant to take down Imperial warlords. She deserted when the republic set her to acting like a riot cop.

We see Cara as a no-nonsense fighter who knows the risks, and attempts to find the best solution. Look at her trying to get the villagers to move away after she learns about the AT-ST. But when spurred, she helps the fight and defend their home. She shows off her mettle, coming up with a plan on the fly and putting herself in danger to lure the AT-ST in.

When she comes back in Episode 7, we see her having fun with combat when it isn’t life or death. We also see that her and Mando can relax around each other and josh, as their arm-wrestling bout shows.

2-Episode 4′s ending was to emphasise to us that Mando can’t just leave the kid behind, that the baby is unsafe unless with a highly trained killer prepared to go to lengths to protect him.

3-In character building moments, we see Mando break his usual stoic nature to actually explain to first Omera, and then Cara, aspects of his culture. He turns out to be reasonably talkative when you’re not a bounty target or someone he distrusts! When Omera asked how long since he’d taken his helmet off in front of others, just the age he was would’ve been enough, but he adds more information about joining the Mandalorian clan unasked. Also, at the beginning of the episode, he makes a point to talk to the baby when it’s clearly demanding attention.

Episode 5: You know, initially I was going to say “uuuuhh… IDK”

1-MANDO CAN’T FIND WORK. He’s cut himself off from the only source of income that he’s familiar with. He has to take what’s offered, even if he knows it’s a bad idea.

2-Mando doesn’t have any way of keeping the baby safe when he’s working other than to lock him on the ship and hope for the best. He got really lucky with Pellli.

3-This episode reinforces again that the baby will be constantly hunted right from the opening scene.

4- We’re not done with Fennec Shand, I suspect. Or the person who found her body. Was it Moff Gideon? Maybe, though why would he have gone to find her himself?

5-This episode shows us what we might’ve forgotten from the opening of Episode 1: That Mando is actually a really competent Bounty Hunter overall. He has lots of tricks up his sleeve. Those flares were a chekov’s gun used within the same episode. Wonder if we’ll see them again.

Episode 6: Which buttons to press to piss off Mando.

1-Mando is really good at keeping his cool around people who are absolute motherfuckers to him.

2-Harass him, insult him, he doesn’t give a damn unless you actually try and start shit. He will end that. Don’t touch his things, don’t touch his kid.

3-Again this episode brings up that Mando is having to do work that he really doesn’t want to because he has few other options.

4-We see just how violent Mando gets on droids when he has the chance, but we also see how coldly calculating he is about them. To rope a droid, take it’s arm and use it to escape a cell like that? Damn impressive.

5-I can’t believe he didn’t kill those three who were on the prison ship with him. They’re out there, still alive. Just waiting to be brought back into the show.

6-We see that Mando knows how to turn the odds to his favor very quickly. We also see that he can go full on horror movie monster when he wants. He’s proving to be one hell of a Determinator.

7-Baby’s learning from the best! The fact that the little goblin can play hide and seek like that could easily come up! Honestly, that kid seems to understand more than you’d think.

SO! This brings us to episode SEVEN: What have we seen within the episode that calls back to the rest of the season? What predictions can we make based off what has happened, and the general style of the show?

Well, A couple very important things we’ve seen, some of which reinforces things brought up in previous episodes:

1-This episode makes it very clear that Mando KNOWS Greef’s offer is a trap, but he also knows that he’s running out of options. All those moments of him and baby being hunted down, all that effort to find work? That’s flashing through his brain as he considers this red-flag laden offer.

2-Baby can float? Wall-climb? He was hanging upside down from the ceiling SOMEHOW. Let’s add this on to his hiding abilities.

3-Baby can force choke a bitch.

4-Baby can heal a fatal injury.

5-Greef Karga, like Mando, cannot bring himself to betray a being that has saved his life. Lovely cinematic parallel there.

5-IG-11 is on Mando’s ship. According the Kuiil, the droid won’t attack people anymore, but it will defend. This droid has all the tools to lay some serious hate if sufficiently motivated though.

6-We see Mando relaxing and playing with Cara during the arm wrestling. He’s playfully competitive with her and joshes with her. Again, a good character moment.

7-Another character moment we see: Mando’s panic when he doesn’t know if the kid and Kuiil are safe. The stoic, self-contained man who doesn’t panic no matter how bad the odds is reduced to screaming into his comm, desperate for answers.

8-Kuiil introduces himself by name, and Mando uses it. It’s a small moment, but I suspect it’s light foreshadowing.

9- it is not for nothing that this episode opens straight up with a flashback to Episode 6. “You were hired to do a job. So do it. Isn’t that your code? Arn’t you a man of honor?”

ALRIGHT SO. SEASON FINALE PREDICTIONS. After I watch the finale I am going to see if any of these were right and I will be delighted if even a single one is accurate.

1-First and foremost, I think we WILL see the plot wrap up. Maybe not entirely, but by the end of Episode 8, we should see Mando and Baby reunited, and have a more-or-less happy ending to season 1. It’s fucking Disney, after all.

2- The fact that it was VERY SPECIFICALLY SHOWN that baby can heal fatal injuries in episode seven? Chekov’s gun, thank you, Kuiil is NOT DEAD. Yes, that scene narratively fits in because it’s what was needed for Greef to join the protagonist’s team, but I will feel cheated if we don’t see baby do more Force healing. If Kuiil is actually dead, someone else will be getting healed.

3-Mando’s helmet and how important it is that it isn’t removed comes up CONSTANTLY in season 1. I rather hope we don’t see it come off in the season finale, it is possible, but I do hope that they wait until at least season 2 before going there. There’s something else I’d like officialy revealed first.

4-And that thing I think should be revealed is Mando’s name. It’s something that he has yet to give out, accepting his culture as a title. Same as how Kuill corrected him in episode 7 when Mando called him Uganaught, it would be wonderful if some friend of our hero called him Mando again, and he simply said to them “I have a name. It is Dyn.”

Not only would that be a moment of reinforcement of how relaxed and friendly he can be around his allies, but I feel like it’s be satisfying from a narrative perspective.

5-In the trailers for the Mandalorian, there are only a few scenes or dialogue now that we have yet to see in the show:

-A-Mando comin out of a door and shooting a stormtrooper with Greef right behind him.

-B- Kuiil patting Mando’s shoulder while they’re in the cockpit of the Razorcrest (MORE PROOF THAT I AM RIGHT THAT HE’LL COME BACK. HELL YEA-Gonna be heartbroken if that was a deleted scene from ep 7) ((EDIT: Nope, that’s a scene from Ep 2. Damnit.))

-C- “Mandalorian… Look outside… they are waiting for you.” Aight so, Werner Herzog’s character seems to be dead… but he might not be! Maybe we’ll get some exposition from a dieing Imperial with nothing left to lose. Of course, it could be from a scene that they had planned out before deciding to kill off his character.

-D- Cara Dune being a badass and shooting with her big gun.- I mean yeah, to be expected.

-E- Mando clinging to a flying TIE fighter with his rappeling line and pulling himself up on to it. We see Moff Gideon look up to see a likely very pissed off Mando on the roof.

-F- Stormtroopers moving in on the Mandalorian Armourer.

(I actually gasped out “OH NO” at seeing this in the trailer. I honestly would’ve thought the Mandalorians would’ve relocated ASAP. ))

-G- This guy:

SO!

6-We’re definitely going to see the Mandalorian enclave again. My thoughts were that it was empty, but still hard to find, and Mando and friends were going to head there to have a few minutes to plan. They still might do that, but it’s not going to be an empty hallway like I would’ve thought.

7-I really hope that that brief cut of Stormtroopers moving in on the Mandalorian Armourer is not indicative of the clan being wiped out. Everyone go in being braced for it. I am going to be optimistic and say that Episode 3′s ending of the clan coming to our Protag’s rescue and being an absolute unstoppable force means that they’re going to help clear out the imperials, though there will be losses. Season 2′s overreaching plot will be helping the Enclave find a new place to settle down.

8-This does hint that Baby will meet the Clan. Will they continue to support Dyn, or will he be blamed from bringing this hellfire down on them?

9-IG-11 is going to come rain down HELL on those who took down Kuiil. He will likely pick up both Kuiil and the communicator and be an important link to Mando and crew remotely. Will he pilot the ship to pick up Mando and gang? Very likely yes.

10-Baby is gonna Force Choke a bitch. Hopefully Moff Gideon. I don’t expect baby’s efforts to be fatal, however.

11-Paz Vizla is going to be back in style. Is it too much to hope that, at some point, likely not Ep 8, him and Cara get into a “whose gun is bigger” match?

12- Baby’s going to be more than his imperial handlers know how to deal with.

That’s it for now. I’m sure at some point I’ll edit or reblog this with “AND ANOTHER THING.”

#mine #the mandalorian spoilers #the mandalorian #I spent TWO DAYS on this post and Tumblr didn't put it in the tag for some reason #TUMBLR PLEASE PUT THIS IN THE MANDALORIAN TAG I BEG YOU

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duhragonball · 4 years

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Oh, Shit,I Just Remembered Pete Wisdom.

I started looking into Warren Ellis a little more, to see what he accusations against him were, exactly. So much has come out about so many people that it’s hard to keep it all straight, but I’ve been a comics fan since 1993, and Ellis has been in the industry for about as long, I think, so I wanted to know more.

