"dude its not that embarassing to rewatch some creepypasta stuff you liked as a teenager" the character i imprinted on like a baby duck at 16 was a demon from new jersey that acts like the humanization of every offspring song and canonically listens to scissor sisters. His favorite color is purple and his favorite pokemon is Gengar. He leaves people notes with emojis on them. He acts like a beetlejuice scare actor at halloween horror nights. His catchphrase is "feeling sassy?" Hes (allegedly) worked with every war criminal throughout history and been every serial killer. even the gay ones. he ate a baby. his animal motif is a rabbit. hes kind of based off donnie darko. he talks to his cats in a baby voice. he wears a white fedora that makes every video he wears it in feel dated by like 7 years. hes 5'3. he hacked a girls tumblr blog. he added a laugh track over a video of him killing people. he named a chainsaw rex. he torments people by playing frank sinatra at them. his name comes from an animal collective song. theres a canon blog entry where he makes the speakers blare rob zombie before he enters a room, then holds a guy at gunpoint to describe what he did to to him while "making sure to leave in all the cool parts". Hes like ten tumblr sexymen traits rolled into one. Sometimes his voice gets distorted and it makes him sound like Bill Ciphers first year on HRT. For some fucking reason i associate the song Cake By The Ocean with him. I firmly believe that if everymanhybrid didn't require a masters degree in creepypasta autism to comprehend, he would've caused more teenage stabbings than the slenderman incident and more kin war tumblr scenarios than nagito komaeda.

25

i think of school shooters the same way that id think of a spoiled child being told "no" to having their third serving of ice cream for the day it's like they figure out that life isn't fair (which literally everyone else figured out at birth + mental illnesses) in spite of their many privileges and then they fucking lose it

and as much as i think back to eric harris and how i feel bad for him on occasion, for him and dylan to grasp at straws for reasons to hate others (which is not to undermine the bullying and torment they received) is insane to me (like him getting pissed about girls not calling him back or dylan slapping his coworker because she told him off about something).

all of this and their childishness in spite of the fact that they were literally planning a massive terrorist attack (which isn't so childish) is essentially prominent in how they mention that the shooting is their fault entirely. did they just think that bbecause you say something that it automatically becomes true? i mean, e&d were going to kill themselves and it ain't possible to bring a dead person to court, so of course they'd arrest mark manes and philip duran and bring robyn to court

i just don't think eric and dylan really understood the consequences of their actions because they were so caught up in this retarded escapist fantasy where they were the heroes in tarantino films (and teenagers). i think the concept of this just makes me sad in general, since the way they behaved during and leading up to the shooting was an obvious way for them to feel powerful and in control, which had been stripped from them by that very school.

i also don't mean to undermine the horrid environment at columbine and the obvious favoritism that plagued the student body and staff. harris and klebold were incredibly mentally ill, which when is combined with a toxic environment in which you spend your developmental years and a mutually hate-filled friendship, results in tragedy.

it also hurts my heart to read anecdotes about the victims, eric and dylan included, from those who loved them. hearing about how cassie bernall struggled with suicidality, thoughts of killing her parents, and briefly experimenting with the goth subculture made me wonder if eric or dylan ever considered that others felt the same pain and troubles that they did. hearing about how devon adams had to decide on which friend's funeral to attend, one murdering the other and many more, reading about an interaction brooks had with rachel while they were smoking wherein they discussed their religious affiliations respectfully, learning about how daniel mauser would attend anti-gun protests, devon sharing how dylan saved one of rachels interpretive dances by fixing the tape, etc make me think of how intertwined littleton is (especially columbine kids) and the domino effect that it's had on the world.

so many shooters have cited e&d as inspirations, people have replicated wrath and natural selection shirts, written fics about them, plays, films, etcetera. there's online communities dedicated to colimbine, sometimes as part of a larger true crime community, where people discuss and learn about it. i myself began research approx. 2 years ago and have since developed a special interest regarding columbine. deaths, other than ones because of copycat shooters/killers such as sol pais are linked to columbine. it's had such an imnense effect on the world that cannot be understated solely because of its magnitude.

columbine was so senseless and i hate that 14 children and a beloved teacher died so that e&d could "even the score." i hope, in their final moments, that eric and dylan felt ashamed and embarrassed of what they did, the world, music, movies, their hobbies and interests they discarded, the people they left behind who've been left to pcik up the pieces of their destruction

me the other night after watching i saw the tv glow: we make fun of kinning communities but its really sad how it exists and preys off mentally ill, often very repressed trans people. like i do feel really bad for people who are so isolated, so dysphoric that they have to revert into a state of dependency on characters that they can project their ideal self onto... ive been like this before and to an extent i still do it. Its a natural result of suburban isolation and repression of the self. And later in life you can run from the show, you can deny the joy you felt watching it as a teenager, but you cant repress the feelings you felt watching that, wishing you were the girl or boy, imagining how much happier youd be living in a fantastical world in a different body. Its such a meaningful commentary on how trans people in this current moment are discovering themselves.

me the second someone who kinned a columbine shooter showed up my comments: holy mother of god shut up and never speak again.

