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nicadilly · 3 years

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what are your opinions on the other courtiers? (esp volta)

Omg thank you for the ask, ill do my best nons. Some of these come easier than others, and im fully aware my takes might be weird/unpopular but as long as im having a blast i think its fine. And im just riffing btw, not following any specific format:

Volta

She celebrates not getting kicked or pushed by anyone... I feel like that's pretty telling of her being a very punished/tragic character. But she also disrespects Vulgora and fights them back, so she can’t be completely helpless. I personally adore the idea of Volta being like a mongoose - will destroy you given the chance (literally. Super potent digestive juices? corrosive saliva? Teeth that never seem to end when you look into her mouth? All checked in my book. I'm thinking Pennywise's mouth from “IT” remakes or a sea turtle's mouth)

And YEAH she could mess up Valdemar, controversial opinion ik. They just get sucked in like spaghetti and DIE knowing the “weakest” of the demons was a herald of their demise >:)

Vlastomil

Basically always snooty and prone to blaming others for everything wrong in his life. Even when he’s hyping about the study of invertebrates, he manages to shade you and be patronizing... At the same time though, he is very zesty. Fun conversation partner and the best associate if you manage to get in his good graces. I also hc him to have ambiguous genitalia, and YES if you cut him in half there will be two Vlastomils :) just like earthworms. Overall a lot of cool wormy features that people pick up on overtime. I feel like some will disagree but I always saw him as a “chaotic neutral” kind of char. Should be evil, yes. But he’s just too fun and lovable imo. Like a snarky professor you weirdly like and respect. He’s also a bottom on a mission. Get it peepaw.

Vulgora

DEVS. DID. VULGORA. DIRTY. And I, for one, love it. No matter how you look at their patron arcana - Vulgora is fucked. If it was always their patron, I don't blame them for making a pact with the devil. Trying to avoid great pain, upheaval and loss seems natural. They are the courtier I would want to get lore on THE MOST. I want to know how their life was before “the demoning” sooo bad. As for their disposition - fun. Frenemies with Lucio, threatens Valdemar, doesn't realize they’re always screaming... just a fun little dude (gnc). I mentioned before that I defo see them doing public beheadings, ancient rome style (they’re the leader of the guard, a high ranking noble... they probably are doing it and its legal). As I said. Fun.

Also they hold the highest score in the game of “push Volta off the stairs”. Valdemar comes in 2nd.

Valerius

I honestly don't feel like I can do Val justice. That's all on @c0nsul-valerius. I will try tho! He’s always been torn between actually wanting to do good and upholding his own reputation/pride no matter the cost. The moment his rep is on the line, everything gets sidelined; relationships, acquaintances, morals. It’s delicious how he’s fleshed out in Nadia's route, just that one encounter, seeing how warped and disgusting he became, how ashamed of it all he is - i really want to see that vulnerability again, get to “crack him open” in a way and see how he would be when there's no obligations, work, or masks being put on for the public.

Valdemar

I have... too many hc’s and theories. I would love to overshare in the future! For this post though I'll try to keep it brief. I think people give Valdemar TOO MUCH CREDIT. An amnesiac apprentice, fresh out of the nest manages to kick their pathetic concave ass time and again. And while the apprentice is made to be OP in game, one would think an ancient demon, capable of raising cities, fallen armies and planning to challenge the devil would easily handle an inexperienced magician (and a redhead armed with a chair) but instead they always abscond. Sure, it could be them just going “LOL” and running off to irk people, but Lucio and Julian routes show them to be rattled by getting SLIGHTLY CHAFED. WIMPDEMAR REAL, DESERVES TO BE JOSTLED. They are on the spectrum and mask it so-so, loves a good stimmy. ALSO - MASSIVE HYPOCHONDRIAC, even tho they cant really get sick anymore. Obsessed with disinfecting everything and everyone.

#the arcana hc #arcana imagines #the arcana courtiers #the arcana #the arcana game #hcs #the courtiers #procurator volta #pontifex vulgora #praetor vlastomil #consul valerius #quaestor valdemar #remembering that post abt valdemar being dumb as rocks #im in that team #punished valdemar fandom #if anyone wants to break every single bone in their plank body hey #shake my gnarled witch hand

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bananaofswifts · 3 years

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B+

By : Katie Moulton

The Lowdown: “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” Taylor Swift wrote in a 2019 social media post after her longtime label, Big Machine, sold her master recordings without her consent. Swift had been unable to gain control of her first six albums through contract negotiations, and then Scooter Braun, who’d demonstrated public enmity with the singer-songwriter, was collecting the checks. (Braun’s company has since sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings for $300 million.) What’s one of the world’s brightest superstars and the preeminent pop poet of a generation to do?

