#(its pretty much the conceit of the series)

[omegasmileyface]

im so fucked up. theres a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel to hitchhikers guide) where zaphod is rummaging through the ruins of a long-destroyed city on a lifeless, abandoned planet, looking for a way off, and he stumbles upon the crumbling remains of a spaceport, and miraculously one of the crafts is still intact, and there's still a quiet hum of power going into it from a connected cable, and it's making a quiet noise. so he rigs up a makeshift stethoscope and listens, and there's a PA system saying something like "we are very sorry for the delay. we are currently waiting for a restocking on lemon-soaked towlettes, for your hygienic and culinary pleasure. in the meantime, we will be serving coffee and biscuits on the deck." and he finds the remains of the arrivals/deparetures board, translates the dates and does a little math, and discovers the delay has been 900 years. spooky, yeah? but he goes on the ship, hoping he can get it flying, and it's perfectly well-functioning and an android flight attendant comes out and tries to force him to sit in the seating area, continuing to apologize for the delay. and when he gets to the seating area, every seat has a person in it. long-haired, long-nailed, and completely silent, but very much alive. and another android comes out with a tray of coffee and cookies, and all of the people wake up and start screaming in agony as she gives them their snacks. zaphod is terrified, so he runs to the control deck and locks the door behind him, and he finds the autopilot computer, which repeatedly tells him to return to the seating area, and he eventually convinces it to talk to him. "have you seen the planet?" he says, or something to that general effect. "there's no civilization! you're not GETTING a lemon-soaked napkin shipment!" and the autopilot says "the most likely path to us receiving our shipment is to wait until another civilization develops on the planet and they can deliver it. so we have put the passengers in suspended animation, and we wake them up once a year for coffee." and then? and then zaphod's friend who he was looking for shows up and the plot carries on and they don't say another word about the ship (at least, as far as i know from my place a couple chapters later). thats it. some classic Space Horror Of Grand Proportions, a doctor who plot, a twilight zone plot, an scp article, an asimov short story— that, when a ship ran out of a luxury amenity and didn't get it fulfilled quickly, the autopilot ai decided that, regardless of plentiful fuel and safety, the ideal way to deal with the situation is to suspend the lives of all of the passengers, waking them up once a year, until a new civilization could evolve around them to produce napkins— and it takes up about two pages total before being put aside completely!

[txttletale]

how would you recommend watching doctor who? there are so many different guys idk how it works.

so the thing about doctor who is that there's two shows -- classic who (1963-1989, doctors 1-7) and new who (2005-2023, doctors 9-14). due to a renumber of the seasons and a change in production company, i think it's fair to call the upcoming version of who (2023-??, doctors 15-??) its own, third show. the reason it's been able to run for so long is that when the show's lead actor, (william hartnell as the titular doctor) had to step down in 1966 due to failing health, they made up some sci-fi bullshit: the doctor's species can 'regenerate' instead of dying, instantly healing but changing their appearance and some of their personality. this means that every time a lead actor has walked away (or, in one unfortuante case, been fired) the show's just recast the doctor and moved on, often with notable changes in tone and format.

the easiest option if you don't want to backwatch anything is to start with this year's christmas special, the church on ruby road (2023). it's an obvious jumping on point to the series, introduces you to all the basic stuff (the doctor, the TARDIS, the fact that it's a silly sci-fi show about fighting weird rubber prop critters), and presumably sets up the upcoming season 1 of the disney-bad wolf version of the show that's gonna come out in may 2024.

if you do want to backwatch, you have to decide if you want to start with new who or classic who. i personally would recommend starting with new who, because there's less of it, it's got higher production values, and (imo this is the biggest obstacle to getting into classic who) it's paced in a way that makes much more sense to a modern TV viewer (self-contained 45-minute episodes). also once you're invested in the show, its main character, and some of its classic elements, you get to soyjak at the screen whenever you're watching classic who and you get to see the oirign of a monster you already recognize. you can also skip classic who entirely and never watch it, they don't bring up anything from it in the new series without giving it a new explanation, but if you do this you hate fun.

anyway, starting points for nuwho: the most obvious one is rose (2005). it's the pilot episode for the new show and imo it holds up brilliantly -- it introduces all the most basic concepts of the show, but ultimately it's really all about billie piper and cristopher eccleston's performances and they deliver. the special effects are gonna be pretty terrible for a while because it's early 2000s cg. there's no jumping on point like it for the whole of RTD's run of the show (imo, the best run of nuwho) so if you want to watch seasons 1-4 you've gotta start on rose.

another episode that's written as a jumping on-point is (heavy sigh) the eleventh hour (2011). as well as introducing matt smith's doctor and his companion amy, this also does the whole rigamarole of introducing the show's core elements, giving a nutshell recap of its history in the form of the doctor's rooftop speech, and also signal what the oncoming moffat era is going to be like (whimsical, full of complex time travel plots, way more misogynist). i'm biased -- i'm a hater, one of this episode's central plot conceits sucks real bad and i also hate the eleventh doctor's whole run. but it is meant to be a jumping on point.

there won't be another one of those in nuwho until the pilot (2017). this begins moffat's final season with which he made the odd but extremely welcome decision to jettison all his convoluted continuity shit from the last five seasons and refocus the show with the doctor being a professor at bristol university with a mysterious secret. i think season 10 is a hidden gem and if you find starting from rose daunting this is the next best place to pick up. capaldi's doctor is a delightful abrasive eccentric with a heart of gold at this point in his run & the stories are wall-to-wall bangers with only a couple misses.

finally, you could start on the woman who fell to earth (2018), the first episode to feature jodie whittaker's 13th doctor and head writer chris chibnall. i'd recommend this even less than the eleventh hour, because while i actually like it more, i think it's a much worse preview of what the upcoming era is going to be like than that one. if you watch the woman who fell to earth and keep watching from the start of whittaker's run on the show off the back of it, you're going to be severely disappointed as most of the more promising aspects of the episode get instantly abandoned.

so, summary, if you're starting with nuwho, there's five jumping on points, which i'd rank:

rose > the pilot > the church on ruby road > the eleventh hour > the woman who fell to earth

but i want to start with classic who because i'm a contrarian

alright. classic who also has a few jumping off points -- before i mentioned them, let me just talk about that format thing i mentioned earlier. classic who doesn't have self-contained episodes for the most part, but rather for most of its run told each of its episodic narratives across between two and seven 20-minute episodes. this leads to a lot of weird pacing, forced cliffhangers, and infamously a lot of filler shots of the doctor running up and down identical corridors. so obvsies i'm recommending entire stories here nad not individual episodes. that said, let's look at where you could jump on:

an unearthly child (1963). this is, like, the start of the show. that said i don't recommend it as a place to start (funnily enough), for a couple reasons. firstly, because of dreadful fucking archiving by the BBC, a lot of episodes from the show's first six seasons are straight up missing. some of them have been animated by the BBC from surviving audio recordings, but some of them are just straight up lost -- due to the format, this means there's very few full complete stories, which makes this whole era really hard to navigate. if you don't mind that and really want to start in the black and white era, i'd still recommend the tomb of the cybermen (1967) instead -- hartnell's portrayal of the doctor as a haughty, slightly impish old professor is great, but troughton basically defined the character's core traits for the next sixty years.

spearhead from space (1970) is a pretty big format upheaval for the show and so serves as a pretty great classic jumping-on point. it's the first episode to be in colour, and sets up a new status quo for the doctor as being trapped on earth and working for an elite paramlitary organization called UNIT that operates out of a ratty office. it's an interesting premise that the show gets some great stories out of. the special effects are bad in the best way. pertwee has instant charm in the role and it's all around a banger by classic standards.

if you want to jump right to the one all the boomers are nostalgic for, you can also start with robot (1974). i wouldn't recommend it, though--tom baker is electric in the role from the start, but the episode itself kind of assumes a lot of the context of the third doctor's setup and supporting cast which you're not gonna have.

i wouldn't recommend anyone start at any point during the fifth or sixth doctors runs because i want them to actually like the show, so i guess the last jumping on point i could really recommend after robot would be, like, dragonfire (1987), which heralds the show's short-lived renaissance with the seventh doctor and his best companion, ace. but although you'd be watching some of the absolute best the classic show ever gets, it feels like it would be a weird and disorienting place to start.

finally, you could watch tales of the tardis (2023), a limited series produced to celebrate the show's 60th anniversary. each episode follows the same format: through a vaguely handwaved Palace of Memories plot, two much-aged characters from the classic series meet up and fondly remember one of the adventures they shared. the bookends with the original actors are mostly shameless fanservice, but the episodes they're reminiscing about are superbly edited down into a much more watchable format -- it works as a good 'sample platter' for most eras of the show (although, weirdly, there wasn't anything from tom baker's run!) and i think it honestly wouldn't be a bad shout to just start from tales of the tardis and then keep watching from whichever of the stories featured in it you liked most. that all said, if you want to start with classic who, i'd rank these jumping on points as follows:

spearhead from space > tales of the tardis > tomb of the cybermen > dragonfire > robot > an unearthly child

all that shit said it's fundamentally a very episodic show with very few exceptions like trial of a time lord and whatever moffat was doing seasons 6-7 so in the end you can basically just start with any episode and more or less get some of the idea. have fun and make sure to do the most important job of a doctor who fan, update the tardis wiki page for penis whenever one is mentioned

[whetstonefires]

Man sometimes I still think about Alfred's Bandit Anecdote in The Dark Knight (2008).

So, the most straightforward reading of this sequence seems to have been the one Nolan intended, because he is not actually a subtle filmmaker, and the further we got into the series the more heavily he committed to making Alfred a mouthpiece. Old man provides words of wisdom that frame the correct understanding of the situation; you can tell it's meant to be correct because subsequent Joker appearances reinforce its thesis statement.

Intended takeaway: some men (like the Joker) don't have rational motivations, they just 'want to watch the world burn,' and you have to account for that when trying to counter them. Chaos agents, basically unstoppable by reasonable means.

But the thing is. This is not a story that stands up to even mild interrogation. The number of assumptions Nolan wants us to swallow without blinking is kind of stunning.

First of all the obvious timeline questions that arise: the Anglo-Burmese Wars and periods between and leading up to them where this kind of white man's burden 'delivering jewels to local elites In The Burmese Jungle to sway them toward British interests, but getting waylaid by bandits' scenario makes any sense all, happened in the 19th century.

The Burmese resistance in the 1930s was centered on university student protests and that sort of thing; it was reasonably successful in moving Myanmar toward independence by increments, though who knows what would have happened without WWII. But it did not provide anyone with reasons to be hand-carrying huge gemstones through forests.