I’ve recently had the idea to make a little document where I can write about all the different school shooters and shootings, like how Adam did with all those mass killings. As of this morning I’ve only written about Sandy Hook and I wanted to post it here, even if no one reads it LOL

Sandy Hook Elementary School - 2012

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting which took place on December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut was a mass shooting which ended the lives of 20 children and 6 adults. The mass shooter who took these lives was the 20 year old man named Adam Lanza. Before the mass shooting Lanza also killed his mother, which would cause 7 adults to be, in total, dead. After Adam had finished ridding the children of the burden of living in this society, Adam then killed himself, either he was already suicidal or he did not want to live the rest of his life in prison. That is still a mystery to me, but it was most likely he was already suicidal since he strongly believed that he and other people were brought into this world without their own consent. Adam used three guns to carry out the mass killings, a Bushmaster XM15-E2S, a Glock 20SF handgun, and a .22LR Savage Mark II bolt-action rifle. These guns were legally purchased by his mother, most likely used for target practice or something along those lines. Adam was also diagnosed with some disorders like autism and OCD, which he would deny and not take medication for, (I think so.) One of Adam’s motive may have been was that he strongly believed in Antinatalism, which I mentioned before, is the belief that people here are brought into the world without their consent and to stop this humans should stop reproducing. Adam might have gone to the elementary school and killed the children because he believed that he was helping the kids by making them not live in this society. He may also have killed the teachers trying to protect the students because he saw it as the teachers making it worse for the children. It could also have just been he was a troubled autistic teenager who has so much anger inside of them that they committed a mass killing, like most people think. This could be a possibility because Adam had once gone onto a radio talk show (I think that’s what it’s called) and talked about “Travis the Chimp” a chimp which was domesticated to live like a human but was then later shot dead after mauling a woman. Adam went on a long but interesting rant where he goes to say that this chimp could just be a teenage mall shooter who was on their last straw and things along those lines. He said that the chimp must have just “snapped” which could also be why he shot up the elementary school. Maybe Adam was projecting his thoughts and how he felt onto this chimp but his point definitely did make sense. The points Adam makes in the radio talk show also show he was really smart and mature sounding, but he doesn’t believe that himself because he later posts online that he “messed up” while speaking about it to the host. This is a trait of autism which he was diagnosed with later in his life. This could also be just because he had been isolated in his closed off room for so long. Another motive of his was because he believed that society was trying to control him, the education system was trying to form him into the ideal human. Realizing this must have made him so mad that he thought that he was saving the children by killing them before the school system had fully controlled them.

[The] entire philosophy behind education: the brutal indoctrination of pristine minds so as to propagate some delusional system of cultural values.... Is it really so ideal to have good and efficient citizens? All they'll do is be more effective at propagating the system you hate.

Lanza was also obsessed with the Columbine shooting, a mass killing which was taken out by two troubled teenage boys, like Adam himself. He may have related with the shooters so much that he thought the best thing he could do was do exactly what they did.

Obviously it doesn’t seem very finished and I might add more to it as I research more. No I’m thinking about what I should write about next, the Columbine shooting or Virginia tech?

Fuck the NRA, and fuck every politician who takes their blood money.

TW: Gun Violence

EIGHTEEN elementary school aged children are gone. 18 sets of parents will never see their kids again, 18 families destroyed. I’m so fucking sick of the NRA pretending like their funded legislation is saving lives.

Anyone who says that this is why we need more guns needs to reconcile themselves with the fact that they too, are okay with little kids being murdered; literally nothing else but stringent gun control is gonna stop this. Columbine wasn’t enough, sandy hook wasn’t enough, parkland wasn’t enough, oxford wasn’t enough and neither will this be.

How can pro gun law supporters reconcile their humanity with these beliefs? there’s more than ample proof that the NRA funded pro gun legislation has done absolutely nothing to curb homicides, but on the contrary increased them.

You’re making deadly weapons accessible to teenagers whose brains aren’t done fully forming. who, in the heat of their emotions, might commit irreparable damage - we don’t let kids DRINK until 21, yet you’re arguing that they have the mental faculties to handle a literal weapon?

Legislators keep complaining about how hard it is to gain bipartisan support, but how hard can it be to gain support for basic humanity? You have been elected to do this arduous task, sworn in to serve the people you represent.

The people you represent don't want bodies riddled with bullet holes, they want their loved ones to come home at the end of the day. And if you believe that staying in power with the aid of death-mongers like Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association is more important than innocent lives, then I hope you remember that you are replacable. The dead are not replacable, but you are.

