#tampere 2018
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Marijke Esselink 🇳🇱
2018 World Championships U20 (Tampere)
#marijke esselink#team netherlands#female athletes#heptathlon#butt#athletics#track and field#tampere 2018
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one week to go. ive officially started packing (fit approximately half my books in an old banana box, the other half should fit okay in the other one i still have. plates & bowls & cutlery etc should fit ok in my uhh three (3) laundry baskets. i have less stuff than i did moving here. im gonna get rid of most of the clothes still in my wardrobe which will likely result in a fuck yeah dressing in all black from now on but not in the cool sexy goth way just in a. all the clothes i wanna wear are black way. anyway my rooms too fucking full of stuff and i cant wait for this to be over. and also no i dont think im gonna pack the rest of the books right now immediately
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#Pullojen kerääjä#The Bottle Collector#short film#2018#behind the scenes#Hiedanranta#Tampere#Finland
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in light of recent events, here's a rundown (again) of all the ways txf has made wombs the source of horror, exploitation, medical rape, or (funny??) non-consensual impregnation. TW for these topics, obviously.
"Eve" - medical rape / impregnation with tampered embryos, and the completely tone-deaf scene with the mother ripping up the picture of a daughter she gave birth to because she was an abomination 🙃
"Ascension" / "One Breath" - GA's pregnancy used to set off the abduction/ infertility/ ova harvesting arc.
"Aubrey" - pregnancy makes BJ crazy and murderous, infected (via the womb?) with the spirit of someone who's still alive (???)
"Fearful Symmetry" - human wombs aren't the only ones being exploited! the aliens are coming after animal fetuses now too!
"Memento Mori" - stolen ova; Scully's infertility becomes a plot point; clones made from the product of medical rape.
"Small Potatoes" - goofy jokey rape episode, you know, for laughs. "If everyone is happy, and nobody got hurt, then hypothetically... where's the crime?" 😖
"The Post-Modern Prometheus" - more hilarious medical rape for laughs, now with Cher! "What's not to love?"
"Christmas Carol" / "Emily" - why are all the girl children disposable? Another child of medical rape who was (conveniently) "never meant to be."
Fight the Future - Scully is damseled once again and this time her whole body becomes a womb to host a monstrosity! Fun!
"Terms of Endearment" - so so so many dead babies in this episode 😭 Pregnant people can be victims OR monsters! That's feminism! 🙃
"Two Fathers" / "One Son" - this one might be a little bit of a stretch, but I'd like to point out again that Teena was 19 when she married Bill Mulder and any "affair" she had with CSM the following year was likely not terribly consensual, given what we see of their relationship later. She was 20 when Mulder was born.
"Signs and Wonders" - horrifying snake birth
"En Ami" - retroactively (2018) included yet another medical rape for Scully (though I 100% refuse to accept it); apparently, CSM is perpetually impregnating the Mulder men's partners 🤮
"Per Manum" - more medical rape by corrupt IVF doctors, and we learn that Scully's IVF attempt was probably tampered with, too. does any character deserve this much reproductive trauma?
"Essence" / "Existence" - yeah. we all know, and I'm not talking about it anymore.
Actually, the whole William arc. I'm just not gonna talk about it because it fills me with an unholy rage.
"My Struggle" - Sveta's medical rape / alien rape? idk, i won't watch these again.
"Founder's Mutation" - more of the same, yadda yadda, medical experimentation, monstrous births, etc.
"My Struggle IV" - we don't need to talk about it, but children and pregnancies are not disposable plot points, Christopher.
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from a 2018 interview with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta on his experiences treating protesters wounded by the IOF during the Great March of Return:
"By 7:00 P.M., the system was on the verge of collapse. There were more injuries than there were beds, or operating rooms, in all of Gaza. Patients at al-Shifa were waiting four to five hours to get into the operating theater. At al-Awda alone, we had seen 120 gunshot wounds, and we were only a 3-operating room, 70-bed hospital. Every single case needed some kind of surgical intervention. And then suddenly there was a decision by the organizing committee of the march, I believe, to start pulling people back because they realized the system was basically about to collapse. By 7:00 P.M. it had become apparent that over a four-hour period, the number of injured had reached 3,500, with around 1,500–2,000 of those being gunshot wounds. Other than the 120 gunshot wounds at al-Awda, we had a lot of gas inhalation cases. And this wasn’t tear gas but nerve gas. These cases have continuous convulsions for an hour and need close monitoring and intervention in the form of anticonvulsants.
... The following day, the number of injured actually dropped because the whole of Gaza was in a state of shock: there had been 63 killed, 44 amputations, and 3,500 wounded in the space of four hours the day before, meaning that we were looking at something closer to a World War I–type carnage than a demonstration. The drop in casualty numbers allowed us to take on more cases: by day three, we were beginning to look at reconstruction for the previously injured and to really start to figure out what we would need for them. And the initial waiting list of 500 I mentioned earlier had more than tripled: there were now 1,600 cases that needed reconstructive surgery, that is, repeated surgical interventions were required to reconstruct these injuries.
Can you give us examples of specific cases?
There were lots of cases of what we call 'fragmentation bullets,' historically known as 'dumdum' bullets. Fragmentation bullets were the first weapons to be banned in international law because the very point of that particular weapon is to maximize injury: a fragmentation bullet fragments into 20–25 different pieces when it hits the body. We saw lots of those. A guy came in one day with two bullet wounds, one in each of his ankles. From the trajectory of the bullet, we could tell that this was not a 'through-and-through,' that is, when a bullet penetrates one limb, exits, and then goes into another limb. These were two separate bullets, and the fact that they were both lodged in his ankles meant that they were fired at the same time or else he would have fallen. This man was shot at the same time by two different snipers.
So, it is very likely that the two snipers were coordinating with each other to target this man, that it was not an accident. They must have been talking and saying let’s shoot this guy, I’ll take the right ankle and you take the left. That is what this injury implies.
Yes absolutely, it was not an accident. It’s like a game, a sport.
... Tissue damage is all about the transfer of energy from the bullet to the tissue. So by definition, by their very nature, 'regular' sniper bullets have the highest form of energy and therefore the amount of damage that they are capable of causing is immense. But what we saw is that even these bullets were being tampered with by the snipers to allow them to behave like fragmentation bullets so that they would release more energy as they hit the body. They were drilling the bullets in such a way as to weaken the tips, so that once a bullet hit the body it would fragment into multiple pieces.
... The Israelis understand that the world counts the dead and considers the injured or the wounded a lesser crime, so to speak, and so it is an attempt at creating an 'iceberg effect': that is, a situation where what is apparent is the killed but the real crime is in the wounded [who are not as visible] and the type of wounds that have been inflicted. To have 13,000 wounded in a place that counts
1.8 million people ... that figure bespeaks a battlefield, not a demonstration."
By the end of 2019, occupation forces killed 322 demonstrators (x) and injured 35,600 more (x), including many thousands with severe injuries leading to long-term disability (x). IOF snipers were documented shooting unarmed protesters with the intent to kill (x), as well as targeting kneecaps to permanently disable protesters (x). Their targets included children, paramedics, and journalists. Many protesters were left with long-term disabilities and trauma (x). This is how the occupation responds to unarmed resistance (or what liberals call "peaceful protest"): with "World War I-type carnage" that "bespeaks a battlefield."
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i did some ridiculous technical BS in pokemon again
NOTE: not only is this post a very very long infodump from yours truly, it is also specifically an infodump involving a lot of pokemon glitches and exploits. even though i don't tamper with my games and everything achieved here can be done on original hardware with no hacking or what-have-you, some people still may consider this Cheating based on their own personal standards of legitimate gameplay. i ask that you please don't try to start arguments with me about pokemon legality and just take it all as an interesting technical infodump about gen 3 pokemon okay thank you <3
SO. i decided that before pokemon bank eventually shuts down one day in the probably-not-so-distant future and makes old gen transfer impossible, i need more ribbon master pokemon (AKA a pokemon with all the ribbons it can possibly receive from its gen of origin to the most recent gen it can transfer to) from gens 3 and 4. i've been meaning to ribbon master a pokemon from gen 3 based on my favorite singer, KAF (you don't need to know anything about kaf for this story whatsoever but you should check her out LMAO) and while musing over what pokemon would suit her best, it came to me.
FARIGIRAF IS JUST KAF'S FURSONA!! the monster teeth hoodie with the eyes. even has the dangly bits. like come on it's perfect. AND girafarig is obviously available in gen 3 so i could RM a kaf girafarig and then evolve her once i got to SV. Cool! Awesome! but here's the problem. I CAN'T SETTLE FOR JUST A NORMAL GIRAFARIG. I HAVE TO GO ALL OUT!!
i started brainstorming my ideal gen 3 kaf girafarig, and came to the following conclusions:
i obviously want the girafarig to be shiny. i mean come on
i want her to be a girl for obvious reasons, and gentle nature to match her personality. just because Armor Tail is better on Farigiraf i also want it to have girafarig's second ability, Early Bird. i'm not concerned with IVs because i think random IVs add flavor and that would add more tedium than i was already dealing with
i want her to be japanese language origin since kaf is a japanese singer (i can nickname her かふ that way too!)
i want the original trainer (OT) name to be PPさん (PP-san) in reference to the person who scouted out kaf's talent in the first place - he goes by Piedpiper online and my friends and i call him PP as a joke sometimes
i want the trainer ID to be 02018 because 2018 is kaf's debut year
since girafarig only spawns in gen 3 in the ruby/sapphire/emerald safari zone, i wanted to hatch a girafarig egg in firered/leafgreen for the kanto origin, which is impossible otherwise. FRLG are also really important games to me, leafgreen being the first pokemon game i ever owned or played, so that's a bonus
now you may be looking at this entire list and being like. What the fuck. how do you intend to shiny hunt girafarig with all of these hyperspecific parameters, especially in FRLG where the everstone passing nature doesn't exist and flame body doesn't even exist to hatch eggs faster. you will be doing that long after bank shuts down. and you're intending on doing this on original hardware too??? WELL. that's where ACE and RNG manipulation comes in babey. i am GOING to attempt to make this comprehensible even if you've never touched ACE or RNG manip in your life, even tangentially, but sorry if this is a bit of a mess it's pretty technical LOL. the rest of this post is going below a cut cause it Goes Places!!