The quick version, from what I can tell, is that Ellis would offer to mentor fans who wanted to break into the comics industry, and with the women, he would start to segue that relationship into something more physical. It would get to the point where he’d want to have sex with them, and they felt like they couldn’t refuse him, since he could torpedo their careers before they could get off the ground. A few women must have spoken out about it, leading others to do the same, and eventually it started to become clear that there was a lot of similarities in their stories.

As I was thinking about this, it suddenly dawned on me that I first heard of Ellis from his work on Marvel Comics’ Excalibur, where he introduced Kitty Pryde’s love interest, Pete Wisdom. And then a bunch of stuff started to make a lot more sense in hindsight.

The X-Men franchise is overrated trash, but probably the wankiest, most usless, most overrated part of the X-Men mythos is the spin-off series Excalibur, which was basically a splinter group of X-Men operating in Great Britain. Fans loved this book, I think because it featured popular characters like Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler, and the book (mostly) managed to steer clear of the mega-crossovers that dominated the rest of the franchise in the 80′s and 90′s. When I finally sat down to read my X-Men collection in 2015 and 2018, I did so confident that I wouldn’t need to bother with Excalibur, because it rarely had anything to do with the main books. The message Marvel sent me with this book was that it doesn’t matter and it never did.

Anyway, around 1995 or so, Warren Ellis took over as the writer, and he introduced a new character named Pete Wisdom, who quickly became romantically involved with Kitty Pryde. This was somewhat controversial for a few reasons:

1) When Kitty was introduced in 1980, she was stated to be only 13 years old. “Thirteen-and-a-half”, to be precise. They actually threw in the fraction, just to make her seem even more like a little kid, if that was possible. Comic book time moves slower than real time, but it wasn’t entirely clear to anyone how old Kitty was by the time she relocated to England and met Pete. Later stories by other writers would attempt to set Kitty’s age as being 16 or 18, which makes Kitty’s relationship with Pete a continuity error at best.

2) In spite of Kitty being very young, people had been shipping her with Colossus for years, and it annoyed them that there was yet another obstacle for their extremely problematic-but-much-desired relationship.

3) People accused Pete Wisdom of being a Mary Sue, since he seemed to just pop in out of nowhere and work himself into the team, win the heart of the most popular female character, and he’s supposed to be this super cool secret agent type. The implication here was that Ellis only invented Pete as a self-insert OC for the purpose of getting it on with Kitty Pryde.

I think there were two schools of thought on how Kitty was supposed to be portrayed in comics. The first was that Chris Claremont had insisted on keeping her eternally 16 or whatever, this plucky kid prodigy who was always too young to get into these kinds of relationships. Ellis’s supporters felt that this was too restrictive, and it was foolish of Claremont to think that other writers would be beholden to his wishes, especially after he left Marvel Comics in 1991. Ellis seemed to be allowing Kitty to grow and mature as a character, and it didn’t matter if it messed around with “comic book time”, since no one knows how that works exactly anyway.

For my part, I always thought Pete Wisdom was a fucking tool of a character. He was yet another government spook riding on the popularity of “The X-Files”. Plus, the conventional wisdom among comics nerds in the 90′s was that U.K. writers were better somehow, just because they liked to write snarky dialogue and deconstruct the superhero genre. Pete Wisdom was a mutant, and he joined the Excalibur team, but he wasn’t gonna wear any poncy tights, innit? No, he went into action with a suit and tie, smoking cigarettes and constantly drinking shots, because that’s more bloody realistic, mate. Ellis gave him an eyepatch in 2001, because of course he did.

The point I want to make here is that Ellis came up with this big idea in the 90′s, and fans ate it up because they were X-Men fans and had no taste. You have to understand that in the 90′s, the big overused cliche was giant guns. The second biggest cliche was nostalgia references to the 1960′s. So when someone trotted out “Fox Mulder, but he’s sarcastic and British”, people actually thought it was kind of fresh by comparison. Surely this bold new concept could only take Kitty Pryde into amazing new directions...

But no, Excalibur got cancelled in 1998, and they moved Kitty back to the X-Men. Did they even break up Pryde and Wisdom on panel? I have no idea. All I know is I read a bunch of her post-Excalibur appearances and she barely mentions the guy, probably because a lot of people in Marvel probably wanted to forget the time she got aged up just enough to sleep with a skeevy-looking older man.

Looking back on it, I always sort of assumed that Ellis only did the Pete/Kitty thing because he was just looking for something interesting to do with the characters, and he wasn’t going to let tradition or continuity stand in the way. But in 2020, the whole thing starts to feel more autobiographical, since this resembles the sort of thing he was doing with young women through his online community. Ellis’ “apology” states that he didn’t notice the power imbalance when he was involved with these women. “I have never considered myself famous or powerful.” I find this insulting to my intelligence, since I used to see fans worship every stroke of his pen like he was some kind of genius. News would come out that Warren Ellis would be taking over the writing duties of a book, and fans would say “Good, they finally fixed it.” They just trusted him to do right by whatever project he was given. So I can only imagine how overwhelmed they might have felt when they signed up for his mailing list fan club thing and he would offer to help some of them become professional writers.

So maybe the critics had Pete Wisdom figured out from the beginning. Whether Ellis realized it or not, Pete was his power fantasy, an older guy just impressive enough to get the attention of a (very) young woman and take her under his wing. And he teaches her how to drink whiskey and smoke and how to know all this black ops horseshit, and-- well whaddya know?-- they’re having the sex.

And to a point, maybe that’s human nature. I always wanted to be a writer because I liked the feeling of power it offered. Imagine being the guy who could put words in Captain Picard’s mouth, or decide exactly what kind of music Superman likes. And yeah, if I could make a name for myself in that kind of field, maybe the ladies would start to notice me, and then I’d be doing pretty well for myself.

The thing is, I eventually learned that writing for comics is a real bullshit thing to get into. You can’t just submit scripts, and there’s no set of steps to follow. I remember reading stories of writers breaking into the comics industry, and they were all different, usually involving some improbable meeting with someone who was already there. A comics writer I respect once wrote that it takes some creativity to figure out how to break in, and if you can’t find your own way, then maybe you’re not creative enough to be in the business in the first place.

And that’s how these women got pulled into Ellis’s nonsense, I assume. They had similar aspirations to my own, and at first he seemed to be offering them a lifeline, but then it led to something they hadn’t bargained for, and what could they do? If they refused to have sex with him, they might have to start from scratch.

Which sort of confirms my suspicions that writing for comics is just a bullshit job, because maybe it’s only hard to get into because of all the gatekeeping that goes on. Why bother accepting submissions and hiring based on merit, when a handful of writers can just vouch for friends or fans willing to do anything they ask? All I know is it’s relatively straightforward to get a job in chemistry. I got a degree in chemistry, and then I sent out some applications, went to some interviews and they offered me a job. Maybe if Marvel worked the same way, guys like Warren Ellis wouldn’t have the sort of unfair influence they have over their fans.

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deltaengineering · 5 years

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Fall Anime 2019 Part 4: also, he has a gun for a head

Beastars

So here’s the CG anime that everyone for some reason decided way in advance would be the best show of the season, more or less by default. I was very skeptical of this for a multitude of reasons. First of all, that is a bad name for a show and you can’t convince me otherwise. It’s actually even worse because you’re supposed to write it in all caps, but I refuse. Second, it has a terribly on the nose conceit in which all sorts of animals live together in a high school setting and it’s all metaphorical ‘n shit. The main character is a wolf but get this, he’s actually all sensitive and quiet! Yeah, this is definitely rated D for Deep. And finally it’s by Orange, the CG studio that got an inordinate amount of acclaim for making Houseki no Kuni, the show that everyone thinks looks great and finally made CG anime worthwhile (actual real fact: HnK does not look great most of the time and CG anime was worthwhile well before it).

But enough about my preconceptions since Beastars is... pretty good, actually. If you ignore the setting, which is indeed terribly on the nose. And there’s not much else to say about the story so far besides it. However, it looks significantly better than Houseki no Kuni because it actually has really good character animation throughout instead of a one-minute action scene with flashy spinny camera tricks every other episode. The directing’s strong too, even if the show conspicuously mainly consists of obvious manga panels. I’m still not too hot on the animal stuff but the general writing seems to be sufficiently competent it would work simply on a character level. So I don’t love it, but it seems solid enough to see if it goes somewhere with its “Zootopia but also Beverly Hills 90210 but also they eat each other sometimes″ plot.

Rifle is Beautiful

Remember the whole “anime about some assorted anime girls joining a club doing an oddly specific activity” thing? This is another one of those, and now it’s about air rifle sports shooting. Except it’s not about air rifle sports shooting because that’s apparently way too violent, so they use rifles that look like exactly like air rifles but are actually based on lasers or really bright flashlights (they can’t keep their bullshit straight between scenes, sorry) instead. I just don’t think “girls doing activities” anime should blatantly misrepresent their subject matter like that, you know? With the possible exception of idol anime that is, ain’t nobody who wants to hear about that shit. Apart from that it’s nothing special, so if you are really into air rifles and wish to watch an anime that’s not about those, knock yourself out. It goes through a whole “club needs 5 members” arc in the first half of the first episode, so I really can’t say where it goes next. Nowhere much, I would guess.