So do your fucking jobs, or get the fuck out.

If you are a WoD fan and you aren’t aware of how fucking wild White Wolf’s strategy for marketing Demon: the Fallen was, that changes right fucking now, get ready.

So, the year is 2002, American Culture is still moving past the Satanic Panic, and your job is to market a Table Top Role Playing Game where you play as literal demons who were aligned with the Biblical figure of Lucifer. The book has a big ass pentagram on its cover, and is filled with information on fictional demons and their demonic powers.

How do you market this?

Well, isn’t it obvious?

You satirise Chick Tracks by making a fake one about how the game you’re supposed to be promoting is satanic. I’ve linked it below, it’s only 23 pages long;

But you may be thinking: “Ok, that’s a funny concept, but why is this such a big deal to you?” Well, buckle the fuck up kiddo’s, because I want you to look at that last panel again:

Do you notice anything about it that could prompt further inquiry? What about that URL?

You see, the chick track was only one part of this little marketing stunt.

And so, I ask again, how do you market Demon: the Fallen?

You create an entire fake Evangelical church website called the Eternal Grace Evangelical Church, and write a fake sermon in which you claim that the brand that hired you is producing games that turn children into drug addicts and sexual predators, also claiming that Vampire: the Masquerade was involved in real world murders including the fucking Columbine School Shooting.

Below is a link to the site from the Internet Archives Wayback machine, the main bulk of the interesting stuff is in the sermons section.

Quick note, they used EVERY part of the evangelical bullshit playbook to make this site look legit, they went hard on this. So, the site is satire, but it still feels like it would be a good idea to mention that they satirise everything about Evangelicals, including their homophobic, transphobic, anti-catholic, and anti-pagan beliefs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031205191032/http://www.father-ramos.com:80/

If you don’t want to read it yourself, here are some actual quotes from this fake Evangelical site that was, and I can’t stress this enough, MADE BY WHITE WOLF TO PROMOTE DEMON: THE FALLEN: (above disclaimer applies here too)

“Eternal Grace Congregation Church is a community of Christians who seek to love, worship and praise Him and to communicate the Word of the Gospel to the world around us while exposing the lifestyles and and recruiting prctices of those deviants who would make this world a place of horrors. Among these are homosexuals, gamblers, drug addicts and role-players.”

“You may find it useful to tell role-players about the Dallas youths who were burned to death in the steam tunnels of Southern Methodist University (of course it was the Methodists) while exploring them for treasure. Tell them about the syphilis-related insanity of Jimmy Cox, a Tennessee teenager who used role-playing games to build around him a coven of homosexuals. Tell them about Michelle Sikes, the Montana role-player who had a sex-change operation. The more perversion you can ascribe to involvement with role-playing the better. You may even wish to fabricate some of your own, to better illustrate the point to your specific at-risk individual.”

“Listening to accounts of the role-players’ games is either the height of tedium (it must be said, pardon my air of judgment) or evinces strong feelings of pity, […] Invitations to participate, if accepted, place the individual in a precarious position himself, and will probably expose him to the scourges of drugs, fornication, homosexuality and Catholicism/paganism in many cases.”

“point out to them that the activity borders on delusion (“You are not an elf, Tommy!”) and heresy (“If God intended for you to act like a demon, he would have made you a demon, Jenny”).”

“In addition, rumors (which is why I relegate this to a side note instead of including it in the main body of my discourse) link the activities of the Columbine high-school “trenchcoat mafia” with Vampires Masquerade.”

“As good Christians, it is obviously our duty to prevent our youth from learning the corrupt ways these books and games teach. Sex, suicide, drug abuse, homosexuality, “golden showers” and many other behaviors proscribed by the Lord and the Good Book come as a result of players taking their games too far. In particular, the moral execration contained with the Demon book takes these aberrations to new levels by openly encouraging players to act in the interests of Satan (or Lucifer, as he is depicted herein).”

“Additionally, role-playing games teach that violence is an acceptable and even admirable way of solving problems. Significant portions of their rules are devoted to combat and weaponry. Demon, for example, also contains systems by which the satanic characters can attack or use magic upon their enemies, with dark arts spawned from Hell itself. These are not unlike the gay community’s reactionary “straight bashing” in response to the more physical efforts of their loving fellows (but loving in the Lord’s intended way) to bring them back into the fold.”

“This Week: Pastor "Father" Ramos discusses the Catholic Church and the 68 Million deaths its evil has caused throughout the world! You won't read this in the history books! Father Ramos also discusses why he has chosen to reclaim the Holy tile"Father" from Catholocism.”

White Wolf was frequently quite edgy, and often wasn’t great at dealing with social issues (you could argue this is still true of the modern World of Darkness in some cases). But honestly I think this is a fun stunt. It mocks evangelicals for all their insane bigoted beliefs, and for basically giving all the stuff they call satanic free advertising. No matter what though this is an unhinged marketing stunt, and it is so wild that they actually did this.

