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morethanaprincess-a · 4 years

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6, 7 & 22

Mun’s Asks: RP Edition

I’m going to answer 22 first as it’ll be the longest. Also, a disclaimer:

The question asks for five blogs I recommend to my followers. While I tried to choose five muns based on a variety of criteria, I want it to be clear that if I’m writing with you and you are not listed here, it doesn’t mean I don’t recommend you. Honestly, I could probably answer this question plenty more times with new blogs each time. The better answer to this question is to comb through my blog and see who I’m writing with, as I recommend them if we’re writing or have written threads together.

However, I tried to choose blogs/muns that really do inspire me, contribute great work and/or rph to the community, and aren’t only Danganronpa blogs. Additionally, I tried to choose blogs who have posted IC content in the past two weeks.

22. If you could recommend at least five blogs to your followers, who would they be?

Okay, here we go! Five blogs and/or muns that you should be following:

@the-taboo-king - Literally no surprise if you’ve been following me for awhile. I will always be a fan of blogs that put so much thought, time, and effort into taking a canon character and truly developing that character into their own. There’s an excellent balance between main/canon verses, AUs, aesthetics, and crack over here and if you need some writing inspiration? Just read any of their threads. Literally, any of them. Each one of my Sonia and Gundham threads pushes me to be a better writer, to develop my Sonia further from ‘safe’ canon tropes and I’m always grateful for that. These threads are just a joy to write and I’d say that if you have a Danganronpa character or verse and you’re not writing with this Gundham, you’re severely missing out.

I liked Sondam before I joined the DR RPC. Now? It’s probably my favorite DR ship for Sonia.

@gungambled / @thawedfrost / @spiritusvendid - Because these are all the same mun, they’re all listed here. All of Kitty’s blogs deserve to be in the spotlight! Admittedly, I’m currently only writing with her Celestia at this time (Sonia and Celestia - future BFFs in the making!), but she gives each one of her muses such a unique voice and insight. Her dialogue is excellent and you really get the sense of who each one of her muses is, whether you’re familiar with the source material or not. Kitty’s also so fun to talk to OOC (possibly because we have some of the same hobbies and enjoy making crack plots about our muses)! It’s a treat when she shares mun photos, as she’s a fantastic makeup artist and cosplayer (And I always support fellow cosplayers and roleplayers, two big time-consuming hobbies!).

@spurnedadulthood - I talk about Livi a lot over here. There’s good reason for that: Livi’s Kensuke Hibiki comes from a game and anime that aren’t too popular over here on tumblr, but with a ton of verses available, Kensuke can come pester your muse almost anywhere. And while his personality takes some getting used to (he’s. a. GREMLIN.), Livi writes him with such sincerity and devotion to his source material that, for the most part, you just have to laugh and shake your head with every response. Also? I’d never heard of the Caligula franchise before writing with Livi. It took about three RP turns for me to fire up Crunchyroll and watch the entire anime to better understand Kensuke and the Caligula verse (I’m not the greatest at those types of games, so the anime was much easier for me to digest!). It’s very rare that I’m inspired to seek out a muse’s source material if I’m unfamiliar with them, but I can attribute that to Livi’s characterizations and writing skills. I’m pretty sure Livi has more than one blog, too? An OC, I think? Anyway, if Livi’s writing a muse, follow that blog.

@trinitytalents - I admit, I am a bit picky when it comes to OC blogs. However, I really like what 7th has done with the variety of Danganronpa OCs that make up the killing game Project Trinity. With a variety of muses to choose from, 7th has made sure each one has a distinct personality, history, talent, and more, and all of them will fit right in with your Danganronpa muse or verse! I’m a bit partial to Satomi and Atsuko myself, but there’s an Ultimate Stylist Sonia needs to meet. In short, 7th brings their original creations to life so well with respect to the franchise that has inspired them and is just a fantastic example of a multi-muse OC blog. I just wish there was more art of all of the Project Trinity students!

@sadisticbloodlxst - For those who are familiar with the Diabolik Lovers franchise, you’ll know that a lot of the subjects in the games and shows are not for the faint of heart. However, this blog handles all of them with such eloquence while writing for every member of the Sakamaki and Mukami families! That’s a lot of muses with a lot of different personalities, histories, and perhaps most importantly in DL, reasons why they’re just not very nice vampires. Each character is so distinct, with writing full of emotion even when the muse themselves is determined to stay stone-faced. They’re taking a small break right now, but when they return, it’s a blog you should be reaching out to if you’re a fan of Diabolik Lovers (or dark plots, angst, nsfw, etc) at all, even just to read the various threads going on with plenty of other muses. Yes, I’m nosy and enjoy reading what all of their muses are up to! I can’t wait to keep developing Sonia’s storyline with Ruki and eventually, maybe, having her meet more of the cast.

6. What are your thoughts on the current roleplay trends on here right now?

I’m not sure what counts as a current roleplay trend, so to speak, but I’ll give this a shot:

- Google doc rules are a good thing, especially to access on mobile. I should do one myself. A lot of times I’ll get followed and I’ve only got my phone or tablet to check out a blog, and a google docs linked in mobile helps me decide much more quickly if I want to follow someone.

- Blogs and promos that focus so much on aesthetics that you cannot read the posts on their blog or you cannot find the rules/muses/info easily on the theme irk me. I’m much less likely to have the patience to move my cursor around your blog trying to find the smallest possible icon to hover over for ‘rules’ than if you have a sidebar icon that just says, plainly, ‘rules.’ My reasoning of following a blog always comes down to: do our rules/values/interests match and can I work with this mun’s writing? No matter how pretty the blog is, if I can’t work with your IC content, I’m probably not going to follow.

- Patience with replies needs to be understood more by the RPC in general. Just because memes and threads are posted doesn’t mean every mun can get to them quickly. It’s fine to ask someone after a week or so (Vacation and other hiatus reasons aside), but before that? Patience. Interact with more muns, post promos, drabble, create moodboards or song lists, or even find more muses to write. Don’t worry, people will eventually respond.

- I wish group blog promos and indie blog promos had different tags. Even in the fandom-specific promo tags. It’s irritating to try and get a promo in the appropriate tags only to have it buried by group blog promos, often mass-spammed with content that isn’t even promo content.

7. What is the one trend you miss the most that’s no longer popular or seen as much as it was before?

I’m not sure if it was just not a trend or just not as further developed, but I miss the RP days of Livejournal and Greatestjournal. A lot less weird formatting and focus on coordinating blog icons in every post. I think for OCs, icons definitely help. But for canon characters that, presumably, the person you’re writing with is familiar with, it’s tiresome to add. Especially if you’re on the tumblr app.

In general, I just miss more of the focus being on writing: developing skills, brainstorming, etc, instead of aesthetics. Whether it’s the blog style or mass-sharing aesthetic posts, I just wish it was more evenly distributed with written IC content in some places.

#more-than-a-princess answered #more-than-a-princess musings #(Mun's Asks: RP Edition)#(Thanks for the ask!)#(Sorry this took so long: it was going to be a long post due to 22)#trinitytalents

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rwby-redux · 4 years

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Preface

RWBY is the breakthrough anime web series created by the late Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth. Originally teased on November 5th, 2012, and officially debuted July 18th, 2013, the series follows the journeys of four young women enrolled in an academy that trains monster-slaying warriors known as Huntsmen. Set in the fictional world of Remnant, the story initially focuses on the surface-level plot of fighting against humanity’s ancient adversary, the ever-present Creatures of Grimm; over time, it becomes apparent that things aren’t what they seem, as the cast slowly begins to connect a string of heists committed by a criminal syndicate with the violent acts of a terrorist cell. The series is aired weekly on Rooster Teeth’s website, with its main arcs spanning 12 – 16 episodes per volume. In the years following the show’s initial release, RWBY has spawned numerous merchandise and related media, including two spin-off shows, multiple side-stories published as mangas, two standalone books, three mobile games, a behind-the-scenes artbook, and OSTs for every volume to date.

As of Volume 7 there are 98 episodes in total with a collective runtime of 18:52:00, or approximately 1,132 minutes, with more episodes and side content underway.

At best, they’re visually interesting; at worst, they’re disappointing.

Let me take a second to backtrack before the lynch mob starts to sharpen its pitchforks. The series deserves much of the praise that it’s gotten. RWBY was the first American-produced anime to be released in Japan (and if you’re a fan of anime, you know how insane those words sound). The 3D models and animation from Volume 4 onward are breathtakingly stunning, and even before the show made the leap from Poser to Maya, the fight sequences managed to be equally creative and entertaining. The show was nominated for and received multiple Streamy Awards, and was awarded Best Animated Series by the International Academy of Web Television. The Volume 1 soundtrack reached number one on iTunes, beating out the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Such is RWBY’s (and Rooster Teeth’s) reputation that it managed to attract the attention of, and later bring on, industry veterans and vocal legends such as Jen Taylor, Josh Grelle, and Aaron Dismuke.

That’s to say nothing of the fandom this franchise has amassed, of kids, teenagers, and young adults alike. RWBY has generated dozens of forums dedicated to fanfiction, fanart, and roleplaying. Thousands of people the world over have bonded over this show, fans from all walks of life. They’re passionate about this series. The fact that I’m writing this post is a testimony of that. If I didn’t care about RWBY, I wouldn’t be sitting on my couch at 3 AM, hunched over my laptop in my pajamas.

If RWBY is so good (or occasionally threatens to become good), you might be wondering, why, then, does this blog exist?

Well, because…when you stop and look at it critically, it actually kind of sucks.