Oh right, there’s one more thing: They frequently render the bodies in CG and the heads in traditional drawings, and they do it every time when they’d actually have to draw a rifle otherwise. It’s a weird effect that I think I haven’t seen anywhere else before, and it’s not great but also not terrible. And it’s the most interesting thing about the entire show.

Kabukicho Sherlock

“Let’s take a bunch of public domain characters and put them into a hip modern setting” seems to be its own genre at the moment, and not only because the BBC did that with S. Holmes, Esq. already. Obviously this show is influenced by that (besides other public domain namedroppers like Bungou Stray Dogs), mostly in Watson and his relationship with Sherlock, but Sherlock-san is rather different here; he’s neither the classic Victorian bohemian nor the abrasive sociopath of the BBC version, and tends more towards a bumbling 90s pop culture version of autism and/or general wackiness here. These two are surrounded by a bunch of campy transvestites for some reason, and I’m not quite sure whether I’m supposed to find this particular stereotype offensive or empowering this week, but it sure is annoying. And it has the same character designer as Joker Game, so if you like chiseled, angular anime men, you’re in for a treat here - even if they tend to wear a lot of makeup and dresses sometimes. I don’t know man, it seems sort of okay-ish for the most part but it’s neither as funny as they think, nor as weird as they think, nor is the murder of the week intriguing at all. Oh yeah, he’s hunting noted public domain character Jack the Ripper. Because of course he is.

Shin Chuuka Ichiban!

I am told this is the sequel to episode 19 of a 52-episode anime TV show from 1997. Okay. I am also told to not dare watch this without the important setup therein, which makes me think I should pay less attention to what I’m told because understanding Shin Chuuka Ichiban and its backstory is not hard at all. Kid is superawesome cooking champion in ancient China and goes around clowning on lesser cooks, got it. It’s not a complicated setup and it’s not a complicated genre either: This seems to be mostly about sick shounen cooking duels. Besides the setting, the main difference between this and Shokugeki no Soma seems to be that SnS goes for ridiculous and Chuuka Ichiban goes for epic - which is to say that it fancies itself emotional as well. Apart from that it’s what you’d expect from a cooking shounen, big moves, big reactions, huge twists and so on. One notable thing is that this show looks really, really nice. Production I.G seems to be establishing a sideline in taking stuff from the 90s and updating it with smoother animation and shinier lighting, while keeping the overall look intact; They did it for Mahoujin Guru Guru, and this looks much the same. Still, I’m just fundamentally not really interested in what appears to be a very straightforward cooking shounen from the 90s.

Assassins Pride

Straight from the Department of Chuuni, we have this light novel masterpiece about a cool as fuck teenage assassin who teleports behind u and nothin personells fools all day. He then meets a princess he’s supposed to off but just kinda decides not to, probably because she seems to be smitten by his m’lady act. Now he has to use his sick skillz to keep them both alive. It’s awful and terrible and no good and also kind of adorable. This truly is the most 13 AND A HALF MOM years old anime in a while, and it’s not even isekai! The writing’s just so amateurish and corny you can’t help but smile when princesses exposit their backstory for no reason while being accosted by pumpkin monsters (without knowing that Awessassin McCooldude happens to be listening in, which is certainly convenient). Or when the episode ends with the man just reading the synopsis of the show out again, in case you were too fascinated by this plot to pay attention to what it’s about. Yeah I’m not going to watch this in a thousand years, but it sure made me chuckle. Your mileage may vary.

Mugen no Juunin - Immortal

Speaking of 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔢𝔡𝔤𝔢, another anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal appeared! You know, the manga for the cultured and historically minded guro fan. The first episode of Blade of the Immortal runs with this and is an arthouse production that someone most definitely directed the shit out of. I don’t think I’ve seen this much directing since, well, Sarazanmai, but “Ikuhara amounts of directing” is pretty much the idea here. And most of the time it even works! The quickly edited, disorienting style gives episode 1 a feeling closer to horror than to a cool swordmen action show, and that really brings out the best in the material, which is grotesque splatter bordering on the comical - It’s somehow a better Junji Ito anime than the actual Junji Ito anime. I think it tries too hard in a few places, but at least it does try.

But then I watched the second episode and that one’s a fairly conventional splatter-comedy swordin’ anime. I am not at all pleased with this development. The third episode was better again and seemed to split the difference between 1 and 2, even if it mostly uses the tricky editing to save on effort in the action – I would much prefer actually readable fights and the wacky mannerisms in the more psychological stuff, thank you very much. Based on episode 1 I thought we might have something special here, but as of episode 3 I’d already merely call it pretty decent. I guess I’ll still stick with it but man, that’s a real bummer.

No Guns Life

No Guns Life is a neo-noir thriller about a guy who has a gun for a head. That’s fuckin rad and exactly the kind of silliness I am totally down for. He also has a gun for a hand, and there’s also some battle nun’s who carry revolvers with two cylinders, so in short I think the title is false advertising. This sounds very wacky (and it is), but it also takes its noir very seriously, down to details more wannabe neo-noirs tend to neglect (like being set right after a big war). The look and feel is pretty excellent, with sharp design and high-contrast artwork, and the music goes all in on the moody saxophone as you’d expect. And there’s some really adorable “look mom, I’m writing” stuff about how Man With Gun For A Head really “needs someone to pull his trigger” and so on (which is, as the astute reader might remember, at the back of his head). It feels like a throwback but then I can’t really think of many 80s/90s shows like this, so it’s actually more like the sort of faux-retro idea Trigger/Imaishi would come up with on a lark. Trigger/Imaishi would, of course, make a far worse anime out of it, so it’s all good. Well, it has some pacing problems and as always it’s a fine line between amusingly camp and not so amusingly camp anymore, but No Guns Life seems to have enough real qualities that it can probably stand on its own even when its conceptual gimmick eventually doesn’t suffice anymore. I give it a two gun’s up.

Hoshiai no Sora / Stars Align

And finally, here’s an anime about middle schooler softboys playing a tennis just as soft as themselves, while being henpecked by the elites on the girl’s team. This is not an “actual” sports anime though: for starters, it’s not based on some shounen manga and is an anime original with quite some staff pedigree instead. It’s also more of a character drama that already goes to some surprisingly real places by the end of episode 1, reminiscent of the recent and quite good Run with the Wind. Furthermore, it looks delicious, with minimalist but distinctive and varied character designs and animation that’s both extremely detailed for a TV anime and also not trying to shove that fact into your face with flashy stunt cuts. In short, this show seems very simple at first glance but every aspect of it just oozes quality. If nothing else, it’s already worth watching just for the excellent ending sequence where the characters show off their “best” dance moves and the chunky student council president dunks on everyone. This one caught me by surprise and it’s an easy pick for most promising show of the season.

#anime #impressions #Beastars #Rifle is Beautiful #Kabukicho Sherlock #Shin Chuuka Ichiban!#Assassins Pride #Mugen no Juunin - Immortal #No Guns Life #Hoshiai no Sora #stars align

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skyfallensoldier · 3 years

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Mobile Navigation || Rules & Mun ↓

DISCLAIMER: I just want to note here at the beginning that while I am considering this RP blog to be historically based, i.e. remaining true to the time period and overall details of John Laurens' biographical information and whatnot, I do not consider myself a historically accurate blog, not entirely. Historical fiction is a well known genre of literature and many, MANY creative liberties are taken within that genre. Think of this blog like you would if you saw an Anastasia Romanov blog. She's dead, we know she didn't survive, and she's been dead a long-ass time; so has Laurens. People still have included her in many works of fiction, even after her body was identified and it was proven she did not survive her family's massacre. I saw a romance book a couple of months ago where she survived that was recently published. Historical fiction, while a controversial thing at times, is a legitimate form of literature.

You don't have to tell me if you think John isn't acting exactly like the real man himself would have, I know that. I'm not going to call John my 'perfect sunshine boy cinnamon roll' or dismiss the privilege he was raised on due to his father, I'm aware he was a real person who had his own personality, virtues and prejudices. I won't deny that while he was certainly a progressive thinking man for the time he grew up in he definitely still had racist thoughts and actions that were indicative of his upbringing. But I'm not on here to debate modern, real life politics, or get into arguments about whether he was a good abolitionist or not. At the end of the day, this is still a hobby for me, and I'm writing for fun.

Basically, don't take it too seriously. I'm a 21st century bisexual woman writing from the POV of an 18th century (likely gay) male soldier, the way I write him is obviously not going to be a perfect representation of who he was. I know he wasn't an amazing, perfect person, but I've still chosen to write a fictionalized version of him for my own entertainment. Please try to respect that; thank you.

Mun Stuff

Name: Luna Gender: Female (She/Her or They/Them) D.o.B: July 23rd, 1996 Age: 24 Nationality: Canadian Sexuality: Bisexual Timezone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) Activity: Daily BIOGRAPHY (SORT OF)

Hello, there! You can call me Luna! I've been interested in writing ever since I first got the internet when I was 14 and discovered FanFiction.Net and now I'm an aspiring author and Roleplay enthusiast. If you include acting/talking out DnD like games with friends then I've been 'roleplaying' since the fifth grade, but I like to think there's always room for improvement. If you ever want to chat I'd love to make a new friend or plot out a roleplay, so don't be afraid to shoot me an ask or send me a private message. Just because my muse can be a jackass doesn't mean I am! I’m a huge advocate for mental health, and if you ever need someone to talk to, please don’t ever hesitate to reach out! Some of my hobbies including literature and writing (of course), digging into mythology from various cultures, practicing solitary eclectic paganism/new age spirituality, drinking tea, and collecting crystals/minerals.