For anyone really interested in how a mass murderer could possibly be redeemed or welcomed by “normal” society, especially a teenager like Himiko Toga, I am begging you to please read the seinen series Vinland Saga. Or watch the first 2 seasons of the anime, which are out in sub and dub. It’s a more mature story set in the Viking era during the reign of a young King Canute (or Cnut) the Great. It’s not just a gore fest — it’s about a kid who becomes a child solider and as a young adult has to find his way to atonement, friendship, and peace. (And my summary isn’t even beginning to do the series justice with its parallel treatment/foiling of Canute’s rise to power!)

For those who say nobody could love or want to reach a murderer, please read at least one interview with Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. It’s a harrowing perspective and a difficult read, and it will challenge your preconceptions about the topic. https://www.npr.org/2016/02/16/466618817/sue-klebold-mother-of-columbine-shooter-carries-him-everywhere-i-go-always

If nothing else, remember MHA is fiction.

HELP ME DEAR GOD

so i luv KMFDM, they make great ass music blah blah blah, they r good, blah blah. u kno the bit. and yea, i knew that the school shooters involved in columbine were also fans of said band, keep in mind i detest violence (and i was abandoned during a school bomb threat, so school related violence REALLY irks. anyway i started liking more kmfdm posts and NOW MY ENTIRE FEED IS COLUMBINE RELATED. BRO HELP I LIKE THE BAND, THE BAND HAS NO HAND IN COLUMBINE OTHER THAN THE WAY IT WAS BLAMED FOR THE VIOLENCE THAT OCCURED. GET THIS CRAP OFF MY FEED, DONT ROMANTIZE MENTALLY ILL TEENAGERS WHO TERRORIZED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE.

Personal rant as an ex-columbiner:

I went through the Columbine tag yesterday and the amount of shitposts and posts about the shooters made me sad. I used to be a Columbiner too, i had a blog dedicated to Columbine from 2014 to 2015, i was 17, and it only took me years to realise how messed up it was. When I was 17 and had this blog I really did write some awful things that I'm now ashamed of and I'm trying to repay for the things I've done now. I was one of those girls who were trying to find a way to relate to the shooters as I had been bullied myself and grew up without being shown loved, so I became "I could have fixed them" girl lmao. Even adding I do not condone line in my blog title and making some posts about the victims was not a justification.

Now that I'm all grown up I realise the gravity of my actions, how messed up it all was. I didn't realise it back then, I had to grow up to realise that. I have to live rememering what I've done as a teenager and it's not easy. Now I'm focusing on obsessing over fictional characters instead because they cannot commit atrocities in real life, it's safer to be obsessed with them (and also they're awesome)

Please guys, don't be like me. Think this over. Focus on the victims of the heinous crime, live your way to honour the victims instead 🥰 sooner or later you're going to grow up and realise how cringe and how wrong the Columbine phase was anyway.

Live your life in such a way that would make Rachel, Lauren, Cassie, Kelly, Daniel, Daniel, Kyle, Isaiah, Matthew, Steven, John, Corey, Dave proud ❤️

Surprising nobody, NoodleKittyRambles blocked me and ACP after we injected some inconvenient reality into her(?) stupid post.

>Yeah young kids can’t legally own firearms, but all these cases came from guns they got from their PARENTS.

You assume.

The Columbine shooters literally convinced adults to buy them guns. The straw purchasers went to jail. There’s also times when kids just straight up stole the guns from their parents’ insufficient security.

Theoretically, they could also steal it from someone else, or get it on the street.

Also, you didn’t specify. The entire point of your original post was that any shooting that fit the description would be damning. 

If you were vague, that’s on you.

I looked up the most recent shooting when I queued the post, and nobody said anything about where the kid got the gun.

And that's information OP didn't even have in the story. That's literally her whole point. 

So claiming her point was actually about kids getting access to guns is...odd. And it wouldn’t rebut my point about negligence being illegal.

I’m not sure if she’s lying, stupid, or if she mentally retconned her own point.

>And don’t even get me started on all the cases of TEENAGERS getting their hands on firearms COMPLETELY LEGALLY to shoot up their own schools.

You mean "teenagers who are legal adults bought firearms, as they are legally entitled to"?

>Making murder illegal doesn’t stop people from murdering. But restricting access to tool specifically made to kill others is better than whatever we currently have.

Except most guns are never used to shoot another person. And most of the ones that do are illegally owned already. 

And many guns are made specifically for hunting, varmint control, and range purposes. 

And they can kill people just as well as guns “specifically made to kill others”.

You’re also equating “made for self-defense” with “made for murder”. (Drink a sip.) And trying to punish a hundred million innocent gun owners for a few thousand criminals.