Despite initially being written by a three-man team, the series is full of inconsistencies and an underdeveloped cast. The characters, especially from Volumes 1 — 3, are full of one-dimensional stereotypes whose contributions to the story amount to a three-word summary: “The School Bully,” “The Wacky Professors,” “The Racist Cop,” “The Cutthroat Bitch,” “The Anime Waifu,” “The Audience Surrogate,” “Discount Elle Woods,” and so on. Fundamental elements of the story, like Aura, Semblance, and Dust, are either poorly-explained or not explained at all, and the limitations of those core concepts can change at a moment’s notice to suit the needs of the plot. The primary antagonist of the first three volumes is universally hated by the fandom for having no discernible motivations beyond being “ambitious and power-hungry,” and having a personality that consists exclusively of irritating smug. The show-writers, despite repeatedly promising queer representation, have failed to make even one of their ten central protagonists queer. This isn’t touching upon the fact that the first openly-gay character on the show was an antagonist, or that the next two were side-characters who were relevant to the plot for all of seven episodes, before vanishing from the story entirely. The two leads that are currently being hyped as our first queer main-cast members have only been repeatedly teased, with said characters never once uttering the words, “I’m bi,” “I date women,” “I’m not straight”—nothing but narrative subtext and playful winks from the VAs whenever a fan asks if they’re queer. Subplots end up having no pay-off or get entirely forgotten mid-volume. The story is so protagonist-biased that the heroes are frequently able to get away with being hypocritical, or committing criminal acts because “it was the right thing to do,” with their POV framed as an infallible “fuck you, got mine” verbal gut-punch to the audience (while other characters in the show, who often make the exact same calls as the heroes, are ridiculed by the show and the fandom). Whenever the story isn’t spray-painting stolen cars and selling them to their original owners, it manages to clumsily handle allegories for real-world issues such as systemic racism, mental illness, abuse dynamics/victim survivorship, and gray morality. The worldbuilding is absent from the main show and has to be supplemented through RWBY’s spin-off series World of Remnant. The story’s setting feels flat and lifeless at times because the “cultures” of this world are never established.

The list goes on and on.

So if this show has so many flaws, why are we still having this conversation?

Because I’m captivated by the untapped potential of this world. When you brush away all of the detritus, you can see the wealth of raw material buried beneath. This is a world where the gods have forsaken their creations, with one having even deliberately created the monsters that hunt humanity. The two characters who are central to the history of this world are tragic figures, one cursed with immortality as a punishment for demanding that the gods revise the first draft, and do away with needless death; and the other, cursed to ceaselessly reincarnate into the minds and bodies of like-minded souls, waging a war of attrition against a person warped beyond recognition by the capricious spite of the gods. This is a world of forgotten magic, of shifting allegiances, of characters embarking on personal journeys and unearthing deadly secrets. It’s a story of people from all walks of life learning to cooperate and work together, forging friendships and alliances in order to face the challenges that lie ahead.

It could easily have the bones of an epic fantasy series as long as it remembers to drink its milk.

RWBY’s issues aren’t insurmountable. Most of them are the byproduct of the series’ blind adherence to “rule of cool,” the motto that practically codified the beginning of the show. From Volume 4 onward, the series took a radical shift in tone that tried to be “more mature,” and only succeeded in making the earlier episodes absurd in hindsight. Why, in Volume 6, are the characters concerned about civilian endangerment, when in Volume 2 they happily pursued a giant mech in a highway car-chase scene that would’ve caused untold collateral damage and civilian death? This change in storytelling created a thematic disparity that reoccurs time and time again, retroactively emphasizing just how inconsistent the worldbuilding and storytelling are.

It tried to be Avatar: The Last Airbender, and what we’re left with instead is Game of Thrones Season 8.

Now, I’m not using this blog as a platform to damn Monty Oum (or claim to be a better creator than him). But it’s important to address the flaws in his story, and to acknowledge that his passing doesn’t make RWBY somehow sacrosanct or immune to constructive criticism. RWBY has flaws, ranging from nitpicky to potentially capable of causing real-world harm (in the case of the aforementioned queerbaiting and racism analogies). I’m a firm believer that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; art is informed by our beliefs just as much as art informs our beliefs. We can still respect and admire the potential RWBY has to offer, while being mindful of where it needs to improve.

That’s where this blog comes in.

At the end of the day, the RWBY Redux exists as a thought experiment. I’m writing it chiefly to entertain worldbuilding ideas and headcanons I’ve spent years musing on. I’m not asking readers to agree with any of my numerous stances, nor am I going to shy away from other fans’ criticism as I hammer this project out. With a little TLC, perhaps I’ll manage to create something that manages to be more complex than its source material. And if you choose to follow along with my endeavors, hopefully you’ll find this project equal parts engaging and entertaining.

Wish me luck.

#preface #deconstruction #writing

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chiseler · 4 years

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The Head -- It Just Won’t Stay Dead

In the early 1960s, the overwhelming majority of European horror films imported to the United States were either British or Italian, the British films being easily understood and the Italian ones frequently pretending to be of British origin. Examples of French horror were rare (odd for a country whose cinema was so rooted in the fantastique), reaching an early apex with Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), which came to the US in a well-done English dub called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus during the Halloween season of 1962.

Seldom paid much attention in retrospectives of this fertile period in continental horror cinema is a rare German example, Die Nackte und der Satan (“The Naked and the Devil,” 1959), which came to the US retitled The Head almost exactly one year before the arrival of the Franju masterpiece. Critics like to refer to The Head as “odd” and “atmospheric,” words that seem to disregard deeper consideration, never really coming to terms with it as anything but a sleazy shock trifle. However, it was in fact the product of a remarkable and rarely equaled concentration of accomplished patrimonies.

Consider this: The Head starred the great Swiss actor Michel Simon, renowned for his roles in Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and Boudu Saved From Drowning; it was directed by the Russian-born Victor Trivas, returning to his adopted homeland for the first time since directing Niemandsland (1932, aka No Man’s Land or Hell On Earth), a potent anti-war statement that was all but obliterated off the face of the earth by the Nazis when he fled the country, and who furthermore had written the story upon which Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) was based; it was photographed by Georg Krause, whose numerous international credits include Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957); its sets were designed by Hermann Warm, the genius responsible for such German Expressionist masterpieces as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), as well as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932), and its score is a wild patchwork of library tracks by Willy Mattes, the Erwin Lehn Orchestra, and a group of avant garde musicians known as Lasry-Baschet, who would subsequently lend their eerie, ethereal music to Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus (1960). If all this were not enough, The Head was also filmed at the Munich studios of Arnold Richter, the co-founder of the Arri Group, innovators of the famous Arriflex cameras and lenses.

Though made after the 1957 horror breakthroughs made in Britain and Italy (Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein, and I vampiri, co-directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava), The Head represented a virtual revolutionary act in postwar Germany, where horror was then considered a genre to avoid. The project was proposed to Trivas by a young film producer named Wolfgang C. Hartwig, head of Munich’s Rapid-Film, whose claim to fame was initiating a niche of exploitation cinema known as Sittenfilme – literally “moral movies” – which, like many American exploitation films of the 1930s, maintained a higher, judgmental moral tone while telling the stories of people who slipped into lives of vice (prostitution, blackmail, drug addiction), their sordid experiences always leading them to a happy or at least bittersweet outcome. Though it goes quite a bit further than either Britain or Italy had yet gone in terms of sexualizing horror, The Head nevertheless checked all the boxes required for Sittenfilme and was undertaken by Hartwig in early 1959 as Rapid-Film’s most prestigious production to date.

After the main titles are spelled out over an undulating nocturnal fog, the story begins with a lurker’s shadow passing along outside the gated property of Prof. Dr. Abel. With its round head and wide-brimmed hat, it looks like the planet Saturn from the neck up. When this marauder pauses to pay some gentle attention to a passing tortoise, we get our first look at the film’s real star - Horst Frank, just thirty at the time, his clammy asexual aura topped off with prematurely graying hair and large triangular eyebrows that seem carried over from the days of German Expressionism. More bizarre still, he later gives his name as Dr. Ood, whose explanation is still more bizarre: at the age of three months old, he was orphaned, the sole survivor of a cataclysmic shipwreck .

“That was the name of the wrecked ship,” he explains. “S.S. Ood.”

The ambiguous Ood takes cover as another late night visitor comes calling: a hunchbacked woman wearing a nurse’s habit as outsized as an oxygen tent. This is Sister Irene Sanders (the screen debut of Karin Kernke, later seen in the Edgar Wallace krimi The Terrible People, 1960). Though Irene cuts a figure as ambiguous and unusual as any Franju ever filmed, she owes her greatest debt to Jane Adams’ hunchbacked Nina in Erle C. Kenton’s House of Dracula (1945). As with Nina, Irene lives in the hope that her deformity can be eradicated by the skill of a brilliant surgeon.

When Irene leaves after meeting with Dr. Abel, Ood presents himself with the written recommendation of a colleague he previously, supposedly, assisted. A burly old walrus of a man, Abel (Michel Simon) already has two younger associates, Dr. Walter Burke (Kurt Müller-Graf, “a first class surgeon”) and the handsome, muscular Burt Jaeger (Helmut Schmid), who hasn’t been quite the same since an unexplained brain operation. Both associates share a creative streak; Burke is also “an excellent architect, [who] designed this house,” while Jaeger “designed my special operating table; it allows me to work without assistants.” (So why does he have two of them? With names that sound the same, no less!) Given the high caliber of Hermann Warm’s talent as a production designer, Burke and Burt together are every bit as skilled in architecture as was Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). The main floor of Abel’s sprawling house is dominated by a vast spiral stairwell, striking low-backed furniture, a mobile of dancing palette shapes, and an overpowering wall reproducing Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virtuvian Man.” Down in the lab, Burt’s robotic surgical assistant looks as if it might have been conceived by the brain responsible for the Sadean mind control device in Jess Franco’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965) - a film that, along with Franco’s earlier The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), seems considerably more indebted to Trivas on renewed acquaintance than to Franju. The film was shot in black-and-white and at no point inside Abel’s abode do the silvery, ivory surfaces admit even the possibility of pigment.

Adding to its effect, the music heard whenever the film cuts back to Abel’s place is anything but homey. It consists of a single, sustained electric keyboard chord played in a nightmarish loop that seems to chill and vibrate, its predictable arc punctuated now and again with icy spikes of cornet. Though I don’t recall reading any extensive discussion of the film’s music, The Head represents what is surely the most important advance in electronic music in the wake of Louis & Bebe Barron’s work on Forbidden Planet (1956). Though the film’s music credits list bandleader Willy Mattes, Jacques Lasry and the Edwin Lehr Orchestra with its music, the most important musical credit is displaced. Further down the screen is the unexplained “Sound Structure, Lasry-Baschet.”