Please note that for the sake of disclosure, I am considered ‘Neurodivergent’, in that I suffer from ADHD, diagnosed at about age six, and have Anxiety and Depression which are directly tied to it. This doesn’t often effect my life on here, but I sometimes have an unpredictable sleep schedule (stay up all night, sleep in late into the morning, etc). I’m usually quick to reply to threads for the most part! I work every Tuesday and Thursday from 5pm to 7pm in addition to odd jobs here and there, during which time I won’t have access to the Internet. The rest of the week I’m on and off all day basically, so you can feel free to contact me any time.

RP Style

⭐️ Please use basic spelling/grammar/punctuation when you RP with me. I'm not a drill sergeant about these kinds of things, I know that typos happen, and if you have a vision problem or such we can absolutely find a way to work around that, I also have no problem roleplaying with people whose first language is not English, so that's totally fine and I’m happy to accomodate in whatever way I can, but it does make it a little difficult to play with you if I don't know what you're trying to say. For this reason I prefer if you not use any text shorthand (lol, idk, brb, jk, etc) unless our muses are messaging each other. Using it in the tags is fine.

⭐️ I roleplay Laurens in a past-tense 3rd Person Point of View (think story-telling format), and generally I don't use icons or text formatting unless I notice my partner does, then I will try to match their style (for example if you use icons and small-text, I will try to do the same, though because formatting isn't possible on mobile, any mobile replies might take longer to be posted than if I were on my laptop). If you have any issues with how I'm writing or need me to adjust my style for any reason don't be afraid to ask.

Contact

⭐️ If you spam me with messages over and over again about something I haven't replied to, chances are I'll drop the thread. I don't mind being reminded because I know Tumblr's notifications are notoriously unreliable sometimes, and humans can forget/lose things, but if you keep poking at me after I've acknowledged you the first and second time, I won't be pleased. Things can get busy on here, or in real life, or sometimes you're just lacking muse for that particular thread, y'know? It doesn't mean I hate you and don't want to RP, I'm almost always up for plotting, but muse tends to fluctuate.

⭐️ My ‘Discord’ is available to mutuals upon request. I don't mind roleplaying on there if Tumblr is being glitchy or you're just not feeling up to formatted/heavily plotted threads, sometimes Discord is fun in that you can do immediate replies without needing the effort of putting icons and formatting into it. I also have a Kik but I never use it. I don't RP in Tumblr's IMs, that's purely for OOC interaction.

⭐️ I also occasionally stream movies/TV shows in group chats or play “in character” Cards Against Humanity game nights, Among Us, etc. If you’re interested, lemme know, I’m always looking for more people to hang out with!

Important

I have no actual triggers that I'm aware of, although snakes do creep me out (mostly shots of them coiled up or images of their pupils), but there are some things I will not roleplay personally for comfort reasons:

⭐️ Cannibalism. You can mention it, for example I won't freak out if someone tells my muse that somebody else ate a person (he might, assuming its not a Supernatural type verse), but I won't RP him engaging in cannibalism, not even in AUs (blood-drinking vampires are fine). I'm just not sure I could stomach writing about eating people. I managed to watch Hannibal, barely, but writing about it? Nah. I can handle lots of horror, gore and disturbing content but not this. Sorry.

⭐ Incest/Pedophilia. I do not SEXUALLY ship with characters under the age of 18. John is not attracted to children, and would never consider sleeping with someone much younger than him.

⭐ I will not write anything sexual with muns who are under 18 years old, even if your muse is an adult. I'll still ROLEPLAY with you if you are under 18 but probably no younger than 16 just because things tend to get explicit on my blogs and I don't want to be accused of corrupting the youth with my foul language and weird opinions, lol. Seriously though, this blog covers a lot of dark subjects and while I’m all for minors exploring that safely through writing rather than in real life, some people aren’t comfortable with interacting with under age people for legal or personal reasons, please respect that.

⭐ Necrophilia. Just... no. Vampire threads don't count, as they're undead and not 'dead dead'.

⭐ Rape. I won't write it with you. I'm okay with mentions of rape, with rape/sexual assault survivor/recovery plots, and even with one character intervening to rescue another from an attempted sexual assault (if an attempted assault does occur, it will be thoroughly tagged and under a cut). I'm fully open to discussing rape recovery/trauma plots as those are things that happen in real life, and it can be interesting to explore how a character reacts to trauma. But anything else is a no-go, sorry!

⭐ Please be aware that I write Laurens as a gay man. However! Because of the time period, violent homophobia and social stigma, he has slept with women before and may be seen flirting with or referencing relationships with women in the past. He is still gay, and still uninterested in being with women long term, he's simply closeted to all but a few individuals. So, unless your muse is Martha Manning (who Laurens DOES love in a manner, and he always will), shipping with female characters on here most likely isn't going to happen unless it's heavily plotted/developed and part of an overall plot, and you understand that it will not be a conventional sexual relationship. I'm sorry if that disappoints you but I've read Laurens as a gay male for so long I have trouble seeing him any other way.

⭐ I will not roleplay slavery plots. This is not up for debate. Roleplaying a highly fictionalized version of a long dead real person who existed during a troubling time is one thing, but I draw the line at that. For this reason, while I'll happily play with non-white muses, muses using non white faceclaims, and crossovers with characters of all sorts, I'll have to decline playing with any muse claiming to actually be writing slavery. There’s a difference between, say, roleplaying a character like Daenerys, a fictional character who was technically a slave-bride sold by her brother, and writing actual slavery from a very real, horrible time period. Slave ownership will of course be mentioned on this blog, that's unavoidable, but just like the mention of rape may happen on this blog from time to time, it will be in reference to a past event or speaking about the subject in general, not roleplaying a scene of it. Please respect this rule, I was hesitant to make this blog at first, because I know it makes some people uncomfortable, but I won't glorify such a horrible real thing that happened to so many people.

Exclusives/Mains

Just a head's up, unless I develop a bunch of chemistry with a particular portrayal of a muse I'm not likely to agree to being exclusives with anyone, unless perhaps it's a very niche or divergent character that has formed a good relationship of some sort with John and I'd have trouble interacting with other versions of that muse. For major characters I just feel it would be unfair to say no to someone who I click with in every other way, solely because I have already befriended someone else writing that character.

I will, however, discuss becoming mains with someone whom I've either developed or plotted out detailed storylines/interactions with regarding our specific portrayals of our characters. This means that I tend to reply to them quickly when I'm online, or may make little gifts (moodboards, aesthetic things, mini ficlets, whatever) for them unprompted, have a verse dedicated just to them, etc. Even if it seems like we haven't done much on Tumblr, there may be a lot of off-site development on Discord or whatnot that led to us plotting out intricate stories for our muses.

Current Mains:

Alexander Hamilton - @quillborn

⭐️ Send private messages.

⭐️ Send my character asks/starters/memes.

⭐️ Tag me in things.

⭐️ Ask to plot or ship.

⭐️ Ask for angst, fluff, etc.

⭐️ Submit things to me & my muse.

⭐️ Do crack and other ridiculous things with me!

⭐️ Like my RP threads.

⭐️ Like my personal posts.

⭐️ Comment on my personal/OOC posts (if you want to).

⭐️ Comment on my crack threads.

⭐️ Instant Message (IM) me if you'd like to talk, whether we're friends already or not!

DON'T

⭐️ Send hateful messages to me about other people and especially my mutuals; doesn't count if it's about the muse and not the person playing them, however. Also, if I’ve got beef with someone for whatever reason, don’t harass them/send hate to them on my behalf, please. I don’t condone anonymous abuse, attacking others, or harassment. I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself, I promise.

⭐️ Introduce yourself with ‘wanna ship?’ For one, I prefer if we’ve at least started a roleplay together, or have spoken OOC. Auto shipping doesn’t always work out and I hate promising people something only to realize there’s zero chemistry, because then I feel like I’m letting them down.

⭐️ Come into my inbox with just ‘wanna rp?’ and that’s it. Please at least have some idea of what you want to roleplay, it’s not very fun when someone approaches you to RP but then doesn’t offer up any suggestions at all. Remember, you are always free to send me memes, whether we’re mutuals or not, and hit me up for whatever plot you think might interest me! I want to hear about it!

⭐️ Spam me with "reminder" messages if I've already acknowledged you the first few times.

⭐️ Reblog my RP threads if you're not a participant in them.

⭐️ Send me anonymous OOC hate. Hate for Laurens is fine, it's just another form of roleplay.

⭐️ Kill off my character or severely injure/maim my character without permission or having plotted something involving that with me first.

⭐️ Follow me if you're a porn blog. I don't mind blogs that post NSFW content, or smut a lot, etc. I mean blogs that aren't for RP and are literally just a normal looking blog until you click on it and the header and first twenty posts are hardcore nudity and porn. I hate those things.

⭐️ Shame my ships.