You can’t pretend your idea is the ongoing shooting issue, but also “guns scary, make them go away!”.

>Did you know that there are 120 guns for every 100 Americans? 

Yes, and? How often are guns used to commit violent crimes, compared to the amount of guns there are? Last time I checked, it was south of 1 in 10,000 or so, IIRC.

Have you ever tried actually persuading someone that doesn’t already agree with you?

Unless, of course, you were saying this to appeal to your followers and look like you’re winning.

>Did you know that our rate of gun related homicide is 4 times higher than every other country? If you combined all the mass shootings in the world, they still would not be able to beat the amount of shootings that have happened in America.

Speaking as someone from a country with a higher murder rate than America, who personally knew at least three murder victims, you are wrong. There are loads of countries like mine. 

That’s they the “correct” line only compares America to other “developed” countries. And ignores the overall homicide rate, of course.

I don’t have the mass shooting stat to hand, but I’d bet that’s wrong too. *

This article says otherwise, but it also says the US only had about 101 mass shootings over 20 years.

Five shootings a year.

In a country with hundreds of millions of guns.

Doesn’t seem like much of a problem. 

Especially since we have no idea how many of those shootings were with illegal guns.

Besides Columbine, of course.

I also notice that you’ve stopped talking about school shootings. Or even your original argument. Almost like you’re just spouting whatever comes to mind that’ll score points.

> #tw gun#gun control#tw shooting#I’m not gonna respond to anyone else on this post#I don’t wanna have to deal with gun loving people on this site

“I’m making posts about gun control, but I don’t want to actually talk to the people I disagree with or address their criticisms.”

Class, notice how Kitty doesn’t actually refer to a single specific incident, or provide any actual evidence. 

*EDIT: Since I drafted this post, I did get the stat. The top for per capita mass shooting deaths was actually Norway. 

When I told the guy I was arguing with, he tried to pretend his point wasn’t (explicitly) “more gun ownership = more mass shootings”, but  “a lot of guns = a lot of mass shootings”. 

Then I pointed to Switzerland, which has only slightly less guns than Norway, and much less mass shootings. Or Germany and France, which have about 1/6th the ownership of America, but much less mass shooting deaths.

He still refused to throw in the towel. He suddenly started talking about the specific gun storage laws both countries had - even though he had only talked about the ownership rate earlier - and refused to explain how those laws were “preventing” mass shootings. 

And he didn’t discuss Norway or Switzerland at all.

EDIT 2: Since I queued this post, I checked the stats for my home country. We have strict gun control, and a much higher gun murder rate than Freedomland. So Noodles is blatantly wrong about that too.

Game Spotlight #7: Snatcher (1994)

Acquired Stardust's next game spotlight is here! This time Ash takes a look back at the first title in Hideo Kojima's portfolio that one would probably call a 'Kojima game' in the Sega CD port of Konami's Snatcher, a traditional Japanese-style adventure game, with an examination of some of the history and culture around its American release!

Popular wisdom recalls that the ESRB was founded in 1994 in response to the moral panic surrounding the earlier 1992 release of Mortal Kombat, but this collective memory is missing a few details - namely that it wasn't Mortal Kombat alone that created the panic. It was a trio of games, all released in 1992, that caused the mainstream American culture to pay attention to the medium, which had begun to enter its edgy teenage phase, and it did not like what it saw.

Sega CD classic Night Trap was one of the most prominent releases in the then-popular Full Motion Video field, essentially an interactive campy d-tier horror movie that tasked players with protecting the residents of a house besieged by bumbling, uncoordinated creepers with the timely use of trap doors via security camera operation. It was vaguely sort of voyeuristic in the way that likely titillated the senses of teenagers in 1994 before widespread access to the internet, but otherwise mostly unremarkable and had little redeeming qualities. Konami's own Lethal Enforcers was the third game in the trio, a fairly standard arcade shooter featuring a realistic revolver-type handgun for players to use as a controller along with Mortal Kombat style digitized actors for its visuals.

Long before Columbine at the end of the decade, these three games were singled out as essentially the harbinger of the doom of a generation of American youths, allegedly promoting violence and sexual assault against women, prompting a series of US senate hearings the following year best summed up by Democratic senator from Wisconsin Herb Kohl's stern warning on the industry needing to reign itself in: "If you don't do something about it, we will".

It's certainly true that the video game industry had begun to experiment with new, different and edgier games that would increase in their edginess in the years to come (Duke Nukem for example was released a mere 3 years after the senate hearings), but it was abundantly clear to anyone who was paying attention (and indeed anyone with a brain) that this was largely a shallow echo of the ongoing satanic panic which had the country collectively clutching its pearls since the 1980s. Night Trap was certainly not endorsing sexual violence against women (and its content was far more tame than was asserted even by the standards of 1993), and Lethal Enforcers was simply a very standard arcade shooter following the digitized graphical trend with a realistic (though brightly-colored) peripheral. However, the industry responded to the hearings in relatively short order with the creation of the ESRB (that's the Entertainment Software Ratings Board) in September of 1994, meant to advise consumers on the content of the video games they were buying in an effort to help police the perceived wild moral decay corrupting America's youth. It was somehow in this climate that Konami decided that it was time to bring Hideo Kojima's PC-88 adventure game Snatcher (originally released in Japan in 1988) to the west for the first time with an upgraded port.