Lasry-Baschet was a musical combination of two partnerships – that of brothers Francois and Bernard Baschet, and the husband-and-wife team of Jacques and Yvonne Lasry. The two brothers were musicians who played astonishing instruments of their own invention, like the Crystal Baschet (played with moistened fingers on glass rods), the Aluminum Piano, the Inflatable Guitar, the Rotating Whistler, and the Polytonal Percussion. The Lasry couple, originally a pianist and organist, began performing with the Baschets on their unique devices in the mid 1950s. Some of the music they produced during this period is collected on the albums Sonata Exotique (credited to Structures for Sound, covering the years 1957-1959) and Structures For Sound (credited to the Baschet Brothers alone, 1963), a vinyl release by the Museum of Modern Art. These and other recorded works can be found on YouTube, as well; they are deeply moving ambient journeys but I cannot say with certainty that they include any of the music from The Head. That said, the music they do collect is very much in its macabre character and would have also fit very well into Last Year At Marienbad (1961) or any of Franju’s remarkable films.

When Ood meets with Abel and expresses his keen interest in experimental research, the good doctor mentions that he has had success copying “the recent Russian surgery” that succeeded in keeping the severed head of a dog alive – however, his moral code prevents him from taking such experimentation still further. After leaving Abel, Ood finds his way to the Tam-Tam Club, a nightspot where a life-sized placard promotes the nightly performances of “Tam-Tam Super Sex Star Lilly.” This visit initiates a parallel storyline involving Lilly (Christiane Maybach), who supplements her striptease work as an artist’s model, and is the particular muse of the brooding Paul Lerner (Dieter Eppler), a man of only artistic ambition, much to the annoyance of his father, a prominent judge who wants him to study law. Maybach reportedly won her role the day before she began filming. According to news reports of the day, the actress originally cast – the voluptuous redhead Kai Fischer – had signed on to play the part, after which producer Hartwig decided she must also appear nude. Fisher sued Hartwig for breach of contract in March 1959 and he was sentenced to pay out a compensatory fee of DM 4,000 – in currency today, the equivalent of about $35,000. As it happens, Christiane Maybach doesn’t appear nude in the film’s final cut either.

The English version of The Head opens with a credit sequence played out over a shot of the full moon taken from near the climax of the picture. Unusually, the German Die Nackte und der Satan doesn’t present its title onscreen until Lilly is ready to go on. It’s superimposed with inverted commas on pleated velvet curtains that suddenly rise, revealing a stage adorned by a single suit of armor. Lilly dances out, stage right, garbed in a medieval conical hat, scarves, a bikini and a black mask, performing her dance of the seven veils around the impervious man of metal. She only strips down to her bikini but her dance ends with her in the arms of the armor we assumed empty, which tightly embraces her as its visor pops open, revealing a man’s face wearing skull makeup. Lilly screams, the lights go out, and the house goes wild with applause – a veritable blueprint for the striptease of Estella Blain’s Miss Death in Franco’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965).

The music heard during the film’s Tam-Tam Club sequences was recorded by the Erwin Lehn Orchestra, evidently with Jacques Lasry on piano, though its emphasis on brass is its outstanding characteristic. Erwin Lehn was a German jazz musician and composer who established the first German Big Band Orchestra for South German Radio. Brass was a major component of his sound – indeed, he made pop instrumental recordings credited to The Erwin Lehn Beat-Brass. You can find their album Beat Flames on YouTube, as well.

Backstage, the beautiful Lilly is a nagging brat, drinking and flirting with patrons while berating Paul’s lax ambitions on the side. Dieter Eppler, a frequent player in the Edgar Wallace krimis and also the lead bloodsucker in Roberto Mauri’s Italian Slaughter of the Vampires (1964), makes for inspired casting; he looks like a beefier, if less dynamic Kirk Douglas at a time when Vincente Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) would have still been in the minds of audiences.

Once Ood joins the payroll, Dr. Abel confesses that his heart is failing rapidly. The only means of saving himself and perpetuating his brilliant research is by doing the impossible – that is, transplanting the heart from a donor’s body into his own, which he insists is possible given his innovation of “Serum X.” What Abel could not foresee was that his own body would die during the procedure. Ood tells Burke that the only way to save Abel’s genius is to keep his head artificially alive, which his associate rejects uncatagorically, pushing Ood over the edge into murder. Then Ood proceeds with the operation, working solo with Jaeger’s robo-assistant passing along surgical tools as he needs them. When Abel revives, Ood breaks his news of the procedure gently by holding up a mirror and exclaiming that he’d had “one last chance – to perform the dog operation on your head!” Abel screams in revulsion of what he has become. The conciliatory Ood gently cautions him, “Too much emotion can be extremely dangerous now.”

The severed head apparatus is a simple yet ingenious effect, shot entirely in-camera and credited to Theo Nischwitz. It utilizes what is generally known as a Schufftan shot, a technique made famous by spfx shots achieved by Eugen Schufftan for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Essentially, Michel Simon was seated behind a pane of mirrored glass with all the apparatus seen from his neck up. The silvering on the reverse portion of the mirror was scraped away, allowing the camera to see through to Simon and the apparatus while reflecting the apparatus arrayed below his neck, in position for the camera to capture its reflection simultaneously. In at least one promotional photo issued for the film, Simon’s shoulders can be transparently glimpsed where they should not be.

Irene returns to meet with Dr. Abel and is surprised to find new employee Ood now alone and ruling the roost. When he offers to perform her operation himself, she instinctively distrusts and fears him – but is reassured after hearing Abel’s disembodied voice on the house’s sophisticated intercom.

After the killing and burial of Burke, whose body Bert Jaeger later finds thanks to the barking of Dr. Abel’s kenneled hounds (a detail that one imagines inspired Franju’s use of a kennel in Eyes Without a Face), the film introduces the dull but nevertheless compulsory police investigation, headed by Paul Dahlke as Police Commissioner Sturm. Sagging interest is buoyed by a surprise twist: when Dr. Ood returns to the Tam-Tam Club and asks the perpetually pissy Lilly to dance, he refers to her in passing as “Stella,” prompting her to recognize him as “Dr. Brandt” (the scorecard now reads Burke, Bert and Brandt), who has inside knowledge pertaining to her poisoning of her husband! Given that his earlier writing projects include Orson Welles’ The Stranger and the bizarre Mexican-made Buster Keaton item Boom In the Moon (also 1946), in which an innocent shipwrecked sailor is rescued from his castaway existence only to find himself confused with a serial killer, Victor Trivas would seem partial to characters who live double lives.

Though Ood/Brandt’s aura is basically asexual through the first half of the film, the second half requires him to take an earthier interest in the female bodies finding their way into his hands. He takes the already tipsy Lilly/Stella home for a drink and some mischief.

“What’s in the glass?”

“Drink it and find out.”

“I hope it’s not poisoned.”

“That’s not my specialty, is it?”

Lilly/Stella becomes the necessary auto parts for Irene’s pending operation. In a nicely done montage, the film dissolves from Lilly’s unconscious body to a glint of light off the edge of Ood’s poised scalpel. It cuts to a curt zoom into Abel’s scream at being forced to watch a procedure he abhors, then a dissolve from his mouth to the spinning dials of a wall clock, followed by some time-lapse photography of cumulous clouds unfurling from an open sky, before Irene awakens in her recovery room with a decorative choker around her throat. She is able to gain her feet and covers her nude body in a sheet. She finds Ood lounging in Abel’s old office. He walks toward her as the sheet tumbles off her bare shoulders.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Well, I… I’ve a strange kind of feeling, as if my whole body were changed, as if my body didn’t want to do what I wished.”

Therefore, Ood has not only taken away her deformity but her responsibility for her actions, as well. Though she has never smoked before, she craves a cigarette. As Ood lights one for her, her wrap falls further, undraping her entire bare back and thus exposing a birthmark on her left shoulder blade that becomes an important plot point. Ood confesses she’s been unconscious for 117 days, during which time he has passed the time by performing numerous enhancing procedures on her inert body. When he compliments her superb figure, she self-consciously covers her legs and recoils from him.

“Why run from everything you desire?” he asks. “You can’t run from yourself.”

He draws Irene into a surprising deep kiss, which – to her own apparent horror - she returns. Ood then tries to take things further but she refuses. After a brief (and surprisingly curtailed) attempt at abduction, he releases Irene, who dresses in a black cocktail dress and heels left behind by Lilly and returns to the humble apartment she kept in her previous life, where a full-length mirror stands covered. In a scene considerably shortened by the US version, she rips the cover away in a movement evocative of a symbolic self-rape, and glories in her new reflection. The score turns torrid, brassy, and trashy as she admires her shapely terrain, fondling the curves of her breasts and hips in a prelude to a gratifying personal striptease. She then goes to her bed, where she tries on an old pair of slippers; she laughs and kicks them away, delighted at how small her feet now are. When she wakes the next morning, she finds a pamphlet for the Tam-Tam Club in Lilly’s old purse, which leads her body back to its former place of employ. When she arrives, another striptease artist is working onstage with a bed. This performance appears to burlesque Irene’s own motions from the night before; she kicks off one of her shoes as Irene had done.

From the moment she walks into the club, still wearing Lilly’s clinging black dress, Irene evokes a black widow, a kind of Alraune – the femme fatale of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel, filmed in 1930 with Brigitte Helm and in 1952 by Hildegarde Knef. Like Alraune, she’s the beautiful creation of a mad scientist’s laboratory, but unnatural. In this case, she’s not really a soulless artificial being out to destroy men; on the contrary, she is soulful, starving for some insight into who she is, what she is. In this way, she particularly foreshadows Christina, the schizophrenic subject of Baron Frankenstein’s “soul transplant” played by Susan Denberg in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Created Woman (1966).

She quickly attracts Paul’s artist’s eye, just as the now-topless dancer onstage swirls into a swoon on a prop bed – unconsciously mimicking Lilly at the only time she ever saw her, when Ood gave her a sneak peek at the unconscious woman on his living room couch. She asks about Lilly, whom Paul mentions has been dead now for three months, her body (in fact, Irene’s former body) found maimed beyond recognition on some railroad tracks. He asks her to dance, but Irene refuses, as she has never danced, never been asked to dance before. But he insists and they both discover that she can: “You must be a born dancer!”