Even if we assume this was somehow a 20th century event, it has to have been before WWII unless we want to postulate a complete alt-history setting, and since The Dark Knight leans heavily into being a modern 21st century story with like, cell phone networking as a major plot point, this still makes Alfred old as balls. Born no later than 1920, and probably earlier.

But that's whatever; comics time. Batman Begins did some fun stuff (possibly in imitation of Batman (1980)) with making it ambiguous what decade it was supposed to be set in, though the sequels dropped that conceit. And anyway, people can be 90 years old.

So that's basically fine, although good god Wayne hire some more servants, this man should be fully retired already.

More problematic is the unfettered colonialism of it all, the confident proclamation that since this guy's motive wasn't profit, since he didn't keep the jewels, he had no motive. Because 'inconveniencing the Raj and weakening their control over the locality' isn't a Real Person Motive that a real person could have had. During or soon after failed wars to resist colonial subjugation.

Like. Come on??

The place where this story utterly shoots itself in the foot, though, is the clever bit at the end, where Bruce asks how Alfred's military unit solved the 'bandit stealing jewels he didn't even want' problem and Alfred's like: 'we burned the forest to the ground.'

Because this is so punchy! In screenwriting technical terms, it's quite well done. It's useless advice that loops the story back to its themes; obviously Batman can't burn Gotham down to get the Joker. Even in a Batman movie that doesn't like Batman very much, this is still obvious.

But at the same time this totally takes the legs out from under Alfred's words of wisdom about human nature. Because if that bandit 'wanted' to 'watch the world burn' then what his unit did wasn't so bad, right; he was basically asking for it. Burning a forest down with all the inevitable collateral damage and economic and ecological cost, all for the sake of horribly killing a group of people in the name of government revenues was totally okay guys!

It transforms the whole thing into a pretty obvious post facto rationalization of colonial violence. Which makes the Insights Into Human Nature bit real questionable!

But the movie gives absolutely no sign of having noticed this.

[datura-tea]

okey dokey! i just finished the fallout show! some Thoughts under the read more

tl:dr, the (bethesda) fallout vibes were definitely there. i liked it as a show on its own merits but as a part of the series canon... i'm mad, and that anger is kind of overriding the little i liked about it. overall maybe 2.5/5 stars and im being generous

things i liked:

visually, it's stunning - i could see scenes already being made into gifsets - the color grading is pretty good; even in dark scenes i could see and understand what was happening

the sets are soooo good!! costume design was alright too

title cards were fun and cute

they did some interesting stuff with the cultures of both vault 33 and the brotherhood of steel

they used the sound effects from the games :)

i liked the wastelanders!!! big npc and random encounter energy. i kind of want a whole show of just them. for example i love the marketplace and settlement in filly; it feels very lived in

the background characters weren't just young thin able-bodied conventionally attractive white people :) there's so many elders, which i loved!! ma june and barv were cool. i love gruff old lesbians

lucy!!! she was already kind of weird and a little off-putting even in vault 33 ("what's your sperm count" as an opener to the husband she was just arranged married to is WILD) and i like that. she's sweet and bullheaded and surprisingly competent :)

maximus is kind of an ass, but is also a pathetic nerd and brotherhood dickrider who actually doesn't really know anything. kind of a girlfailure

the ghoul was pretty cool too!! i liked him, though more for his prewar story than the one he has post-apocalypse

lucy's brother norman kinda grew on me. "i lack enthusiasm for every job that i do here" so relateable. also short king <3

THE DENTIST THAT BUYS TEETH. never thought that would be a Thing but now that i think about it, it makes sense

the monsters that we have were cool!! wish there had been more of them

MATT BERRY IS IN THIS!! i just really like him so i got excited :))

maximus and lucy's "wanna have sex?" talk LMAO

vault 4's various mutations!!

those giant unwieldy fuckass duffel bags that brotherhood squires lug around hahahhahahaaha

vault 4 and its genetic experiments because its main conceit is that it was ruled by scientists who hybridized humans. it's exactly the right amount of fucked up i want in a vault

i like that the protagonists regularly get captured and eat shit

FRED ARMISEN IS ALSO HERE

haha hacking minigame :) also chatting via terminals (and im assuming pipboys?) is canon now

they're growing crops in the wasteland + bustling trade + livestock + pets yay

robobrain was cute

things i was just ok with:

dane, the they/them brotherhood of steel aspirant who was fucked over so maximus can get their spot as a squire LMAO what a waste of a potentially cool character

IT'S SO FUNNY that there's yodelling whenever the ghoul comes into the scene ????? WHY

fight scenes.... pretty good but someone definitely had the bloody mess perk (i don't do well with gore so ew yucky). also lots of [VATS NOISE]

pipboy was not used as much as i thought it would be

cousin stuff... i get it, i guess in a vault you'd have a lot of cousins and not a lot of choice, so some incest would probably happen

the ghoul being vault boy's inspiration?? not sure what to feel about that tbh

the casual dismemberments... and equally casual attaching of limbs... not even prosthetic limbs.....

the vaulties eating good healthy well-balanced meals. giving out caviar in the welcome basket. kinda 50/50 on it

the vault 31 - 32 - 33 subplot couldve been more fucked up

have brotherhood knights always been celibate or did i miss the memo

there are regular chickens and... deer? for some reason?

the ghoul's design. it's fine in action but mostly it's meh

the vault 4 cult for moldaver

vault 4 as a refuge for shady sands survivors. im mad about it but like. i get it

that guys "elixir" (some altered jet??) fixing everything about thaddeus' foot instantenously AND GIVING HIM HEALING POWERS???

things i did not like:

lucy's plot premise is very much fallout 3 redux

lucy and maximus as a ship is very meh and kind of forced and not compelling. go give us nothing!!!

wilzig's head as a macguffin that everyone is after... ehh kind of just okay as a plot device

also the ghoul randomly eating that other ghoul???

the squire who bullied maximus calls himself fat but he isn't fat?? not even chubby??? hello????? just got a soft face

water chip being fucked feels very fallout 3 also but they kind of dropped it?

they definitely named cooper howard after todd. as tribute probably, which he doesn't deserve

fiend = cannibal now?????

maximus recognizing vault 4 as a cult but not recognizing the brotherhood as one lol

vault tec evil capitalism vs hollywood communists storyline was kind of basic. and bland. and weak

the enclave could've been established + explored better

no geckos or any other west coast-specific monsters

showing me ncr ranger armor when the ncr is gone

ghouls have healing powers?? WITHOUT RADIATION??

things i hated hated hated:

the ghoul needing drugs to combat the Disease That Turns Ghouls Feral

feral ghouls being basically zombies :/

IN EPISODE FIVE. THEY REVEAL. THAT SHADY SANDS. WAS BOMBED. THE ENTIRE NCR. WAS BOMBED. IN 2277. THE YEAR OF THE FIRST BATTLE OF HOOVER DAM

BASICALLY RETCONNED FNV?? IM PUTTING MY EARS IN MY FINGERS AND GOING LA LA LAAAAA

VAULT-TEC DROPPED THE BOMBS ???? BIG MT + MR HOUSE BEING IN ON IT????

THE BIG STUPID FUCKING REVEAL IN EPISODE EIGHT?? THAT THE OVERSEER BOMBED SHADY SANDS BECAUSE HIS WIFE DIDN'T WANT TO GO HOME WITH HIM??? FUCK THAT???

the brotherhood being the main faction of the west coast now. booo!! booo!!!!

the fucking last shot of new vegas being a burnt out husk. probably foreshadowing that hank is going to house's body but. UGH I HATE IT

to summarize: it came out strong! and stumbled hard falling face fucking first at the finish line. i would have liked it a lot more if it did not shit on the west coast as much as it did. because what the FUCK. if it was set literally anywhere else and left the ncr alone i would have liked it more, because on its own, as a self-contained story, divorced from the rest of the fallout series canon, it's not bad!!! it's fun, there's some good bits, it has the ~vibes~ but - and this is a big but - i don't know what it's trying to say. it's all very surface level and the very vague themes i picked up on are not really reiterated in the plot

it's like... the bits that make it fallout are there. vaults. the brotherhood. ghouls. a dog named dogmeat. but there's something lacking. it's like your usual sci-fi post-apocalypse show with a fallout veneer. idk. i like it for what it is but also i hate it for what it's emblematic of. that's all

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #42 – The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

This is the rare book that I read less than six months after finishing the previous entry in the series, and only the second definite conclusion to a series. It was incredibly readable and never a slog, and the big final climactic set-piece absolutely worked for me, but on the whole I probably enjoyed it rather less than The Last Graduate?

The book picks up the precise moment Graduate lets off, with El getting shoved out of the Scholomance moments before it goes spinning off into the void by Orion – her storybook monster-hunting hero/traumatized child soldier boyfriend. Who she instantly tries to move heaven and earth to drag him out, and then spends a week near catatonic with exhaustion and grief. In the end, the plot comes in the form of Liesel, the valedictorian of her year at the Scholomance, arriving and all but dragging her off to save the London Enclave from imminent collapse and consumption by a rampant Mawmouth, one of the horrifying, deathless monsters that she is one of exactly two people alive to ever kill. From there she’s dragged into the mystery of an unknown malificer destabilizing and destroying enclaves, the brewing war between New York and Shanghai, and convincing Orion’s family to help try and rescue him before the Scholomance vanishes entirely into the void.

Despite being about ostensible adults who have graduated and are properly finding their places in the world, this still very much read like YA to me – moreso, really, without the conceit of the killer magic highschool overshadowing everything else. Or, okay, have gotten disagreement when describing the series as YA before, so to be more specific – El’s romantic and familial drama are quite literally the most important things in the world, as she and her highschool boyfriend are the most important and powerful entities in all creation. With the exception of El’s mom being a saint and providing healing and support, I’m pretty sure literally every consequential act that occurs on-screen is done either by or to someone under 20. El melts down, fucks off for a week, and never answers her phone in a way that is very relatable for an overwhelmed 18-year-old but potentially world-war-starting for a walking WMD. And so on. Without the deliberately artificial setting of the Scholomance, the wires of genre convention just show through more obviously, you know? (Also, my first introduction to Novik was Spinning Silver and I’m still waiting to read anything else of hers that comes near it on the level of prose and style).

