#( I can't write anything short these days with meta pieces )

[cabbxges-and-kings]

WHAT  IS  YOUR  LOVE  LANGUAGE  ?

* 𝐀𝐁𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐎𝐃𝐇𝐔𝐋𝐋

I wasn't tagged in this and I'm like half asleep-half awake, so I hope I make sense here.

I find this pretty accurate overall. Abe wouldn't be entirely against gifts, but I think Abe finds more appreciation through these other love languages than through gifts. When Abe and Anna had their secret relationship, Abe probably found more of a liking towards gift-giving since it's something that could stay with him when they were away from one another. But Abe is a son of a wealthy magistrate, after all. I feel like Richard didn't spoil his children, he seems like the tough love/"You have to work for it" kind of parent. For Thomas, maybe he spoiled him with gifts, but not so much for Abe. Abe would probably finds it as a cheap form of affection anyway since his father is wealthy. Buying something is nothing to him. Richard always made sure his sons had high quality items. Richard isn't a cheapskate. So again, this is why Abe isn't into gift-giving as much because he's so accustomed to luxury.

Regarding these other love languages, I feel like Abe's in the weird category where it depends on who he's with. I think regardless of that, he still takes acts of service into account, but it also depends on what it is. For his spying, he prefers for things to go this his way until he can bite back his ego when a better plan arises, so he may be cautious when it comes to that on what exactly someone did for him.

I think Abe values quality of time since I can only assume that with what we saw in the show, Abe and Anna spent a lot of time together. Being able to spend time with her in their previous relationship and now as a married man is really important to him. He wants to spend as much time as he can with her. (Why he wants to is another topic for another day). This makes me think of the scene in s1 when they were going over the first intelligence letter and the whole "trysts" comment is made.

Physical affection might have a tie in with the last one since I would imagine Abe looked for physical affection from Anna in their times alone, but I think the other two are stronger love languages for him. For Mary's side of things, I think their disagreements and kind of acquaintance in one another dynamic in the beginning made it harder for Abe to engage in quality time or physical affection because the spark wasn't there like it was for Anna. So when he's at this spot of disagreement, when someone does something for him and compromises (even in their annoyance with him), he really takes it to heart. It sucks that until Mary started to work with him with his spying he really started to appreciate her, but I feel like this was similar to his dynamic with his dad. When Richard worked with him more, he started to get along with him. Its shitty that you have to cave in to get Abe to appreciate you more, but I think it worms it way through his blinding ego.

In regards to Mary, once they got along more, it seems that Abe enjoyed quality time with her (the whole musket shooting scene in the start of s3). So I think quality time can work for either Anna/Abe & Mary/Abe. He probably leans more towards quality time and physical affection with Anna and quality time and acts of service with Mary. I think it just depends on what kind of relationship you have with Abe.

[consistentsquash]

5 meta recs for monday

the humanity of creators by @danpuff-ao3

A brilliant short essay on parasocial relationships/separating creator and art.

Creation is such a personal, vulnerable experience. Art, music, writing, etcetera. Creation itself is deeply personal, but so is the experience of those creations. It creates a point of connection, in a way. Connection to the creator, connection to other fans. But experiencing these works does not mean you know the creators. You know a piece of them, perhaps, but not the whole of them.

 

Must-know for Japanese fandom: the meaning of "proship" and the concept of "proshippers" in Western fandom by Maromi

Really well-written essay about Maromi's experiences with antis. Especially love the perspective of cultural differences and how folks can use literally anything to harass you if you are making some problematic art. Link is English translation of Maromi's actual essay in Japanese.

Proship-antis (hereafter referred to as "antis") began to claim that the "pro" stood for "problematic," and expanded their scope beyond a specific ship war to instead begin attacking all "proships." As the definition of the word became muddled, the number of young antis increased, especially among teenagers, who would attack people who supported any kind of problematic ship. This has sometimes escalated to bullying, to the point that one might become a target for harassment if they don't prove that they aren't a proshipper, or might be ostracized for not putting "proship DNI" in their profile. It's also used as a tool for racism―asking someone whose primary language isn't English whether or not they are a proshipper, and if they can't prove that they aren't, they may become a target for harassment. (This is what happened to me.)

  Mumbles by eldritcher

A really poignant look at fandom changes esp HP slash fandom changes. Incisive and resonates a lot.