ACE and RNG manipulation explained (kinda)
first off a quick overview of ACE, ACE stands for arbitrary code execution, which is the ability to run your own (arbitrary!) code within the game. this can be set up with a series of elaborate glitches, that break open the gen 3 pokemon games into letting you run your PC box names as code, enabling you to do pretty much anything you want. to be upfront, i'm not an expert on ACE - i understand it in an overarching conceptual sense and am able to follow ACE guides just fine, but i cannot write my own ACE code, which essentially requires you to know some GBA assembly. doesn't really matter for the purpose of this story though.
you can see an example of a tiny snippet of a larger ACE code with the PC box name below. it looks like gibberish but that's because every character used in the name corresponds to a specific internal value, which when all run together, is code!
i need ACE in FRLG because resetting for, or RNG manipulating (more on that in a moment), trainer ID (and secret ID, also more on that later) is pretty much impossible. ACE will allow me to change my TID to 02018 by essentially just telling the game to do so with my PC boxes. this requires me to set up ACE in emerald first since that's the only game with a viable entrypoint, and then use emerald ACE to make glitch pokemon that can activate ACE in FRLG when traded over.
as for RNG manipulation, that's a bit more straightforward, especially if you've ever watched a speedrun of... pretty much anything with random chance in it. games with random chance are not actually fully random because computers can't really be fully random, and in the older pokemon games with unencrypted and less advanced RNG (random number generator) algorithms, this is pretty easy to exploit.
this is a heavy simplification, but whenever you encounter a wild pokemon in RSE or FRLG, the amount of frames that have passed since the game was turned on are compared to a number that was generated upon boot, called the RNG seed. if you've ever played minecraft you can compare this to world seeds - the pokemon RNG seed determines all possible wild encounters in that play session in a similar fashion as minecraft determining the infinite terrain layout. this comparison determines every aspect of an encountered pokemon; its species, nature, IVs, and so on. so, if you were able to time your wild encounter (or any other type of pokemon encounter) down to the 1/60th of a second frame, you can get the game to spit out whatever pokemon you want at you! you just need a bit of typically invisible information first - the RNG seed, and if you're RNGing a shiny, your secret ID aka SID, which is like an invisible second trainer ID generated alongside your TID that is paired up with the TID and compared against any pokemon you encounter to determine if it should be shiny or not. both of these things can be figured out without hacking or tampering with games/save files.
the most common program used for all things RNG manipulation is called pokefinder and you can see an example of it spitting out what shinies are available on hoenn's first route in the first 100000 frames of the game being on with an RNG seed of 0 and my old TID/SID combo below. it's pretty damn cool to me tbh, i love RNG manipulation and i'm way more versed on it/experienced than i am with ACE
TLDR; rng manipulation is essentially a frame perfect, speedrunning-adjacent trick to get the game to roll the RNG in your favor, including for perfect IVs or shininess. for reasons that will become clear later, this is much easier to do in emerald than any other gen 3 game, so i will be using emerald for the RNG manipulation of the girafarig egg
with ALL of that context out of the way, this was the gameplan:
play through a fresh file of japanese firered (i don't own japanese leafgreen, RIP) all the way through the postgame to unlock trading with hoenn with the name PPさん, not worrying about TID for now. the guide i was following did not have a code for changing name with ACE in japanese FRLG specifically, so i figured playing the game again real quick would be a better alternative to trying to teach myself assembly in an afternoon LOL
set up ACE in my new emerald file i completed recently
use ACE in emerald to generate the glitch pokemon needed to run ACE in FRLG and trade them over. finalize the setup process over in FRLG too
look up possible gentle, ability 2, female, and shiny egg frames, and pick one that looks good to RNG manipulate in emerald, noting its PID (an encounter-specific ID number, pretty much)
figure out what SID, when combined with a TID of 02018, will cause that egg frame to be shiny - that way when the egg is traded over and hatched in firered, it will be shiny
do the RNG in emerald, trade over the to-be-shiny egg to firered, and hatch it after changing the TID/SID with ACE appropriately!! bam female, gentle, early bird, shiny, JP origin girafarig with an OT of PPさん and a visible TID of 02018. Pog!!
to execute that gameplan would take me an entire day, though...
step 1: play through firered
ok gonna be honest this is the ONE part of this entire process that i did not play on original hardware. i wanted to get to the Cool Parts of this process so i decided to play through firered on emulator. absolutely terrible picture sorry but i do actually own japanese firered, so i could dump the game legally to my computer to use speedup in mGBA with a little device called the Joey JR which connects the cart to my computer by USB like so
after that it was pretty much a relatively normal playthrough but obviously with emulator speedup. i used solely my starter blastoise to, well, blast through the rest of the game LMAO. after just a couple of hours or so i was right before the elite four, which i completed while in the car after moving the save file back to my cartridge with the same device, since i had to leave the house to go to a doctor appointment. i tried to take pictures of me beating the game but the sun was not doing the photos any favors lol. blastoise ended up being level 76 by the end. was easy with surf and an ice beam TM from the game corner (i just bought the coins)
unfortunately beating the game isn't the only requirement for trading with the hoenn games, so i also had to complete the whole sevii islands postgame quest... which required me to have 60 registered owned entries in the pokedex, which i wasn't really doing while speeding through the game initially, so i had a lot of mons to catch. i was still out of the house at this point (and playing at normal speed lol) so i wasn't really taking pictures, but i did make a stop at the power plant to look for an electabuzz despite it being an inefficient 5% since i needed a spare anyways for my leafgreen file unrelated to this story lmao. took a pic of it since it took a while to show up. anyway soon enough the dex had 60+ entries! i've played FRLG so many times that the encounter locations are memorized in my mind... i did all of this with no googling asdfkasfd
at this point i got home and was able to do the ruby/sapphire postgame quest on emulator with speedup again, so it was pretty easy. moved the save back to cart and i was done with step 1! obviously this didn't actually take me 21 hours of playtime, that was the emulator speedup's fault loool. from here on out i didn't touch any emulators again!
step 2: set up ACE in emerald
ACE time! i've actually set up ACE in an old emerald file before but i wanted to do it again fresh. i was following a guide pretty much to a T so i'm actually going to skip over the details of some of the steps since you can read about those more in depth over at the guide i was using if you want
TLDR; you have to trade for the NPC trade pokemon, DOTS the seedot and PLUSES the plusle, then EV train DOTS a specific way. these EV values cause DOTS to turn into a glitch pokemon egg 0x0611 when corrupted with the pomeg glitch (more on that in a bit), which, when hatched, runs the PC box names as code, aka ACE! why does it work? if you really want to know, there's plenty of stuff online about it, i'm not the best person to ask haha
it's worth noting that volbeat is really annoying to capture in emerald as it's literally only available as a 1% in one patch of grass, so i caught an illumise instead and bred them until a volbeat hatched lol. was much more efficient
also lol "Take good care of DOTS!" sorry i will be corrupting your son into demonspawn that lets me wield godlike control over your universe
after getting the necessary NPC trade pokemon all ready and moving them into a specific pattern in box 2 (i cloned them with the emerald tower cloning glitch) i had to perform the pomeg glitch. this involves using a pomeg berry to decrease a pokemon's health to 0 without causing a whiteout. this is achieved by getting a pokemon with at least 8 HP EVs to 1 HP and then using the pomeg berry on it, decreasing the EVs and taking off a point of health in the process (it's slightly more steps than this but whatever). i decided to use the camerupt i had during my playthrough of the game for this purpose. just took him to fiery path to get poisoned and walked until he was on 1 HP and healed him with an antidote lol
by doing the pomeg glitch and entering a wild battle, the game gets a bit confused since all the pokemon in your party are fainted and just sends out some sort of glitch decamark pokemon. in this situation, after viewing my camerupt's summary in battle and exiting back out of the summary screen, i was able to corrupt the DOTS and PLUSES sitting in my PC by scrolling up above the usual limit of the party menu, which reaches into data used by the first two PC boxes and fucks them up, ending up with, assuming that i EV trained correctly, a glitched egg that is about to hatch in a nest ball named DOTS with pokerus. this will run ACE when hatched! (if you want more info on this corruption pomeg stuff, check out the bulbapedia article for glitzer popping. yes that's what they named it)
step 3: use emerald ACE to set up firered ACE
so once again you can find a lot more detail on this process over at the guide i was using, but the TLDR of the matter was, i needed to put a bunch of codes into my PC box names to generate a few different glitch mons. specifically, i needed a egg that would hatch into a crobat (yes, fully evolved lol) with a singular glitched out move, that when used in battle in firered, would cause ACE to happen similar to how hatching the corrupted DOTS egg causes ACE to happen in emerald. i also needed a specific buggy shiny umbreon and a very strange glitchy egg.
even though this step was mostly a lot of tedious typing on the gen 3 keyboard (+ i had to redo things once because i made a typo at one point in the process LOL) it was so much fun! the game breaks in so many ways that you would just... never see during normal gameplay and it makes for some really good pictures and whatnot
first of all, when you hatch the 0x0611 egg, it hatches into a decamark of varying colors, in the case of the picture below it's almost imperceptible because the whole sprite is just a black circle, blending in with the background (sorry for the quality on this one, it's a screencap of a video clip i took).
additionally, trying to scroll over the hatched decamark in the PC or viewing its summary screen will crash the game, so to get rid of it, it has to be moved to the front of your party in the party menu, and then you go to the PC to release it through the deposit menu. since the cursor just defaults to the first position of the party and you don't have to scroll over to it, it's possible to release it from here.
oh yes and the umbreon/other glitch egg? similarly screwy - actually after generating them, their sprites are glitched out until you reset the game, so they look like this. behold their nonsense summaries:
after i had all i needed to trade to FRLG, i cloned an extra set of them with the emerald tower glitch again just in case i messed something up and got to trading! here's me receiving them on the firered side:
and last but not least, i'm a little obsessed with the way the glitch move looks in FRLG on the hatched crobat, absolute nonsense:
i finalized setting up the FRLG ACE (check out the guide i linked earlier for more info) and put everything into their proper positions, but before i could actually execute any code... i needed to know what SID i was going for!
step 4 + 5: look up potential egg frames in emerald and find an SID
soo now for looking at potential girafarig eggs. instead of using the program pokefinder which i mentioned earlier, i used a program called pokenav egg rng tool, which is exactly what it sounds like, a tool specialized for rng manipulating eggs with the pokenav in emerald. using it, i was quickly able to generate a whole list of gentle, female, ability 2 (early bird) eggs, and i picked one that was around 1300 frames in since that made for quick resetting attempts, but not so quick that i could barely make my inputs in time. the one i picked was frame 1381. with a TID of 02018, the PID D2C5EF55 would be shiny with an SID of 14962, so i noted that for later in firered. (i figured this out using an old program called RNG Reporter which is what i'm familiar with but i don't recommend using lmao. it's the "Pandora's Box" feature of that software though if you happen to look it up)
i won't make an entire guide on how to do emerald egg RNG here because it's a lot of steps, but i might at some point because the most up to date method isn't super well documented. anyways, here's a very paraphrased version of the process (this is also assuming that you aren't dealing with "redraws", which i wasn't... like i said very paraphrased):
get a pokemon with the ability lightningrod in the front of your party (i used electrike) to make pokenav calls happen more frequently, and a pokemon with flame body or magma armor (i used slugma) to make eggs hatch faster
get a male and a female of the pokemon you want to hatch, in my case girafarig. if you were RNGing IVs, the parent's IVs would be relevant, but i am not RNGing IVs so i didn't care and just caught the first girafarig i could in the safari zone
an egg is attempted to be generated every 255 steps after the parents are deposited in the daycare together, so by timing the usage of a max repel in such a way, it's easy to save the game exactly 10 steps before an egg is generated. do this
using a timer such as eontimer, soft reset and try to take that last 10th step on your target frame. this will also trigger a pokenav call (or lack thereof) and by looking for the phone call you got in the call column of the egg rng tool and whether or not an egg generated at the daycare, you can tell what frame you hit. didn't hit your target? just soft reset and try again, calibrating the timer for your own human error. this can take a while since the timing is precise to 1/60th of a second
once you hit your target frame, woohoo you did it just take the egg and hatch it! if you're RNGing IVs you would actually save before taking the egg and then RNG the IVs separately but that's a whole different thing i'm not explaining here since i wasn't RNGing IVs
i've avoided mentioning it this entire time till now, but emerald is particularly easy to do rng manipulation in because due to a programming error, the rng seed is always 0 - all encounters are predictable and you don't have to dedicate a frame perfect input to getting the right seed, making emerald rng a matter of one frame perfect input instead of two (there ARE ways to get emerald to generate a proper rng seed but that's unrelated here). additionally, its pokenav system means you can see if you got the right egg BEFORE taking it and hatching it... doing egg RNG in any other gen 3 game is basically a death sentence due to multiple untelegraphed frame perfect inputs that have to be executed in a row, plus really long wait times due to hatching eggs on a slower bike without flame body. there's a reason i was not doing this on four island in frlg.