None of which is a complaint – the fact that your boyfriend’s mom is literally the worst person in the world just comes with the territory. What is a complaint is how the book treats its supporting cast. This is El and Orion’s story, and I’m pretty sure they are literally the only people in it who get – not even an arc, but just any sense of development or change over time whatsoever. They feel like characters, everyone else feels like cardboard cutouts, or NPCs in a video game. Which is a fair choice to make when space is at a premium, but my copy of this came out to over 400 pages. Even the other characters with enough personality and screentime to make any sort of impression can honestly be counted on one hand.

In consequence, this is an incredibly plot-driven novel. The pacing is both frenetic and frantic, with what feels like basically the entire thing spent either in or rushing to one crisis or big dramatic set-piece after another – a surprising amount of it is spent in airports, honestly. The epilogue mentions that they ‘crammed a decade worth of crises into a fortnight’ or something along those liens and, yeah! The contrast between this and the previous two books spreading their crises across whole school years is inescapable.

That said, that frantic, 400-page-sprint plot did work. Or, at least, the big emotional setpieces and dramatic confrontations that are clearly the heart of the whole thing absolutely hit me like they were supposed to. The finale especially.

There is a certain sort of cliche in old arguments about superhero stories, where one side says that superman is boring because he’s more powerful than the rest of the world put together and impossible to threaten, and the other says that he’s interesting for precisely the same reason. This isn’t actually true of most superman stories as far as I can tell, but it still seems an apt comparison for this book. There is absolutely no point in the entire story where ‘Can El kill this?’ is a question that is in any doubt. The horrifying monsters that the thought of fighting again in Book 2 sent her into panic attacks? She can kill them with a sentence an a wave of her hands. There is simply not a moment in the book where her efforts fail due to a lack of force – so the entire story becomes an exercise in supplying dramatic tension and a compelling action-adventure wizard-battle narrative despite this handicap. And it (mostly) works!

The series has never been big on villains – in both the previous books, the central problem being struggled against was always environmental or systemic or a matter of coordination and planning. This book redoubles the commitment, to the point of dangling the red herring of the sinister dark wizard running around destroying enclaves before eventually revealing that the real villain is, well, the collateral damage of trying to fix (metaphorical) climate change and structural inequality without a full understanding of the problem. Never a really convincing red herring, but I still enjoyed the reveal.

Part of the whole YA feel is just the themes being very close to the surface of things and legible to casual reading. What with the enclaves of comfort and luxury that every wizard is fighting for entrance to literally being built on a foundation of eternal and deathless suffering, or the number of monsters in the world being the proliferation of enclaves as China and India began catching up with the Euro-Americans leading to an arms/development race that leaves anyone not part of it just more and more fucked over, and all. Not a bad thing – honestly it’s a compliment to say that the book managed to have such clear themes with such obvious applicability to the real world without ever feeling like it had turned into a lecture. Many similar works fail the test.

It is I think kind of funny how you can use the prominence of queerness in this series to track how the culture of mainstream publishing has changed between releases. From not really mentioned at all in Deadly Education to El sleeping with a woman on-page in this. (I actually can’t remember if she ever, like, realized she was bi or it just got retroactively established as something she was already comfortable with?)

Speaking of themes – this is mostly just on me personally, but the whole resolution with El’s great-grandmother left an intense bad taste in my mouth. I’m sure it was just necessary to make the whole very cute resolution of her whole doom-laden prophecy work, but ‘yes the family matriarch basically threw my mom in the gutter with newborn me in her arms, but it was with the best of intentions! She felt really bad about it, and she was right that it was the only way things would work out well in the end!’ is a trope that just viscerally repels me. Or at least it does when El reconciling and reconnecting with the extended family that abandoned her is clearly portrayed as part of the big happy ending. I’d probably react less harshly if this was a different genre, honestly? But as it is, yeah, in the same way that being so consistent about making The System the only real villain makes the fact that there’s apparently some sort of system of instant karma and doing good things/being a good person actually does make the universe like and do good things for you ring a bit hollow.

Anyway yes, there’s definitely more to talk about – Orion as a character is a whole essay in himself, and so is his mom, but that’s enough for now. It was a very fun, addictively readable book that hit the Big Moments very well, but everything outside of them and the two main characters felt kind of threadbare and perfunctory. Still, not a book I regret reading.

[biblioflyer]

To boldly go backwards?

Unpacking the attitudes behind people burned by Burnham. No, not those people. The other people. The ones who authentically seem to care about something other than protecting their image of Columbus as a cool dude.

This will be a series. If you’re reading this on the day it escaped my queue, the rest are queued for a 1 a day. If not, all will have the ‘Star Trek ethics’ tag in common. If I’m really on the ball, I’ll come back later and edit in links to the other chapters here.

I can see it now. Enterprise had its 1701-D cameos, Star Trek Picard had its Enterprise-G moment, and now Discovery’s finale will likely be controversial on the basis of Burnham placing the Progenitor’s technology out of reach of pretty much everyone. There will be many different ways of contemplating this, but I think you can sum it up as:

Did Discovery “give in” to techno-pessimism and in doing so undermine a core theme of Star Trek?

I don’t personally think so, but you might and I think I know why. Burnham is kind of, sort of applying a reverse Prime Directive on the Federation. She comes away believing that the Progenitor tech should not be entrusted to one person or even one civilization, and that ultimately it's unnecessary. So she “throws it away.” 

By throw it away, I mean she has it yeeted into a Black Hole where theoretically more advanced civilizations than the Federation can access it if and when it comes to it, but by that point it will likely be more of an anthropological curiosity to them rather than a new technological singularity.

Thus, the series finale of Discovery is one in which some observers might feel that a core premise of Star Trek, that of techno-optimism, is betrayed. While the grousing I think is likely to be hyperbolic, not all of it is necessarily a mask for something more nasty, feral, and likely to get a person kicked off any reasonably well moderated platform if expressed in the open.

What you think the core values of Star Trek are may actually be just that: a different understanding of what the core values are, and thus a different understanding of when they have or have not been undermined. I have my own take on those values.

For instance I despise Section 31 as a concept and storytelling device, believe it has directly attacked one of the most important core conceits of the setting: its fundamental optimism, and the damage this embrace of cynicism has done is continuing to ripple through Trek into the present day.

Yet at the same time, I also understand Trek as a set of modern fables, that the Federation is not a real place, and that it has a narrative function. That function being to model becoming aware of and confronting that which we should find repugnant and unacceptable in our own society if we were not desensitized to it.

Thus Burnham’s choice is one that can be read a few different ways, and that’s without getting into whether it was satisfying as a climax. While it is often derisively referred to as “NuTrek”, a label that both describes a worldview and a storytelling style anathema to those who prefer the more professional affectations, high regard for Classical Education, and “competency porn” of TOS & TNG or the more “neo-realist” shades of gray of DS9; Discovery is in many ways a fusion of the Treks of yesteryear. 

Sometimes it can be a lot closer to The Original Series in worldview than one might imagine in its willingness to indulge moral gray zones: “the Vulcan Hello” being a prime example. Other times it affirms the TNG obsession with personal and civilizational virtues as a thing one actively commits to upholding even when there are tremendous, even transformative benefits to be reaped by conceding. The refusal of the Progenitor tech being one of those examples.

This is something I’m going to unpack in subsequent posts in an attempt to try to sidestep some of the nastier fissures in the fandom and uncover what I think may be a genuine difference in the worldviews and orientations of some fans rather than, at best a distaste for the story structures and affectations of Discovery, and at its worst naked hostility to a crew that isn’t predominantly Anglo-European, heterosexual, and male. 

Next: What is the Kirkian ideal?

[veliseraptor]

February Reading Recap

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer. I didn't find a whole lot new in this book, as far as thinking through questions of how to deal with art made by people who have done things or hold opinions that one finds morally reprehensible, but it was a well-written and thoughtful probing of the subject nonetheless. I really appreciated the fact that Dederer was comfortable (or, if not comfortable then at least accepting) of coming to a place with no easy answers. rea

Stars of Chaos: vol. 1 by Priest. I'm not sucked into this one yet, but I am intrigued by it enough that I'm going to keep reading. I haven't hooked into the main relationship, and it hasn't had the same level of delightful banter (at least, as yet) that I have enjoyed in other Priest novels I've read, but I do have volume 2 sitting on my shelf and I'm looking forward to reading it.

System Collapse by Martha Wells. I find that I've liked the early Murderbot books a lot more than the later ones, and this one unfortunately continued that trend. I don't think the series has overstayed its welcome for me yet - I'll probably continue to read it, at least for now - but I find myself losing interest.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone. I said I was going to reread it and I did! And it didn't blow me away in quite the same way I remember it doing when I read it the first time around several years ago, but I still really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it enough this time around (and was still compelled enough by the worldbuilding, which I do remember being a big part of what stood out to me), that I plan to reread the rest of the series as well. But while, again, it didn't blow me away the way I remember, I would say that I generally recommend it, particularly as a fantasy that is doing some things different.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Manhua): vol. 5 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I am only and specifically reading the volumes of the manhua that have Yi City in it, so I'm pretty much exclusively assessing this based on my Yi City feelings. And while overall I feel like the art style isn't working for me in a way that is impacting my ability to really get into it there was at least one panel that really conveyed something and made me Feel Things, so it gets credit for that. I am enjoying the experience of doing Yi City in a whole new format, though, that's enjoyable for the sheer "getting to do Yi City, again, but in a different medium this time" reason.

We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinker. I read this book for a book club I'm in and I found it rather too didactic and the ending a little too pat. The family dynamics were strongly written and I sort of feel like Pinker could've written a stronger book that was just about a family without the part about New and Suspect Technology. I wouldn't even say that I necessarily disagree with the points I think she's making in this book, but I would say that it went a little too hard and a little too obviously on making those points.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. I liked this one and particularly as of the last...idk, five pages or so, I'm so on board for what comes next. I am promised that it gets even weirder and given that it was already fairly weird...I'm fascinated by the worldbuilding here, and the conceit of the Enlightenment-style contrasted with the future setting is a fun one. I'm looking forward to more.

Ring by Koji Suzuki. I was neither scared by this book (though perhaps I was ruined by knowing the whole thing more or less beat for beat) and did not particularly enjoy the experience of reading it, and then the part where Sadako was revealed to be...genderweird? somehow? unclear to me what the author was going for exactly, sort of tanked it for me. I probably will not be reading the rest of the series unless I get truly desperate for horror to read.

Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler. I don't know that I'd say this was the highest quality fantasy I've read recently but it might be the new-to-me one I've liked the best in a while. It was a lot of fun, very fast-moving, and I was intrigued enough by the entire set-up that I pretty much immediately put the second book on hold at the library after finishing this one. Maybe it's just been too long since I read a new-to-me fantasy book that really grabbed me, but I liked this one rather a lot and even if it was maybe more "fun" than "good" I'm still calling that enough to give this one a loose recommendation.