Beautiful and irresponsible, she allows herself to follow Paul back to his studio, where drawings of Lilly are displayed. Paul asks to draw her, and when she turns her back to bare her shoulders, he recognizes Lilly’s beauty mark. She flees from the apartment and confronts the unflappable Ood.

“You must have grafted her skin on my body!”

In the movie’s most hilarious line, he fires back, “You have a poor imagination!”

She rejects his true account of the procedure and demands to see Dr. Abel, so Ood takes her down to the lab for a personal confirmation from the man himself. Ashamed to be seen this way, Abel pleads with Irene to disconnect him from the apparatus. She is driven away before she can accomplish this, and tries to shut away the horror of the truth that’s been revealed by losing herself in her new relationship with Paul – but the old question arises: Does he love her for her body or her mind? There seems to be one answer when he first kisses her, and another and his lips venture further down her front.

I should leave some things to be discovered by your own viewing of the film, but it demands to be mentioned that Irene – the triumphant climax of Ood’s genius, so to speak – actually survives at the end of the film to live happily ever after. Think about this. This is something that would have been considered unacceptable in any of Hammer’s Frankenstein films at the time – indeed, through the following decade. So, although Ood is ultimately destroyed (you’ll need to see it to find out how), the mad science he propounds is actually borne out. It’s left up to Paul and Irene, as they walk off together toward a new tomorrow, how they will manage to live with the fact that the two of them are in fact a ménage à trois. Will they keep the details of her existence a secret? Will medical science remain ignorant? Should they ever have any, what will they tell their kids?

The Head was hardly the first word on severed heads in horror entertainment. In his own admiring coverage of the film, Euro Gothic author Jonathan Rigby likens the film to the story of Rene Berton’s 1928 Grand Guignol play L’Homme qui à tue la mort (“The Man Who Killed Death”): “There, Professor Fargus revived the guillotined head of a supposed murderer and the prosecutor lost his mind when the head continued to plead his innocence.” Earlier such films would include Universal’s Inner Sanctum thriller Strange Confession (1945, in which a never-seen severed head is a main plot point), The Man Without a Body (1957) and The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958), the latter two proving that the concept was actually trending at the time The Head was made. Also parenthetically relevant would be She Demons (1958), which involves the nasty experiments of a renegade Nazi scientist living on an uncharted tropical island, who removes the “beauty glands” of native girls to periodically restore his wife’s good looks. Though The Head wasn’t the first of its kind, many of the traits it introduced would surface in similar films that followed – not only in Franju’s Eyes Without A Face or Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orlof and The Diabolical Dr. Z, but also in Anton Giulio Majano’s Italian Atom Age Vampire (1960), Chano Urueta’s The Living Head (1963), and most conspicuously in Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, not released until 1962 though filmed in 1959, some six months after The Head.

It must be mentioned that the film’s unusual quality did not go unrecognized by its American distributor. Trans-Lux Distributing Corporation advertised the film that took a most unusual approach to selling a horror picture. The ads did not promise blood, or that your companion would jump into your lap, or shock after shock after shock. Instead, Trans-Lux promised that “At The Head of All Masterpieces of Horror [my italics] That You’ve Ever Seen… You Must Place… The Head.”

Of course it was an overstatement, but the size of its overstatement would seem to have narrowed appreciably with time.

So why has The Head, with its rich pooling of so much European talent, been so neglected?

A key reason may be that horror fans like their actors and directors to maintain a certain consistency, a certain fidelity to the genre. Horst Frank (who died in 1999) would appear in other horror films, but never again played a lead; he pursued his career as a character actor and singer, maintaining a career on the stage and keeping close to home, never making films off the continent or appearing in productions originating from England or America. After The Head, Victor Trivas made no more horror films. The other four features he made had been produced a quarter century earlier and the majority are impossible to see in English countries. Those who remembered him for Niemandsland would have considered The Head an embarrassment, an unfortunate last act. It wasn’t quite a last act, however. The following year, he returned to America, where he sold his final script to the Warner Bros. television series The Roaring 20s, starring Dorothy Provine. Though the show avoided fantasy subjects, it was a voodoo-themed episode entitled “The Fifth Pin,” directed by Robert Spaar and televised during the series’ first season on April 8, 1961. The guest stars included John Dehner, Rex Reason, Patricia O’Neal and, surprisingly, beloved Roger Corman repertory player Dick Miller. Trivas died in New York City in 1970, at the age of 73.

The English version of The Head is considered to be a public domain title and has been available from Alpha Video, Sinister Cinema and other PD sources. This version was modestly recut to create a new main title sequence and to remove certain erotic elements unwelcome to its target audience in 1961. Happily, a hybrid edition – which, in a fitting fate, grafts the English dub onto the original uncut version from Germany – was recently made available for viewing on YouTube.

In the immediate wake of The Head, producer Wolf C. Hartwig pushed another erotic horror film into production, Ein Töter hing in Netz (“A Corpse Hangs in the Web,” 1960). Scripted and directed by Fritz Böttger, the film (Böttger’s last as a director) was first released in America as It’s Hot In Paradise (1962), sold as a girlie picture with absolutely no indication of its horror content. It was later reissued in 1965 as Horrors of Spider Island (1965). Under any of its titles, the film is notably lacking all of the artistic and aesthetic pedigree that made its predecessor so special and, indeed, influential.

Sixty years further on, The Head warrants fuller recognition as a spearhead of that magic moment on the threshold of the 1960s when so-called “art cinema” began to be fused with so-called “trash cinema,” leading to a broader, wilder, more adult fantastique.

by Tim Lucas

[1] Victor Trivas’ Niemandsland may be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4XhNMWoyw

[2] Rapid-Film’s later successes would include the German film that was subsequently converted into Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut (The Bellboy and the Playgirls, 1962), Ernst Hofbauer’s Schoolgirl Report film series (1970-80), and Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977).

[3] You can see Lasry-Baschet perform and be interviewed in a French newsreel from January 1961 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awaFd6gArLg&t=46s.

[4] Well, as “recent” as 1940, when footage of a supposedly successful Soviet resuscitation of a dog’s severed head was included in the grisly 20m documentary Experiments In the Revival of Organisms. The operation was performed (and repeated) by Doctors Sergei Brukhonenko and Boris Levinskovsky, making use of their “autojektor,” an artificial heart/lung machine not unlike the contraption seen in The Head. A close look at Experiments reveals that it really shows nothing that could not have been faked through means of special effects. (When George Bernard Shaw learned of the Soviet experiment, he’s said to have remarked, “"I am tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.") Experiments In The Revival of Organisms has been uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE.

[5] Rigby, Jonathan. Euro Horror: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema (London: Signum Books, 2017), p. 79.

[6] Joseph Green also worked in motion picture distribution and later formed Joseph Green Pictures, which specialized in spicy imported pictures, some from Germany. It’s possible that he saw the Trivas picture when it was still seeking distribution in the States. When Ostalgica Film released The Head on DVD in Germany under its Belgian reissue title Des Satans nackte Sklavin (“The Devil’s Naked Slave”), the disc included The Brain That Wouldn’t Die as a bonus co-feature.

[7] A fine quality homemade experiment, it runs 91 minutes 47 seconds and can be found at: The Head (Die Nackte und der Satan) 1959 Sci-Fi / Horror HQ version!.

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bccity · 4 years

Text

NOVEMBER 2019 BC ENTERTAINMENT SCHEDULES & REVIEW

Members may earn 3 points each (up to 6 points) for writing, by the end of December 7 KST:

A solo para of 400+ words based on their monthly schedule (does not count toward your monthly limit).

A thread of six posts (three per participant, including the starter) based on the monthly schedule.

Threads and solos do not have to take place directly during an important date listed on the schedule, but must be related to what the muse is mentioned to be doing in the paragraph explaining their schedule/the company’s schedule for the month and/or their thoughts on the mentioned activities or lack thereof.

These schedules may be updated throughout the month if new information needs to be added.

Reminder: October schedule posts are due by the end of November 7 KST.

Overall Company

It’s the quiet at BC Headquarters through the end of the year after a noisy year. Talk about Goeun has died down to a manageable level, thanks in part to BC‘s own influence, and she’s yet to be heard from publicly since the ruling of the case was announced. It feels as if what’s to come is more confidential than ever.

Important dates:

N/A

BC Soloist 1

Awards season begins this month after she takes a short trip overseas to perform in Singapore. Her award shows performances for the end of the year will be either a combination of “Hands on Me” and “Why Don’t You Know” or a full performance of “Why Don’t You Know” (with a new performance wardrobe a bit more appropriate for the weather), depending on how long of a performance spot BC is able to negotiate for her. For the Asia Artist Awards, she’ll be doing a full performance of “Why Don’t You Know”. In comeback news, at the beginning of the month, she’ll meet with management again to go over the finalized concepts and demos for her now internally confirmed January comeback. This mini-album will play up a perhaps slightly more confident and girl crush concept than her first and BC is showing their confidence in her by giving her a title track written by a songwriting/production team responsible for many of the company’s other female act’s popular songs like BEE’s “Touch My Body” and even WISH’s biggest hits. This month, she’ll do all of the studio recording for the mini-album.

Important dates:

November 3: Performance at JTBC Seoul Marathon After Concert in Seoul, South Korea.

November 9: Performance at KAMP Global 2019 at Singapore Indoor Stadium in Singapore (also performing: Unity and Lucid).

November 26: Performance and attendance at the Asia Artist Awards at Mỹ Đình National Stadium in Hanoi, Vietnam (also attending: Decipher, CHARM, WISH, 7ROPHY, Impulse, and Fuse).

Decipher

The title track choreography and b-side choreography continue to be drilled into the members, but they’re veterans at this by now, so they’re expected to already have it down by the beginning of the month. From there, it’s the more marketing focused comeback preparation, including the shooting of concept teaser photos, album cover photos, outfit fittings, and finally, the MV filming. Day one of MV filming will cover the drama scenes from the MV while the second day will finish any scenes from the first day and involve filming the performance aspects of the MV.

Important dates:

November 15: Stage and M/V outfit fittings.

November 16: Nene Chicken fan sign in Yeongdeungpo, Seoul, South Korea.

November 23: “Overcome” MV filming day one.