⭐️ Complain about my tagging. I put my smut under a 'read more' without exception and tag them as "NSFW //" with two dashes. Things that are not necessarily graphic but still have sexual undertones go under "Suggestive //". I use these tags to avoid attracting attention from porn blogs and porn bots that track certain key words, as such I do not tag my content with "Smut" or trigger words such as "dick, oral, anal, nudity, etc", please block my NSFW and Suggestive tags if you're uncomfortable. Triggery subjects (mentions of rape, animal abuse, torture, mental illness) will be tagged under the name of said trigger with a space and two dashes, example: "Self Harm //", “Suicidal Ideation //” or "PTSD //".

⭐️ Godmod my character. If you’re not sure what is/isn’t okay, come talk to me! I don’t bite! If you’re looking for an example of god mod behavior, here: “X lunged at Laurens, taking him by surprise, and hit him square in the nose, causing blood to spurt.” It might not seem like a big deal but it means that you decided how your character’s actions affected my muse, and not only that, didn’t give him a chance to dodge or anything. Not cool.

⭐️ Ship with me without permission (sending in shippy asks is A-Ok if you're interested in exploring a ship between our muses, I'm talking about things like claiming that our muses are in a relationship without discussing it with me, referencing dates or sexual acts that never happened, etc. I ship mainly with chemistry otherwise things get boring fast.

⭐️ Assume/act like our characters know each other/are closely connected (friends/family/lovers) if we've never discussed it unless it is established in canon/history. This especially goes for original characters. I'm open to Laurens forming deep relationships with OCs obviously, but those have to be developed in character, not just assumed from the first interaction.

⭐️ Attempt to roleplay with me if you are not a roleplay blog/or if you're just trying to RP as "yourself." I don't do Character X Reader imagines stuff. I don't RP with 'fan' accounts, only RP blogs. You can still send asks so long as you're not trying to initiate an RP scenario. For example, asking Laurens what his hobbies are, asking for a blessing etc? That's fine. Spamming me with different actions "you" are talking to Laurens is weird. Stop that. I will also not RP with blogs that claim to roleplay as real life people, such as Markiplier, that's super creepy. This does NOT apply to "historical fiction" roleplay (obviously since that's what this blog is), which is considered its own genre of literature. I'm talking about the above where people will 'roleplay' as real life, currently alive people like YouTube celebrities and ship them with their friends, even if they've made it clear that they're uncomfortable with it.

⭐️ Get angry at me for doing something you don't like if you don't even have a rules page for me to go by. It's not fair; you can't expect your partners to just read your mind and magically know how you feel. If something bothers you let me know, I’ll make a note about it so I avoid it during our interactions!

⭐️ Use me as a meme resource blog without ever interacting with me. I don't require "reblog karma" for you to follow me, partners are more than welcome to reblog from me, but if we never interact and I just occasionally see you reblog fifteen posts from my meme tag and then disappear again I'm not gonna be happy. Go to the source or to an archived blog no longer getting notifications, please!

⭐️ Reblog my Meta/Headcanons. If they're from a different blog it's fine but the ones I've personally written are for MY portrayal of Laurens. I work hard on most of my stuff and I'd prefer if you didn't reblog it, not because you aren't allowed to have the same headcanon ideas as me, but because then it ends up getting liked or reblogged by lots of other people, spamming my notifications, etc.

OCs & Multimuses

I love OCs and multi-muse blogs (I have my own multimuse sideblog over at @historyremembers, which has other 18th century characters including the Hamilton children and some OCs), so feel free to interact! That being said, please have an about page of some sort on your blog. I can't follow back blogs that have absolutely no information available regarding their character(s). I don't RP with OC children of Laurens. This is nothing personal, but I'm fairly certain he was gay in real life and prefer to play him that way, and he only had one child - who he never even got to meet - in real life, so it just wouldn't make sense to me for him to have other kids running around unless he'd adopted some. If you're a multimuse, I may not follow you back if I'm only familiar with two of your muses if you have a blog of fifteen characters, simply because I'd prefer to keep my dash clean and only have characters/fandoms I'm familiar with on it. I'll still RP with you if you have a character I'm interested in! I just might not follow back if the majority of your characters I do not know, I apologize for this.

If you’ve made it to the end of this, congrats! I know it couldn’t be easy (my ADHD brain was frustrated trying to just write all this up) but it’s necessary so there’s not misunderstandings on what I am/am not willing to RP. I won’t ask for a password since I trust most people to have the courtesy to at least skim the rules of those they want to RP with.

Have a nice day!

#Everybody Listen Up! {PSA}#Out Of The Field {OOC}#Long Post //

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lechevaliermalfet · 5 years

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In the Name of the Moon – A Look at Lunar Legend Tsukihime

There’s a popular joke in the Type-Moon fandom that there is no Tsukihime anime, but boy it sure would be great if there was one.

I had only ever been dimly aware of this attitude toward the Tsukihime anime myself. Watching it fansubbed for the first time in the early 00s, I wasn’t really plugged into the fandom, and the joke seemed like a minor thing to me. I had all but forgotten it by the time I was with my wife at Otakon in 2012, and we went to a panel about Type-Moon for fandom newcomers.

The panel was pretty salty about the Tsukihime anime, taking the joke about there being no such thing so far as to refuse to acknowledge it or discuss it. If I recall, they insisted on this refusal even when directly asked about it by someone in the audience. I also don’t recall them being all that complimentary about the Fate/Stay Night anime (the original 2006 series) for that matter. We had a long drive home after the convention – fourteen hours, give or take – and our discussion about the convention kept circling back to that panel.

She’d gone mostly to accompany me, I think, and because she didn’t have anything she wanted to do that conflicted with it. She had some minor interest herself, as she’d seen this supposedly nonexistent Tsukihime anime, and like me, she enjoyed it. So it was pretty irritating for her to go to this panel ostensibly for newcomers and then have them trash the one thing she’d experienced in the fandom. It was all the more irritating when you stopped to consider that at that point that it was, in all probability, one of the handful of things real newcomers might have experience with.

In its way, though, the panelists’ hostile and disdainful attitude toward the most accessible works in the general Type-Moon oeuvre did make for a suitable introduction. If not to Type-Moon and their work, then to the fandom, and the high levels of toxicity most of its assholes could and would display given the opportunity.

But I’m not here to talk about the Type-Moon fandom, except as it amuses me, or is relevant to the subject at hand.

The subject being this supposedly non-existent anime: Lunar Legend Tsukihime.

My own relation to the Western Type-Moon fan community is tangential at best. A couple of guys I know (one a good friend, the other an acquaintance), back in the early to mid-aughts, were moderators for the Beast’s Lair forum, basically the center of the English-language fandom community at the time. Of course, at the time, the fandom was almost brand-new. Tsukihime was all the rage then, because Tsukihime was almost all there was. Fate/Stay Night was new enough that there hadn’t really been time for the discourse around it to even form, let alone evolve much. And in those days, Beast’s Lair was basically the forum owner and a few of his online friends, and I feel like half the reason it existed was because at that point, it was more convenient to just have a forum than it was to get a bunch of guys together on an AIM group chat with that level of frequency. This was before Mirror Moon created a translation patch for any of these games. These were guys who bought the game direct from Japan, paid the outrageous import fees, referred constantly to a GameFAQs walkthrough, and died like men. It was that, or learn Japanese. Most of them opted for the walkthrough. Thank Whoever you believe in that the game runs windowed, I guess.

Fate, which has been the bread and butter of Type-Moon’s success for well over a decade now, was a commercial game. But it was one built with on the base of the huge support Tsukihime had garnered following its launch. Tsukihime itself was a doujin game, made when the guys at Type-Moon were a bunch of nobodies and had no real money to speak of.

Because they were nobodies, and because they needed the game to sell big if they were going to make the kind of money they needed to make, they did what a lot of Japanese doujin developers have done and continue to do, and will probably do until the end of time, and put porn in the game.

This is not unknown in Western development circles either, just for the record. But Japanese culture is in some ways more permissive when it comes to depictions of sex or sex-adjacent topics and material in their mainstream entertainment. Porn can net you a decent career, or at least a halfway-decent living, and it’s generally easier over there for porn artists in any field of endeavor to “go legit” and make the jump to the non-porn version of their field.

That doesn’t happen in the West, or at any rate not in America. Or very rarely. We have (for better or worse; there’s a whole separate debate there) a much sharper division between the porn and non-porn sides of the entertainment industry, and that barrier’s much less porous. But porn fans will support you. If the success ceiling is far lower than in the legitimate side of the industry, it’s also true that the floor is likewise lower.

So here we have Tsukihime. Not “porn with plot”, or even “plot with porn”, but “plot (…with porn)”. It’s there because they were worried the game wouldn’t sell without it, and so there’s not much of it in the first place. What I’m saying is that if you’re wanting to get your rocks off, you’re going to be a while.

Which is not to say that Tsukihime as a game is inherently like… progressive, or woke, or anything like that. Oh no. Nonononono. It’s horror (-ish, depending on your route), for starters – a genre that thrives on objectification and exploitation. And then it’s Japanese, which gives it an extra few layers of seeming weird to American sensibilities. So this is less like going down the rabbit hole and potentially more like falling into a snake pit.

I say all this to lend some context. When we think of Type-Moon today, we tend to think of this highly successful production house with a star franchise that’s rapidly hitting the market saturation point. If it hasn’t already (and I have a friend who maintains that it has). And that is absolutely not Tsukihime. Not the game, and certainly not the anime. No ufotable animating, no Yuki Kajiura composing, no Gen Urobuchi directing the critically acclaimed and popularly loved (and irritatingly overpriced) prequel.