[cerezzzita]

Hey there, kween. Rainbow dragon here with some valentine themed asks. Giving Dante a bouquet of his favorite flowers (red roses?) with “how much did all of this cost you…” “does that really matter?”. Or forcing McCree to watch a soppy movie + "That's really all I need. Some time with just you." Here's some valentines chocolates a s payment 🍫🍫🍫

🍓 ˖ . ᵎᵎ kiss from a rose ✦ dante x fem!reader

⌕ synopsis: It's Valentine's Day and your loving devil have a thing for everything red, especially roses.

notes: oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god- FINALLY MADE SOMETHING WITH >HIM< AAAA he's my boo, Dante's just the love of my life, I can't put in words how much I love this man! he's so sjsksananwwh UGHHH I LOVE HIM SO FREAKING MUCH! MAN I LOVE YOUUU <dante3

okay okay, now i can breath. oof! firstly, happy Valentine's Day y'all! if you have a Valentine to spend the day with, hope everything's nice and smooth with you, sending you friendly but sweet kisses, and if you're like me, without a Valentine (not that that's sad okay it can be pretty good and all), come here, Dante will make your day brighter and especial as he's making with me hehehehehe.

so! hope you all enjoy the reading! AND BY THE WAYYY GO FOLLOW @aldryrththerainbowheart, yup, the sweetheart that requested this! they (sorry, I don't know your pronouns, hope I don't offend you) have an DMC Arcana Series that's mwah, over the top! thank you for requesting, though <3333 and here some sugar for ya too 🍫🍫🍫

♡ word count: 455

♡ tags: fluffy, 2nd pov (you/yours), Dante being an sugarcube, use of petnames (because it's not Dante if he's not using petnames), female reader, he's shirtless btw, Dante being the ultimate red lover that he is <3

✦ read on ao3

Stealthily, you entered the doors of the Devil May Cry shop, the tails of your eyes inspecting every possible corner. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet for a venue that had daily hustles among its members. Perhaps it was due to the fact that that day was no other than Valentine's Day. And you were looking for your valentine, one with silver hair, crystal eyes and a smoldering mischievous smile.

Speaking of mischief, the tips of your lips twitched in a similarly conceited smile. Your hands behind your back guarded a preciousness that yes, could have taken a good amount of your salary as a Devil Hunter, but it would be worth it.

Returning to the present scenario, by instinct your eyebrows shaped curious curves by the unusual silence, which was occasionally interrupted by the low — almost inaudible — music coming from the old jukebox. Your mouth opened to vocalize:

“Yoo-hoo, Dante! Where are you?”

“Miss me, sugarcube?” From the top of the stairs emerged the slender half-demon, looking fresh and shirtless. Oh yeah. A freshly showered Dante could never be too much candy for the eye.

Your teeth subtly bit into the soft flesh of your lower lip, but not to give reasons to further inflate the Devil Hunter's ego, you shook your head and took a step or two towards him.

“There you are,” you purred, capturing the smoothness of Dante's lips on yours that resulted in a brief seal. “Did you really think I would let such a special date go unnoticed?”

It was Dante's turn to let his brow rise in question, the look of his features compounded by his caricature lightness and wit. Though he couldn't be astute enough to predict the movement of your hands as you filled the fields of his eyes with a neat, fragrant bouquet of red roses. His clear, icy eyes widened in surprise.

“Babe…”

“Since you have a thing for everything that's red, I thought they were your favourites!” You justified, the soft feeling of the fervency of love and embarrassment united in a single averted gaze. Your irises returned to Dante's still dazed face.

“How much did all of this cost you…?”

“Does that really matter?” You replied.

Dante finally gave you one of those rousing, contagious smiles of his, catching the crimson flowers in one hand and wrapping his arm around your waist, lifting you off your feet in an impromptu hug. The palm of your hand, by impulse, found the warmth of the firm and naked chest of the half-demon.

“Aw, babe, you're the best girlfriend ever!" With that said, your entire face was soon taken over by lots and lots of splattered kisses. “Thank you so much, angelcake!”

“Tee-hee, happy Valentine's Day, daredevil…”

cerezzzita©, 2023 · all rights reserved ⓘ do not copy, edit, steal or claim as yours

[skaruresonic]

Oh boy, more bullshit. My favorite.

Ngl, it really sucks to be an SA2 fan these days. Between the hype and the hype reactionism, it really seems like no one's giving the game a fair shake.

I feel like I have to either defend the game from people who deride it as utter trash that you'd have to be nostalgia-blind to appreciate (because that's not insulting at all), or pop the hype bubble for people who can't bother to remember its most basic plot points.

Both of these stances ignore what SA2 actually is in favor of some strawman version of SA2. I shouldn't have to painstakingly list its flaws to be allowed to love a janky game without people assuming I'm huffing nostalgia.

I don't understand why people always say "high-speed sections only make up 1/3 of SA2" as if that means anything. Folks assume it's just a given that the game's only worth lies in the Sonic/Shadow stages.

Never mind how, according to those standards, SA1 boasts a greater mediocre-to-quality ratio for only featuring speed-based gameplay for 1/6th of the game.

If you don't like the treasure hunting and mech stages, you don't actually like SA2. Which is fine, different strokes for different folks, but don't go around assuming your experiences are universal.

By now, you guys probably know how I feel about the "hasn't aged well" argument; it's a bunch of semantically null bullshit that borders on revisionism and neglects the historical context in which games are made. It doesn't impart any objective metric of criticism; it's just a reflection of ever-fluctuating audience taste.

No one can predict the future, much less game developers. In that vein, it could be argued that many aspects of SA1 have aged just as poorly as SA2.

Don't really see the point in comparing the two because despite hosting the same title, they were aiming for different experiences. Both have merits and flaws as unique titles.

Sonic fans don't saddle their endearment with caveats about how much they know the series sucks, actually.

The underlying implication that SA2 fans appreciate the game for the aesthetics is actually pretty insulting to me as well.

The introduction of Shadow and the Crush 40 songs certainly don't hurt, but they're not the only reasons I could possibly ever like the game. To imply otherwise is to imply I'm nostalgia-blind and lack discernment.

Shock and surprise: I like the game because I enjoy the experience that it offers, rough edges and all. It's one of those games where its idiosyncrasies are inextricable from its identity.

"Slither" of good?

Once again, your argument fails on the basis that it could easily be turned against SA1 by only having 1/6th of the game consist of high-speed stages. You are also assuming your experiences are universal, which they are not. While many prefer SA1's treasure hunting stages, I actually prefer SA2's treasure hunting stages.

I hate how Knuckles controls in SA1, I hate the radar (what does blue even mean?) and I hate how the level layout is literally copy-pasted from Sonic's level design. SA2 at least offers you unique stages.

I also literally do not understand what, exactly, there is to complain about the treasure hunting aside from an unwillingness to engage with the stages. Rouge and Knuckles control just as tightly as Sonic and Shadow, and the objective of their stages largely remains the same: achieve your goal in the fastest time. You are, by design, intended to master the stages until you can memorize them.

You're allowed to dislike that, but if you do, you'd also have to admit you dislike a core design conceit of the game: replayability.

The point of a treasure hunt is to hunt. If you don't like the exploration aspect coupled with the speed-as-mastery angle, that's fine, but your subjective tastes not aligning with the game's design is not inherently a fault of the game. It's unfair to portray it as such.

And it's weird because I actually agree that some hints are needlessly obscure.

"Take an age to complete" sounds like a skill issue, bud. Most, if not all, of SA2's treasure hunting stages are designed around three tiers orbiting a central hub. The layout is not that complicated.

Honestly, I feel like the same kind of person who criticizes the mech stages for being "slower" than the Sonic-Shadow stages would also complain about Marble Zone taking place after Green Hill Zone. They simply don't get that Sonic games use the feeling of speed as a reward for mastering the game. That is to say, speed in and of itself must be earned; the games don't instantaneously grant it to you.

And you are lying through your teeth if you don't think racking up combos in the mech stages is fun. real SA2 fans complain about the shitty kart racing instead

Like... do Big, Gamma, and Amy's gameplay styles fare any better? Gamma may have been more floaty than Eggman and Tails' mechs, but that didn't make his stages any less stressful.

Hmm. Can't help but notice a conspicuous lack of Big fishing nestled amongst all this "SA1 was soooo much better you guys"

"Many boss fights are just the equivalent character from the opposite story" - wow it's almost like SA2 built its mechanics around themes of dichotomous rivalry and mirror reflections. gee it's like ST incorporated those themes into the gameplay or something. golly gosh, how incredibly odd and strange.

Imagine taking issue with the rivalry mechanic when the boxart juxtaposes the characters next to each other. If you think this is a legitimate criticism that can be leveled at the game in good faith, then nothing I say can help you.

"which is pretty dull since you can just spam leap on their head." - Yes, because being forced to fight Chaos 4 three times in a row is so much less tedious.

"They aren't mandatory to play as" unless you want to beat the game. Tell me you haven't beaten SA1 without telling me you haven't beaten SA1.

You can switch between Hero and Dark stories anytime you want in SA2 as well, goofball. You can also jump to any cutscene once you've cleared a Story, which you cannot do in SA1.

Jesse.

Whyyyyyy do people act like Knuckles doesn't move just as quickly as Sonic in SA2? I don't get it, man. Based on the way people talk, you'd think he moved like molasses.

You would only be entering the Chao Garden after each level if you picked up the Chao key in the stage and held onto it. And it's not like those Chao boxes are absolutely in your way and you have no choice but to pick up the key - you'd have to go out of your way to track them down.

This is such a "you" problem, dude.

I don't know. In hindsight, it's weird how Sonic got sidetracked from looking for Tails following the Tornado crash, to escorting Amy around town, to looking for Amy after Zero abducts her, to not finding her, and then serendipitously stumbling upon Tails in the process. In the two hours or so since losing Tails, we almost forget about him.

It's funny because, as iconic as Speed Highway is, it doesn't really have much reason to exist in the overall narrative. I'm just saying, weird pacing and stage placement are not solely SA2 problems.

Just because SA2 lacks a hub world doesn't mean there is no connective tissue between stages; it's just incorporated into background elements instead.

Knuckles comments on feeling gravity shifts in Meteor Herd, which only occurs because Sonic is concurrently throwing gravity switches in Crazy Gadget.