While the video game scene in America had begun to show signs of maturing into its teenage years, Japan had at this point a well known pop culture machine churning out plenty of violent and sexual content (not without its own local controversy I might add), and was no stranger to content not meant for children. Typically when an American thinks of Japanese adventure games they think of Capcom's popular later Ace Attorney series, and might consider Snatcher the direct predecessor of it, but the genre has a very long history on Japanese PCs with a large number of games, often of a pornographic nature, released. It's a chapter of gaming history that is poorly preserved, particularly in the west (where it is often unknown that Enix, famous for its Dragon Quest series, started with releases of erotic adventure games in 1983), but is an important link between the two games.

Particularly foundational for the Japanese adventure game genre was 1983's Portopia Serial Murders, a game by future Dragon Quest creator Yuuji Horii, responsible for popularizing the interface and style of virtually every game in the genre to follow. Of particular note it was a young Hideo Kojima, future creator of the Metal Gear franchise, who took heavy inspiration from Portopia, seeing the adventure game genre and their cinematic nature as his pathway into doing the next best thing to what he'd always wanted to do: creating movies. And so Snatcher was born.

Snatcher is set in the fictional Neo Kobe city, a cyberpunk dystopia heavily inspired by Blade Runner, and while the video game industry may have been maturing into its teenage years, it is incredibly striking how adult Snatcher immediately comes across. Opening with a fully-voiced narration about a catastrophic Russian biohazard that killed 80% of the populace preceding the appearance of what are essentially Blade Runner's replicants (the titular snatchers), main character Gillian Seed bids farewell to the wife he recently underwent a separation with and sets off to join Neo Kobe's JUNKERs, a special police force tasked with hunting down and eliminating snatchers.

Snatcher stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries in not just the content of its story but the sophistication with which it is told. It boggles the mind that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Donkey Kong Country, incredible games in their own right, are some of the big mainstream releases of 1994 while this was also on store shelves. Immediately obvious through its incredible opening cinematic is a hallmark of creator/writer/director Hideo Kojima's titles all the way to the present day: they are incredibly dense and feature an almost overwhelming level of worldbuilding. Arriving at JUNKER headquarters only hammers the point home, with the player able to research a number of in-world historical topics that play out across multiple lengthy encyclopedia entries. While it is not necessary to fully explore these (the player does receive a few answers to later characters' questions in two entries), it goes a very long way to making the world feel very real which is an effect that the game achieves very well out of the gate with its flawed protagonist picking up the pieces and attempting to rebuild his life after a failed marriage with or without his former wife, itself a very realistic struggle that many can relate to. Another hallmark of Hideo Kojima titles is present in the form of abundant easter eggs and meta humor, with just one example of such easter eggs being that the player can use a phone obtained early in the game to call one Taeko Hayasaka (then a spokeswoman for Konami) as well as the localization director Jeremy Blaustein and receive some special dialogue.

Playing out across three acts, the player follows Gillian's investigation into the snatcher crisis gripping Neo Kobe city which threatens to spill over into the world at large all while grappling with his own amnesia stemming from a mysterious incident before the start of the game. It's worth noting that another hallmark of Kojima video games was present in the original 1988 release of Snatcher in the form of deadlines cutting his project into dramatically shorter form, where a planned six acts was cut to a mere two. Ending on a severe cliffhanger up until this generation of ports where the final third act was added in an attempt to wrap up the ongoing storyline as best as possible, the third act was somewhat controversial at the time due to its linearity in comparison with the rest of the game which is rather open in its accommodation of player sidetracking.

Though toned down in its Sega CD port to the west, Snatcher features a very surprising level of gore and sexuality (all while somehow only achieving a rating of T for teen from the ESRB) that can catch people even today unprepared for it. A clearly defiant Konami takes several shots in-game at the then-current moral panic around video games and the senate hearings that resulted in the creation of the ESRB, and it's hard to deny that had the game received more contemporary attention that it probably would've been hugely controversial in the mainstream for its violence and sexual content (much of which is based around the absurdity of being able to investigate people you meet, leading to everyone from JUNKER chief Cunningham to daughter of fellow JUNKER Katrina thinking you're an unhinged lunatic). The game does have a reputation for allowing the player to behave in a creepy manner towards female characters, itself an oft-criticized element of Hideo Kojima's works, and while that is true in some respects I found it of particular note that Gillian is able to 'investigate' every single character in the game regardless of gender (much to their dismay) and that not only is this never actually required to progress in the game, there are instances where being creepy towards female characters can result in the player being actively punished. Just because Gillian can doesn't mean that he should - a good lesson to all you people struggling with self-control out there.