This is Tsukihime. This isn’t the property that launched Type-Moon to stardom. That would, again, be Fate. This is the property that let them make Fate the way they did. Tsukihime is the visual novel world’s equivalent of some garage band you never heard of releasing their demo tape as their debut album, and the demo tape is actually pretty good, even as it suffers from having basically rock-bottom production values. It’s one of those things where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have to look at what it tries to be and tries to do, and like it for that. In that much at least, even as they differ in many other ways, that much is true of both the anime and the visual novel.

It’s worth it, though.

Phantasmal Fantasy

If we’re being honest (and why wouldn’t we be honest?), Tsukihime, at least going through the main route, is a little bit less straight horror and a little more what I think of as horror-fantasy. It isn’t horror because it’s rarely if ever actually frightening. But it uses horror aesthetics in a fantasy setting (urban fantasy, in this case), which may lend things a generally eerie and unsettling sense of ambiance and a particular feeling of threat to the main characters without ever quite getting your pulse up. It’s a hybrid genre I happen to have a huge soft spot for (I’ve been reliably informed that this is sort of My Thing). The entire Legacy of Kain series falls under that banner for me, as do most of the Castlevania games. The Dark Souls games all have it to some extent, and Bloodborne leans into it hard enough that it actually is kind of legitimately scary at various points. And then there are movies like Vampire Hunter D.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime, the anime based on the visual novel Tsukihime, was released in the early to mid 2000s. On a technical level, it’s very middle-of-the-road, with a bit of a generic visual style and workmanlike animation. But we’re talking about an anime based on a doujin hentai game. More mainstream visual novels’ adaptations tend to get better treatment. Tsukihime is well-regarded, but probably not really “popular” in the same sense as something like, say, Da Capo or Little Busters or Air, or... Look, Type-Moon’s getting the star treatment was pretty much going to be impossible at that stage. It took Tsukihime and the first Fate adaptation before we got to that point. That the Tsukihime anime happened at all is honestly kind of remarkable, and a testament to how much of an impact the game made.

Tsukihime takes place in the modern day (well, modern for the date of its release, which for the game was 2000, and for the anime would be 2003 or so). It’s a vampire story, of sorts, though the only creatures we’d recognize as traditional vampires are a minor threat at best.

Our main character, or at any rate, our viewpoint character, is Shiki Tohno. He’s part of a large, wealthy, and presumably powerful family, though he lives with an aunt and uncle whose ways and means are much more middle-class than his father, the head of the family. He was banished from the main estate eight years ago, shipped off to live with his aunt and uncle after an accident when he was about eight.

He doesn’t remember much about the accident. He (and therefore we) are initially told it was a car accident, and that it damaged his heart. He has fainting spells occasionally if he over-exerts himself, and otherwise generally anemic symptoms. Something to do with damage to his heart after the accident; it’s not really clear. The weakness makes him an unfit heir to be head of the family, hence his being put aside.

The real change in him is far stranger, and far harder to understand.

While recovering in the hospital, he begins to see odd lines running through everything, making the world look fractured. He discovers that if he cuts along those lines with a blade or other edged implement, the object will simply fall apart along those lines. It takes little to no force to do this. He could cut down a tree simply by dragging the edge of a knife along a particular line on its trunk, a line invisible to anyone but him. His attempts to convince others that these lines exist fall on deaf ears, and only cause concern for his mental state.

One day during his recovery, while wandering around outside, he runs across a woman named Aoko Aozaki who not only believes him, but understands what’s happening. She explains to him that he has a rare ability – perhaps the only one in the world with it – known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. What he is seeing is the inevitable destruction and dissolution, the “death”, of every person and object around him. The lines are the only way his brain can make sense of it, as this is something the human mind doesn’t readily grasp. She gives him a pair of glasses which make the lines go away while he wears them, and which therefore allow him to go on with his life as normal. She tells him that he mustn’t use this power of his unless absolutely necessary.

Shiki lives his life normally from that point forward, until one day while he’s in high school, he receives notice that his father has passed away, and Shiki is to move back into the main estate. Said estate is in the same town, so much of his day-to-day should remain the same – same friends, same school, same daily routine.

But a strange thing happens on his way to the manor after school. While resting in the park, he sees a young woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a white sweater. From out of nowhere, he is overcome with a furious, murderous impulse. His body seems to move on its own, with no input or control from him. Off come the glasses, out comes the knife he carries with him, and he’s off chasing her. Bad things happen.

He wakes up in the Tohno mansion, having blacked out and been retrieved by Hisui, one of the two maids of the home. She dresses as a Western maid, while her twin sister, Kohaku, also a maid, prefers a kimono.

But his arrival at the manor comes with significant culture shock. In the wake of his father’s passing, possession of the manor and the position of head of family have both fallen to his younger sister, Akiha, whom he hasn’t seen since his accident some eight years ago. His memory of her is a little hazy, but he seems taken aback by the polite but stern young lady she’s grown into. Altogether, the four of them – Akiha, Shiki, Kohaku, and Hisui – are the only inhabitants of the house.

Shiki finds its size and sense of isolation intimidating, all the more because his daily life in and around the house is in for a massive shake-up. For starters, there’s a strict curfew, and also no television. When Shiki objects, Akiha puts her foot down, and seems determined that he will live according to the family’s ways and rules, or… Well, there is no “or else”. He just will, end of story.

So he sneaks out to go buy some snacks and magazines. On his way, he is accosted by one of his classmates, Ciel. But here, she’s dressed in an odd outfit, carrying a set of deadly-sharp swords, and seems intent on killing him until she satisfies herself that he poses no threat.

The next day, further weirdness ensues. He encounters the blonde lady, the one he thought he killed, very much alive and well. His initial relief that he didn’t actually kill her is quickly undone by her assertion that actually, he did, and with rare skill and gusto. She then goes on to describe the exact cuts he used to slice her into seventeen separate pieces.

Then it gets stranger.

She is, she tells him, a vampire, albeit not all that much like what you’d think of when the word comes to mind. And no, she doesn’t sparkle. Her name is Arcueid Brunestud, and she’s hunting an enemy of hers who’s in the area, and is responsible for a string of murders and mysterious deaths that have been occurring lately. She was doing well enough until Shiki came along murdered her. While she was able to recover from this inconvenience, their encounter has left her in a weakened state. Now she needs help, and who better than the one who put her in this position in the first place?

Twists, Turns, and Dead Ends

I’m a little conflicted about the problem with the Tsukihime anime. I can’t decide whether its creators overestimated what they could do in twelve episodes, or underestimated the material and the time it needed. I supposed it really doesn’t make much difference. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bad news first.

There are some technical issues with the show, which are probably the least of its problems. The art style is kind of lackluster and workmanlike, and the animation is overall pretty by-the-numbers. There are numerous moments where you can see drawing or animation shortcuts were taken, and there are lots of long shots where the camera lingers on one place or on one person well beyond what’s necessary for drama. On the other hand, the more important action scenes do see a slight jump in quality, so maybe the producers were keeping something up their sleeve for when it counted.

The English voice work is serviceable. The actors’ voices are by and large a good fit for the roles, but the acting is occasionally a little wooden. The writing is somewhat off as well. Shiki disappears from his normal life for a while in the third and fourth episodes, and his friends’ and family’s discussions of it once he resurfaces don’t seem to agree on the times he was gone – at one point, even within the same conversation. This may be a translation or dub writing error, though. There are other weird gaffes (this time in the original script), such as that Shiki doesn’t notice that Kohaku and Hisui are identical twins. This despite the fact that their only notable differences are eye color and wardrobe.

But these are mostly technical troubles, and they’re things I can overlook pretty easily. The writing errors are never so serious that I get confused about what’s going on, and the artwork issues aren’t too out of line, either. Certainly I’ve seen other shows from the time that did worse and more often.

The real issues \with Tsukihime, and the problem most of the original game’s fans have, stem from the way it’s adapted from the game.

Like a lot of visual novels, Tsukihime has multiple routes, and many if not all of them are mutually exclusive. In fact, some don’t even involve Arcueid, who you’ll remember is one of the main characters. This presents some difficulties when making a TV series. On the one hand, there is a canon route, and you could probably make a decent twelve-episode TV series out of just that. On the other hand, there are lots of fans who prefer the alternate routes, who would be pissed if their favorite characters showcased in those routes weren’t given some screen time, and so you want to give them something. And, too, one of the intriguing things about a game like Tsukihime is all the lore and world-building that makes these divergent plotlines possible and interesting. Even when not pursued, elements of those routes may come up one way or another, and lend a certain richness and depth to the story. It would be a shame to leave that on the cutting room floor.

Another possibility the show’s creators could take is to craft their own continuity, essentially creating a story hybridized from multiple routes from the game while not adhering strictly to any one of them, and create a single story that way. This hypothetical hybrid story would then be better able to explore more of the background and lore, and incorporate that richness into its own new canon. But that would take probably more than twelve episodes, and twelve was all Tsukihime got. For anyone who’s curious about what this approach might look like, there’s a manga adaptation that incorporates elements of the other routes into the main story. It’s out of print now, sadly. Originally published by ComicsOne, it was taken over by DrMaster after ComicsOne went out of business. Then DrMaster themselves went out...