The answer: Do it all again.

Swift has begun to re-record her back catalog, and the first release is Fearless (Taylor’s Version) from 2008. (For the Swiftian numerologists, with the new version of Fearless released on 4/9, Swift now owns 4 out of her 9 albums.) This pop-country juggernaut, her second album, was the most awarded in the history of country music, sweeping up honors from Album of the Year at the Grammys to Best Female Video at the MTV Music Awards. (Her VMA acceptance speech was notoriously interrupted by Kanye West, marking one small step for that Moonman, one giant leap for petty celebrity scandals.) Taylor’s Version includes new recordings of all 19 original tracks from the “Platinum Edition,” plus six never-before-released songs “from the vault.”

It also creates a soundalike alternative for both discerning fans and industries (from advertising to radio) to decide which album they play and license – the one owned by an investment firm or the one owned by the artist herself. In that way, Swift is asking (if not pressuring) us to choose. She’s also playing chess. For the critical listener, the questions are: How closely can Swift recreate beloved songs recorded 13 years ago (13 = big number in Swiftian lore)? How might she reimagine or even improve these songs? And how does one analyze an album when the album is also a chess move?

The Good: Damn, this album holds up – not only to the hype of its initial release, but despite that, beyond that. At the time of the initial release, the public was hung up on the figure Swift struck as a precocious ingenue in boots and ballgown, swinging an acoustic guitar with a knowing twinkle in her omg! expression. And Fearless still evokes that moment, but it emerges as a classic account of youthful romance, drama, and fantasy. “Love Story” remains a touchstone of Swift’s lyrical quirks and worldview but continues to stand out as a universally appealing pop song. (Put it on the next Voyager golden record, beam it into space.)

Swift has never been shy about mining her diaries and blowing up the most fleeting of feelings into emotional epics, but one can imagine the trepidation of a 31-year-old singing songs which are not only written by a teenager but so deeply ensconced in teenagehood. What cringe awaited us! These re-recordings, however, mostly escape cringe by playing it straight and allowing us, as the best songs do, to fill in the spaces. For example, much of the charm of bittersweet ballad “Fifteen” was the precocity of its delivery by an 18-year-old who perceived herself to be already so distant from adolescent innocence, but who still clearly felt its hurt so sharply. Now sung by “Pretty Grown Up” Taylor, the song conveys a different pathos: the knowledge not only of her own coming of age, but a protectiveness over the millions – multiple micro-generations – of fans she has witnessed come of age alongside and behind her.

But this is knowledge the listener brings to the listening, not a change that’s made explicit in the re-recordings. The arrangements remain faithful to the original, with plenty of heart-plucking banjo and cinematic fiddle, which belies both Swift’s confidence in the catalog and her honoring of fans’ commitment to these songs.

The most noticeable difference is Swift’s vocal ability, which has been deeply strengthened and expanded as an instrument, both by age and her force of will. Her command as a singer means that the high-flying hiccups and breaks and urgency of the original recording are gone. When she recreates these youthful flourishes – the twangy pronunciation of “Fee-uhr-less,” the laugh in “Hey Stephen” – the longtime listener recognizes them as recreations. But Swift’s fuller, smoother vocals on rage-romp “Tell Me Why” (hold that grudge, girl!) and “The Way I Loved You” (stay high on that drama, Tay!) inject these B-sides with new life.

The Bad: There is so much content in the Swift universe, and apparently in her bottomless Vault, that it can be (to quote “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”), exhausting. We could do without any of the “dance” remixes of songs like “Love Story”, for example. The six “From the Vault” tracks are solid, but it’s obvious why they didn’t make the final album cuts. The vibey electronic atmospherics of “Don’t You” and “Bye Bye Baby” sound like they come from a later era than Fearless. (The Vault exception might be upbeat breakup song “Mr. Perfectly Fine”, which resurrects Swift’s delightfully petty side. By the way, did she have to pay RuPaul for using the line “Sashay away”?)

While the fealty to the original recordings is understandable and even admirable, I wonder if there are missed opportunities for further reimagining of this collection. For example, could Swift re-order her at-times confounding tracklists for future releases or choose different singles to showcase previously overlooked songs?

The Verdict: There’s a chance that, based on the success of this release, Swift reaches a deal with the current holder of her masters and won’t re-record her entire back catalog. This is probably just the latest interesting thing she’s done in music and business, but it’s worth our consideration since it’s been undertaken with such care and could pave the way for other artists.