"People are looking back with rose-tinted glasses" - my brother in Christ, you just wrote an entire piece praising SA1 without mentioning Big's fishing stages even once. Perhaps don't call the kettle black?

"it isn't weighed down by gimmicks" - What gimmicks? The same ones SA1 has? How come you don't consider the inclusion of the Chao Garden and kart racing gimmicks when SA1 does them?

"The only thing it's missing is Shadow" - Fuck all the way off with that. Don't you dare start.

SA2 is gimmicky trash, fine, whatever. You're entitled to your opinion. But do you not understand how insulting it is for other Sonic fans to assume you only like your favorite game because there is nothing to appreciate about it other than aesthetics and nostalgia? That we're too stupid to recognize that this 23-year-old game "hasn't aged well"?

At this point I'd really rather folks just rip the Band-Aid off and call me a rube instead of espousing this "huehuehue you SA2 fans don't even know how trash the game really is, you probably like the buttrock, don't you" rhetoric. It'd be so much less condescending.

[himitsusentaiblog]

Just got back from Shin Kamen Rider

And here are my initial thoughts: Wow! I enjoyed that a lot. Much like Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider is an abbreviated take on the first series of the classic tokusatsu franchise updated with some twists and surprising differences.

I was actually not prepared for the opening sequence, which involves Hongo Takeshi's escape from the facility where he was turned into the half-man/half-bug hero. It begins pretty in media res with an exciting chase scene that leads to a surprisingly, almost shockingly, bloody fight sequence that would not be out of place in Kamen Rider Amazons/Amazon Riders.

There is a great amount of obvious love for the 1971 original dripping from the screen with classic villains reimagined (of course the first two foes he faces are the Spider and the Bat), music cues and updated but very classic technology.

As with their previous two live-action Shin versions of classic Tokusatsu franchises, it is clear Anno and Higuchi are having the time of their lives playing around with the toys of their youth in new and exciting ways. Some of the massive standouts for me were the bizarre but brief sequence involving the Scorpion Lady monster and the brilliant new take on Hachi-Onna (Wasp Woman) who may be my favorite villain of the entire film.

This an Anno film though and he cannot resist tossing in some truly weird ideas and getting incredibly introspective. I have heard numerous complaints about the weird Water Memory scenes from 2006's Kamen Rider The First and this might just one up that with one of the central conceits of the entire film. Mind you, this is a MUCH better film than The First with a much more consistent tone and more balls to the wall Rider action but you do have to take the odd mystical stuff with the awesome.

This was a good way to round out the Shin Japan Heroes series (if this is indeed the last film of that loose grouping) and I had an amazing time. I will not say anything about the ending BUT if you do see it when it runs for its second showing on June 5 (and you should if you at all can) stay past the ending credits for a special 50th Anniversary treat.

Ok, minor spoiler after the cut here... I just had to gush for a second.

They found a neat way to work in the Shocker Riders and it made me grin from ear the ear and cackle like a madwoman!

[ryunumber]

Does Misa Satsukino (Gundam Breaker 3) have a Ryu number? [I don't know if this is against the rules because while it is a game it's very much based on an anime.]

Misa Satsukino has a (Limited) Ryu Number of 3/does not have a Ryu Number.

(explanation below)

Gundam characters usually aren't too difficult to link given the series's long history with Super Robot Wars, but the key point here is that moreso than being a Gundam game, Gundam Breakers is more accurately a Gunpla game.

Gunpla, of course, being the wildly popular model kits based on the titular mecha, and most importantly for this blog's purposes, not actually the mecha themselves.

To that end, while the likes of Amuro are technically present in the recently shut down Gundam Breaker Mobile, they appeared as AI pilots you could assign to your Gunpla while participating in Gunpla battles, instead of the in-universe flesh-and-blood Gunpla nerds the game was ostensibly about.

So in a sense, these pilots all "appear" in whatever game-like system the Gunpla battles take place in. But does that count as an appearance in Gundam Breaker Mobile alongside the actual Gunpla battlers?

While I'm generally pretty hard-nosed about not counting depictions that are fictional in-universe, which kinda comes part and parcel with the Gunpla conceit, the Twitter account's judgment on in-universe media appearances is "How lazy is it?". In that sense, you could make a decent case that this is worth carving out an exception for. They all came with their own set of stats and characteristics, they were all voiced, and while this is personal speculation, if the primary appeal of Gundam Breaker as a series is playing with Gundam models by assembling and battling with them, the secondary appeal of Gundam Breaker Mobile was getting your favorite characters to pilot said Gundam models. So in a sense, you could assert the in-universe Gunpla battles were the actual core of Gundam Breaker Mobile, and the story with the "real" characters were little more than periphery flavor.

Now, my gut is to keep being a hard-nose about the in-universe depiction thing separating the two levels of fictionality at play, but complicating matters is that the game also added its own story characters as AI pilots.

So now there's characters that exist in both the fictional universe of Gundam Breaker Mobile and the artificial Gunpla battle system that exists within the fictional universe of Gundam Breaker Mobile. Are those the same character and character appearance within Gundam Breaker Mobile? I don't know, this is the exact situation I try to avoid with Extended Ryu Numbers and real ass people, just wrapped around another layer of fictionality. (Which itself could imply that, if you take the dubious step of extending the Gundam Breaker Mobile universe by asserting that other fiction beyond Gundam exists almost exactly as it does in real life, these characters have in-universe Ryu Numbers, which has to be by far the most ridiculous phrase I have ever seen fit to post.)

Not complicated enough for you? There's also AI pilots from Gundam Breaker Battlogue, the tie-in ONA for Gundam Breaker, which naturally includes Misa herself.

Honestly, if I'm twisting myself into this many Gordian knots just to establish some basic ground truths, I may as well cut it myself by saying that yeah, sure, she can have a Ryu Number if you want. It might even be Limited, going by when the Misa AI pilot was available. I don't know. Embrace and reject nuance simultaneously.

(Also, there's multiple Haros don't fucking @ me)

[charmwasjess]

Okay, I finally finished The Living Force, and as promised, I have thoughts. These are just my musings as a fan and a reader - if you enjoyed the book more than I did, I'm really glad! If you hated it, good for you too! Let people like things, let people not like things. <3 My feelings with this book were somewhat down the middle. I'm interested in reading it again in a couple months and seeing how I feel.

Overall: a fun, engaging read, genuinely hard to put down once the action starts going. The book isn’t afraid to be funny. SO MUCH GOOD JEDI CONTENT! Miller takes on a huge task trying to write perspectives for all twelve Council member characters and does a pretty good job bringing them to life. Mace and Depa steal the show. I had a hard time with some of the meta plot and overriding messages about the Jedi Order.

Andddddd the long version:

The entire conceit of the book comes about when Qui-Gon goes head to head with the Council, who are bogged down in committee red tape Senate paperwork disconnection, and challenges them to “help one person.” So inspired, the Jedi Council in its entirety goes to the planet Kwenn to help close down a hundreds-year-old Jedi Outpost. 

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan serve as the book’s inciting incident, our quest giver NPCs, who hang around close enough to the action to keep the readers who bought the book only for them engaged. It reminds me a little bit of a spin-off TV show where the fan favorite character from the original series shows up to boost ratings, saying their classic catch phrase while the live studio audience goes crazy. Look, Qui-Gon is Being Kind to Pathetic Lifeforms! Obi-Wan drops a “hello there” in the first scene! Oh, them!

Lest you think I’m being shitty, let me say that it was actually great to see Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on the eve of TPM working together well and having a blast. Both in Padawan and Master & Apprentice, they are still very much figuring out their relationship, and now it’s clearly evolved to its final magnificent form. They’re utterly corny together - I love that for them. This is the same pair that gave us “the negotiations were short” and the baffling “there’s always a bigger fish!”

I’ll talk a little bit about Sifo-Dyas because of course I will. He appears only in mentions, but so many of them, he's a huge part of the subtext of the book as he's recently left (been fired) from the Council and been killed - he's apparently on everyone's mind. I’ve posted about this before - I love the Seeker Sifo addition, and further, letting him be a rightful problem, a true pain in the Council’s ass and who ultimately got himself fired for not following the rules. Of course I have sympathy for him: this is a person who is beyond desperate to save his world and willing to try anything at this point in his life. And I think it’s worth mentioning that this is well within Cavan Scott’s characterization of him as a natural born troublemaker. I mean, he’s on screen for about two pages in Dooku: Jedi Lost before he just fucking literally steps on Yoda. Apparently, he never stopped. 

The book is oddly complimentary of him in weird places. Canon is inconsistent about Sifo-Dyas and how much his visions were impacting his judgment or even his simple ability to function. The last we heard of him in the Yoda comics, Sifo-Dyas was so routinely incapacitated by them that he was traveling with Lene full time. So it was cool to see that he had apparently gotten in control of them enough to be a super crucial member of the Council. Mace complains about Sifo’s absence and how that has directly impacted their entire ability to perceive the future, an acknowledged blind spot that comes up quite a lot in the prequel films and Clone Wars. Yoda goes on and on about how what a powerful Jedi he was.

...I don’t think the scene where the ENTIRE FUCKING Council round robin style takes potshots at Sifo-Dyas for *checks notes* rescuing some orphans was particularly successful. Of course, accuse me of bias, he’s a favorite character of mine, and it’s rough to see his colleagues - who are also his only friends and family - sitting around talking shit about him (to a bad guy no less!) for a page and a half, when he literally just got violently killed. (And they know he’s dead, at least, if not the circumstances. Killed on Felucia was the official story reported to the Council per wookiepedia.) Just tonally weird.

But really, I think what actually bothers me about that scene is the treatment of the baddie, Zalestra’s motivation as in any way legitimate, credible, or worth an apology by the narrative. Wow, the villain had a good point! To be clear, her issue with Sifo-Dyas taking her friends away to be Jedi is not that it changed her situation in any meaningful way in terms of care provided. It was a crime of omission. And these friends were so dear to her that she goes around indiscriminately killing Jedi of their exact generation? I suspect Miller liked his cool Nautolan Pirate Joker OC and wanted to give her a sympathetic excuse for why she was going around torturing and murdering Jedi (and just random people, including children) for fun, and “I got separated from my friends as a kid because of a Jedi” was the best he could do. Of course, it sets up Depa for a really beautiful line about not using other people as a canvas to paint grief on. 