but yeah now i knew what egg frame i was going for and was all prepared to do the RNG, so now it was onto actually executing it all:
step 6: getting kaf girafarig babey!!
before doing the RNG manipulation in emerald, i needed to change my SID and TID in firered finally! this required me to run two different codes, one for SID and one for TID. it was actually pretty painless since the code is nearly identical for both, you just swap out the values of each ID and one character changes in one box name to decide whether you're changing TID or SID. you can find the list of codes i was referencing here.
i was saving my one allotted video clip in this post for changing the TID with the glitched crobat move though because LMAO
^ shoutout to my qpp @/spikyearr for this one i fucking chokedSKFDDSFK
anyway, after doing that i went through the process of the egg rng in emerald (unfortunately no pictures because it's kind of hard to take pics mid-rng) and actually saved before taking the egg so that i'd be able to soft reset after hatching it - i just needed to check to make sure it was gentle and everything, and then i could soft reset, take the egg again, bike around to decrease the egg cycles in emerald since hatching in firered is super slow, and then trade it off before hatching it to go be hatched in firered. i knew it wouldn't be shiny in emerald, so i wasn't concerned with that. it only took 40 or so minutes of attempts before i got her!
and then AT LAST after spending my ENTIRE DAY ON THIS SHIT (like 10x the amount of time on the ACE stuff for the TID instead of the actual RNG itself LOOOL) i just had to trade the egg to firered and hatch it and i was golden!!!!! AAAGH here she is next to my kaf plushies!!!
also a picture of her summary screen after being traded to my english leafgreen!! i am assuming this will be easier to read for most of the people reading this post LOL
THAT'S IT. POST OVER THIS WAS SO LONG. IF YOU MADE IT THROUGH MY RAMBLING GOOD JOB. I HIT THE PHOTO LIMIT HELP ME
anyways yeah i'm gonna be ribbon mastering her and idk i might post about the process as i go. not immediately though i have a platinum playthrough to finish teehee. also if any of this was interesting to you i highly recommend trying out RNG manipulation, it's a really fun way to play pokemon games! gen 5, BW specifically and not their sequels, is REALLY beginner friendly for RNG manipulation as the timing is a lot less precise. check it out, there's plenty of guides online!!
#pokemon#pokemon rse#rse#pokemon frlg#frlg#rng manipulation#arbitrary code execution#girafarig#ribbon mastering#kiki was here#kiki.txt#long post#kiki plays games
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So I just recently watched this confused little movie in full again.
And I have to say, shocker of shockers, Doug Walker got it wrong yet again. Aside from his typical lack of research on the development of this film (I don't think the "one character from each animated canon movie" project that was concieved for the potential 50th film back in the 2000s had anything to do with this and its correlation with the 100th year, as this was a project concieved in 2018, when it wasn't certain that it would be rolled out in 2023 five years later) and his typical hypocrisy of not giving it the "it's fine" pass that he gave the similarly middling quality Super Mario Bros Movie, his venomous lambasting of the film as being the worst Disney film because it's "nothing", thus capping off 100 years of history and creations with "nothing", is just dead wrong. If anything, the problem with Wish is exactly the opposite: it's got more than one "something" going on for it and gets perpetually tugged at and torn in all those directions.
The movie clearly began as merely a way to tell an all-new Disney original fairy tale that ties back to the old "When You WIsh Upon A Star" theme, but the 2023 deadline turned that into a celebratory milestone feature alongside the animation studio's own supplemental celebratory feature for that same milestone, Once Upon A Studio. But then the big corporate side of the Walt Disney Company, the side of Bob Chapek and Bob Iger, put its heel down on the production and tampered with the shape the film was taking in order to ensure it checked off every possible box of some arbritary Disney Formula checklist and include all the homages, references and cameos they wanted in it so that it could serve as the corporate celebration of Disney too.
But this isn't the only identity crisis it got hit with, for Wish presents itself as clearly a kiddie-oriented flick, trying to be something that whole families can watch together and enjoy well enough on the most basic, casual level, but particularly geared towards the little ones in the audience, to be for them what the Disney animated fairy tales of old were for Disney fans who are old timers today: the throwback is all too calculated and deliberate. And yet it tries to do this on the back of a premise that is rife with complex ideas, spiritual subtext, vague and sometimes contradictory rules that dictate the worldbuilding, and heavy themes like a self-made monarchy that has corroded the society of its citizenry into a cult following that puts all faith and trust in the royals to manage the most important parts of their lives and very selves for them not realizing or caring that they're being befrauded and restrained from the pursuit of self actualization and the realization of their own visions, how placing too much trust in one solitary other person with power over something that is your inalienable right not to be marked as anyone else's possession in the blind hope of a magic solution to all the obstacles in your life is unwise and unfulfilling when you could instead try to realize your heart's deepest desires yourself through your own utilization of other means, and when even the best intentions of a civilization's leadership gives way to oppressive, harmful practices, betrayal of committed responsibilities, and destructive corruption that seeks gratification and elevation of the self through the subjugation and dissipirtment of others. This is unfortunately on brand for Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, who similarly set up themes and ideas and even ethical dilemmas with potential dramatic weight in Frozen II only to have the film get cold feet (ha ha) and not go all the way with them because being a markettable Disney fairy tale for kids took priority.
And then lastly you get the whiplash duality that I as a viewer has to experience, where my mind is always wandering to what I wish (HA HA) this movie had been but also trying not to veer too off track from engaging with what the movie actually is, with the most bothersome part being that while I can get some decent, wholesome, all around solid entertainment from the movie as is (King Magnifico's scenes are always the most captivating and show-stealing parts), it also keeps showing me so many areas where even this finished product could have been significantly improved, which is especially true of the film's erractic pacing. The story slowing down a bit and allowing some of its scenes the breathing room they needed to really get the most out of them so that they sit better with the audience would've done wonders for the viewing experience. Expand more on backstories and axe the go-nowhere bits, have Asha be a ball of anxiety who’s not accustomed to having to extrovert so much, make Gabo less of a douche, make King Magnifico more of a douche, make Queen Amaya more morally gray and give her character arc the details to make it sensible and convincing, do similarly with Dahlia, give Star more clear communication bits, give Valentino much less to say, etc. That way even without the darker edges, the evil power couple, the Star Boy and semi-romance, the film is still a strong enough version of what it needed to be for a young audience.
Wish is ultimately an alright Disney film, definitely not the worst they’ve done, it’s passable entertainment. But I’m sure the creative team that worked on it is on the same boat as much of its audience: wishing for much more than this, ‘cause how much more this tale could’ve been is apparent in all the lanes it touched yet did not pick.
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I am beside myself at this because this bleak bleak convo goes to the heart of it - maybe she can get her actual memories back but does she want to? Objective reality or her remembered reality, what does she pick? And is returning to the "actuality" erasing the current her? Never thought I'd see this in a cdrama...
And once again, he's pragmatic - he is trying to save her life as the specter of future madness and suicide covers all discussions, but the problem is, that is not enough for her - her very sense of self is at stake. Which self is she?
And the answer is not surprising - and so is their conversation because he says memories or not she is always her, and it's romantic and wonderful but it's both true and not - her basic traits are the same, and her little quirks (like the way she eats her sauce or plays with her ears) but so much of us ARE our memories....
Her answer! I knew his freakout back in ep 7 would come back to bite him. But it's an interesting philosophical question, isn't it? If JXY from a different universe and year 2025 was a different woman to him, not the one he loved, why is JXY from 2018 but with different memories the same? What makes a person a person?
That's what I mean...
She asks this and I get shivers because this drama doesn't really do throwaway comments unless it's to do with hairdressing :P Seriously - I still think his memories were tampered with somehow. (OK, wild theory time - what if HE were the first experiment and the phone he thinks is Xu's is actually his, the tracker expired because he made it past a year. He doesn't seem to have memory gaps but still. He does have a bunch of money; could be from his dad yes but it's kinda weird his fam was wealthy, then he was so broke he was literally homeless and now he's back to having lots of cash - once again, could have been daddy giving him stuff or w/e but could have been Lighthouse payment. I dunno, my brain is buzzing.)
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Angels in America: In the first part, we meet Louis and Prior and Harper and Joe, two couples whose relationships are on the rocks: the former because of Prior’s AIDS diagnosis and Louis’s inability to cope with illness, the latter because of Joe’s closeted homosexuality and Harper’s incessant fears and hallucinations, as well as her addiction to pain-killers. The second part focuses on the story of Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS who has recently been left by his partner, Louis, after he could not cope with the physical and personal impact of the disease.
The Importance of Being Earnest: Two bachelors, John ‘Jack’ Worthing and Algernon ‘Algy’ Moncrieff, create alter egos named Ernest to escape their tiresome lives. They attempt to win the hearts of two women who, conveniently, claim to only love men called Ernest. The pair struggle to keep up with their own stories and become tangled in a tale of deception, disguise and misadventure.
Propaganda under the cut!
Angels in America:
painful funny surreal and down to earth all at the same time somehow, even without being a landmark piece for me personally w/ regard to queer literature
The Great American Play. The definitive exploration of how AIDS affected an entire generation of queer Americans in the '80s, and what it left behind in its wake. Those more eloquent than I am will be better at doing this play justice, but my sincerest hope is that the sheer significance of this work is clear enough to carry it all the way through to the highest end of this showdown.
honestly the peak of modern theater 2 me. everything i write and create is in the hopes that i might someday make something that lives up to the bar that angels set. it treats every one of its characters with such depth and compassion and the world it creates is so vivid and fantastic. and the context in which it was created will always be beyond important to me like i don't know how to describe how important it is that a play widely considered an american classic is about the aids crisis. she's the blueprint she's perfect she's everything
genuinely changed my life when i first read it. andrew garfield played prior walter in the 2018 national theatre version and he fucking kills it. it's 6 whole hours of joy and heartbreak and, most of all, hope. stan harper pitt!!!
This epic stageplay has become more accessible since its HBO miniseries adaptation in 2003. It is epic, intersectional, commemorative of a collective trauma that had been silenced for too long at the time of writing. (also Harper deserves to be as much a Tumblr Sad Girl icon as Lana del Rey or Sylvia Plath.)
The Importance of Being Earnest:
Queercoded love interest and Victorian dandies, what’s not to love?
Quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever read.
It's very funny.
there is a HANDBAG and it is a MAJOR PLOT POINT. jack pretends to be ernest because he's been doing it for ages and why not am i right? algernon pretends to be ernest to get a girl and also so screw stuff up. as one does. gwendolen and cecily have a REALLY passive aggressive tea party. this play slaps. it is so good. go read it and/or see it
“Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.”
Lady Bracknell: “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.”
Lady Bracknell: “My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.”