LJ fandom was criticised often for its cult of nice that was a facade hiding all manner of nonsense. There’s truth to that, but what I’ve seen in the days after I find magnitudes more unappealing. The polemics of identities conducted so effectively and continually in modern fandom and fandom-adjacent publication genres is quite extraordinary. It's wicking out voices and stories, and it’s become an exercise in walking on eggshells. New authors, or new to English authors, or authors unfamiliar with or uninterested in Anglosphere cultural discourse, may not be able to do what I could do in the aughts, because of everything they’ll have to fear tripping on. 

  House elf plotline: A Critique of Author Choices by @ashesandhackles

HP meta in 2023??? Trust me! I really liked this meta and definitely recommend reading it even if you don't normally go for meta. It's just an incredible summary + observations of the worldbuilding. Definitely one of the most objective metas I have read in HP. You should actually think about posting it on AO3, @ashesandhackles.

With a character that had this much thought and agency in Chamber of Secrets specifically because of what it meant for house elves as a whole (and one whose presence made Hermione excited in GOF and hope that other house elves look at his example), one must ask ourselves: why?

  cringe by lierdumoa

The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers That's what "cringing" is. It's pearl clutching. When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don't want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.

I feel like there's a lot of folks who are trying to reclaim cringe. But some newer folks are kind of missing the history context behind a lot of fandom vocabulary like this.

[forget-mad-not]

Alas, I have not read Macbeth and therefor cannot judge or analyse you on your references. If I miss or misinterpret anything blame it on that. English classics are still difficult for me in terms of english, for the most part, so I tend to avoid them. Schiller, Büchner or Goethe references are very welcome though. /j

I love how everything, even before the last paragraph (the revelation) points to the fact that this is not the height of the plot, the story reaching it's climax of an organic development but a perfected, practiced tale being told to the audience.

"Once upon a time: all as it should be."

The very first line, fairy tale opening. This is the Actor introducing his audience to the tale. I really love how fond you seem to be of repetitions. How it is repeated again in the last paragraph, promising that nothing will change.

"Revenge is always predestined, a necessary heartbeat. If it is a good story, it must be fulfilled, because every good story is a promise kept, like ‘till death do us part’ or ‘I’ll protect you’."

Well, this is just foreshadowing to DAMIEN in the best way possible. Again, drilling in the fact that Celine is a character in this, by the Actor perfected, tale. Repeated actions over dozens of the same day all coming to a climax where she buries the axe in Marks chest. Revenge being fulfilled, planned, leading to Damien taking the leading role. As planned.

To me, it almost seems like sentences in italics are either thoughts planted by the Actor or direct comments of his (I'm obsessed with him, I can't help it).

Your use of stylistic devices is fantastic. The frequent use of anaphoras, parallelisms and repetitions combined with your fantastic use of metaphors? Perfection

Keeping this short as it is 00:29 here and I am tired.

Spoiler for anyone out there, we're talking about this fic of mine:

And now I'd like to shove all the thought-forming tools of my entire academic career into the answer /hj /lh

First of all, I swear I'm going to put a Woyzeck-quote in a piece of writing just for you :"D ✨

In this piece of writing, by the way, I didn't so much refer to the plot of Macbeth as use fragments of its more known speech because intertextuality is a wonderful thing:

Small allusions, I know, but first of all: they sound good ✨ On the other hand, the mental image of theatre evoked by these lines are to further build associations that are meant to suggest the reality-creating function of a story (which is an important point of the characters in WKM?, especially in relation to Actor and the DAMIEN-video).

The loop-mechanic, the act of continuous repetition, also evokes a sense of rehearsal, which can develop the classic rules of storytelling and the methods that can give a story its most powerful form. One might think, of course, that a self-regarding all-mighty story-creator like Actor would be aware of them and use them to the verge of obsession.

HOWEVER. Of course, there has to be a 'however' :"D

You point very well here to the self-reflexive nature of the text and, more importantly, the story, probably my favorite canon element of the Markiplier Cinematic Universe.

Because Actor may be aware of the elements that make up a good ol' perfect story, but on the one hand: fiction is not life, and on the other hand Mark as a writer (consciously or in his usual 'sounded cool' way) has very cleverly in DAMIEN subverted the audience's expectation and literally put a gun on the wall that didn't fire and said 'fuck Chekhov'.