November 24: Performance at Pepsi #ForTheLoveOfIt All Four Seasons Concert at Jamsil Student Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea (also performing: Dimensions Soloist 2, MARS, 7ROPHY, and Lucid).

November 25: “Overcome” MV filming day two.

November 26: Performance and attendance at the Asia Artist Awards at Mỹ Đình National Stadium in Hanoi, Vietnam (also attending: BC Soloist 1, CHARM, WISH, 7ROPHY, Impulse, and Fuse).

↳ Decipher R & V

No schedules for the month.

Important dates:

N/A.

BEE

For the members of BEE, this month is mostly filled with rehearsals to make sure all of the necessary choreography for their upcoming concerts is cemented in their minds. There will only be one special stage in the set list, a dance cover of Britney Spears’s “Womanizer”, which they’ll meet with a BC choreographer to learn this month. Additionally, they’ll be filming another CF, this time for a mobile game called 1942 Pacific Front. They’ll record the CF song early in the month and film the CF itself mid-month.

Important dates:

November 16: 1942 Pacific Front mobile game CF filming.

Knight

They don’t have any public schedules this month, but they’ll begin preparing for a January comeback. They’ll do all of their studio recording for the mini-album this month and during the last week of the month, they’ll begin learning the choreography for the title track and b-side “Play Hard”. They’ll do their photo shoot for their 2020 Season’s Greetings package this month as well. The members haven’t been officially spoken to about plans for 2020 other than continuing their tour, but word is the members are being considered for unit work other than White Knight next year and it isn’t clear if the members have been decided yet or not.

Important dates:

November 16: 2020 Seasons Greetings shoot.

November 29: Initial comeback stage and MV outfit fittings.

↳ White Knight

No schedules for the month.

Important dates:

N/A

Lipstick

On the sixth, the members film their comeback music video. It’s a low budget music video by BC’s standards, but as Lipstick’s third comeback of the year, it’s more important to the company that the group has a new single to entice fans to come see the encore Seoul concerts that will end their tour than giving them an award-winning video to accompany the single. Before their comeback, the members will also shoot for a group Season’s Greeting package for their fans and film a Christmas-themed CF for BC Card.

Important dates:

November 6: Glue M/V filming.

November 8: Prima Donna tour concert at Impact Arena in Bangkok, Thailand.

November 9: Prima Donna tour concert at Impact Arena in Bangkok, Thailand.

November 12: Season’s Greetings photoshoot (reference).

November 14: BC Card CF filming.

November 27: Release of “Glue” digital single, promotions continue until December 27.

↳ Lip Gloss

No schedules for the month.

Important dates:

N/A

CHARM

CHARM comes back on the 11th of this month and promotions aren’t as packed as they were for the group’s other comeback this year. It’s only a digital single and is intended more to tide fans over and advertise the beginning of their world tour next month than be a moneymaker comeback. They will be making an appearance on Knowing Bros, though, where they’ll perform “Hit” and “Very Nice”, as well as introduce themselves and play games like musical chairs. At the end of the month, major award season begins with perhaps a less major award show, the Asia Artist Awards, in Vietnam. They’ll leave for Vietnam on the 25th and return to Seoul on the 27th to get back into promotions. When they have time, they’ll also be in rehearsals for their Seoul concerts next month, which will feature remixed performances of many of their songs.

Important dates:

November 8: Knowing Bros episode filming (to be aired: November 23).

November 11: Release of “Hit” digital single & showcase, promotions continue until December 11.

November 21: Performance at Blue Dragon Film Awards at Paradise City in Incheon.

November 26: Performance and attendance at the Asia Artist Awards at Mỹ Đình National Stadium in Hanoi, Vietnam (also attending: BC Soloist 1, Decipher, WISH, 7ROPHY, Impulse, and Fuse).

↳ CHARM U

CHARM’s main vocal 1, main vocal 2, and performance unit leader/main dancer/sub vocal are called into a meeting at the beginning of the month without previous explanation. During the meeting, it is revealed to them that they’ve been selected as the members of CHARM’s (first) official sub-unit, following in the footsteps of the sub-units both Decipher and Knight have debuted. The sub-unit, dubbed CHARM U, won’t be promoting until April of next year, but they will begin preparing this month since they will perform the sub-unit single during the full group’s tour before its official release. The single has been chosen from a song that was being worked on initially as a full group song. A long-term future isn’t currently planned

Important dates:

November 1: Announcement meeting.

WISH

"Whatta Man” didn’t do as well as BC had hoped and doesn’t seem to be on track to have the sort of longevity WISH songs usually enjoy. This had led to the media beginning to make more comparisons between WISH’s digital performance this year versus Femme Fatale’s hit summer comeback. It’s not ideal when BC has been working to take back their number one title from Gold Star, but WISH is still their best performing group digitally, all aspects considered, so they can’t be pushed aside like the company may have done to an older group. Members of the group will be granted a two week break from November 2 to November 15 where they’re permitted to go on vacation, including leaving the country, unless they have individual schedules to attend to (members part of Shared Home’s main cast will have scheduled filming during this time) and as long as they’re on their best behavior. This vacation will be publicized to appease fans who have been upset about the members potentially being overworked. The members are also permitted to begin moving out of the dorm on the 2nd. The day of their return to normal schedules, the members are scheduled for a game CF and will then begin rehearsing for year-end stages.

Important dates:

November 1: End of “Whatta Man” promotions.

November 16: DX: War of the New Century CF filming.

November 17: 2020 Japan Season’s Greetings shoot.

November 19: Performance at ABU Song Festival at NHK Hall in Tokyo, Japan.

November 23: 2020 Season’s Greeting shoot.

November 26: Performance and attendance at the Asia Artist Awards at Mỹ Đình National Stadium in Hanoi, Vietnam (also attending: BC Soloist 1, Decipher, CHARM, 7ROPHY, Impulse, and Fuse).

#fmdschedule #queued post

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furuba-imagines · 5 years

Text

A Glimmer of Hope [1]

A/N: I shall be posting requests over the weekend. I started writing this story around 2016 (it’s on my quotev and FanFiction.Net) but bc of the rebooted anime I decided to reboot my own story as well the new anime’s honour :3

Word Count: 2706

Warnings: Swearing, mentions of sad character past, mentions of family abuse. Crappy format bc it was posted on mobile app. I’ll fix it up later. For now, enjoy!!

Pairing: Eventual Kyo x Oc

Story Notes:

Bold text is Amélie’s thoughts and inner dialogue.

Italicised text is when Amélie is narrating bits of the story like Tohru does in the anime as well as flashbacks (I will let you know what’s a flashback and what’s not though)

ONE - ENCOUNTERS

Amélie smiled to herself as she breathed in the fresh morning air. She marvelled at how beautiful and blue the sky was and how the white fluffy clouds looked as if they were painted in gentle strokes.

'Oooh yeah, that sun feels so warm.'

The sun shone bright, warming up her pale skin, erasing the goose bumps that littered her exposed arms. Turning back to the small black tent that she currently called home, her lip twitched and formed into a forlorn smile as she looked at the photograph sitting atop a folded pile of clothes in a simple brown wooden picture frame. It was a picture of her when she was six, posing with her mum and dad. Everything was so happy and bright back then... but a dark storm washed all that happiness away and she hasn't really felt it since. Despite the accident that befell them happening so long ago, it still got to her. It still haunted her dreams at night and plagued her thoughts during daylight. She wished she could just stop feeling – it would make things so much easier.

With a heavy sigh, Amélie grabbed her school bag and guitar and secured them both around her back and shoulder respectively. She cast one last glance at the picture before zipping up the tent and making sure it was secure, not that she was worried about anyone breaking in. Not many people passed by this area.

'See you guys soon. I love you.'

Even so, she didn't keep her more valuable belongings in the tent, like her piano keyboard. She kept that safely locked up in the school music room. Normally, she'd leave her guitar there too but she wanted to work on the new song she was writing. But she never kept both instruments in the tent at the same time in case something did happen. She didn't want to risk it no matter how small the chance. A part from the picture, her guitar and piano were the only things she had left of her parents. They were both musicians – her mum sang and wrote and her dad played. Music was one of the only things she still found happiness in. She hoped that one day her music would be played across the world for people to enjoy.

Amélie tugged at her uniform, wishing she had a mirror to check herself with. Amélie was never very fond of the girl's uniform so she wore the boy's one instead. She traded in her skirt and blouse for the pants and collared shirt and paired it with her own plain black Doc Martin's. She felt more comfortable in them than the lace up shoes the school provided. The school faculty stopped carding her after the first two weeks she refused to change. She also liked the fact that she didn't have to worry about boys trying to sneak-a-peak up her skirt. The last boy who tried walked away with a swollen cheek, bruised eye and busted lip. She stood by her actions however.

'The little shit deserved it. He had it coming if you ask me.'

Amélie hadn't always lived in a tent. After the death of her parents, her French side of her family were given custody over her but she wouldn't really call them family. The first thing they did was disown her, cast her out and hand her over to the state orphanage as soon as they could. She ended up living there until she was thirteen after her Japanese side of the family finding out about her and adopting her. Amélie would've preferred to stay at the orphanage since they were more of a family than her actual relatives. By the age of sixteen she had endured enough of their abuse and torment and ran away. She ended up staying at both her friends, Uotani and Hanajima's place for a while upon their insistence but the guilt became too much so she lied about having found good accommodation. In reality, she kept moving from hotel to hotel until she was forced to live in the tent she was living in currently. A glamorous life she liked to sarcastically call it, but she was grateful at least that she wasn't living on the sidewalks or under a bridge somewhere.

"Il ya toujours un arc en ciel après la tempéte!" She quoted to herself. There's always a rainbow after a storm. It was something her mother used to quote quite often.

The forest that she walked through she found to be quite calming and beautiful with all the tall trees and lush greenery. With that being said, feeling a little adventurous this morning and wanting to delay school as much as she could, she decided to take a different route. The more she drifted away from her usual path, the more the forest became increasingly unfamiliar until she had no idea where she was going.

"Fuck sakes," She cursed. 'Why would you even try straying from the main path with your horrible sense of direction? I'm such an idiot sometimes.'