Jack: “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”
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Post 1007
Jonathon Adamson, Washington inmate 425903, born 1998, incarceration intake in 2019 at age 21, sentenced 42.5 years; scheduled discharge date not available
Murder, Rape, Kidnapping, Witness Tampering
In a 2019 hearing in Lewis County Superior Court Adamson pleaded guilty in the death of Randle (Washington) teen Benjamin Eastman III.
Adamson, who has been in the Lewis County Jail since June 30, 2018.
As a condition of sentencing, Adamson testified and provided a full and accurate account of Eastman’s death as a state witness against other individuals involved, including cases against Michael D. Salazar, 17, and Amanda L. Hagerty, 42.
Salazar is accused of preventing someone from reporting to attack Eastman to a third party, after it was overheard during a camping trip. Hagerty is accused of helping Adamson and his brother, Benito Marquez, 17, devise a false story to tell law enforcement as they investigated Eastman’s disappearance.
Adamson pleaded guilty on July 3, 2019 to first-degree murder, first-degree rape, second-degree kidnapping in Eastman’s death, and to two counts of witness tampering from February 2019.
The plea agreement includes an agreed-upon sentence of 42 and a half years to life in prison.
Marquez pleaded guilty on Feb. 22, 2019 to charges including first-degree murder and first-degree rape.
The brothers were accused of luring Eastman into the woods in East Lewis County and beating him to death. They allegedly left him in a shallow grave, then dug up his body and moved it before fleeing to Eastern Washington, where they were arrested.
3g
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19-year-old Susan Swedell sang in the choir and played hand bells at Christ Lutheran Church in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. She spoke Spanish, studied psychology and worked two jobs, one of which was at the Kmart in Oak Park Heights.
On the night of the 19th of January, 1988, a blizzard had fallen over Lake Elmo. Susan was finishing up her shift in Kmart at approximately 9PM and was heading home. Before leaving, she pulled on a short skirt. A couple of miles down the road, she pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant if she could leave her car there overnight as it had overheated. As the attendant peered through the snow covered window, he saw her climb into a car with a man. She hasn’t been seen since.
A subsequent investigation of her car found that the radiator’s “petcock” - a plug on the bottom - had been removed, draining the radiator of fluid. The gas station attendant told police that when Susan pulled in to the station that night, she was followed by a “light-coloured older-model car with sport wheels that was in good shape, but dirty.” It was this car that Susan then climbed into after abandoning her own car. A composite sketch of the man in the car was drawn up. He was described as being 6 feet to 6 feet 2 fall with long sandy-brown hair and three to four day bear growth. He was wearing a leather jacket.
The gas station attendant as well Susan’s manager recalled that she was wearing a short skirt and no coat - they noted she was dressed inappropriately given the harsh weather conditions. Her mother, Kathy, believes that she may have been planning on meeting somebody after work who would bring her back home. They noted that Susan was afraid of storms and didn’t like to drive in bad conditions. During the blizzard, over seven inches of snow fell. The main theory is that somebody tampered with Susan’s car and then followed her, waiting for it to break down.
In the run up to her disappearance, Susan had raked up an expensive phone bill by using chat lines to talk to boys. Those who worked at Kmart told police that she frequently received calls from somebody called “Dale.” While evidence pointed towards foul play, police still considered Susan a runaway.
In fact, a week after her disappearance, Susan’s sister, Christine, came home and couldn’t find the key to unlock their front door. It was kept on a shelf next to the door but it was missing. When she finally found it hidden under a box, she went inside and found dirty dishes that weren’t there earlier. She noticed that the house smelt of marijuana although nobody in her family smoked it. Even more alarming, she later found the outfit that Susan wore to work on the day she disappeared stuffed under her bed. Police never even came to check for fingerprints even though her family were adamant that whoever was involved in Susan’s disappearance had been at their house that afternoon.
There wasn’t much activity in the case until 2006, when police told Susan’s mother, Kathy, that there had been activity on her social security number. In 2018, a cold-case unit to investigate Susan’s disappearance was formed. Led by Washington County sheriff’s office commander, Andy Ellickson, the unit is re-looking at everything from day one in the hopes that they can shed some light into what happened to Susan.
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Lost Judgment's Lost Plot | joyce-stick
Didn't like the "detective boys punch school bullying revenge janitor" plot.
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Essay transcript:
All right, before we get started, here's the plot of Lost Judgment without all the twists. Oops, all spoilers! Oh, and also, quick note that this story deals with… or rather, invokes, the topics of bullying, suicide, bereavement, sexual assault, and of course, murder. We're gonna talk about some tropes, some themes, some ethics, and of course some casual sexism, too. Fun stuff! So. Here we go.
It’s 2008, and a student, Mitsuru Kusumoto, is being bullied at Kurokawa Academy, a Japanese private high school. His bullying is reported to his homeroom teacher, Yu Kitakata, by a classmate, Yoko Sawa. Kitakata, in order to collect evidence of the bullying, places a hidden camera in the classroom, and from this, obtains footage of several of his students bullying Mitsuru. The same day as this footage is recorded, Mitsuru attempts suicide. The suicide attempt fails and he falls into a coma which goes on to last thirteen years. Kitakata is fired as a result of this incident and later goes off the grid, changing his name and identity to “Jin Kuwana,” and branding himself as a local Yokohama handyman.
Feeling guilty about having neglected to intervene in time, Kuwana subsequently plots to go about exacting his idea of justice on all the bullies who pushed their classmates to suicide. He approaches the parents asking if they’d like to get some real justice for their children, and then goes and kidnaps the former bully, and encourages the parent of the bullied child to murder them. The first such murder victim is Shinya Kawai, the one who bullied Mitsuru, and the first such murderer is Reiko Kusumoto, his mother and the Vice Minister of Health in Japan. He continues doing this for five years, amassing seven victims.
To do this, Kuwana enlists the criminal accompliceship of Mitsuru’s other former bullies using the video that he recorded as blackmail material, and preserves Kawai’s body on ice to use as further leverage over them. In 2018, Akihiro Ehara sues Seiryo High School over the suicide of his son, Toshiro, who was bullied by Hiro Mikoshiba, a classmate of his. No substantive evidence turns up on account of tampering and obfuscation by the school board, and the perjurious testimony of Yoko Sawa, now a teacher at Seiryo, who is pressured into keeping quiet about the truth. As such, the case is dismissed.
In 2021, Kuwana helps Ehara exact revenge on Mikoshiba. Ehara and Kuwana hatch a plot to make a public mockery of the Japanese justice system’s failures, which involves Kuwana posing as Ehara and staging a sexual harassment incident with the help of Yui Mamiya, one of Kuwana’s blackmailed ex-students, in order to furnish Ehara with an alibi for the murder of Mikoshiba. Ehara’s sexual assault case is taken on by defense attorney Saori Shirosaki, and two months later, the court declares Ehara guilty and gives him a six month sentence. As he receives his sentence, Ehara cryptically reveals the identity and location of Mikoshiba’s corpse. Shirosaki finds this suspicious, and contacts Takayuki Yagami, the protagonist of the Judgment games, asking him to sus out what in the heck is going on.
Yagami and his colleagues deduce and uncover all this, with their detective skills. There is a conspiracy with a gang, Reiko Kusumoto’s political rivals, and a bunch of other people who they confront, indict, and/or beat up.
Ultimately, Yagami brings the truth about these murders to light, confronts Kuwana and beats him in a fight, and the story ends.
*cough cough cough*
Okay, um, now I don’t have to play along with this fucking Like an Ace Dragon Attorney twisty ass bullshit. I can now talk about the game without recapping the important stuff. That’s great. I think.
So, if you couldn’t tell, Lost Judgment’s plot is a tad unhinged.
Okay so one minor note before we start: Lost Judgment has a little story DLC, called The Kaito Files, which could be very quite good, but it doesn’t look worth fifty (actually thirty) dollars. This video is not about that DLC. If I ever play the DLC, maybe I’ll make a follow-up video. If you think you might want that, back the Patreon, and maybe I’ll do it. Now then…
The first Judgment, developed by Yakuza series creators Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and released in Japan in 2018 and elsewhere in the world in 2019, is a game that I quite enjoyed. It’s a Yakuza game, meaning it has the various trappings of Yakuza games that you might’ve heard about, from the distinctive free roam town slash real time action combat random battle gameplay to the wealth of activities and diversions you can do speckled all about, and also the plot, which is still at its core the sort of wildly implausible thrilling criminal conspiracy that you’ll be used to if you’ve seen any of these games to the credits.
But it’s also a detective-themed game and a sendup of the mystery genre, meaning that its story is structured as a murder mystery, and there’s also some more detective-like flourishes in the gameplay loop, like interrogating witnesses or snooping around for clues. The story is fun, the detective stuff is fun, the game is fun. It’s also, quite notably for our purposes today, reasonably thematically cohesive.
If you’ve played any Ace Attorney game, you’ve seen this game’s basic thematic thrust: the justice system turns out skewed and often unjust results by imperfect people who make mistakes despite the best of intentions, as well as those in power trying to protect their good name, and it’s up to the law-dealing, truth-seeking protagonists to apply the law fairly and bring the truth to light. It’s Ace Attorney through a Yakuza lens, and that’s just a hell of a lot of fun. While there are some clumsily executed minor story beats, and some fumbled talking points, those don’t drag the game down significantly, and it is, nonetheless, a good time.
While I would overall recommend Lost Judgment to RGG veterans and anyone who really liked the first Judgment, I’d say that recommendation comes with reservations, because, oh gosh, that plot. It is much clumsier than the first game’s, much more thematically complicated, and rhetorically baffling. It’s also probably the most messed up scenario I’ve ever encountered in an RGG game, and that’s unfortunately not to its benefit, because the game really isn’t interested in engaging fully with the implications of this plot, and I think that’s pretty disappointing.
But before this story gets into the weeds, we do a cold open on a run-of-the-mill case for Yagami and his colleagues where you do a regular old Yakuza games tutorial, get to meet the characters, the parkour and stealth mechanics that this game introduces, and of course, the cats. This game is full of cats. Then we’re whisked away by the plot to do a first chapter case, where Yagami and Kaito are enlisted to help by their buds up in Yokohama who’ve been contracted to deal with a case of alleged bullying. Obviously the bullying is real, they help stop it, they all pat themselves on the back— and then the chapter ends with Yagami getting that call from friendly lawyer girl Shirosaki.
Before I continue, it’s important to note that the bullying of which this game’s story speaks is very much a real problem that plagues real life Japanese schools, and also that I don’t know shit about it. I am not Japanese, I have never been a student in a Japanese school, and I have no connections to anyone who ever has been. I’m a 24 year old transgender plural lesbian otaku failwoman from the US of A. I wasn’t even a student in any American schools, bar a few specific limited circumstances, as I was homeschooled. As such I’m pretty far removed from the cultural context and life experiences that might make this game’s story ring very differently to a Japanese player, or to anyone who’s been a victim of school bullying. So, I can only authoritatively comment on the topic of school bullying insofar as how much its invocation affected my enjoyment of this video game. In short, do your own research! Or, if you don’t, then just, assume that everything I say is true and don’t fact check any of it.
School bullying in Japan is infamously traumatizing, and often has tragically violent outcomes, the most well-known and oft-discussed of which is suicide. This is often chalked up to a few specific factors, namely the stifling routine and workload of school life, the cultural pressure to achieve harmony and not rock the boat, and school boards who have a vested interest in sweeping potential scandals under the rug.
sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
It’s a pretty serious social issue, to put it mildly, and one that, like all social issues, has naturally come to attract satire. My favorite examples of such satire are the erotic horror visual novel Wonderful Everyday, or Subahibi, and the manga/anime series Sangatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion in English, but let’s just call it Sangatsu), each of which have a bullying arc.