All the things one typically associates with a Hideo Kojima title are present in Snatcher, including heavy inspiration from cinema, self-referential elements such as Gillian partnering with a very familiar robot sidekick appropriately named Metal Gear, to dense narratives told with an astounding level of worldbuilding and flavor, all through the style of using familiar concepts such as a setting very inspired by Blade Runner to get its foot in the door before making a hard left turn into original wonderful sci-fi insanity that culminates in what can only be described as 'a very Hideo Kojima' third act, and if you're familiar with his work you likely know exactly what that means.

The graphics and storytelling are excellent, featuring some incredible writing and localization for the time. Thanks to the Sega CD's disc-based nature the game boasts very good quality music and even a shocking level of voice work which is also similarly surprisingly high quality for a release from 1994 (though there are a few lines which fall flat), as many wouldn't consider the golden age of English voiceover dubs to start for another several years. Extremely ahead of its time in a year when we were still playing as giant gorillas jumping on crocodiles, the incredibly intricate story of Gillian Seed won't be something I forget and has held up remarkably well, serving as a great early example of the depth of experiences that gaming would come to host, particularly in the indie game scene which produces experiences often very relatable and impactful to players with a similar 'art from the artist' vibe.

In a time where the industry was beginning to reflect the sensibilities of a teenager, Snatcher largely feels very adult and manages to impress with its content and sophistication even to the present day. Hideo Kojima's freshman effort laid the groundwork for an incredible portfolio of titles and is worth experiencing for anyone who are fans of Japanese-style adventure games, visual novels, cyberpunk, or just plain good stuff.

A gem hidden among the stones, Snatcher is undoubtedly stardust.

--Ash

Good Omens reading time. :-) 

Young Warlock and Adam are finally eleven, or nearly. The time for nannies and tutors and satanic nuns and what-not is past. The Hellhound approacheth. And let me tell you, if things had to get so colossally mixed up it’s damned lucky (or something in any case) that they got mixed up in precisely this way. 

See, if you’ve only seen the miniseries you’d be excused for thinking Warlock is a charmingly normal preteen boy. He likes his video games. He tells charming little stories in a lisp about how the gardener says he must always be careful not to hurt slugs. He’s bored with his mother and really would have preferred teenage mutant ninja turtles or some such rather than magicians for his birthday, but he’s basically a normal boy his age. Which he is in a way, at least for his family’s being so rich and privileged. And that’s precisely the problem, isn’t it?

"You, my fine jack-sauce. Come here. Now, if you inspect your breast pocket, I think you might find a fine silk handkerchief."

"Nossir. 'Mafraidnotsir," said the guard, staring straight ahead.

Aziraphale winked desperately. "No, go on, dear boy, take a look, please. "

The guard reached a hand inside his inside pocket, looked surprised, and pulled out a handkerchief, duck-egg-blue silk, with lace edging. Aziraphale realized almost immediately that the lace had been a mistake, as it caught on the guard's holstered gun, and sent it spinning across the room to land heavily in a bowl of jelly.

The children applauded spasmodically. "Hey, not bad!" said the pony-tailed girl. Warlock had already run across the room, and grabbed the gun.

"Hands up, dogbreaths!" he shouted gleefully. The security guards were in a quandary.

Some of them fumbled for their own weapons; others started edging their way toward, or away from, the boy. The other children started complaining that they wanted guns as well, and a few of the more forward ones started trying to tug them from the guards who had been thoughtless enough to take their weapons out.

Then someone threw some jelly at Warlock.

The boy squeaked, and pulled the trigger of the gun. It was a Magnum .32, CIA issue, gray, mean, heavy, capable of blowing a man away at thirty paces, and leaving nothing more than a red mist, a ghastly mess, and a certain amount of paperwork.

Aziraphale blinked.

A thin stream of water squirted from the nozzle and soaked Crowley, who had been looking out the window, trying to see if there was a huge black dog in the garden.

Aziraphale looked embarrassed.

Then a cream cake hit him in the face. It was almost five past three.

This is a child with no real concept of consequences. He and his friends (or guests, at least) aren’t precisely bad, they’re eleven and clearly haven’t spent much of those eleven years learning a thing or two about consequences. So when a gun pops out by accident, their first instinct is to go “Cool!” Warlock reaches out and grabs it; a lot of his guests try to unarm their own guards so they can have the same.