However, much to her surprise, something in the peripherals of her vision captured her attention and halting her steps. To her far right, down a hill was a large clearing that lead to a traditional Japanese looking house. Amélie should've known that a forest as beautiful as this one had to have some kind of estate built upon it. With her curiosity piqued to the max, she couldn't help herself and decided to investigate.

‘A little snooping wouldn't hurt anybody.'

"It's called trespassing Amélie and its illegal," she reminded herself but proceeded to ignore her own warning.

Amélie was careful as she made her way down the hill. Hiding behind a bush, she did a quick look around to make sure the coast was clear before approaching the house.

'At least they don't have to worry about annoying neighbours. Must be nice to live here.'

Coming up close to the porch, Amélie couldn't help but be drawn to little ornaments sitting on a wooden rack. Upon closer inspection, she recognised them as the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. She smiled to herself.

"They look so well made and detailed. I wonder how long it took to paint them all..."

"Hello, this is a surprise. We don't get many young girls wondering around these parts."

Amélie bristled at the sudden voice and stumbled backwards, almost falling flat on her ass.

'Shit, shit! You've done fucked up now! Run before he calls the cops on you for trespassing! On second thought... he doesn't look too mad. Just play it cool and maybe you can leave without getting into any trouble.'

"I'm so sorry sir! I was just admiring I swear! I'm not here to cause you any trouble." She barely managed to string her words together without fumbling over them.

The man just chuckled and waved a hand at her. "It's quite alright, no harm done." The man's smile turned pensive. "I just find it hard to imagine that a teenager like yourself would find this place interesting." He mused.

'Oh thank goodness, I'm not in trouble.'

Amélie was quick to shake her head as she knelt in front of the rack, the man following suit. "No, it's a very lovely place. And I especially love these little zodiac ornaments here. Did you make them?" She asked.

"Yes I did. They're a favourite of mine too you could say."

Amélie scanned every rock that had been painted with detail and precision but a frown soon formed on her face when she noticed something missing.

"Of course you left out the cat just like everyone else." She muttered. It was more to herself than to the man in front of her although she realised she must've spoken too loud because of his surprised expression.

"The cat? Oh right, I see. You're referring to the old zodiac folktale." He said in realisation and Amélie nodded.

"I used to get dad to tell me the story sometimes before bed. I've always thought the cat had just as much importance to the story as any of the other animals did. I always felt for him."

_____________________

>>>Flashback<<<

_____________________

Little Amélie laid in her bed all snuggled and tucked beneath her plush blankets.

"Goodnight princess," Mr. Hoshimi smiled down at his daughter and placed a gentle kiss to her forehead. As soon as he stood up to leave though, Amélie grabbed onto the sleeve of his shirt and tugged on it.

"Wait! Can you tell me that story about the animals again? Pwease?" She pouted, putting on her best puppy dog eyes. The elder man quickly fell for her doe eyes and hopeful smile and found himself smiling along with her.

"Oh wow could I ever say no to that cute face?" he cooed, sitting back down onto the bed.

"A long, long time ago, god decided to invite all of the animals to a glorious banquet. He sent out word for all of them to come to his house the following evening and he told them not to be late.

"Can you name all the animals Amélie?"

Amélie sat up straight and proudly listed all the animals – The dog and the dragon, the rabbit and tiger, the rat and the pig, the cow and horse, the sheep and the rooster, the monkey, the snake... "And my favourite, the cat!" She cheered.

Mr. Hoshimi just laughed and tucked Amélie back underneath the sheets and continued with the story.

"However, when the mischievous rat heard the news, he decided to play a trick on his fellow neighbour – the cat. He told the cat that the party was the day after tomorrow."

Amélie turned her nose up and scowled. "I hate this part," She grumbled with a huff. "The poor kitty cat deserves better..."

"The very next day, all of the animals lined up for the celebrations with the rat leading the way, riding all the way on the back of the cow. Everyone had a wonderful time, except for the foolish cat who missed the whole thing." Mr. Hoshimi finished.

When he looked down at his daughter, he chuckled at her grumpy pout and furrowed brows.

"Amélie honey, why so grumpy?" He asked, but he knew why. She always got mad at the rat for tricking the cat, even though it was only just a story, Amélie had vowed to be the protector of all cats.

"Because the rat was so mean! If I was the cat, I would've kicked the rats butt for being such a... well, a butt!" She exclaimed, balling her hands into tiny fists.

"And if mummy heard you talk like that, she'd have yours."

Amelie giggled sheepishly before a thought popped into her head. "Do you think the cat would like it if I started a year of the cat?!"

Mr. Hoshimi just smiled. "I'm sure he would love that honey."

_______________________

>>> End of Flashback <<<

_______________________

The kimono wearing man smirked and tapped his fingers against his chin in thought. "Funny, I wonder how he would feel after hearing that story, knowing he has a little fan."

Snapping out of her reverie, she looked at him with a confused tilt of her head. "I'm sorry, who?"

The man shook his head and part of her wondered if she was actually meant to hear what he had said or not.

"Oh nevermind. So, what year were you born in?" He asked, quickly distracting her by changing the subject and Amélie went along with it.

"Year of the Ox," she replied.

The man nodded but Amélie noticed his eyes drift to her uniform. Most people found it odd that she wore the boy's uniform so she was used to it by now. She was about to speak, but he beat her to it.

"I apologise, I don't mean to stare. I've just never seen a girl wear the boy's uniform before. I must say though, you pull it off quite well."

Amélie's cheeks flushed at the compliment. She was the worst when it came to accepting flattery and compliments.

"Thank you."

"You're not from around her are you?" He asked suddenly in a curious tone.

Amélie had been waiting for that question. Something she was often asked about also.

"It's my accent isn't it?" She supplied with a smirk.

'I'm glad it isn't too thick for people to understand me.'

"It is quite nice to listen to. I mean, aside from your pretty fa-"

Whatever the man was going to say next came to an abrupt stop and was replaced with a pained gasp as something landed on his head. It was a schoolbag, just like the one Amélie and most other high school students had.

'Oh shoot, did not expect that.'

"My head!"

"Will you at least try to control yourself?" A new voice sighed.

Amélie's eyes trailed up the person's arm that held the bag until she reached their face and her eyes widen in shock.

'No way, Yuki lives here?! If I get caught with him, that stupid fan club of his won't let me hear the end of it.'

Yuki turned his attention away from the man to Amélie. "Good morning Miss Hoshimi, I'm sorry for my cousin. He's bit of a flirt but's he's harmless. It's best to just ignore him."

"Oh no, it's alright. We were just talking is all; he's good company."

The man, Yuki's cousin, rubbed the sore spot on his head. "What do you have in there? A dictionary or something?"

Yuki barely batted an eyelash at his whining. "Two dictionaries actually," he sighed in exasperation as he slid the schoolbag onto his back, adjusting the straps so it fit comfortably on his shoulders.

Yuki's cousin rubbed his head one last time. "So, you two know each other?" He asked, pointing between the two of them.

"Miss Hoshimi and I are in the same class."

Amélie dipped her head in a respectful bow. "The name's Amélie, pleasure to meet you." She officially greeted.

"Same here. I'm Shigure Sohma and Yuki here is my little cousin." He explained with a friendly smile.

"And what brings you to our house this morning?" Yuki asked in his usual soft and polite voice.

Amélie offered them a nervous smile, rubbing the back of her neck. 'I can't exactly tell them that I live in the middle of the forest. They'll probably laugh at me. I need to think of something good to say and fast!'

"Oh uh, well you know, I live... nearby." She trailed off lamely. It wasn't a complete lie.

'Oh yeah, that's such a good cover up.'

She gulped when she noticed their stunned expressions and wished they would change the subject. She didn't do well under pressure.

"Around here? Really?"

"You do? Where?" Yuki pressed. Amélie was hyperaware of how clammy the palms of her hands were becoming.

'Abort! Abort!'

"I don't mean to be rude but I should probably head to school. I haven't been late in a while and I wanted to keep my record clean this semester."

'As if they cared or needed to know that last bit.'

She bowed to them once again. "It was nice chatting with you. Have a good day." She said in a hurry, quickly turning on her heel and walking away.

'Don't look back. Just keep walking...'

"Miss Hoshimi?" Yuki called out after her.

Amélie sighed inwardly. 'Dammit.'

Putting on a smile, she turned to face him. "Yeah?"

"Since you're here, why don't we walk to school together?" He suggested.

'Say no. It's not worth the wrath of the fan club.'

"Sure, I don't see why not?" She accepted with a forced smile.

The entire walk was done so in an awkward silence as neither Yuki nor Amélie spoke a word or even looked at each other. And to make matters worse, they did eventually run into the Prince Yuki Fan Club, prompting both teens to ignore their chants and poses which only made it all the more awkward until they parted their separated ways.

'I better prepare myself for their onslaught of pathetic questioning.'

Amélie groaned. She could feel the headache coming on already...

#fruits basket 2019 #fruits basket #furuba #kyo sohma #Kyo Sohma x reader #Kyo Sohma imagines #Furuba imagines #Fruits basket imagines #Kyo Sohma x oc

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heamarvel · 5 years

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Holiday Movie Challenge Info

(This is a mirror post of our blog’s page, kept so mobile users can access the info much more readily. Mod juuls is working on getting this ready, so give her some time to get the links up and running.)

Holiday movies are a tradition for many Americans - they’re two hour long fluff fests where two people find love and live happily ever after. Since Marvel can always use more HEAs, we’re running a holiday fic fest designed to create more content. This is a content-creation focused event - so there are no sign-ups and (we hope) no pressures!

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Basics

There will be ONE prompt list that everyone will work from - based on plots from actual holiday movies. The prompt list is NOW LIVE.

You can start uploading things to the AO3 collection on November 1st and it will remain open until midnight EST on December 24th.

There are prizes up for grabs for creating the content, and if you want to claim yours, you’ll need to fill out the google form (that we will provide closer to the date) by midnight EST on December 24th.

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Minimum requirements for content

Fics: 500 words

Art: completed basic sketch or lineart, or equivalent in chosen medium

Moodboards: minimum 6 images compiled into one cohesive collage (one for each character, two for the prompt, two for the specific interpretation of the prompt) and should include a small paragraph explaining the story behind the mood board and the prompt chosen.