Anyway, the compromise measure that the show’s creators eventually decided on was to largely tell one story (the Near Side routes, particularly the Arcueid route), while throwing in bits and pieces from other routes… and then never following up on them. There wind up being a few non sequiturs and narrative dead ends or red herrings, almost as a kind of wink and nod to say that the show’s makers at least know those possibilities exist. But this results in the show being unfocused. For instance, a couple of episodes build up the Problem With the Tohno Bloodline, but this ultimately doesn’t figure into the story. This material comes from what the game refers to as the Far Side routes, and those developments largely go unnoticed during the Near Side routes which the anime’s plot focuses on. The problem is, again, that these are mutually exclusive as the presented in the original game. Weaving them together in the “new continuity” approach would be fine – maybe ideal for the anime, even – but it would take an amount of alteration to the continuity that the anime never makes. It winds up being less of a problem than it sounds like, but it does manage to be frustrating.

The main story, meanwhile, hints at interesting elements from the broader cosmological background that the game establishes (and which later Type-Moon games borrow and build upon), but many of those elements never quite leave the background. This leaves a frustrating sense of massive, powerful forces and entities moving in the background, that there is something far larger happening that we are not even quite glimpsing, but only being given hints of.

But if it sometimes seems that Tsukihime only scratches the surface of the greater and deeper lore of its setting, that lore and setting are still compelling. There’s an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic scale to the supernatural as it’s presented in Tsukihime. Arcueid, Nvrnqsr Chaos (no, that’s not a typo; it’s the real name of an adversary in the game, though the anime presents it as Nero Chaos instead), and her ultimate enemy, Roa – all of them are connected to higher forces and entities. The murders occurring in Shiki’s city are the most minor of problems in the grand scheme of things. This is what makes the anime both fascinating and frustrating. It shows us this conflict, but refuses to give the full context for it. So much seems to be held back; the full natures of these characters goes unexplored.

I like a little mystery. I like it when some things are unexplained, or when the answers are there to be found rather than to be given. It’s one of the things I love about Dark Souls and Bloodborne. But the story of Tsukihime fails to explore these mysteries in a way I find really satisfying.

I feel like this is the root of why a certain overly vocal segment of the fandom chooses not to acknowledge the anime. Coming to it from the game, I can see where it might seem a little disappointing. Many of these hooks can seem like teases to those who understand their significance enough to be upset that they ultimately don’t deliver.

But that’s not the experience that either I or my wife had watching the anime. We both came to it before we ever knew anything of the game. For us, those odd hooks were just moments where we went, “Huh. Weird,” and carried on watching the show. Sure, there was clear and unaddressed significance, but it wasn’t a problem. If anything, it made me more curious about the game.

The show may seem meandering to some, but to me, I just tend to think of its pace as sedate. It doesn’t really dig into the characters’ backstories, but it does help to develop them and give them room to breathe.

In particular, the anime spends a lot of time developing Arcueid. We see that despite her power, and her potential for wrath and violence, she’s surprisingly cute and innocent-seeming at times, and actually innocent when it comes to some things. You can see her interest in Shiki grow, but she seems unable to express it. Her attempts at being normal can come across as almost mocking, when they are instead sincere and well-meant, but hopelessly clueless.

What we learn of her story is somewhat sparse, but we know that she spends most of her time asleep, awakening only to deal with threats like Roa. The reasons for this are complicated, at least enough so as to be beyond the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say that there’s a wiki if you’re after more information. Just be warned: The writing there is pretty iffy. Anyway, Arcueid is capable of getting by just fine on her own (when some inconsiderate dick doesn’t just up and murder her, anyway), but it’s also clear that, thanks to spending most of her time asleep, she doesn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on around her. There’s a kind of obliviousness to her that might be frustrating in another character in a different show, but is somehow just endearing here. Like my wife said at one point: You just want to hug her. Which is not, you know, the normal reaction you have with vampires. “Aloof”, “compelling”, “seductive”… These are the words we tend to think of when it comes to vampiric “affection” in fiction. “Huggable” doesn’t really show up on the list. And yet, here we are.

There’s a certain cat-like quality to her. Elegant, graceful, mysterious, sometimes selfish, frequently endearing, and occasionally ridiculous. There’s comedy in her situation. Shiki, despite his powers, is otherwise kind of a dork who could not be more clearly in over his head, at least at the start. He spends most of the series bewildered, confused, scared, and very occasionally snapping and completely losing his shit against some eldritch horror. And yet he’s the one who has to keep Arcueid grounded (to the extent that this is really even possible) and basically explain to her how the world works. In some ways, it’s really Arcueid’s story.

The pace of the series helps it build a sense of brooding mystery as it explores the twin dilemmas of finding a way to stop Roa and figuring out Shiki’s uncertain place in and relation to the rest of the Tohno family. And as you might suspect, these two problems aren’t as separate as they first seem.

If nothing else, the opening theme is just about perfect. Subdued, mysterious, haunting; it sets the mood of the show almost perfectly, in a way that comes close to over-promising on what the anime actually delivers. It definitely sets a mood.

That mood is one I tend to get into around this time of year. I’m normally a night person in the first place. No amount of working mostly first-shift jobs over the last two decades has changed the fact that there’s some part of me that wakes up when the sun goes down, and wants to stay up until the sunrise. I like to be out and about in the dark. I can remember back when I was in college, I would be out with friends trying to find any reason at all to stay out as late as possible. Later in life, I’d duck out long after everyone else was asleep and go for roaming walks at night (at least, back when I lived in a reasonable neighborhood). With fall here, the urge just gets stronger.

There’s something of that feeling I get from Tsukihime, large portions of which involve that same nocturnal roaming, and take place in the nighttime times of life. And I enjoy stories about monsters and the supernatural – I went through something of a vampire fascination phase when I was younger, and still maintain a certain amount of interest – and so those things alone might have gotten my attention.

Fuck the haters; the Tsukihime anime exists, and it’s good. Not great, and not as good as it might have been, but it’s fine. If it’s not exactly gripping, edge-of-your-seat suspense, it’s still an entertaining way to spend the better part of five or six hours. Certainly worth a watch if you can track it down.

Tsukihime tells an odd, interesting story – moody, dark, weird, mysterious, fantastical – all things I like. A story of supernatural threats, monsters, mystery, and marauders in the night. It’s hard to think of anything more appropriate for fall – for October – for Halloween.

Availability

The DVD release for Lunar Legend Tsukihime was originally handled by Geneon in both Japan and the U.S., since they were part of the original production committee. After they folded, it was picked up by Sentai Filmworks, one of the several splinter companies that rose from the ashes of ADV’s implosion in the late aughts.

Geneon’s release was evidently a multi-volume affair. Which seems ludicrous today, when you typically buy an entire season of twelve episodes or so all at once these days, in a single set. But Geneon (which had previously been Pioneer) had been around since the VHS days, and a lot of those companies in some sense inherited the mindset that had governed the VHS release schedule, which was to release a volume every couple of months or so, with three or four episodes on each one, and that was that.

Sentai Filmworks’ version is a two-disc, single-volume set, so that would probably be the way to go. Especially if shelf space is a concern.

There is no Blu-ray release, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine what Blu-ray would really do for the show. At any rate, it seems to be out of print currently. Geneon, of course, folded about a decade or so ago. And although Sentai Filmworks lists it in their catalog, there’s no option to buy. And it doesn’t appear to be available for legal streaming anywhere. Like a lot of older (and I hate to think of this as “older” – I remember being an adult when it was new) – maybe I should say somewhat older anime – Amazon and eBay are your best bet if you’re interested.

Postscript the First – The Anime versus the Game

Tsukihime, as a visual novel with multiple routes, contains far more material than the TV series. HOWEVER, please consider this paragraph your giant, flashing, neon-lit trigger warning for content potentially involving sex, assault, sexual assault (of various kinds), incest, violation of consent, and more violence than the anime producers could show even with the series airing at otaku o’clock.

Just to be up-front for a moment, I haven’t played much of the game. Much of my information comes secondhand, or else is the result of reading the Type-Moon wiki and talking with friends who’ve played through it. I’ve yet to finish a single route. I’d like to, and I occasionally chip away at it here and there, but the problems are twofold.

The first problem – probably the main problem – is the low level of engagement. I get curious about visual novels from time to time, but they’re always a little too easy to put down, and a little too hard to pick up. And that may seem strange, since there’s so little to do in one. The amount of effort involved is nil. But that’s just the thing. I often wrestle with whether or not I even consider them to be games at all. And, look: It’s not like I think visual novels are unworthy of anyone’s time. They’re fine. Largely not my cup of tea, but fine. But what you do in a visual novel could hardly be called playing, any more than you “play” a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are no mechanics, no maneuvering through the world, no use of skills. Just decisions to make, and those not very often. The thing about an actual game is that I’m mentally engaged, fully occupied and firing on all (or most) cylinders. When I want to play a game, that’s what I’m after. And visual novels just don’t offer that.

Of course, I do love to read, and so it would seem like they should be right up my alley for that reason at least. But no. The writing is actually my second problem.