Subahibi’s bullying arc is oriented as a revenge fantasy where the victims fight back against the bullies, presenting this violent resistance as a necessary and natural outcome of the cruelty of the antagonists and the impotency of the teachers (although, to avoid misrepresenting Subahibi, I should clarify that this subplot is a relatively short section of the game, and there is a lot more going on in it that is far beyond the scope of this video).
Meanwhile, Sangatsu takes a more down-to-earth approach that frankly discusses the nuances of the issue and has everyone involved more peacefully (and probably more realistically) confront the social causes at play. Both these works each focus effectively on one of these two angles, and do them well in their own ways, but Lost Judgment sort of awkwardly marries the realistic social commentary and the revenge plot, to the murder mystery, legal drama, to what I feel results in the detriment of both. Sangatsu and Subahibi, along with numerous other examples, are in my opinion far better at discussing this topic than Lost Judgment- though, once again, it bears reminding that I am saying this as a media critic, and not a sociologist. Do not believe me!
So, anyway, the first chapter of this game is a pretty straightforward case of solving bullying, and I have to say, I don’t really like it. If I had to put it in about a sentence, this opening chapter plot feels like all the parts of Persona 5 that people claimed to like, albeit forced into the framework of a Yakuza game.
If you’re wondering why I think this, well, RGG Studio and Atlus are both divisions of the game development branch of our beloved SEGA, itself a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, their friendly megacorp pachinko-churning parent company that they merged with in 2003, shortly after discontinuing the Dreamcast and leaving the console market, a thing no one mentions because it obviously didn’t affect anything because everyone still likes the video games! Mostly.
I’d hazard a guess that the different people making these games probably talk to each other. (I’m very certain that there was, at some point, an interview with an RGG developer that said this, but I cannot find this interview anymore (gosh damn, did I try), because advertising has gone on to make search engines worse. Or maybe I dreamed that interview up.) And given how Sega frequently boasts at the end of each fiscal period that their sales figures have been bolstered by both Yakuza and Persona, whose audiences definitely overlap (at least internationally), it only stands to reason that they would think that Yakuza can make some more of that Persona money by borrowing elements from the latter.
Whatever the case may be, this first chapter doesn’t work very well for me.
Firstly, it just makes me feel really uncomfortable, what with how Yagami and company go about placing hidden cameras and listening devices to spy on teenagers, something I find ethically suspect. The story never stops to consider if this is the most correct or appropriate thing to do, because we’re supposed to be on Yagami’s side since we know he’s got a good reason for it! There’s a girl who confronts him about it, Kyoko Amasawa the schoolgirl detective— literally the best character in the game, voiced by Xanthe Huynh, literally the best dub actress, in English. Amasawa is great, it's wonderful to hear Xanthe say such lines as
"This is your Reichenbach Falls Moment!"
But this conversation is just, she thinks Yagami is doing something malicious or perverted, she's wrong, he proves she's wrong, and the game never asks the question of, "okay, but, is it really fine to spy on teenagers even if one does truly have good and pure intentions in doing so?" I don't think it is, so, yeah, this whole plot point just makes me really uneasy. Like, I would not trust any adult with technology designed to invade the private lives of the children under their charge in the name of ensuring their safety. More often than not, that sort of practice is used to rob children of their personal freedoms, a thing that we as a society really like doing to children in the name of protecting them! In general! But that’s a whole other video.
Anyway, that’s ultimately only a minor issue I have with the story, it doesn’t matter that much, and it’s done and over with quickly, so we can ignore it. Mostly. The bigger and more enduring issue is how the story goes about talking about bullying.
There’s two things that this game attributes bullying to, and those two things are hormone fluctuations and the bystander effect. Early on in chapter one, we get this dialogue about the hormones thing:
Tsukumo: Research shows that boys at that age experience a sudden spike in testosterone. This leads to outbursts to assert dominance, compounded by the irrationality of an immature brain. Scientifically, this potent mix of impulses often manifests as bullying.
Kaito: Yeah, I call that puberty.
Yagami: But that would apply specifically to boys, right? You're getting cases with girls involved too, aren't you?
Tsukumo: Ah. With girls it's more likely rooted in oxytocin, a brain hormone that also has links to bullying.
So, I don’t know if this is true, and if so, to what extent. I did try to do some cursory research, but didn’t find any definitive answers. However, I am fairly suspicious of how this dialogue uses the scientific argument of the impact of oxytocin and testosterone on social behaviors to suggest that bullying is basically human nature, and especially in how it genders the two. “Oxytocin and testosterone make girls and boys, respectively, be mean” sounds like a rationale that is at best very reductive and at worst outright pseudo-scientific.
But, let’s just assume for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Alright, well, what about all the other reasons why bullying happens? Like, I don’t know, social and cultural pressures? For example, one character who appears in this game is Akane, y’know, the girl, who is in on the bullying for…
I don’t know why, actually. I don’t really know why any of these kids are bullying Koda. I mean, I do know why, they do tell Yagami what started the bullying, but I feel that that's a thing that's explained to further the plot, rather than a part of the story that is told. I don't have a great sense of what their social dynamic is, or why they all decided to bully Koda together, or, that they have any individuality really, beyond just... "Mean Kids 1 through 4."
But, given that Akane is like, the one girl in this group, I feel like there must be an interesting reason for that. Maybe she’s the leader of this clique who rallied all these guys to her cause, or maybe she joined them because she used to be Koda’s friend but felt like if she didn’t bully Koda with them, she might become a potential target. Maybe there’s some other reason! Maybe there’s other external reasons for all these kids to be bullying this girl. Maybe they just want her money, maybe they have a petty grudge against her, maybe they have an abusive home life, or maybe they’re just stressed and lookin' for someone to take it out on. Maybe it's all of these things between all of these kids. There could be all sorts of issues at play here, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity that basically all the game has to say about it is:
Kaito: Hormones are f**ked up, huh?
This isn’t a strict requirement for me to enjoy this plot, or find its perspective worthwhile. Like, you don’t need to empathize with antagonists. Sometimes you just want people to be mean so that you can feel good about them getting kicked in the face. That is basically the point of Subahibi’s bullying subplot, particularly the branch where Zakuro and Kimika fight back against Megu and Satoko and their, um, bullying friends—
Kimika: Looking at it from afar, I had to think... why should the person who's suffering die while they get to go on with their lives like nothing happened? I couldn't stand it. If it's so bad that I would kill myself, I might as well kill them instead... that's the conclusion I came to.
(they do A LOT WORSE than bullying in the other branch. I can’t show you, it’s YouTube illegal and kinda disgusting)
I think that plot works precisely because it doesn’t justify the actions of their bullies. It doesn’t say that they’ve got the bullying hormones, it doesn’t try to make them sympathetic in any way, they’re just a bunch of mean bitches and we’re supposed to be happy when Kimika fights back against them. Similarly, in Lost Judgment, if they wanted to make these characters just mean, they could’ve just not said anything about the hormones! They could’ve just said these people are bullies, and left it at that! I mean, the Yakuza games up till this point have been doing just fine letting you kick random gangbangers in the face without telling you they’ve got the criminal hormones, and that was fun and we all had a good time!
But, because this game doesn’t go into any further detail about why bullies are bullies, it comes off pretty much like that. These kids have the bullying hormone. Is that their fault? I don’t know, but they’re pulling a knife on Yagami, so it’s fine to beat them up, I guess. The story does come back around to make the bullies sympathetic, when they decide to stop being bullies, apologize to Koda, and help Yagami, and that’s nice and cool and everything, and something that can also work without the hormones thing— like, for example, how it works in Sangatsu! Hinata’s bullies apologize, there’s a mutually amicable and peaceful resolution, and the story discusses and sympathizes with the broader social circumstances that pushed them to bullying, without condoning or excusing their actions. Like, maybe teenagers are just dumbasses who don’t always foresee their actions having consequences, or are afraid to change even if they do, and most people are just trying to do good at heart and will come around when they realize that their bad actions have negative consequences. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that there is!
Anyway, the story hasn’t got anything to say about the social conditions that might have led these kids to start bullying. It does, however, have a bit to say about the conditions that lead others to allow bullying to continue, and in this, the bystander syndrome is cited.
And this isn’t wrong! Although, I feel they don’t adequately address the potential social causes of this phenomenon. Like, for example, the cultural pressures to not do anything when you, y’know, have a life, and standing up to bullies might get you in actual trouble beyond just being embarrassed. Everyone we’ve talked to who’s either stood up to bullies in their time, or known someone who has, has spoken of being met with discipline or even expulsion even though they were the ones being aggressed. And in other contexts, standing up and speaking when you see a wrong being done could be met with violence or losing employment or legal repercussions or what have you.
So, it goes beyond simple embarrassment, to say the least. We could probably, as a society, I imagine, be doing more to encourage people to not ignore injustices beyond just appealing to their moral sense. But that’s, also, a different video. Overall, I feel like this entire plot ignores the bulk of the actual systemic problems at play in favor of armchair psychology, which, hey, I guess I’m doing armchair sociology about a social issue that, while obviously not unheard of in my country, is very different from how it is in Japan. So it’s not as if I’m not guilty of talking shit about something I know nothing about.
Ultimately, this first chapter is just, like. Fine. It has a weird bit with spying on teenagers. It has a cheesy feel-good Hallmark Channel drama ending. There’s not much of a message to take from it, besides “well, it sure is good to stand up for others” which is very true, but also a rather shallow moral. With regards to how much it seems to borrow from Persona 5, I’d say that Persona 5 was at least very specific in explaining the social ills at play, how it affected the teachers, the students, the parents, the concrete reasons why it's easier for all these groups to stand by and do nothing, and was by no means above naming and shaming the individuals in power responsible for allowing the crimes to proceed. Sure, it goes about it in a very straightforward and teenage manner, without offering much more meaningful systemic analysis to speak of, but it does do it!
Conversely, Lost Judgment acknowledges the systemic issues: the students and their clique behaviors, the teachers who turn a blind eye at best and actively contribute to the bullying at worst, the school boards who try to hush up potential scandals, and makes someone stop in the middle of grieving to say DID YOU KNOW THAT IN OUR COUNTRY THIS HAPPENS THIS OFTEN,
Sawa: In Japan, 300 children commit suicide every year, across all grades. Less than three percent are proven to be linked to bullying.
But while it points all of this out, it doesn’t analyze any of it beyond the most superficial of observations, and it certainly doesn’t take anyone to task. The tone it takes with all of that is more like, “well, who can blame them? Folks gotta keep their jobs.” It feels like it just doesn’t have the guts to blame anyone in specific, besides just “the system” and “human nature”, both things that are hard to get mad at, because, those things are the way they are! It doesn’t really have much of anything to say about why they are the way they are, or suggest those things could be changed, and thus no coherent solution is presented, besides encouraging individuals to lean into their better senses and just sorta going, “well, hopefully good people will make the system good.” …Which I suppose is, the same, thing that Persona 5 does… but… anyway… um, Sangatsu also does this part better
added interlude
Hi, editing Audrey here, and um. There’s one other probably sorta really significant critical difference I forgot to mention, and it’s that Lost Judgment’s plot focuses on the perspectives of adults.