Podfics: First chapter of the chosen fic recorded (*contact mods to see if the fic meets event standard)

Playlists: minimum of 12 songs. 3 songs for each main ship character, 3 songs for the relationship, and 3 songs that speak to the prompt itself. Should include a small paragraph explaining the story behind the prompt chosen.

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Details

Open to ALL ships. We encourage OT3 and OT4 content as well - sky is the limit here, folks, just tag appropriately!

Oh, and by “sky” we mean no underage sexual content, no non-con, and no Nazis. So, some limits.

While holiday movies don’t believe in smut - WE CERTAINLY DO. All ratings encouraged! (They don’t really believe in casting people of color, either, or acknowledging holidays besides Christmas, so we’re just blowing up their spot completely.) (Also, if you’re under 18, you need to stay in the safe-for-work range of things, but you know that.)

Yes, you can use these fills for any other challenge you’re a part of - as long as their rules are cool with that.

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Prizes

What’s the holidays without useless but pretty gifts?! We’re designing badges you can earn through content creation in the following categories:

Word Count

Ships Sailed

General fic elements

Holiday-specific

Avengers stereotypes & fanon

Holiday movie and other tropes

Writing format/style

Mod specials

Check out our Prompt and Badges post for a full list of the prizes we will be awarding!

Each work can earn one (1) badge for prompt, length, and ship per fic, as well as up to FIVE (5) badges from the other lists. We encourage mixing and matching to your muse’s content!

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Have a question that’s not answered here or on the Prompt and Badges page?

Hit up: [email protected]

Send us an Ask!

Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page!

Or ask us on Discord!

#marvel event #heamarvel #hallmark challenge #hallmarkholidaychallenge #mod post #admin post #holiday movie challenge

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starcunning · 6 years

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Temple of the Lost: a boss fight for X’shasi Kilntreader

Inspired by Azana Kusuri’s askbox prompt list, some musings on what a Trial against X’shasi might be like ...

The arena is circular and enclosed, likely the tower of some ancient castle or temple. The weather outside changes between phases; the Word calls the Aurora Borealis, the Flood calls bright sunlight, and the Martyr calls a swirling blizzard. X’shasi herself calls crimson static.

The theme is the same throughout the Call Memories phase, but the leitmotif is played by different instruments: the harp for the Word, the violin for the Flood, and the organ for the Martyr. The X’shasi phase of the theme introduces guitar and lyrics on themes of sacrifice and loss, victories won at impossible cost.

X’shasi begins the fight by casting Call Memories. Three adds are summoned by the use of this ability, The Word, The Flood, and The Martyr. The Memories must be tanked, but in their default state they don’t do too much damage and can be tanked anywhere in the arena. They have a buff called Ephemeral that greatly reduces damage done to them.

X’shasi will cast Hallowed Bonds to empower each of the adds in turn. The targeted add will lose their Ephemeral buff and become active. When active, each of the adds gains new abilities. While adds are present in the arena, X’shasi is untargetable and immune.

The Word

X’shasi, casting Hallowed Bonds on The Word: “To Hear and feel and think is not enough. We must also act.” The Word, when targeted by Hallowed Bonds: “For those we have lost; for those we can yet save. Forgive me.”

Casts Crystals of Light, which places six overlapping pools on the ground that detonate in a wave, herding the party toward the center of the arena.

Immediately follows it up with Dawning Light, a proximity-based pulse AOE.

Casts the tankbuster Blade of Light, which deals magical damage.

Casts Whispers of the Soul, a “look-away” telegraph which, if improperly executed, debuffs players with Will of the Mother and causes them to attack the nearest party member.

The Word, when defeated: “She calls, and I must answer Her. She will call you, too.”

The Flood

X’shasi, casting Hallowed Bonds on The Flood: “But when we act in ignorance, we act at cost.” The Flood, when targeted by Hallowed Bonds: “There are truths at the heart of this star not revealed to its inhabitants.”

Casts Flood of Light, a heavy raidwide AOE. The party must be quickly topped up, because it is followed 5 seconds later by Heroic Sacrifice, a targeted “stack up” attack.

The tankbuster, Reflections of the First, adds a stacking debuff to the tank. This debuff will be fatal if it stacks too high, so tanks will have to swap between holding The Flood and The Martyr.

The Flood, when defeated: “We did everything right, and still it wasn’t enough!”

The Martyr

X’shasi, casting Hallowed Bonds on The Martyr: “And when we cannot act? What then?” The Martyr, when targeted by Hallowed Bonds: “A dozen knights could not keep me from your side, my friend!”

Casts With Blade, a conal sweep AOE on his right side. Immediately afterward, casts With Shield, a conal sweep AOE on his left side.

Casts Unicorn Charge, a line charge across the arena in a proceeding radius.

At 2% health, activates an ability called Shield of the Martyr. Players are pulled into an Active Time Event and must channel their aether to pierce his shield and his body in order to kill him.

If the Active Time Event is failed, he repels the players and he and X’shasi retreat. The fight resets and must be restarted from the beginning.

The Martyr, in retreat: “My arm will not falter! My shield will not break!” X’shasi Kilntreader, in retreat: “Let’s go on an adventure, just you and I ...”

If the Active Time Event is passed, The Martyr is defeated.

The Martyr, when defeated: “You … you are unharmed? Forgive me. I could not bear the thought of …”

X’shasi Kilntreader

After the death of The Martyr, X’shasi joins the battlefield.

X’shasi, during phase transition: “So it comes to this. I shall show you what it has cost me, to be called ‘Hero.’”

X’shasi has a tankbuster called Weapon of Light, which places a stacking debuff on the tank called Burdens of the Crystal. There is also a short (~5 sec) Heavy debuff associated with Burdens of the Crystal, which means party movement must account for the reduced mobility of the active tank. Tanks must switch off after three stacks of Burdens of the Crystal.

X’shasi, casting Weapon of Light: “This is who I am! This is all I am!”

X’shasi uses an ability called Echoes of the Dead, which does three pulses of raidwide damage at intervals of five seconds. Subsequent pulses will kill party members if not adequately healed in between.

X’shasi, casting Echoes of the Dead: “The dead are not silent. They scream to be heard in the hearts and memories of the living.”

X’shasi casts Corpse-a-corpse, a targeted charge indicated with a prey marker and ground-indicated tether. The targeted player must immediately move away from X’shasi to the far edge of the arena, and raid members must interpose themselves along the line of the charge. Players in the path of the charge will take damage, but will reduce the damage taken by Corpse-a-corpse’s target.

A player who dies of damage taken from Corpse-a-corpse spawns in their place a skeletal Ashkin with a strong melee attack. This mob must be killed before the player can be Raised.

X’shasi, casting Corpse-a-corpse: “En garde!” X’shasi, killing a player with Corpse-a-Corpse: “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

X’shasi casts Unhallowed Bonds, which targets two sets of two members of the raid (it will never target the person highest on her enmity list). Players targeted by Unhallowed Bonds must run away from one another to break the chains, which deal periodic damage and grant stacks of Vulnerability Up. She will cast this soon after Echoes of the Dead or Corpse-a-corpse, when the party is grouped up.

X’shasi, casting Unhallowed Bonds: “If my connections fetter me, so be it! I can still strangle you with the chain!”

X’shasi casts Surge of Light and Surge of Darkness, which puts small pools on the floor of either black or white coloration at random. After a Surge of Light, all pools must be turned to black by interacting with white pools. After a Surge of Darkness, all pools must be turned to white by interacting with black pools. It is possible to interact with pools a second time or interact with pools which are already the correct color, so players must be careful, as any pools of the incorrect color will strengthen her follow-up attack.

X’shasi, casting Surge of Light/Darkness: “You must balance on the blade’s edge ...”

X’shasi follows up a Surge of Light with Sins of the First and a Surge of Darkness with Sins of the Thirteenth. When Surges are executed correctly, the damage from Sins is negligible, but each pool of Light remaining will strengthen Sins of the First, and each pool of Darkness will strengthen Sins of the Thirteenth. This can quickly become lethal.

X’shasi, casting Sins of the First/Thirteenth: “… and have a care not to be cut.”

When X’shasi reaches 20% health, she casts Emptiness, which sets everyone at the party to 1 HP. She gains a damage up / vulnerability up buff also called Emptiness. Abilities come more frequently in her final phase.

X’shasi, casting Emptiness: “No matter how powerful you are, you cannot always stop those you love from dying.”

X’shasi, when defeated: “If this is my end, I welcome it; sometimes, Death comes to reunite us with those we’ve loved … and lost.”

X’shasi’s loot table is weapons, of course. The weapons are of interesting, highly geometric design, and are pure white, with cyan glow. Her primal mount is similarly colored. She also drops Fragment of Light, which can be used to make a tabletop housing item: a model of the Mothercrystal, perfectly sized for a bedside table. Turning it on makes it glow softly and the smaller crystals around it orbit the main crystal.

#ff14 #mateus #x'shasi #you should never have let this depressed bitch have a DRK crystal

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iheartgod175 · 6 years

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2018 Netflix Bucket List Part 1: Animation Nation

After watching some of the original Idolmaster today, I felt inspired to tackle my VERY LONG OVERDUE Netflix Bucket List. Although to be honest, two of these that I watched were on Netflix; some of the others I’ve watched and/or dumped were on KissAnime, and the remaining ones were on either Crunchyroll or Hulu. So yeah...not really a “Netflix” bucket list in this regard...BUT PART TWO IS I SWEAR

I decided to start off with the “animation” side of things, since I watch a lot of anime and cartoons, and I felt it’d be good to talk about some anime (and the one cartoon) I’ve finished up. Some of them are from months (or possibly a year back), but I feel like I should still talk about them anyway ^^

So here we go!