Basically, he managed to take his Markiplier-promises to the level of storytelling meta-criticism. Brava.

So this fanfiction was trying to be a lyrical expression of that idea, as Celine, thinking like Actor, tries to adjust and win in this twisted world, because until the story is over, she can win. (The tragedy: the story will never be over.)

From that point of view, your point about the italicized sentences is absolutely correct, on some level Actor did indeed plant those ideas there, but they are more Celine's (otherwise correct-seeming) assumptions about Actor's strategies.

However, Celine's downfall in this situation is, ironically, that she is trying to play Actor's game, following in his footsteps, trying to make sense of his arcane, stupid story-beats, trying to use them to her (and Damien's) advantage. However, all this does is make us go round and round in circles and we just tire ourselves out.

Maybe, a solution (won't solve everything, though, some things can't be fixed, and that must be accepted): if you don't play by the rules, there is no play.

You can only break out of the loop. But look, it's cracking around the edges like ice anyway. Leave the gun on the wall. Here's an axe, more practical.

Fuck Chekhov.

But hey, that's just a theory, a dead author's theory! (Next time our lesson respectfully will be 'fuck Roland Barthes', just watch :"D)

Meo dear, thank you so much for your thoughts and for taking the time to reflect on my story and share your interpretations with me, it means a lot! :"3 💜

And, I haven't forgotten, I will definitely keep in mind your offer of beta-reading and German proofreading ;) ✨

[loopy777]

Yeah, the brutal demand for quality and excelence in the japanese weekly grind for Manga artists means that even the best of them experience burnout at some point or discover their plans didnt quite go as they wanted it too.

Because of this, even excelent manga tend to have at least one terrible or subpar arc, when things just did not come together.

As i said, i think there are plenty of better manga and animes that FMA, but there are very few of them that doesnt have such a dip in quality at some point.

And thats the series that are overall good, plentyu have a bad arc and never really recover. Naruto pre timeskip was better than FMA, and the peak of what shonen could be... Post timeskip it eventually fell off a cliff.

Bleach had a very interesting world, and peaked during an arc where it essentially was a giant murder/political mystery... With a spectacular plot twist at the end... But it never managed to reach that level of quality again, and meandered through to a finish line, where both anime and manga got cacencled at different points(despite what some like to argue) for shitty quality. Hell the manga was cut short during the final battle itself. Thats really bad.

The list goes on and on.

To be fair, one bad arc isn't exactly limited to manga, or shonen. You'll find it in many excellent series.

Hell, while not really an arc, even ATLA, amazing as it was had one episode which almost all fans utterly despises.

Also about the peanut gallery... Us talking about it, actuqlly reminded me that one of the best Fights Luffy ever had, actually had the Villain, Katakuri, basically go:

"Damn this peanut gallery is annoying... Lets get rid of them before we kick things into high gear."

And then he knocks them the fuck out so that him and luffy can have an epic battle in peace. It's not the funniest scene in the world, but when i actually look at it on a meta level, yeah, this fight is so much better speciffically cause Katakuri removed the damned commentary track.

Okay, that's almost worth going through all of One Piece to get to, considering my gripe. XD

I have to wonder about the weekly grind for manga compared to American comics. Sure, you can cover a lot more territory in 50 issues a year compared to 12, but in practice, does that hold up for most action manga? Is having a single writer-artist superior to having a writer who works with a rotating artist team?

I would argue that having a full writing team is inferior to a single writer, and American comics seem to agree with me as writers these days seem to stick around for an uninterrupted run for at least a year before leaving and never looking back, and that's when the book isn't writer-owned. But considering manga art is a group effort, anyway, it seems like it would be a simple shift to having a larger team who do every other issue or something like that.

And a shift to every other week as a standard probably wouldn't be hard to accommodate. It still gets installments out fairly frequently, and I'd argue that manga has largely decompressed in order to manage its update schedule, so I think we'd see a natural speed up in pace and the storytelling wouldn't be any slower. I suspect that even the writers who don't fumble things just learn how to stretch things or tread water with their stories in order to give themselves time to recharge or resolve creative issues, so giving them that week's buffer would just result in things tightening up.