Subahibi, Sangatsu, and Persona, in all their various plots about bullying and harassment, focus on the perspectives of victims. That is to say, the kids who are affected.
And, in what I originally wrote for this video, I spent a lot of time discussing how Lost Judgment is missing the perspective of the bullies, which it is, but I overlooked the perhaps even greater and more damning sidelining of the perspectives of the bullying victims. Like, we have Koda, who does get to say a small piece about how she just sorta put up with the bullying and then Yagami and company helped her realize how bad she had it, but then just talks about how she wants to play basketball, which is not something we care about, and then... is never really ever relevant, ever, again. Then we have Toshiro... who is already dead, and Mitsuru... who is also already dead (in a coma). And then we have seven other unknown bullying victims... five? Right. Yeah, five other unknown bullying victims... who Kuwana at some point took revenge for.
They're already dead!
And their voices are just not relevant, to the story, at all. Instead the story chooses to prioritize the voices of the people who, let’s not mince words, weren’t there for the kids when they should have been.
Not to say that the feelings of the teachers and parents aren’t worthwhile perspectives to include, but it does kind of brush aside their part of the fault for ignoring the bullying in the first place, and also doesn’t deign to inquire how the victims would feel, about an ex-teacher inciting their parents to Murderous Violent on their behalf. Unlike in Subahibi, where, the revenge is exacted by the actual victims of the bullying in direct self-defense against their immediate aggressors and then they stop once the bullies back off, in Lost Judgment it’s done long after the fact, by people who weren’t even the primary victims, and who really bear a lot more fault for not helping when they should have, and… really, that line of thinking puts this story in a really, really dark light.
Anyway I’m gonna just, stop now
end interlude
I appreciate the earnestness of this arc, the hopeful note that this concludes on. I think that the confidence and strength of this writing elevates this ending scene to the point where I at least don’t find it outwardly cringe. But overall, I genuinely just do not think that the Yakuza formula is equipped to deal with this kind of nuanced social issue where there’s specific problems and sides. We’ve seen this kind of fumbling before, in Yakuza 7 with illegal immigrants and sex work, in Yakuza 5 with idols, and now here, with bullying. The writers of these games seem to like gesturing at these sorts of things, and making a few genuinely salient statements, but ultimately their attempts to comment on these issues don’t work when they have to be crowbarred into the fantastic conspiracy plot in this manner. They just don’t have the sensitivity or sense or interest to write this sensibly with an eye towards actually acknowledging what the real issues and their causes are.
The events of the first chapter are relatively segregated from the main story, almost making it so that we’ve now had to play two prologues, and I’d imagine that it’s almost representative of this game trying to tell two completely different stories; the bullying drama, and the conspiracy drama, and the former doesn’t really get a chance to play out to its fullest and best, because it’s forcibly truncated by the game’s need to move onto the latter. Which I guess we may as well start doing ourselves, because gosh I’ve said entirely too much about this game’s first few hours. I hope y’all are prepared for me to list off everything that I do not like about this game that I do not like! Or, don’t like as much as I want to, at least. Maybe we’ll talk about that.
I think the role of Yoko Sawa, the teacher, in this game’s plot, is casually sexist to an exhausting degree. Big surprise, right? This is an RGG game, after all. Well, yeah, but more so than usual.
Sawa first meets Yagami when he's investigating Koda's bullying, and then gets to see a lot more of him when he keeps showing up at the school to investigate the main case. All throughout, she’s constantly telling Yagami to please stop talking to her.
I get that Yagami is a private detective and all, and he cares a fair bit more about solving this case and finding the truth than people liking him. He’s not a stalker or a criminal, he is a lawyer and he does to a point care about the law, but he’s also not the most straight-laced of characters, either, and he is willing to and does break a little law to achieve his goals, sometimes. To a certain point with him, the end justifies the means, so it makes logical sense that he would keep trying to get to Sawa-sensei, despite being told to fuck off, because Sawa-sensei is so frequently a lynchpin of the case. And, y’know, he does this with everyone! Yagami sure does do a lot of pressuring people into letting him interrogate them! So it’s not, like, out of character or anything.
With all that said— it really gets to me that Sawa is the person who Yagami ends up interrogating the most frequently, and thus the one who tells him to fuck off the most. At first, because she really doesn’t want to talk to him, and later because even though she’d maybe like to talk to him, she fears for her safety. And I’m just kind of like… okay… plot… why must Yagami go bother this poor woman again. She’s been through enough. Gosh.
It super doesn’t help that one of the first things said about Sawa is that she’s hot? Like, Kaito says that she's hot, makes a pass at her, and Yagami’s like, “bro shut up” but, oh boy, they really wanted you to know she’s hot. And unlike Kiryu, who is a remarkably sexless protagonist throughout most of the series, Yagami fucks. Or seems to anyway. So that first impression of being told that this woman is hot, gives an entirely different texture to these later meetings with Yagami, where he, y’know, a guy, is repeatedly showing up like “hey please talk to me” and she, a woman, is like, “uh, no.” Oh boy, I love gender~
Yagami: I think you have the key to that answer, even if you don't know that you're the one holding it. It's like a lock. And until I figure out how to get through it, I'm going to keep picking at it.
Sawa: I told you. I'm late for a meeting.
Yagami: I'll be here when you get back. Have a good meeting.
And then Sawa dies!
It’s a pointless, cruel, and meaningless death committed by a gang boss to send a message. And that’s the point of it, yeah. It’s a death of an innocent to raise the stakes and show the villains mean business and all. I get it. I also fucking hate it. Like, it’s obviously fridging, yeah, but y’know, I’ve seen fridging. What I’ve also seen is a pretty recurring trope in the Yakuza formula, where RGG Studio just needs to kill off a woman to advance their plot. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if not for the fact that women aren’t allowed to do anything cool or interesting in these games! I could make a video talking about that. I did make a video talking about that, and I got rid of it because it was bad.
Anyway. This worked better in Yakuza 4, 5, and 6, because at least there, the dead women had, y’know, relationships with the relevant playable characters that I found believable and credible and were built up enough to make it hit hard when they get killed off. And 6 gets points for revealing that the woman being killed off was a fakeout, and she's fine, because the goon that was supposed to kill her had a conscience, that's funny~
But like, Yasuko, in 4, for example! Or Lily. Whatever. Yasuko gets killed off in a similar way for a similar purpose, but it kinda worked there because they at least gave us reasons to care. Yasuko gets to move the plot and have some interactions with Akiyama, Saejima, Kiryu, and Tanimura. It feels justified when they all pray together at her wake. And, like, Akiyama has a thing for Yasuko, but it fits his character and he’s not weird about it, and it seems like Yasuko might reciprocate if not for the criminal underworld at her back, so, yeah. It’s still not great, and it’s kind of egregiously uncomfortable that Yasuko isn’t actually physically shown doing any of the interesting things she’s said to have done that got the yakuza after her, before she dies. Still, it makes sense. It’s, y’know, good, so long as you accept the fridge and its chilly embrace.
Sawa and Yagami in Lost Judgment don’t have this factor for me. When Yagami later continuously brings her up, saying that the killing of bullies needs to stop lest more innocents come into the crossfire, I can’t help but think “bro. you didn’t know her. she kept telling you to go away. why are you being weird about this woman you didn’t have a relationship with. she wasn’t going to fuck you!”
*laughs* yeah. Yeah, okay, I realize this isn’t funny. But like, that’s all I can really think! I know that’s not textually why he was talking to her, but it really does feel like that! I don’t know, it just feels like that! I do not like it!
So, yeah, that’s that thing. Another thing that’s stupid about this game! Y’know how earlier I mentioned that the antagonists stage a groping to fabricate a murder alibi? Yeah, that’s a twist. We go through a huge chunk of this game thinking that Ehara, an ex-cop, harassed some poor woman on a train. Then it turns out that the sexual harassment was fake. That the woman who was supposedly victimized was in fact in on it. I don't have another word for it. That's just stupid!
They could’ve salvaged that if, perhaps, they’d wanted to explore how Yui Mamiya was victimized in the course of being forced to play a part in a murder alibi. Then maybe they could’ve swung it, made the throughline about her being victimized, like, cohesive, somehow. But they don’t do that, and in fact, Mamiya just kinda, does nothing, for most of the rest of the game, after the fakeness of her sexual harassment is exposed. She tells them about the conspiracy and its motive, and how they staged the incident, and that’s kind of it. It’s kinda made way worse by that before they find out, Saori and Yagami go to interrogate Mamiya about the supposed harassment, and Saori mostly says a bunch of platitudes about how good it is that she came forward.
Saori: No, what you did was both brave and inspirational. Many victims are afraid to come forward for any number of reasons. Your voice might give them courage to find their own.
“You’re such an inspiration! -oh, you were faking it, to cover up a murder.” This just feels deeply ill-advised, and, I imagine, like this particular game really wanted to work sexual assault into its plot to feel like it’s tuned into the zeitgeist, to make that Persona money, again. But Lost Judgment has nothing to say about the topic of sexual assault. It’s simply a prop in the murder mystery. This plot twist could’ve worked just as well with anything; Ehara and Kuwana could’ve faked any number of petty crimes to furnish him with an alibi, like, mugging, or shoplifting, or vandalism, or pulling a knife, or whatever else, and the writers chose this one.
And, adding to the absurdity of this plot twist is that Ehara is said to have been a cop, which, is never really relevant besides explaining away why he got such a slap on the wrist for the sexual harassment charge. But that's just hilarious, also, that the story exchanged "cop sexually assaults woman on train," a curiously specific and highly plausible chain of events, for "woman faked sexual assault to help cover up a murder," which is, of course, far less likely.
I’ve got a funny anecdote about this one, actually. In the mystery solving dialogue where Yagami draws this conclusion, you’re asked to select it from a dialogue wheel, and I looked at that and was like, “no. no. no. fuck noooo” and selected every other option. A friend of ours, who watched us play most of this game, commented that the various dialogues about the wrong answers made it feel like Yagami really didn’t want that to be the answer, to which I said, “yeah, I don’t want that to be the answer either!”
Another thing that bothers me about this part is that, when Yagami and company deduce that Mamiya is an accomplice, they also deduce the thing with Kuwana using the bullying footage to blackmail her. When they learn of this particular means by which Mamiya was victimized, they… use the bullying footage to blackmail her. This in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it didn’t feel like the game twisting the knife on that they really don’t care how she’s been victimized.
I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Yui Mamiya, overall. This reads like an absolute nightmare scenario to me. You were mean to some other kids in high school, like a lot of kids are. Maybe you were pressured into the bullying, maybe you had a difficult life, maybe your parents abused or neglected you, maybe whatever. Your actions have some unforeseen negative consequences, but you get on with your life because you can’t let that guilt destroy you, and then almost a decade later, long after you’ve moved on, your old teacher shows up at your doorstep and blackmails you into becoming an accessory to murder.
There’s a lot of people in the past who we were mean to as a kid, as a teen, even, once or a time another, when we didn’t yet know any better, and like, the thought of something from that long ago, coming back to bite us? Someone showing up at our door to say they hate us for that, let alone trying to blackmail us over it? That’s fucking terrifying.
And the fact that the game doesn’t consider this entire plot development through the lens of Mamiya being a victim, and being retraumatized by Yagami making her go through this all over again, it’s… it feels like a pretty big narrative oversight.