The question of Attachment is a strong theme. Depa seems to be Going Through It - about attachment in particular, but also generally in the book. She’s shown relying a little too firmly on the no attachment cause in the wake of grief for a lost student. For example, she is quick to volunteer that Zalestra’s friends who were brought into the Temple together would be immediately separated so as to not form attachments - without pointing out the rest of that, that this separation would be specifically into Creche clans so they could bond with other Jedi kids and grow up in a community. Mace’s reaction to Depa’s attitudes make me suspect this is a Depa character growth thing, not something we’re supposed to take as a face value fact about the Jedi Order. Indeed, she ultimately overcomes her fears about this and decides to take a Padawan. And the final lines of the book include Qui-Gon defining for us that it isn’t attachment that’s a problem for Jedi – it’s indifference. 

Mace and Depa are the clear stars of the book. The Shatterpoint lineage vibes are immaculate. I’d read that the Living Force is supposed to set up an upcoming novel about Mace, and I am legitimately thrilled for it after reading this. Anyway, their dynamic is fantastic. Mace treats her 100% like a respected colleague, no cute Padawan infantilization tropes, even when he is put in situations like rescuing her after weeks of prolonged torture. Instead, he gives her his lightsaber to use, since hers has been taken. A really powerful and beautiful moment of support, while still recognizing her strength and agency. 

That said, if you’re looking for a deep dive into more obscure members of the Council or an EU/Legends junkie looking to see your favorite backstory pulled from the fire, this book might not be it.  With his five wives and seven daughters in old EU, Ki-Adi-Mundi might be the least likely Council Member to be the comedic butt of a bit revolving around awkwardness around women, but Miller goes for it, and there’s no mention of his family situation. 

Another odd reference, this time to current canon: the civilians the Council are working to help are mentioned as being the relocated survivors of the Protobranch disaster. It’s an ironic choice to frame the narrative of “the Jedi have been too focused on the big picture/the future at the expense of their duty to ordinary people” and then set the story in a community of people that the Jedi literally saved after getting a vision of the future disaster. The fact that it was our problem child Sifo-Dyas’s vision, and the rescue only happened after he and Lene outright defied the Council to get the gears moving is never mentioned or addressed, despite its seeming supreme relevance to the other themes in the story. 

For a time, I thought the narrative tension there between those two truths - that the Jedi should be concerned about ordinary people and living in the moment, but that this doom future is truly about to be a huge problem for the Jedi Order and the galaxy - was intentional. Having now finished the book, it doesn't seem to have actually been. Maybe someone else has a different perspective.

In truth, I didn’t understand what I kept reacting negatively to about with some of the meta themes of the book until the literal last page, John Jackson Miller’s author’s note where he says it outright. He talked about the other Star Wars books he has written over the last decade - how they all have depicted (Jedi) characters who are off on their own, away from the Order, “loners like Luke Skywalker,” and how his depiction of the Jedi Order from that perspective has been very critical. With this book, he decided that ALL Jedi couldn’t be bad, and that “Qui-Gon Jinn was the greatest symbol (of diversity of thought in the Order)” so he wanted to explore that. 

I closed the book and gently placed it in the trash can.

No, I’m kidding. Kind of. You know that I love Qui-Gon Jinn, he is my first favorite character, but this take exhausts me. That he is the magical exception to all of Jedi’s problems leading up to the prequels, and that if he were somehow not a direct product of that same Jedi Order, which encouraged him in his particular way of thinking almost to a fault, starting with Dooku.

In the final scene, with a magical twinkle in his eyes, Qui-Gon explains his own “defiance”of the Council: “I’m not insubordinate. I’m unorthodox. The insubordinate are ignored. The unorthodox are heard - grudgingly.” So the book finally resolves for us the narrative confusion in the difference between Sifo-Dyas’s bad future-fixated rulebreaking, which is shown to create villains and piss off his colleagues alike, and Qui-Gon’s good Living Force-serving unorthodoxy, which creates friends for the Order and moments of spiritual understanding for the Council. 

...Smashcut to six months later when Qui-Gon himself is outright defying the Council’s decision on Anakin and sidelining Obi-Wan because he’s convinced the Chosen One prophecy is just that important. 

Star Wars: The Living Force by John Jackson Miller, 6.5/10 stars, would have been 7 if I hadn’t read that asinine author’s note and gotten all mad again. 

[yurisorcerer]

That was really good!

Gosh, I have many thoughts, but I'm not sure how well I'll be able to articulate them given that I'm kind of tired at the moment.

So, my main love here is for the characters. I think people tend to sell Dungeon Meshi on its worldbuilding and I do get that (it's very complex and is quite well thought-out), but the characters are what really grabbed me. I don't think there was a single member of the main cast I didn't love. Laios is such a delightfully weird monster manual fanboy and I 100% agree with the people who say he feels neurodivergent and that this feels intentional. Senshi is awesome and it's very funny how the manga is extremely horny for him. Chilchuk brings a profound Divorced Dad energy to the cast that I think is great for bouncing off of the other characters. Izutsumi is interesting by how she contrasts with the earlier party members, I want to think about her role in the story more. I think she was kind of meant to give us an "outcast's perspective" of sorts? I think she's good at being that, but I feel like having blown through most of the manga in a few days may have hampered my appreciation of some of the more subtle aspects of her character.

Marcille, though, is my favorite; as someone who is also a really fussy eater and just kind of tightly-wound in general I found her really relatable. She's also super, super, super pretty and cute but we don't need to get into that right now. I cannot be the first person to point out how, when she becomes the dungeon lord, her behavior starts feeling extremely manic, right? I suffer from delusional episodes that include very difficult to ignore intrusive thoughts, and I thought the whole bit she went into about how being the dungeon lord feels felt very familiar in that respect, and it really hit home for me.

(On the flip side, having your desires eaten by the demon seems similar to depression. I've been there, too.)

Other stuff! I like the whole overarching theme of eating both in the literal sense and as a general metaphor for going through one's life. In the very last chapter Marcille says something to the effect of, perhaps this journey was to teach us to accept death, and I don't think that's necessarily the entirety of what the series is going for, but that's part of it definitely. There's a whole circle of life thing going on here. The manga is very....sensory? Lots of focus on taste of course but also scent and feeling. Lots of really strong imagery along those lines throughout the entirety of it.

I set the worldbuilding aside earlier but it is super neat actually, also. I still don't love the general conceits of a western-style fantasy setup, but I think this is honestly about as well as it's possible to do this material. Everyone has a motivation for their actions that feels inspired by experience and history rather than just Dwarves Do X and Elves Do Y and so on. There's a LITTLE of that, but not nearly as much as is typical for this kind of thing. In particular, I liked the orcs. Their usage as a symbol is perhaps somewhat fraught (I'm not the person to make that call either way), but it felt like it was coming from a good place and they're just treated so much better here than comparable people in other media, idk. It felt nice to me.

The art! The art is fucking gorgeous, like, if I wanted to get someone to read this manga this is one of the things I'd mention. The entire dungeon feels so wonderfully lived-in and ancient. You can practically feel the stonework in some panels. (Sidebar here! The anime is really good at capturing this, do watch the anime it's fantastic.)

Some other random stray thoughts:

-The circumstances she gets it in obviously suck, but Marcille's dungeon lord outfit honestly serves hard and everyone should get off her case about it.

-I ended up liking the captain of the Canaries a lot more than I thought I would. He's just an interesting character all around.

-I also really love Sissel / Thistle / apparently how you romanize this is a source of some contention. I feel sooooo bad for the guy. He just wanted to keep everyone safe! It's not his fault that his idea of keeping everyone safe ended up being influenced by a lion-headed demon from outside of reality and corrupted into a suffocating hellscape for those same people! OK maybe it's a little his fault

-I like the diversity in appearances across the characters. This is a thing I wish more manga did this well.

-Laios' kingly titles in the final chapter, RANKED from MOST to LEAST badass: 1. Laios of the Three Heads (based as fuck, makes people ask questions when they hear about you in a history book several centuries down the line), 2. The Demon-Eater (badass and very specific) 3. The Vegetable-Armored (basically gets the same reaction as #1, but with a more comedic lean) 4. Demon King Laios (this honestly seems pretty disingenuous but it is dope) 5. The Dragon-Slayer (very generic, also not even the most impressive part of what he did) 6. The Lord of the Dungeon (Crusader Kings 2 auto-generated-ass name) 7. Pervy Tallman (this sounds like a bad comedian)

-I want to kiss Marcille on the lips

-who said that

-haha I wouldn't mind the Canaries coming to arrest me am I right fellow lesbians

-who said that (part 2)

anyway yeah really good manga highly recommended. I'm not sure if it's a (get out the scare quotes folks) "Personal Favorite" per se, but it might become one over time. Usually such things take a bit to settle with me. The fact that I have any interest in reading it again is a good sign, though. 90% of the time when I'm done with media I'm fine with never revisiting it again. Dungeon Meshi I would very much like to revisit, both in the form of the anime that's airing right now and also I think I'd like to re-read the manga in a few years when I'm at a different place in my life to see what I think of it a little farther down the line. I liked it a lot, and I think it will stick with me.

[necromycologist]

#prev the narrator tries to quit????? #that's incredible do you have any other details??

@certified-bone-owner haha ofc! i think most of my old planning documents got deleted but i'll try and put down what i can remember

iit got written while i was biiiiig into the invisible library series and also making my way through peritale so if you have any idea what those are theyre a pretty good guide to the conceit and general vibes of the setting. also looking again i think there's definitely a bit of kate milfords work/specifically trigimene foulk in his dna so. take from that what u will

the main character was this extradimensional narrator (rather obviously ig), and part of a whole guild of similar beings who were somehow recruited to guide and tell stories. i can't actually remember his name, but he was a pretty typical cynical wisecracking type. ...he also happened to be a grey jay, for some obscure 13-year-old's reasoning that i can no longer remember.

now that i think about it, he might've been a grey jay/whiskey jack because he was called jack (as in, the generic fairytale protagonist jack) but i don't really know for sure. ill call him jack for now

he was.. relatively new to the whole narration thing, i think?

stories got assigned based on difficulty level, which in practice meant how hard it was to wrangle characters into obeying the plot.