But I'm just speculating as an ignorant Audience. I can't draw, I've never written anything professionally, I've never even worked on an amateur comic, and I know very little about the manga industry except that they come out bundled in weekly anthology magazines and about 15,000 mangaka die every year from overwork. As someone from an engineering background, my solution when a machine is burning itself out is to run it slower or stop covering up the vents. And I have no idea what that second option would look like in the comic industry.

[marithlizard]

Yeah, a lot of companies, like Funimation, have pulled  their titles off of Crunchyroll in the last few years to launch their own paid services etc. It's as much of a mess as live-action streaming. 

(oh boy do I have recs.  We have some similar tastes - Mushishi is fantastic, and I have not seen Dr. Stone but it looks interesting.  Death Note was entertaining as a cat-and-mouse thriller, but the degree of casual sexism and contempt that suffuses everything to do with Misia, and to a lesser extent every other female character, horrified me too much to ever rewatch.)

- Any anime rec list by me starts with Revolutionary Girl Utena, the groundbreaking postmodern surreal queer shoujo anime that people still write undergrad theses on.  But....the dub is genuinely, notoriously bad (not through any fault of the voice actors, to be fair).  So even though Nozomi usually has it up for free on youtube and there is a high-quality box set rerelease, I can't recommend it in your situation.

- Princess Tutu is not available anywhere but boxed set AFAIK right now, but it is phenomenally good.  Ballet,  fairy tales, a duck, and so many layers of meta. A tiramisu of meta.

- Chihayafuru is a highschool sports anime about a thousand-year-old card game. Anything that has so much passion for its subject charms me, and karuta is just really neat.  

- Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, aka  "the rakugo anime", opened my eyes to an entire culture I never would've known anything about.  No supernatural elements to this one, it's an exquisite historical piece set starting in the 1930s.  If that is the sort of thing you like, you will like it.  

- Mononoke might be up your alley since you liked Mushishi.  Very different visual style, and the stories are slanted heavily towards horror but a similar formula of wandering protagonist  encountering supernatural problems and situations, and the writing is great.  CW for sexual violence and some other disturbing stuff, definitely  not for kids.

Gankutsuo is visually  in a similar style to Mononoke, only more so - I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.  A science fiction retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, very well done. 

- Bakemonogatari is a modern-day anime in the supernatural-short-stories genre;  the first season at least is definitely worth checking out.  (Later seasons fall increasingly into the trope of having every female on screen of any age be enamoured of the protagonist, which gets tired and in some cases icky, but some of the individual stories are really good nonetheless. )

- The Promised Neverland is a tense, clever thriller about young children who realize they're living in an inescapable deathtrap, and apply their intelligence to the problem.  There is one POC character with an unfortunately stereotypical visual design (she's a good character,though), but other than that it's pretty brilliant.  We started buying the manga as soon as we finished watching the show because we had to know what happens next.  

Er.  I could go on for a while - my friendgroup has been doing weekly anime viewings for over 20 years now,  and my flatmate keeps track of everything we've ever seen on his blog, so there's a lot to draw on for recs.  If you want any more, let me know what sort of story you're looking for. :)

I have been checking out anime on Crunchyroll lately. First impression: I'm impressed with the amount of titles but disappointed that there aren't many older titles. Where are Cowboy Bebop or any Takahashi series except Inuyasha? Seriously.

Second impression: Sturgeon's Law holds true once again. 90% of any genre is crap.

Unfortunately there are two problems on my end. Vision problems mean my entire family can't read subtitles right now, and our terrible connection means we can't just link the computer to the TV and all watch it in comfort at the same time. So I am basically previewing titles to see about getting dubbed DVDs at a later date. Hoo, boy.

Dr. Stone Season 1 was highly enjoyable. It's a classic boy's adventure story with elements straight out of the 19th and early 20th Century updated for the 21st; I jokingly call it "Tom Swift in the 38th Century". It reminded me of Astro City, in that it not only deconstructed it's genre (shonen adventure for Dr. Stone, superheroes for Astro City), but it reassembled the pieces into something better. I am really looking forward to watching this one with my family of science nerds.

Mushi-shi was excellent, I would call it "Spirited Away for Young Adults". The "wandering hero" genre has fallen out of favor since the 1970s, but it works perfectly to showcase an anthology set at the turn of the 20th Century that reads like a collection of folk tales. The art and the storytelling are both so high that I immediately ordered the boxset.

That's the start. Next up -- Death Note.

Any recommendations?