Completed Series

The Idolm@ster Cinderella Girls

I liked this one. It was cute, the characters were charming, and I found six of my favorite characters from it (one of them being the Producer). That being said, I can see why it and the characters were seen as bland by other iM@S fans; the show doesn’t do a lot to really develop its large cast. The main beef I had with it was its treatment of New Generations, the group with Uzuki, Rin and Mio. They were the three main characters in the beginning, but then they kinda got shafted mid-season and then suddenly came back near the end again. I do love them (especially Uzuki and Mio; and I’ve warmed up to Rin a bit), but I felt the drama that Mishiro caused between them was drawn out a bit, and that the ending was cute, but rushed. Despite its flaws, this show got me into The iDOLM@STER series as a whole, and I even had my brother interested in it for a while to the point where he started watching it--keep in mind that my brother’s a die-hard Love Live fan. I won’t say that it’s a good gateway point to the series, but I will say that it’s alright for an idol series.

Flip Flappers

My friend @infiniteglorias was watching this show about a year or two ago, and I watched it out of curiosity. I expected it to be a bit off beat, and boy howdy did I get off-beat. It’s bizarre, it’s funny, it’s got some pretty cool scenes, and an interesting villain backstory. It’s also super gay. Like, Symphogear-level gay. And even that’s a stretch; Shirabe and Kirika ain’t got nothin’ on Papika and Cocona. But it’s a good show, even if by the end it got a little mindscrewy.

And I just found out that there’s a Blu-Ray box with an artbook and art cards. R.I.P. my wallet.

BanG Dream!

Back when my brother was annoying the crap out of me with Love Live!, I was desperate to find a good idol series. I had started watching Cinderella Girls, but my brother took to bothering me about that, so I left it for a while (and also because although I enjoyed the show, I found it to be slow in some parts). If I had to describe BanG Dream!, I’d say it’s like Love Live! meets K-On!. I didn’t think I’d like it, and I thought the title name was kinda silly, but I ended up loving it. It really says something when you like some of the music better than Love Live’s...in fact, I can kinda thank this show for pulling me to other idol anime away from LL! and introducing me to other things like Tokyo 7th Sisters, The iDOLM@STER and most recently IDOLiSH7. I loved this show, and I can’t wait to see the OVAs for it. Oh, and I’m patiently waiting for the release date of Girls’ Band Party’s English localization! I might not be able to play it, but I pray it goes well!

LoliRock season 2 (cartoon)

LoliRock’s second season is leagues better than the first one. So much effort was put into making the five princesses stand out in their own ways. We got great songs, great outfits, Dark Talia and Dark Auriana, great episodes focusing on Carissa and Lyna, more worldbuilding, more Lev, great episodes focused on Amaru, and best of all, episodes focused on developing Mephisto and Praxina. That Praxina episode was a hard one to watch, because of how genuinely sweet her good side is--given events in the season finale only made me sadder. About the only gripe I had was Gramorr. He still didn’t do that much to interest me as a villain, although I have to admit his powers were pretty cool. At least he’s slightly better than Hawk Moth from Miraculous Ladybug.

Either way, if you want an excellent example of a great show for girls, watch this (and Ladybug too, if you want). You won’t be disappointed.

The Seven Deadly Sins

I’ve been meaning to talk about The Seven Deadly Sins. But now that I actually have it here, I don’t have much else to say, other than it’s one of my favorite fantasy anime ever (and my favorite happens to be the Record of Lodoss War original OVAs). It’s funny, pervy (but not too pervy, unlike some shows I know *cough* High School DxD *cough*), tragic, awesome, gory and likeable. It’s totally binge-worthy. And it’s one of the few shows where the ships are totally okay; I usually avoid shipping people with people who look like they’re twelve or younger, but the maturity with which the show handles it changed my mind.

And season 2 has been announced. Enough said.

One Punch Man

One Punch Man was great from start to finish. It was awesome and thought provoking for a show that parodies the Japanese superhero genre, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed at a show this much (that is, until Blend S came along). Moreover, it showed how to do an overpowered character right. I haven’t read the manga yet, but I can’t wait for season two of this show to come out!

Kokoro Library

I found this little thing when I was cruising around for an older anime, Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san (a classic favorite of mine). I saw the opening and dismissed it as a bland show probably based of a visual novel. But curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to watch an episode of it, just to see if it’s as stupid as I thought. Similar to what happened with LoliRock, I took my words back. This show’s a cute slice-of-life show about three sisters who live in the mountains running their parents’ library. The interactions they have with each other and the rest of the town are what make this show. I admit, the first part is kinda slow, so I wouldn’t blame people who dropped it if it was boring, and you can tell this is an older anime from like the 2000s...but it has a great soundtrack, adorable characters, and a really sweet origin story. I would give it a shot and see how you like it.

Currently Watching

The iDOLM@STER (Original)

Move over, Love Live. There’s some new idols in town.

I came across the original iDOLM@STER several times while looking for Cinderella Girls content. I thought nothing of it at first, but as I was finishing the Cinderella Girls anime, I did some research, and learned that these girls were the original generation (similar to how Muse was the original before Aqours). I decided “Eh, I’ll give it a shot. I like iM@S enough anyway; I’ll check it out before Side M, at least.” Gotta say, I am so glad I did. The original iDOLM@STER is leagues and above Cinderella Girls in terms of characters, story, humor and feel (although I still kinda like CG’s score more). In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that I prefer this over the original School Idol Project, which, while I think is pretty good, didn’t feel that spectacular to me, which is why I rank it 5th on my favorite idol anime list. Similar to IDOLiSH7, I don’t have a Best Girl, because pretty much all of them are awesome...although I gotta say that Iori, Hibiki, Makoto, Miki, Takane and Chihaya are my clear favorites, and I love Producer-san, surprisingly more than CG’s Producer-san, who was one of my favorites as well.

If you want to get interested in the iDOLM@STER universe, this is the series you need to watch.

Blend S

Blend S is great. I have never laughed so hard at an anime save for a few. And I love the character dynamic; even Dino’s crush on Maika isn’t really, really creepy since he’s not going borderline pervy like some other shows possibly would. I’m only three episodes in, but it’s been a great ride.

IDOLiSH7

If you can’t tell that I love IDOLiSH7 already, you haven’t seen my blog recently. Eight episodes in, and I’m in love. I can’t say much else other than that, but it’s right behind the original iDOLM@STER as one of my current favorite idol anime.

Glasslip

Glasslip is a little anime I found on Hulu. It’s about a group of friends who go through the trials and pains of first love during summer vacation...oh, and something about the main heroine, Toko, and the mystery dude, Kakeru, being able to see the future through objects--in Toko’s case, it’s through glass objects, hence the title. It’s supposed to be a supernatural romance, but think it does better on the romance, though; their attempts to explain how and why Toko and Kakeru can see the future comes off kinda flat. Honestly, the real reason I’m watching it is for the romance plot between everyone. It’s a bit of a breather between watching shows such as Fate/Zero and Gundam SEED (seen below).

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed (Remastered)

Yes, I realize this pic is from SEED Destiny. But hey, the pic’s cool ^^

Gundam as a series is one of the series I enjoy, but never really watched much of because I was intimidated by the universe. It is massive, and most Gundam anime take place in its own universe. Thanks to some help from my dad (who is a huge Gundam and Macross fan in his own right), I started watching the series again, starting off with one that I found the most interesting, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. I had started watching it years ago, but I forgot about it. I’m glad I gave this another chance, although I must be careful, because the last Gundam I watched was Gundam 00′s first season, and I binged watched it for hours.

Fate/Zero

I forgot to mention that one of my friends, @infiniteglorias, is a fan of the animated Fate series. I also forgot to mention that my dad is a semi-fan, too. Between the two of them, I became interested in watching the series, and my dad got me into Fate/Zero. I love it thus far, and the characters are pretty awesome. I can’t really say much else about it other than that, honestly...other than that I’m a complete newbie to the Nasuverse ^^

Shows I Need To Get Back To

Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ

I was following AXZ, and then that delay caused me to get off track. I will go back and watch it and include it in my next Netflix Bucket List (hopefully).

Haruchika: Haruto and Chika

Haruchika was an anime I found when I was watching Shakugan no Shana (more on that below). I thought it’d be a high school romance, but what it actually is is a high school mystery with a very, very tiny bit of romance...and both our male and female heroine are going after their teacher, believe it or not. I don’t find it as interesting as Glasslip, but I feel that I should finish it on general principle before deciding it sucks. Plus, it does have a great soundtrack.

Hunter x Hunter

Hunter x Hunter was a show I started watching around the same time as Lupin III (more on that on my next list). The only reason I’ve put it on hold is because of the above mentioned anime.

Attack on Titan

Attack on Titan was one of those shows that I heard was good, but didn’t watch because of the hype (I swore to myself that I’d stop watching on hype alone after what happened with Sword Art Online and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha the Movie 2nd A’s). I watched it with my uncle and we both really enjoyed it, going through like 13 episodes. I haven’t watched it with him in a while because we’ve both been so busy, but I have it saved on my list to watch it later.

Future Shows to Watch

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card-hen

The ONLY reason I’m not watching this one is because I haven’t watched the original in years and I don’t remember much of the plot. *sigh*

Macross Delta

Macross is another love of mine. After the amazingness of Frontier, I’m going to give the more recent Macross a try. That’ll probably be after I finish either iM@S or Blend S.

Violet Evergarden

WHEN WILL THIS SHOW COME TO NETFLIX?!

Girlish Number

Girlish Number is another one of those shows that my brother annoyed me about, but I guess I’ll give it a shot to see what he really liked about it.

Magical Girl Raising Project

More dark magical girls! Fun! Well, this should hold me over until I can watch Washio Sumi is a Hero, at least.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride

This is a show I’ve heard was quite good. It’s got some solid production values, and it’s a fantasy, so I’ll give it a shot and see how it turns out.

Shows I’ve Dropped

A Certain Magical Index

I wanted to like A Certain Magical Index, but alas, I found it to be a bit tiresome. At least its magic system and characters are a sight better than The Irregular at Magic High School.

Shakugan no Shana

It’s a shame I had to drop this show, because honestly, I had liked it at first. But then came the incesty bits between the two new villains that were introduced. On one hand, the sister was voiced by Yukari Tamura. But on the other hand, I do not want to see a younger sister slipping her older brother some tongue. Incest’s one of the few things that will make me drop a show like it’s a plague, and that’s what I did with this show. I just couldn’t stomach it.

That is all I have to say for part 1! What do you think? Are there some recommendations you have or do you think I should talk about certain shows more? Let me know in the comments!

Part 2 will be coming soon~!

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