So far as I’ve observed, which admittedly isn’t much, most Japanese visual novels translated into English are pretty awkward, and this is probably a combination of factors. One is that what constitutes good writing (in terms of how the language is deployed) in Japanese differs considerably from what constitutes good writing in English. It’s not just visual novels, mind you. The couple Haruki Murakami books I’ve read have both also seemed off to some degree as well. I think it’s just something in the translation, some difference between English and Japanese in the matters of word choice, rhythm, and flow, and the sense for how these things work in each. I sincerely think that making a Japanese work really sing in English would involve a level of change that most translators (and visual novel fans in particular, given their greater likelihood of being total Japanophiles) are deeply uncomfortable with.

But beyond the general problem of Japanese-to-English writing, there’s the problem of Kinoko Nasu in particular, who is Type-Moon’s writer.

Nasu is, I think, something of a Lovecraft disciple, with his cosmic-scale sense for horror. But he’s also like Lovecraft in another very important and distinct way, which is that despite having really interesting ideas that set my imagination on fire, he actually can not fucking write.

I’m sorry, Lovecraft fans, I really am, but it’s true. Deep down, you all know it. Lovecraft, for his part, was a man who at some point earlier in his life swallowed a thesaurus, and was then hell-bent on vomiting it out over every page he wrote ever afterward. He never used one word if he could find a way to use five or six to say the same thing, never used a simple, elegant, and concise word when he knew a more complex one, and his style has so little flow you’d need an electron microscope to find it. You could make a workout of running back and forth to the dictionary while reading his work. Or you could make it a drinking game. And then die, of alcohol poisoning.

He had some great ideas, once you got past the writing, and the multiple onion-like layers of intense racism. And he was intensely racist; let’s not forget that. Not just “racist because it’s the 1920s or ‘30s and basically everyone white is racist right now,” I mean racist even for those times. People back then were a little weirded out by how much he hated the Jews, and black people, and anyone else who wasn’t the right shade of paper-white. But even just focusing on his writing, the feeling remains that he was not the best vehicle for his stories, and that’s just how it is. The most aching, taxing, fucking grueling reading I have ever done on stories I still actually liked is mostly found between the covers of the various Lovecraft compendia I have lying around the house. I like his stories; I just don’t like reading them much.

Nasu may well be his reincarnation (and oh, would it ever have horrified Lovecraft to be reincarnated as a Japanese person). A common complaint I’ve heard about Nasu’s writing (from people who’ve read it in Japanese) is that he has good ideas, but just isn’t a skilled writer. Now, I’m not qualified to really dissect how he comes across in his own culture, but when translated into English, he’s a painful read. Maybe it’s the fault of the group responsible for the translation (Mirror Moon), but at the very least, I can confidently state that he should stay out of porn. His sex scenes have some of the least sexy and most unintentionally hilarious writing I’ve seen in my life. It’s why I think that even Fate didn’t really take off to become the absolute phenomenon it is until after we started to get anime adaptations of it. Those adaptations would all have been written by other people, or at least had some amount of editing or collaboration to dilute the worst of his influence, letting the good ideas shine through without Nasu’s own writing griming everything up.

I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison, but I feel like on a technical level, Tsukihime is pretty basic. The character artwork is nice enough, with a distinct style. The backgrounds, though, are in most cases very clearly photographs that have been filtered or otherwise manipulated so as not to clash too badly with the character art. This was probably a shortcut to save time or money, or both.

On the balance, I’d say it’s worth looking into, with the major caveat that there’s a lot of stuff in it that didn’t (and couldn’t) make it into the anime, that makes the story overall much darker and more sinister than the anime could manage. Unfortunately, it’s going to be hard to find. There’s only the original version released in 2000. There’s talk of a sequel and a remake, but the amount of time that’s passed for no more attention or work than the project has received, to the extent that these things have become running gags in the fandom. They probably are things that the higher-ups at Type-Moon really do mean to create at some point, but which aren’t a huge priority for them, and so are very, very back-burner projects.

As I mentioned above, the anime and the game are both similar in that their quality persists despite somewhat lacking production values. But the anime’s middle-of-the-road budget and somewhat generic style was never the problem. The game, meanwhile, was pretty clearly made on a close-to-shoestring budget, but this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much. Visuals novels live and die on their writing, ideas, and artwork, I think. Rarely if ever do they rely on really cutting-edge graphics for their impact. And in truth, Tsukihime the game was always going to be marred far more by Nasu’s writing than anything technical.

A nice upside is that, since we’re privy to Shiki’s internal monologue, he comes across as a more interesting character. He seems to sometimes just float through the story in the anime, with bouts of intensity here and there when things go wrong or he’s totally lost it. But the game gives us his thoughts, and we get a better handle on why he does the things he does.

For English-speaking fans, there are walkthroughs, of course. But if that understandably sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, there’s also a fan translation (unauthorized) by Mirror Moon. In addition to rendering the game into English, I believe it also introduces an option for removing the sex scenes. So for those who are uncomfortable with those, this will answer that concern, at least.

Postscript the Second – Alternate Takes: Kara no Kyoukai

Frequently referred to in English-speaking circles by its subtitle, The Garden of Sinners, Kara no Kyoukai (which Wikipedia tells us means something like “Boundary of Emptiness”) is an interesting story from Kinoko Nasu’s early days. It began publication (independently) in August of 1998, and is set in that timeframe. Originally a series of novels, it’s primarily known in the U.S. as a boxed set of seven movies (plus a stand-alone eighth) priced exorbitantly by Aniplex USA (the Blu-ray boxed set for the first seven will set you back a cool $400). These movies tell the story of a different Shiki, this time a young woman who wears a kimono, boots, and red leather jacket, named Shiki Ryogi.

There are pretty clear linkages between it and Tsukihime, though these are thematic rather than narrative, and the result of ideas being reused. Nasu began writing Kara no Kyoukai first, and seems to have cannibalized some of its concepts for Tsukihime. The two stories take place in alternate universes. As with Tsukihime, this version of Shiki also has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, although Kara no Kyoukai’s Shiki does actually come by them after an automobile accident. There’s also a redheaded sorceress with the last name Aozaki (Touko instead of Aoko), and I want to say that I’ve read somewhere that they’re sisters, and that Touko traveled to this alternate reality from the “main” one where Tsukihime and Fate take place. She was initially envisioned with sort of pixie-cut blue hair, but was converted for the movies into a redhead like her sister Aoko, and Nasu decided he liked the change so much that it became canon.

But although it features a Shiki with the Mystic Eyes, she shares the spotlight with Mikiya Kokuto, who’s a dead ringer for the Shiki of Tsukihime. His personality’s different – he lacks Shiki Tohno’s deeply buried killer instinct, for a start. Mikiya has no special abilities beyond a knack for information-gathering and a better-than-average capacity for deductive reasoning. Moreover, even without any special powers of his own, he seems to move with relative comfort in a world full of sorcerers and mystical murderers, in part by keeping an open mind, taking nothing for granted, keeping his assumptions in check, and taking everything as it comes. He works as an investigator for Touko’s paranormal detective agency, Garan-no-Dou. Shiki is mostly the muscle.

Mikiya has a younger sister, Azaka, who in her turn looks an awful lot like Shiki Tohno’s sister Akiha. Except for in flashbacks, where she looks like a young Rin Tohsaka from Fate instead. As with Tsukihime, she is attracted to her brother. Unlike Tsukihime, the two of them are actually blood siblings, so... At least with Kara no Kyoukai, this profound failure of the Westermarck Effect is entirely one-sided; Mikiya has eyes only for Shiki. TV Tropes would undoubtedly describe it as Single-Target Sexuality.

There are any number of other parallels between the two, but these are the most obvious. Much of the background lore seems to be similar between the two series, although Kara no Kyoukai doesn’t use the same parts of it, and doesn’t dig into the parts it does use quite as much. It’s much less concerned with cosmic entities like Arcueid or Roa or Nvrnqsr Chaos, and more concerned with its characters as individuals, and how they relate to each other. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t dive into the sort of metaphysical strangeness on display in Tsukihime and Fate – Kara no Kyoukai is aggressively weird – but its metaphysical struggles are more self-contained, connected more directly to the characters and less tied to the cosmological backdrop.

The movies were released in Japan beginning in 2007, almost a decade after the novels began publication, and well after the successes of Tsukihime and the first Fate series. They’re animated by ufotable, and feature Yuki Kajiura as the composer. I’d encourage anyone interested to track them down, though I know the price tag can be offputting. Aside from high-quality video and sound, the set is pretty bare-bones. There’s no English audio track; in fact, the impression I get is that this is basically just the Japanese Blu-ray release, re-encoded for Region 1. This includes the movies’ proper titles not being displayed in English anywhere on the discs or cases, so you have to do a little sleuthing to figure out which movies are which. This is doubly aggravating considering that the intended viewing order isn’t chronological, so it’s not immediately apparent if you’ve started with the wrong movie. If you feel totally lost and like you’ve just come into the middle of things, then it’s highly likely you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Thankfully, the menus are in English, and the subtitles are serviceable.

There’s a DVD version of the boxed set that costs less – I want to say the whole boxed set went for something like $200 – which is still a decent chunk of change, but more reasonable for a set of seven movies. Unfortunately, a quick browse of Amazon makes it seem even harder to find than the Blu-ray set. And, sadly, there are no legal streaming options for this series.

#type-moon #tsukihime #shingetsutan tsukihime #visual novel #anime #halloween #vampires #lunar legend tsukihime #arcueid #arcueid brunestud #shiki tohno

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