The same can be said for her other classmates, as well, who are also being blackmailed by Kuwana in the same way, and similarly thrown under the bus by the story, albeit without the sexual assault thing. But, they have much less screen time than Mamiya— and they're all guys, so I naturally have less to say about them.
It just bugs me, in general, that like, the story never questions the notion that these people deserve some kind of comeuppance for bullying a child to suicide over a decade ago. Is encouraging a suicide tantamount to murder? Especially when the ones doing it are a bunch of teenage dumbasses? I don’t have any definitive answer to that question. Your own opinion will depends on your sense of ethics and perspective on the issues of bullying and suicide, and those could be radically different from mine. Legally, it’s a very muddled question that would be answered very differently in different courts at different times with different case contexts.
source: [7]
But personally, if I had to draw a line, I would say, no, bullying someone to suicide isn’t tantamount to murder. And the reason why is because, I think, if we were to say that that was the case, then where does that stop? How do we measure what actions caused someone’s suicide, and whomst of the actors are more guilty than others? Is the teacher responsible for their death, not having noticed or taken action on the bullying? Are the students who stood by and did nothing responsible? Does being a bit mean to someone who later kills themselves mean that you might’ve pushed them over the edge and could therefore be culpable? Or are we to say, no, none of that makes you guilty, and take the other extreme position, being that no one can be guilty of causing their suicide unless they physically coerced the victim to jump off of the roof? But even in that case, how do we decide that they really meant it?
I genuinely do not know, but I would say at some point after enough time has passed, it’s really not worth punishing anyone. I don’t know if y’all’ve noticed, but I consider myself pretty left-wing, and as a necessary result of that, I don’t particularly believe in punitive justice. I don’t think people should be sentenced to death, and I don’t think people should go to prison. This isn’t to say that I think that someone who bullied a child to suicide is blameless, or that they should face no consequences, but unfortunately our society isn’t particularly equipped to deal with this kind of thing in a healthy way, that would actually be meaningfully reparative. All that the system, and thus most people, can conceive of, is punishing individual wrongdoers.
Sugiura: “well, all you kids tormenting mitsuru looked pretty psychopathic to me”
Mamiya: “oh, and YOU’RE so perfect? an angel who never once acted out of line? Never lashed out at someone weaker than you? Or sided with the group to shut someone out? Everyone does it! We were just ‘lucky’ enough to have some creep tape us picking on some kid who couldn’t take it! Why did this have to happen to me…?”
Yagami: “I’d say it’s because bad things happen to bad people.”
At this point during my initial playthrough, I paused the cutscene, and let out a beleaguered and tired sigh.
Mamiya is obviously being a little hysterical and all, but like… she has a point. She isn’t wrong. As much as she and her friends did to hurt Mitsuru as teenagers, the chain of events she describes sounds horribly traumatic in itself. Her teacher, lying in wait with the evidence of bullying for nearly a decade, so that he could come around and hold that over her head. That’s legitimately fucked up. Did she deserve this? Does this fix anything? Sure, it doesn’t seem like she or any of the others particularly regret their actions, but even still— Is it worthwhile to punish her for the rest of her life for this, especially so long after the fact?
But the story just dismisses all of those questions with that line. Of course she deserves to get punished. She’s a bad person. And that’s it. The issue that the story ultimately takes is with Kuwana’s methods of blackmail and serial murder, and even then, it doesn’t say that it’s because it’s not effective, but rather because it’s outside of the justice system.
And that’s, y’know, kind of expected, given that this video game is, in part, a murder mystery pastiche, particularly of Ace Attorney. A game series that I like, despite the fact that every episode of that series necessarily ends with the true murderer being exposed in court, arrested, and sent to prison. Things that I necessarily do not agree with, because I disagree with the existence and function of the institutions of the courts, the police, and the prisons, but hey, you get what you sign up for when you wanna have a good time with the detective-lawyer game about exposing the real murderer and sending them to prison.
[https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1051484419251425280]
That Lost Judgment goes so far as to say, whether deliberately or by oversight, that someone is still guilty of something they did thirteen years ago as a dumbass teen who wasn’t mature enough to foresee the consequences of their actions… it bugs me. So.
Anyway, the other thing I have to criticize, is just, Kuwana, or more specifically, the plan he has.
I just think it’s stupid. Both in the sense that obviously it doesn’t actually do anything to stop bullying, and also I don’t think I see what it actually illustrates about, y’know, the thing the game purports to be about. It’s not really bad exactly, I mean, obviously this game was going to revolve around catching a murderer, and Kuwana, sure is a murderer, or murder instigator if you wanna be technical, and he sure is a villain in this pulpy murder mystery conspiracy story.
I just don’t get why that story needed to be about bullying. I don’t get why it needed to be about sexual assault. It isn’t really about bullying or sexual assault, it just uses those topics as props in the murder mystery. By the time we find out what Kuwana’s motive is, the game has stopped being about bullying since about, like, between 15 and 30 hours ago, and it just feels, meh. For all the reasons I’ve kind of already said. I do kind of like how Kuwana is sort of positioned by the story as something of an anti-hero, and got hella charisma, I wanna like him. Given that I think both sides are wrong here, it’s. Y’know.
From then on the stuff that happens is just, yeah, conspiracy, fights, and then exposing the truth in court, and all of that’s entertaining and everything. All the normal things that I come to Yakuza games for. I mean, I also come to them for the thematically rich narrative wrapped around this hokey action crime plot, and that feels pretty thin in this game.
Again and again over the course of its 40 odd hour runtime, Lost Judgment loses the plot. Or rather, gives ultimate precedence to its plot, at great expense to its themes. All of the remotely worthwhile or interesting ideas that it hits on aren’t developed, all just kinda fall by the wayside in favor of these three rather trite, formulaic talking points: That the law isn’t perfect but people need to try their best to do the best they can with the system anyway, that vengeance is hollow, and that you should stand up for others. And, that’s what there was to take away from the first Judgment. And in that game, it was fine, because that story was mostly just a fun time and didn’t exhibit any significant aspirations to say anything else. It might have been fine in Lost Judgment, too, if not for that this story’s subject matter felt like it wanted something else. Something more specific and nuanced. But instead, its purported themes are left feeling like interchangeable plot devices, the fun core of this murder mystery muddled by the question of
“why? and what was the point?”
I mean obviously the point was for people to buy the game, but, other than that… who knows. who can say.
So, all the stuff I said is, genuinely, what I figure I probably believe. Probably. But, it bears clarifying, I still like this game. It wasn’t trying, necessarily, to be super deep or thought provoking or politically accurate. I’m sure the creators see it as a nice bonus if it’s seen as such, but its ultimate goal is to, y’know, be a game that’s fun to play with a story that’s fun. And I think it is! I think there’s a lot of things in it that are fun and good. There’s honestly too much that’s interesting and good about the optional content of this game, which, is the case with every Yakuza game, but that’d require a whole entire separate video, and, maybe we’ll make that video. I don’t know.
I don’t think borrowing from Persona is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think there’s a hell of a lot of potential for good in doing that! Like, Persona’s appeal, to a lot of people, is the exaggerated school life mystery thing, but it’s somewhat stymied by its need to be an SMT game, because it is. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they really don’t like how Persona 5 ends with them fighting the huge anime god, because that’s just such an absurd and nonsensical escalation of a plot that starts really serious and realistic.
The Yakuza games are very similar in structure to a JRPG like SMT or Persona, but their “huge anime god” is just “a regular guy who’s in charge of the conspiracy,” and that’s also an absurd power fantasy and all, but it’s a more realistic one that makes more sense with that kind of story. Y’know, if they want to focus on a high school setting again, maybe have a teenage delinquent as a protagonist— which, I guess they already sorta did in Kurohyou, but, y’know, if they wanna do that again. That could be cool.
So! Yeah! Lost Judgment's not totally wasted time just cause its main story is kinda weird and bad. It's at least hella interesting. And, with that, I want to talk about another way we could possibly look at the main story.
About two thirds or so of the way through the story, Yagami gets an audience with Reiko Kusumoto, the mother of Mitsuru, the bullied child whose suicide attempt started Kuwana’s murder instigation spree. She tells Yagami about the events that led up to her murder of Shinya Kawai, how he didn’t even recognize her or seem to regret anything he’d done, and that pushed her to kill him, a thing she states that she doesn’t regret in the slightest. And I wondered,
… shouldn’t she regret that?
I mean, basically, all the stuff I’ve already said. I’m not sure if this situation warrants murder, or furthermore, if it’s really realistic or interesting to depict the parent of a victim as desiring revenge like this. There’s a significant contingent of friends and families of murder victims whose murderers have been placed on death row who advocate against the death penalty, so I don’t figure it’s unthinkable to suppose maybe some parents of children who died to suicide don’t actually want revenge on the people who pushed them there. And maybe the story could’ve acknowledged that possibility, and that might’ve been something, but also, maybe that wouldn’t have gelled with what it was trying to do.
If someone is placed on death row for murder, the feelings of the victim’s families don’t matter. They can say they would rather not see the murderer killed, and the state will still execute them anyway. So, aren’t they, kind of, in the same position? Where they don’t get to have any meaningful hand in deciding what justice would be, and the state holds a legal monopoly on exacting violence, and choosing when and where it’s appropriate to do so?
I mean, I, as some sort of dumbass anarchist, would say the state is pretty definitionally illegitimate, and that the monopoly on violence they hold over the populace is unjust. As a general rule, I don’t like violence, but I’m also not a pacifist, and I’d say sometimes that violence is maybe necessary… although in a case such as what’s depicted in the game, I’d say that death is a pretty unjustified response, but.
Is that something that matters to the families of the bullying victims? I don’t really know what it’s like to lose someone close to you to suicide. I especially don’t know what it’s like to lose a family member to suicide as a result of bullying this cruel. So, maybe some people who have experienced that would feel that that is justified, or at least fantasize about this sort of revenge. I mean, even despite my stated politics (you can correctly guess I oppose the death penalty), I can’t claim like I’ve never had thoughts like this. Statistically speaking, most people do!
I may not know people who’ve endured bullying specifically in Japan, but I do know people who’ve been bullied. Some of those people know, or knew, others who attempted suicide as a result of bullying and negligence by the school they went to. Some of those people, actually, a lot of those people, scratch that, all of those people, are queer. (Almost everyone in our social circle is queer.) If they’re angry at, and feel vengeful towards, those who’ve bullied them, or their friends, or just people who bully others to the point of suicide in general, then I don’t think I’ve got any right to criticize them for that. I believe their anger is justified, and I don’t think I’d be able to fairly criticize them for acting on that, or, thinking about acting on that.
And if nothing else, this story definitely does focus a lot of attention on the grief and anger that these game’s antagonists feel, and it cares a lot about portraying that effectively. It might be that this game is actually a really emotionally potent picture of that anger that resonates really well with people who’ve been in that situation and felt that way, and I’m just not one of those people.
So maybe in that sense, Lost Judgment is in its own way an emotionally honest depiction of how bullying in Japanese schools affects people that couldn't come from something more considered and careful in how it discusses these issues. And maybe that’s good. And I just don’t see it.
But my eyes aren’t the only ones.