Swift has always been a masterful writer of short fictions, able to swell a small feeling or moment to contain an era, a relationship, a universe (a skill she continued to develop on folklore and evermore by drawing even more overtly from literature and film). Yet, this project of re-recording her catalog requires her to become a memoirist: re-examining her former selves and reinhabiting her former voice. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate the time-tested strength of the original music, but there was also an opportunity to re-evaluate previous positions and experiences, to reveal what they meant in the longer run. But Swift seems to resist passing judgment on her younger self. Instead, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) states boldly, simply and perhaps, generously, that this is a story still worth telling – and a fight worth fighting.

Essential Tracks: “Love Story”, “You Belong with Me”, and “Tell Me Why”

#taylor swift #review #fearless

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gofancyninjaworld · 3 years

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2020 in One-Punch Man. Part 1: Manga

How shall I describe this succinctly?

It's like ONE and Murata looked around them, saw a raging pandemic, massive disruption to all walks of life, uncertainty of when, if, or how it might affect them, took a massive drag of their cigarettes and said: “Fuck being conservative. Let's go wild. Fuck making our current arc a webcomic retread with fancier fights. Let's introduce more lore, let's have more characters interact in ways one would never have imagined, let's have characters do things that hadn't previously been thought of and make this really exciting.“

If you were holding onto the webcomic as your guide to what next, 2020 was not a good year for you.

723 pages in 24 updates (including revisions) changed the status quo ante in deliciously unanticipated ways!

Where we left off in 2019, we were following the webcomic pretty faithfully, with most manga-original elements being removed at a fast clip. Phoenixman was dead, the mercenaries had died a brutal death, the ninjas had been resurrected but had run off buck naked, Orochi was dead, G5 was very much destroyed, Drive Knight had appeared but had obligingly limped off, taking Nyan with him. The S-Class heroes were in trouble with the cadre exactly as expected and Saitama had met up with Flashy Flash. Tatsumaki had finally found Psykos. Yup, no real changes here.

2020, HAHA!

Awaken!

Throwing manga-specific elements away? As if! They took the great opportunity that preparing chapters for publication to critically review and revise the story so as to first, make it move at a faster pace and second, to be enriched. It’s meant that chapters for volume 22, 23, and 24 (to come) have been redrawn to accommodate the changes and we got the benefit of many of them between April and August of this year.

We started with Phoenixman’s fight with Child Emperor. It started innocuously enough with Phoenixman resurrecting, but then we got a much more interesting chunk of knowledge -- the existence of a metaphysical world modelled on one’s on psyche where the assault on Child Emperor’s sense of self took a much more existential nature.

From a purely physical battle (and some nifty cool info about the Subterraneans) to an otherworldy battle happening in parallel with the physical battle:

It ended up a very interesting examination of Child Emperor’s character and his relationships with other heroes, as well as telling us something else freaky about Saitama’s ability to be anywhere he damn well wants to be.

Ah, and Phoenixman lives. Albeit as a little chick (for now). He’ll probably be back, but not just yet.

The mercenaries were next. They didn’t die. Not because Amai Mask had a change of heart, but because Iaian listened to the niggling feeling in the pit of his stomach and turned his team mates around to intervene just in time.

As you’d expect, trying to guide the mercenaries back to the safety of the surface has been an incredibly challenging ordeal for the disciples. It’s revealed much more about the way the disciples trust each other and lean on one another, and yet, when there was no option to do so, Iaian stepped up wonderfully to fight to save the mercenaries.

We’ve also learned something interesting about why mercenaries exist at all in a world supposedly at peace. I look forward to seeing where this plot might go next.

Elsewhere, we got to learn a little less about Puri Puri’s dancing and swimming lessons, but we got some really awesome nods to the mythical in Bakuma (the baku is a long-nosed creature formed out of all the bits left over after creation that eats dreams) and Electric Catfish Man’s sudden sense of doom is both reference to the way catfish are supposed to detect earthquakes and just damn cool.

A monsterised exploitative business man taking the form of a demonic dream-eating monster that consumes weaker monsters so as to exploit their abilities is so appropriate on many levels (and unreasonably hot!).

Yes, Waganma does make it to the surface, along with Saitama and Child Emperor. Saitama gets chased away by a Sekingar outraged that there’s a clueless hero just wandering aimlessly around. Child Emperor goes back underground and I loved to death Waganma being pierced with remorse as he realises that the hero is going to go risk his life anyway. He’s spoiled, but his keeping quiet came from a place of being a scared human being desperate to be saved (a surprising number of fans did not like that -- they preferred to think of him as a psychopathic monster incapable of remorse).

Orochi still has a date with a gloved fist, but he’s getting to live a little longer than he did before.