(the narrators DID tell the story, obviously, but they also spent time planting plans, drumming up resentment, etc so that characters would act as needed. by design this was limited tho as the narrators aren't really People, just conciousnesses. they tended to just get smoothed out of characters' brains once everything was done which i think was an angst thing 2..)

he got assigned a case above his paygrade, so to speak, when a prominent narrator that was meant to tell it disappeared along with their last story.

hes very determined not to screw this up. he is a Good Boy and is doing Lots of Planning and Scheming to get this to go right

unforch it turns out that at the beginning of this story not only is the villain pretty nice and actually makes friends w jack despite his supposed unmemorability, she's also very much in yuri with the hero.

like fully they lived together in a little cottagecore wizard tower i think. they are Going, eventually, to break up and become bitter and jaded towards each other. this seems very far off and remote.

he feels kinda bad for his earlier scheming now.

this is really screwin with his plans in a multitude of ways. on one hand he wants to get this job done but on the other hand these are, yknow, the only people that have ever seen him as a person in his entire sad gothboy narrator existence and he REALLY doesn't want to kill both of them.

oh yeah, did i forget to mention? they're both supposed to die at the end by the other's hand.

he's screwed himself over now!! he's quite literally cooked!! he's set the dominoes up and by golly the rube goldberg machine will run!! his friends and their happy life and town are arthur dents house and you can fuckin call jack a bulldozer driver!!

he's stuck, frantically, speeding forward and back through the story like he's in some pathetic self-inflicted timeloop, trying to find a loophole for them or a way out of telling the story to it's conclusion for him.

there's no loophole. or way out.

i never got NEARLY far enough in writing this to actually get to this part (i wrote like. two pages of actual prose and a 5 page planning doc i believe) but i think the end was either, depending on my mood, his final selfish escape out the side of the story to avoid witnessing the tragedy of it all (at which point the remainder of the book would simply be blank) or his grudging resignation to telling the story, with the hopeful implication that despite its course being set, the story could be replayed.

anyway yea that was the general plot! i kinda want to revive these guys now tbh... they were pretty cool

[turtlemagnum]

ok, gonna try my hand at compiling my thoughts on fist of the north star first. here goes nothing! warning, this post is gonna be Long, open the read more at your own peril.

i think the best way to go about this might be roughly chronologically, so i'll start at the start. i think it's interesting how very early on, the conceit is "there is but one practitioner of hokuto shinken and but one practitioner of nanto seiken, and they are sworn to never fight lest the world fall into Chaos..." and that degrades very quickly past the first arc. i will say that overall, the shin arc is a very fun, enjoyable and relatively quick watch, with mostly interesting fights, decent character designs and a mostly compelling narrative. i think one of the standout parts, to me, was when shin was actually defending yuria from his former goons while they tried to revolt. it definitely added a certain texture to shin's character where he had previously been just 100% straightforwardly the bad guy, instead of being 99% that. also there's the devil rebirth fight and that time ken killed The Entire United States Military in the same episode that he punched a wrecking ball so hard that it shattered like a christmas ornament. now that i think about it, the leader guy of the former US military was actually probably the first time we see nanto seiken used by someone who isn't shin, and i remember it being kind of a big deal that shin had violated their sacred traditions to such an extent, y'know? how quickly that went out the window

something that's been consistently good in the series was the music. the fight music, the ambient stuff, and especially the openings. all 3 of the openings are S tier, but i will say they never quite top ai wo torimodose, it's just that fucking bombastic and fun, y'know? at the same time i wouldn't stab somebody for thinking silent survivor or TOUGH BOY are better, they're all fuckin great even if in different ways at time. honestly i'm mostly surprised that an anime from back then had more than one opening, much less 3. from what i can tell that shit wasn't nearly as common back then as it was today, so i think it speaks to how deeply popular the series was back in its heyday. hell, OG dragon ball got just one and im pretty sure DBZ barely got two. i hope one day i'll be able to make music as stellar as the hnk soundtrack, really.

something that bugged me about early fist of the north star is how every fucking woman looked like yuria, just sometimes with different hair. this definitely got better as the series went on, and i have no idea if this was a problem in the manga too, but by god is it glaring. thankfully that seems to clear up ironically after mamiya is introduced, who is explicitly portrayed to be the spitting image of yuria. i think the first time i noticed that women finally look like unique people and Not Just Yuria was that one martial artist who fought with roses and shit. side note but i genuinely loved her design, the show got really sexist about her being a Femoid who fights but setting aside that i really loved her. i should learn to draw her. anyways, i like how the series improved over time in that regard, at the very least

one of my biggest problems in the series starts with shin's death. i remember when shin first died and he burst out crying, i had assumed it was just a fucked up manipulation tactic like the yuria doll, but apparently we the audience were expected to take it seriously? and like, this began a longrunning trend of a villain being like, absolutely irredeemably evil, like puppy crusher machine, baby eating, torment nexus evil, and then at the end they're all like "i just wanted 2 play on de play groundt...." and we're expected to take that seriously???? like, i'm all for moral nuance and complexity, and there are times where this whole shtick was done more tolerably than others, but in my opinion they never actually redeem somebody in a way that's satisfying. a redemption arc has to be, y'know, a fucking arc. and even if you're trying to do a redemption = death thing, the thing that makes that trope work is that they die doing something, y'know, actually good???? the reason anakin's redemption worked (aside from actually being foreshadowed pretty blatantly) was because he actually saved lukes life and died in the process. he did a good thing and died because of it. meanwhile shin, he still fought ken right up until the end and acted like nothing was out of the ordinary until he was literally seconds from dying. at least raoh had it built up to a little bit, like jesus fucking christ.

now, i will say that the arc from roughly jagi's introduction to the first fight with raoh is the best fist of the north star gets. if you're thinking about watching the show but don't wanna commit to 150ish episodes, i'd recommend watching from the beginning right up until the end of the first raoh fight. i feel like that's still be a pretty compelling 50 or so episodes, and it has literally all the best bits within it. honestly kinda sad that the show peaks approximately 1/3 of the way through it, but what can you do. anyways, enough backhanded compliments; jagi is probably the best all around villain in this series. he's an absolute bastard, he's one of the first characters in the entire show to just straight up pull a normal gun on people, and he inspires one of the most cathartic moments in the entire show. this is around when we first get into like, the soap opera shit, right? first it's a bit contrived but still cool as hell that rei is a new nanto seiken practitioner, aside from That One Scene he fills the deuteragonist role pretty nicely and is honestly the gold standard by which the rest of the series' guys can be judged off of. he's no ein or juza, but to be fair basically nobody is.

anyways like, that cathartic moment i was talking about. it was just after jagi admitted to ken, taunting him with the fact that he's actually the reason shin kidnapped yuria, and he's the reason yuria died. this, alongside the "actually the main character has 3 secret brothers that we just havent mentioned until now, and theyre ALSO hokuto shinken practitioners" is very like. soap opera/bad fanfic-y, right? but it works because in execution, it's still pulled off well, and we're still nowhere near the bullshit horizon we'd skyrocket past by the end of the series. so, when ken's finally killing jagi, there's a moment where he says something to the effect of "this is for yuria, and...." and you just know what he's about to say next, but he hesitates, and when he finally says it it's so damn satisfying, "and for me!" and the thing is that it's a deeply compelling moment for a variety of reasons.

so, the thing with fist of the north star is that, in a lot of ways, it's very analogous to a superman story where the question is almost never "will the main character lose this fight" because he's so insanely fucking broken, right? the real question is, "will this character protect those he cares about in time", that's where the tension comes from, and it comes from the fact that he is in fact a hero. that's how you write a compelling overpowered protagonist, you give him either people to love or just a love and respect for all life in general and so that always gives you stakes. i get that to a lot of people, the question of "will ken save this nameless chicken farmer?" isn't a very compelling one. but to me, it is, because he cares so deeply about it that i start caring about it. in the words of aphex twin, "i care because you do".

so, the thing is up until now ken is a very selfless character. it's to such an exaggerated degree that it becomes fairly evident that he has very little regard for his own safety or wellbeing. in the first arc, aside from helping whoever he happens across he's motivated exclusively by rescuing yuria. every fight he has up to this point isn't even for himself, really, and there's something almost sad about that. he doesn't allow himself to have needs. so it's actually very satisfying to see this strong, principled man admit that he has in fact been hurt, and that he's not just doing good for those around him but for himself as well. and it's a very natural character progression that you don't even realize is happening but also makes complete sense. there's something deeply compelling to me about a man so devoted to helping others that he has to actively learn how to live for himself, y'know? i feel like that's a relatable struggle to a lot of people, really

i will say i have one gripe about the jagi fight, and it's that it's almost perfect except for the fact that jagi dies laughing. at first it's seeming like he's gonna die in agonizing misery like he deserves, and it's satisfying well up until the point he starts to laugh on the way out. and like, i understand why it was done that way, and i'm pretty sure it was meant to be haunting, but it honestly just felt like it undercut an otherwise great moment, y'know? i want that motherfucker suffering god damnit, its what he deserves.

there's not much to say about the arc up until the first raoh fight, really. toki is really fucking cool, i love me my apocalypse karate jesus boy, and the fight with that uighur guy was really good setting aside the weird racial thing of having a character that's of a certain ethnicity and just naming them that ethnicity. like, imagine if there was just a guy in a show named Jew, and he's canonically supposed to be jewish but it's never really addressed, like that'd be weird right

i will say, the raoh fight was fucking precious, easily the best part of the entire series. it has this amazing and complex rhythm to it, where every character who tries to fight raoh ends up trying their own self sacrificial bullshit move only to be thwarted by the next guy, until there's essentially like 3 or 4 different fights going on at the same time. it's also nice seeing ken get straight up hard countered for once, like straight up he gets just as fucked up as raoh does and it makes raoh that much cooler of a villain. up to this point, ken is like, essentially invincible. he's basically post apocalypse aikido jesus, poking people so hard that their disabilities are cured and punching people so hard that their entire bodies explode like he's got the bloody mess perk. so to see someone even break even with him is a damn impressive thing, it instantly establishes your villain credentials y'know?

the thing about raoh is that i love him, very much, but i very much hate how he was handled near the end. the fights with him after the first one are very eh, the penultimate one is close to satisfying but then there's that whole "and then he randomly got away with yuria and now he's gone!!!" bullshit, and i get what the final one was going for and it's kind of built up to but i still didn't exactly like it, y'know? for what it's worth, raoh's redemption arc was probably the most well set up in the entire series, but it still wasn't actually y'know. good. like, the way we're introduced to him is by him being Ken-Oh, King of Fists, and he's this fucking tyrant who recruits people to be his slaves by giving them the ultimatum of "willingly brand yourself as my property and then be my slave for the rest of your short life or get burnt to death", and we're shown that his goons are inches away from burning lin, a literal baby child, to death. and we're supposed to just buy that he's actually not that bad at the end???