I tell you, 23 years post-Columbine, this whole scene just hits differently. The girl’s comment (forgive the slur; this is a quote) that Aziraphale was “rubbish, and probably a faggot” has a different impact too. But I’m old enough to remember the slur bit was definitely learned behavior, that while there was certainly very serious homophobia in the world, not everyone used language like that quite so casually. This is something that girl has heard from the adults in her life, she knows it’s meant to hurt, but she sees no reason not to sling it around so casually. Because for her there isn’t. She has a thought, she does it. And similarly for Warlock: he sees a gun, goes “cool!”, grabs it up, gets surprised by a bit of flying jelly, and pulls the trigger.

Today we have a word for this: affluenza. I don’t think I’d have known it if I read Good Omens back when it was published. And this was pre-Brock Turner and so many others like him, so I don’t think I would have been as attuned to how dangerous it really is. Even now, I’m more likely to view this as people being deeply damaged by the system that enables them more than being really bad people, even though the solution has to be more responsibility and consequences, not less. I pity them, up to a point at least, even as I hate the thought of them going unpunished for the harm they cause.

But just think of an eleven-year-old Brock Turner being the actual antichrist. What a bullet to have dodged! (If you’ll pardon the pun.) Thank Someone. And what a chilling realization to realize just how many of these kids grow up to have that same power to shift reality to their whims. Though arguably that’s a big part of the point.

Moving on to Adam, he really does strike me as this decent, normal kid. Not particularly good or bad, just normal like I and my friends were at eleven. And it strikes me he’s surrounded by actual individuals. Wensley, who “all that separated this voice from chartered accountancy was a matter of time.” Pepper, so attuned to sexism and fairness who we later learn was raised on a hippie commune. They bring their own bits and emphases to this normal act of play; I don’t remember that we were ever even given a name for any of Warlock’s guests. And that strikes me as important. Adam, for all his untapped power, isn’t used to thinking of himself as the only one that matters.

Aside from all that, though, there’s just great fun writing throughout this section, generally, but this is probably my favorite:

There was a thoughtful pause. The hound slunk closer, and realized that the voices were coming from a hole in the ground.

The trees in fact concealed an ancient chalk quarry, now half overgrown with thorn trees and vines. Ancient, but clearly not disused. Tracks crisscrossed it; smooth areas of slope indicated regular use by skateboards and Wall-of-Death, or at least Wall-of-Seriously-Grazed-Knee, cyclists. Old bits of dangerously frayed rope hung from some of the more accessible greenery. Here and there sheets of corrugated iron and old wooden boards were wedged in branches. A burnt-out, rusting Triumph Herald Estate was visible, half-submerged in a drift of nettles.

In one corner a tangle of wheels and corroded wire marked the site of the famous Lost Graveyard where the supermarket trolleys came to die.

If you were a child, it was paradise. The local adults called it The Pit.

If you know your Bible, you might perk up at that name. It was a kind ofmetaphor for Sheol, which most of us would connect with Hell (not 100% accurately, but also not entirely wrong either). For Adam it’s a paradise of sorts, and the weird thing is he’s not wrong. I would have loved to build forts and poke at slugs with sticks in a bit of wilderness just like this.

The bits about the dog are brilliant, too, but scattered about and hard to quote to give you the full effect. You should really read them if you have the book, though. They definitely left me smiling. Though I’m not 100% at ease. A Hound is still a Hound, after all, even if he now answers to Dog.

erm haii

So, you're a weird teenage girl with no friends who's into horror and serial killers? same.

name: isabella or kenny.

i am a 🫘er.

she/they.

i like creepypasta, mlp, tcc, gore, art, zero day, writing ,shooters, nge and fashion.

i live in columbine state😇😇.

also I listen to MIDwest emo :3. and ig rap.. and peso pluma and like bts😪😪.

i also love pink sm.

dm me if u wanna be pals.

Why do I feel like most people into Columbine fall into two categories. Either they act like Eric and Dylan are infallible Gods, and we should treat their every word like gospel because they were so deep, OR people see them as just stupid edgy teenagers who had nothing substantial to say. Like yes! I find a lot of what they said to be fascinating! But I also think they were sometimes just stupid teenage boys who said stupid things!

Balance people. Balance.

Who are these people who went to these high schools in which there were ANY class periods that you didn’t actually have to go to!

Study halls! Free periods! “Geometry reviews!”

Was this a thing invented for the purpose of being able to write television shows in which you could show teenagers just aimlessly lounging around their high schools? Making out in the boiler room? Or were there actually high schools like this? Because mine was well on its way to being a panopticon by the time I was there, and that was still pre-Columbine.

???

don't mind me, I'm just having a weird flashback to what it was like as a goth teenager after Columbine, because Tumblr keeps showing me some kid posting in #kmfdm about the *mass shooter* corner of the "true crime" fandom

like, oh yeah, "I like industrial music and my favorite mass killing was that guy who tried to shoot up a sorority, second place is the bowl cut who shot up a Bible study at a black church" gtfo