Overall the story is tighter and there’s a lot more interest as well as future plot hooks than there were. I’m interested in seeing how it gets tied up in the next volume sometime in 2021.

Reddit did not take it well. Summary of discourse:

sorry not sorry, I lost patience around the 500th whiny post

Advance!

What about the new chapters we got? Also here, ho ho ho, that status quo has gotten a good kicking!

Orochi came back. Not the most surprising surprise in the world, given how carelessly Saitama punched him. Also not surprising that he came back stronger; Phoenixman had wonderfully demonstrated that monsters can bounce back from near-death situations much stronger. But his form... such a disgusting, slimy, ever-shifting mass of tentacles and dragons, consuming all in its way led to the third craziest development: his fusion with Psykos to launch a new monster.

I’ll spare you the disgusting intermediate stages but the end result has been the birth of Psykos-Orochi and with that, what had been a total sweep for Tatsumaki turned into a much more dangerous enterprise where every mistake of hers got punished brutally.

Why is that only number three? Because Tatsumaki raised up the entire base to try to encompass the whole monster (and it turns out that she was thinking far too small -- the monster had actually eaten large sections of City Z) and Psykos-Orochi uses the space to launch a beam so powerful that it literally cuts off part of the Earth itself. It was a real I see it, but I don’t believe it moment.

if you didn’t spend a few seconds just staring in disbelief, you’re not paying attention. OMG. Boy is the Earth in trouble.

Why is that only the second craziest thing? Because of why this fusion monster was able to do as it did. ‘God’ doesn’t just go round looking like a semi-tangible being giving random homeless men magic powers. Yup, the Earth really in in trouble if some supernatural being is smushing monsters together to make a stronger one and then granting it extra powers. Just like that, the struggle has turned cosmic.

Tatsumaki trying to figure out how to fight back and save City Z from being swept away by a tsunami, save the heroes, and save the planet from further damage by the beams all at the same time was one of the most spectacular fights to date.

As I said earlier, this monster has presented Tatsumaki with a real fight where the slightest mistake on her part leads to severe punishment. She wound up in trouble when she underestimated how extensive the monster actually was and let up on twisting it too early, only to have it come right back and skewer her hands.

Thankfully, Genos came in and saved her from that pinch, then held the monster at bay long enough for Tatsumaki to finish saving the strike team so she could give the monster her undivided attention.

Which is a very tame way of saying that that was an incredible development in capability. That some of the fandom had trouble accepting (they suck). Watching their protests has been an exercise in special pleading. They have no trouble understanding how Murata uses scale...until it came to accepting the size of the explosion resulting from Genos smacking away Psyko-Orochi’s execution beam then it had to be a fisheye lens (visibly incorrect, but who’s talking facts here?). Have had no trouble understanding how Murata portrays escalation... until it came to accepting that Genos is strong then no, somehow the monster had to be weaker. Have had no trouble with the freeze frame language that Murata uses to portray things happening at great speed... until it came to accepting that Genos could move really, really fast. For some people, the new is only welcome when it confirms and validates preconceptions. Anyway, that’s my rant done!

the most unlikely of partnerships and they’re still going despite having taken a hell of a battering since this scene

Guess who’s back?

We’ve also been seeing more heroes come back to the fray. The emergence of the Tower of Doom acted as a clarion call to every hero around and able to move. Metal Bat sneaked out of hospital to come running back. Tank Top Master hitched a ride with Mumen Rider to go to City Z. He intended to stick around and save people, but seeing how much wider scale the fight was, he literally threw himself into battle.

Drive Knight decided he literally had to have a piece of the action, took up a ton of power from the nearest substation and came flying in to intercept a desperately escaping Psyko-Jet... ah, I didn’t say? Yes, the monster turned into a machine to run away once hard-pressed.

And we finally got to see what Blast actually looks like, courtesy of a flashback of Amai Mask’s. He definitely looks the part of a caped superhero and it’s little wonder he’s stuck in the imaginations of so many. But now I’m even more interested in seeing what his deal is and what is he’s like now

The one thing we know for sure will be happening is that Garou will not be denied his destiny. He’s coming. But what else is happening? Ah, that’s all in the air.

Bring on 2021!

#OPM #review #long #2020 #so much has happened #so much still to come #manga #Garou is coming BACK #13th #December #December 13th 2020 #so many incredible developments #Genos coming back far stronger than he's ever been and then hanging tough despite overdoing it #the unquestionable appearance of a meddling godlike entity #the Psykos-Orochi fusion and all its crazy permutations #the massive loss of life in Z-City: such an irony between heroes killing themselves to save a few individuals when mass death is all around #Not mentioned; Saitama Flash and their misadventures with Manako

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