Thanks for watching this, this was really hard to write, but, I guess I did it, so, yeah. I’d appreciate getting thrown a few dollars on patreon or ko-fi. And also subscribe or like or whatever, share the video to whatever social media platform you use. Anyway, the important names are:
Patreon credits: Ada. Just Ada - Anime Omelette - ASabitsukiFlow - Azu - ColorfulCast - dameDiadora - deeso - Duskpixie - Elvenoob - Emma R - Femboy Bebop - Good Civilization - Gwen Starlight - hev - Kaylee Smerbeck - Korin - L Tantivy - LaLaLacuna - Lilly - M - Mira Yeuden - Nik Gothic - Pigeon - Roger C Walker - RukaCollie - Sally - Saoirse Russell - Scimitar - SimplyAero - SleepySlug - Spiderrebelnews - Thijs - Trucy - Vile Lasagna
Aaaand bye.
#lost judgment#judgment#video essay#going to make this 'public' tomorrow morning#but in the meantime#it is unlisted#and I will just reblog it later#yakuza#ryu ga gotoku
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MADISON – Wisconsinites convicted of multiple counts of a sex offense will be required to register as sex offenders for life even if the counts were part of the same incident, under a bill signed by Gov. Tony Evers.
The law effectively nullifies a 2023 state Supreme Court ruling holding that multiple convictions stemming from the same criminal complaint do not necessarily classify someone as a repeat offender. The governor's signature brings resolution to a question officials have debated for years.
In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled in May 2023 that "the plain and ordinary meaning of 'separate occasions' does not refer solely to the number of convictions" in consideration of whether lifetime registration is required for an offender.
"It is undisputable that all sex offenses covered by the sex offender registration statutory scheme are heinous in nature, thus necessitating the use of the registry for the protection of the public. However, within that scheme, the legislature, not this court, made policy decisions regarding which offenders are categorically required to comply with registration requirements for life and which are required to comply for 15 years," Justice Jill Karofsky wrote in the majority decision.
The case involved Corey T. Rector, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to five counts of possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision on each of the five counts, to be served concurrently, and was ordered to register as a sex offender for 15 years.
The case made its way to the state's high court after the state Department of Corrections requested in 2019 that Rector's sex offender status be changed to a lifetime registration because he had been convicted of more than two sex offenses, relying on a formal opinion issued in 2017 by Republican then-Attorney General Brad Schimel.
Schimel issued the opinion in response to a request from then-DOC Secretary Jon Litscher, who had asked whether the state's "special bulletin notification" statute applied to offenders with multiple criminal convictions that occurred at the same time or stemmed from the same criminal complaint.
State law requires people who are convicted of a sex offense (or found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect) on two or more separate occasions to be classified as "special bulletin notification" (SBN) offenders, who trigger notification of law enforcement when they change addresses. These offenders are subject to lifetime GPS monitoring.
Schimel's opinion was that "separate occasions" referred to the number of convictions, "including multiple convictions imposed at the same time and based on the same complaint."
Evers' signature codifies Schimel's interpretation in state law, negating the court's 2023 ruling. It will apply retroactively, and offenders who were previously released from the registry will be notified that they must re-register.
The bill's opponents included a number of prison reform groups and the State Public Defender's office.
The agency's legislative liaison, Adam Plotkin, argued judges should have the discretion to determine whether an offender should be required to register for 15 years or for the rest of their life.
In testimony before a Senate committee last month, Plotkin noted that malfunctioning devices or poor cellular service expose offenders to potential felony charges for removal or tampering with a GPS tracker, and argued the policy would ultimately reduce the public safety benefit of registration and monitoring.
"If everyone is considered a risk to the point of lifetime monitoring, it dilutes the efficacy of tracking those that a court determined are of higher risk based on the individual facts of that case," he said.
The proposal was drafted in consultation with the Department of Corrections, whose legislative adviser Anna Neal testified that the agency was concerned the Supreme Court's Rector ruling "is not reflective of communities' and law enforcement's expectations regarding notice and monitoring of sex offender registrants."
"The Rector decision may limit or reduce the notifications law enforcement agencies receive from the Department regarding the release of individuals who have been convicted of multiple counts and the Department's ability to require GPS tracking of these individuals," Neal said.
#nunyas news#worried that someone busted for#something dumb like public urination#will be on for life#unless there's degrees and I didn't see it
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Y'know, I am very interested about Psychic guy (vigdissigritr) who wrote this comment, before wicked witch (Danneel) deleted it. And you say on your post you did speak with psychic guy. I want do know did he say more information anything about Danneel?
Me? I do still believe Danneel will get her karma for all the bad deeds she did during years of messing around with Jesnen's free will and ruining innocent people's lives by her spell works. Trust me, I think Danneel messed up with the wrong person who is protected by god and their ancestors.
I still believe Jensen is good man. I wish everyone would give him chance. I think Danneel is problem.
Hello Anon, thank you for the ask. I had a feeling an ask of this nature was coming my way soon and you delivered! :D So, I understand you are concerned about Jensen's well-being and have been made aware of her having done witchcraft from the getgo. Frankly, I believe that any spell used to attract a specific person is in fact black magic because if it's meant to be it'll be. The song "Meant to Be" by Bebe Rexha would be a great thing for Danneel and Gen both to listen and take to heart, as well as anyone else considering doing any love spells.
🎶So, won't you ride with me, ride with me?
See where this thing goes
If it's meant to be, it'll be, it'll be Baby, if it's meant to be🎶
and also
🎵I ain't gonna lie, ain't gonna lie
'Cause I'm tired of the fake love, show me what you're made of
Boy, make me believe🎵
youtube
If it's NOT meant to be... Let. It. Go. Seriously, if you're that desperate enough to do black magic on someone else just to keep or attract them (or should I say lure them in), YOU are the problem not life itself. This life just ain't that serious you guys, let it go for real ha ha. I believe on a personal note, my ex himself used black magic on me, as I overheard him say one night when I was supposed to be asleep "I never pray I know but please, bring Ellie back for good and let me keep her". This is when I was technically moved out in Summer 2018 but only went back because I couldn't get off the lease. From what my guides have told me, black magic lasts at max about 30 years but I feel like somewhere close to 15 years or so is about average. With my ex, it didn't even last a year LOL! I explained here what black magic really is as far as divine blueprints goes and how it relates to the divine plans, along with explaining what divine blueprints and divine plans are. I decided to copy and paste magic in terms of white, gray, and black with respect to divine blueprints from that post of mine below for your reference.
* White magic is the manifestation of so called original divine blueprints, or what was always meant to happen.
* Gray magic is the manifestation of so called fixes to one's divine blueprints and plans after someone has tried using black magic after their astral body tried "tampering" with someone's divine blueprints and plans through the computer located in Cloud Nine. Of course, these fixes sometimes come at the cost of someone else. An example of this is if a woman loses a job but shouldn't have. The fix could be where she gets another job; naturally since there's only 1 job, someone else who should've gotten that job does not get it and another version of that person's divine blueprints ends up manifesting or their divine blueprints have to get "fixed" too, and so on and so forth.
* Black magic is the manifestation of so called tampers meant to benefit the person using it at the expense of others. For example, someone may use black magic to get revenge on someone else, get wealthy, etc. This is where someone's astral body (the astral body of the physical person who is trying to make a good landmark event or several occur to them at the expense of someone else) "tampers" with someone else's divine blueprints by adding in an unpleasant landmark event or several. In some horrifying cases, this can be say the death of a spouse via workplace accident in order to get settlement money from their dead spouse's former employer. The maximum amount of time someone can benefit from using black magic is about 30 years.
All black magic does is ultimately delay the unpleasant landmark events in their own divine plans and making the pleasant landmark events occur sooner. What goes up must come down. People using black magic may have many good things happen to them at once, but they will also experience many bad things eventually.
However, I am going to say this about free will before I carry on talking about what else this psychic said about Danneel. People on Earth assume free will pertains to us being able to make choices, to move how we want, act how we want, etc. without being controlled. Here is the thing, in other places where there is no free will they can still make choices, move how they want, act how they want, eat what they want, all of that. So, what the heck is free will? Free will is more or less being able to make choices that harm or even kill others for selfish gain. Free will is essentially the capability of messing with someone else's divine blueprints in order to benefit themselves. Free will is the capability of doing things like murder for reasons like greed, revenge, etc. Free will is the capability of "stealing from others" as this psychic puts it (in short, like I said making bad things happen to them so good things happen to you).
Here, I am establishing that this guy does not know Jensen or Jared, doesn't follow them, etc.
Here, he mentions some health issues of Jensen's going back to Danneel. He sometimes says Daniel or Danielle I believe because this is what the translator he uses does but I know he meant Danneel so please read these as such.
Now, he also mentioned that he doesn't believe Danneel wrote the birthday post but it was Jensen because "it's necessary".
He also brought up some marriage issues going on as well.
This is where he talked more about Danneel and Witchcraft.
These go a little out of order because I'm trying to put similar messages together and also excluded a lot of them out of course as I wanted to highlight the things he said. I did tell him some things of course about things I've written about on here and such. I withheld a lot of info from him to see what all he picks up and see he does pick up a lot as a seer and as someone who doesn't know much about Jensen at all. Below, he talks about world karma and then I wanted to put in this screenshot set below that he mentioned May or June is when he believes things are gonna start panning out and also the said "aftermath" after she is exorcised from his life.
As for what else was said about Danneel's eventual fate... and yes Gen Padalecki is who he was talking about with regards to who she met with "yesterday" (this past Saturday, 3/30/2024)...
Hmmm. Even though I believe some of the messages he is receiving require "interpretation work" with what is really meant as far as who is speaking to him goes, I do think he has a lot of things correct about what her fate will be and how things will eventually pan out okay for Jensen. You mess with someone else's divine blueprints for personal gain and you will suffer consequences...
#black magic#anti danneel#anti elta#psychic messages#psychic#channeled message#divination#anti genevieve
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A Houston man who spent six years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit had his conviction overturned Thursday.
A judge granted the DA’s request to dismiss the methamphetamine possession case against Frederick Jeffery. “I’m glad we were able to fix a wrong,” Judge Danilo Locayo told Jeffrey in court. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”
Frederick Jeffery’s 2018 conviction was based solely on the testimony of former HPD officer Gerald Goines who was later charged with murder and tampering with a government record in a separate case.
Jeffery was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was freed on bond in July after the district attorney’s office reviewed dozens of cases linked to Goines.
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I’m glad he didn’t die. So he can continue to live in misery and keep being attacked. Remember his story. From wiki (even commie wiki couldn’t hide his crimes):
Lawrence Gerard Nassar (born August 16, 1963) is an American serial child rapist and former sports medicine physician. For 18 years, he was the team doctor of the United States women's national gymnastics team, where he used his position to exploit, deceive, and sexually assault hundreds of children and young women.
Nassar's sexual abuse of young girls and women and the subsequent cover-up led to the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal that began in 2015, alleging that Nassar repeatedly sexually assaulted at least 265 young women and girls[4] under the guise of medical treatment.[5][6] His victims included numerous Olympic and United States women's national gymnastics team gymnasts.[7]
Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison on December 7, 2017, after pleading guilty to child pornography and tampering with evidence charges on July 11, 2017. On January 24, 2018, Nassar was sentenced to an additional 40 to 175 years in Michigan State prison after pleading guilty in Ingham County to seven counts of sexual assault.[8][2] On February 5, 2018, he was sentenced to an additional 40 to 125 years in Michigan State prison after pleading guilty to an additional three counts of sexual assault in Eaton County.[9]
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