like, something i wish this series would just fucking do would be to have their villains just fucking own their villainy right up till the end. they do it before the end!!! one of the first bits with shin has him literally monologuing about how cool & good it is to be evil before busting out one of the greatest evil laughs i've ever heard from a voice actor in any media ever. the best villains are pretty consistently That kind of evil, like the kind of evil that'd make the average disney executive go "hey maybe we can chill a bit out here real quick", and that'd be wonderful if they were unrepentant about it!! it feels really forced!!! imagine if like, frieza, before the bitter end, went all "hmm, maybe i do regret blowing up planets and spending my days being space hitler...." that wouldn't've fucking worked!!! there is, in fact, such an intense degree of evil in fiction that it just doesn't make sense for them to immediately go "hmm yeah i'm a good guy now. right before i die. how about that :)". it's deeply unsatisfying every fucking time, like my god

there's something to be said about the queer coding in this show. i remember in one of the earlier episodes, there was this bear dressed as a BDSM cop and his two goons were scantily clad twinks, and internally i went "haha that's kinda gay" before he straight up kisses random dudes before he kills them. and it hit me like "oh. he IS gay..." and it's like. i don't think that's even the gayest thing in the series, really. there's that one scene where two fang clan dudes are checking out rei and the one with the binoculars is like "woah, this guy's real pretty!" and the other dude is all "well, not as pretty as me right bro???". and then there's just yuda, in general. relatively uninteresting villain, but him dying in rei's arms admitting that his motivation in trying to kill him was that he was the only other man who he found beautiful, like. i don't think there's a heterosexual way to interpret that, really! and that's even setting aside the hideous makeup he's always in! and that's not even mentioning yuria's brother wanting to "see what she(yuria) saw in him (ken)" and as a consequence, wanting to die by his hands. also ein is a bisexual icon who canonically thinks ken has a pretty face and i love that for him

the next bit after yuda was, i believe, souther and shu. now, i think souther might've been the only villain to outright defeat ken up to this point, and i think there's something that could've been interesting about that if souther just wasn't like, aggressively fucking boring. i think he's also the introduction to ki blasts, so that's cool, but the most interesting bits about the souther arc were the bits with shu. shu was a homie, very speedwagon-esque in terms of vibes if not functionality, i liked watching him at work. i will say that shu was probably the point where nanto seiken was wearing out its welcome, we're at like 4 or 5 guys whose main deal was nanto seiken and their entire fighting style could essentially boil down to "cut em into bits" and the only real variation was the shape of the bits people were cut into. i think this might've been the prevailing attitude at the time too, because they definitely pivot away from nanto seiken after this in favor of other, usually dumber martial arts

i will say that this series is, usually, very good about respecting character deaths. with one piss stained exception, characters pretty much always die and stay dead forever, meanwhile i feel like in series less committed to death mattering would've still had toki or rei around by the end of it. the exception is, of course, yuria. it was to give yuria and ken a happy ending, at least for a little while, and honestly while i kinda hate the concept the execution was still fairly competent so i didn't outright dislike it overall. i think it's stupid and retcon-y and at times feels like yet another excuse to make shin seem like less of a bad guy, but it still felt nice to know that yuria got the spend the last few years of her life with the man she loved

i liked ryuga for what he was, mostly just because he wasn't yet another fucking nanto seiken user. he's probably about on par with the elemental guys that'd go on to die to raoh, juza excluded. which brings me to, the man who is tied for Best Boy, juza of the clouds! i.e., my current profile pic. i like juza. he's probably the best thing to come from the series post the Peak arc of jagi to raoh. one of my first criticisms of the characters in this show was something to the effect of "look, if you're a handsome, muscular guy who's also ungodly fucking powerful in terms of martial arts in a world where martial arts is fucking magic, And you're in a post apocalypse? all i'm saying is that you could have basically any girl you wanted CONSENSUALLY, like seriously shin just ditch yuria and build yourself a harem of all the women that look exactly like her". and juza did exactly that, and i love him for it. i'd like to think i'd be like juza, in his universe, not quite the top of the totem pole in terms of raw power but still well above every normal person, saving women from being abused and letting them join my harem if they want, living in a fucking castle with a pool/bathing house? that's the dream, man. that's the fucking dream.

now, that's setting aside juza's whole "wanting to fuck his sister" thing. like, to be fair, yuria's his half sister, but seriously dude what the fuck is it with everyone in this show and yuria. ken and all 3 of his brothers were into her, juza was into her, shin was into her, if there is a man in this show and he knows yuria there's like an 80% chance that he wants her. what's the fucking appeal? like yeah, she's pretty, sure, but so are all the women in this show!!! personally i'd rather date like, a martial artist lady who could actually defend herself, but that could just be me. well, that's like the only thing wrong about juza to me, and honestly while that's a pretty significant flaw you can still say he's literally one thing away from being flawless, so that's pretty cool. god i love him

now's about when we get into hokuto no ken 2, where the main difference is that lin and bat are actually useful now and i'm pretty sure lin wants to fuck kenshiro now, which still weirds me the fuck out. my other favorite character in this show, ein, is the most american fucker on earth. like literally he wears an american flag suit, has blonde hair and blue eyes, is a fucking bounty hunter, and literally rides around on a killdozer driven by what i'm pretty sure is a slave. literally cannot get more american than that, i just hope that the slave guy is like a former bandit or something. little known fact about me, one of my biggest turn ons in a piece of fiction is when a character is a bounty hunter. something about bounty hunters just fuckin gets my brain goin, y'know? i remember when i played the GTA online bounty hunter quests, they were straight up some of the most fun i've had with GTAV and i still think i'd enjoy playing a game where that's the main mechanic. also, at first glance he's a wife guy, but it turns out he's a loving father which makes him even better. it's even acknowledged in universe that he's cool as hell!!! i love him dearly

viceroy jakoh is a decent villain. he's enjoyable to see die, at least. we also meet falco, who's a homie, and honestly i think it's pretty badass that he's a canonically disabled character who's shown to be strong and capable and yet is still clearly held back by his disability. he's a bit like a proto edward elric, in that regard. honestly one of the most sharp inhale inducing scenes of the show was when jakoh swept his prosthetic out from under him and then proceeded to beat the shit out of him, frankly that was an egregious way to make a villain hateable and it was honestly very effective in that regard. gento koken is ok i guess. at least it's not nanto seiken. honestly that whole "celestial emperor" thing felt rather contrived, but eh.

ok so, around this point in the show is when one of its worst aspects really starts to become apparent. so like, it starts out relatively normally when ken is shown to have a few brothers that we didnt know about. it's not that absurd, it makes some amount of sense, the hokuto brothers remain some of the best characters in the entire fucking show. and now all of a sudden, yuria has a brother we didnt know about, and a half brother, and now we meet raoh and ken's biological bigger brothers and after a certain point it just feels like bad self insert fanfic, y'know? and that's what kaioh is to me, it feels like somebody thought raoh was cool and thought "heh, what if i made my own OC that's raoh but even BIGGER and STRONGER and MORE EVIL", like that's what kaioh feels like to me. and then ken's bio brother is just ok, i already forgot his name despite it not being that long since i watched the final arc

but the thing is that kaioh is just like, arguably the most cartoonishly evil villain out of the entire fucking series, seemingly completely unrepentant, literally regularly talks about existing in the "Dark World", straight up kills his own sister just to make ken's brother wanna kill ken, the dude is just bitter and evil the whole way down, so when he pulls that "i just want 2 play on the played ground" bullshit it rings especially hollow even by the standards of the show. god, fuck kaioh, he's just poorly executed overall

the biggest part of hnk2 that i actually liked was shachi. i liked how he was essentially a stupid kid that lucked into being taught unearthly powers basically on par with hokuto shinken, and as such got a big head over it even though at his core he was still a good kid. hokuto ryuken sure felt fuckin contrived, it kinda felt like the writer(s?) noticed how the hokuto brothers were some of the best, most interesting characters in in the original series, and were just like "yeah let's do that but again", and while i guess it doesn't not work it also doesn't work all that well either. hokuto ryuken sounds cool though, even if "north star lapis lazuli fist" doesn't.

another thing i liked about the last parts of the show were that, while definitely not martial art wizards, bat and lin were still deeply competent fighters and put up a consistently good fight against Real Fucking Fighters, which you really wouldn't expect from bat's cowardly ass growing up. i will say that i always thought lin would make a good successor to hokuto shinken, but that might just be wishful thinking. there is a quite prevalent undercurrent of misogyny in this series, and while i understand that it wasn't exactly uncommon in the 80s, i gotta say that i still feel like they could've done better. i dunno

all of this is to say that i liked fist of the north star, very very much. i'm not sure i could recommend it without a laundry list of caveats and disclaimers, but i will say that if my interminable bitching hasn't put you off of it, it's probably for you. it's got a lot of good fights, it scratches that little kid part of your brain that thinks it's so cool to see a guy get kicked in the dick so hard that his entire body explodes, it has great music and mostly competent writing. if you think about it too hard, you will cry, so don't do that, just go along for buronson's wild ride and fuckin enjoy yourself. i probably wouldn't recommend it to someone who's not like, already an anime fan and already likes shonen though. it feels very of its genre, if that makes sense. which i guess it should, given how foundational to shonen in its modern forms as it was

[twistedtummies2]

Gathering of the Greatest Gumshoes - Number 31

Welcome to A Gathering of the Greatest Gumshoes! During this month-long event, I’ll be counting my Top 31 Favorite Fictional Detectives, from movies, television, literature, video games, and more!

Today, the countdown begins in earnest!

SLEUTH-OF-THE-DAY’S QUOTE: “Be careful, Brain! Those are probably priceless fake artifacts!”

Number 31 is…Inspector Gadget.

Not every detective on this countdown has to be a GOOD detective. They just have to conform to the rules and regulations I established, and…well…be a detective, in general. While most of the sleuths on this countdown WILL be relatively serious characters – which is to say, they’ll actually be good at their jobs, no matter how silly they at first appear – there are a couple that will fall into the “Bungling Detective” trope. These are comical, parodical characters who are decidedly NOT good at their jobs. Most of them are, weirdly enough, given the title of “Inspector,” which really makes you wonder how terrible the law enforcement offices in these universes must be.

Out of all the bumblers and baboons who wear an inspector’s badge, I think many would agree with me that Inspector Gadget is quite possibly the single most dunderheaded lout of the entire bunch. In terms of sheer ability, Gadget is arguably the single worst detective of all time. This character is SUCH a goofy loser, that I actually had a couple of people outright telling me, when I told them about this concept, that he shouldn’t be included. HE’S. THAT. BAD. So why IS he on the list, after all? Well…like I said, competency isn’t really an issue here, and I do have a big nostalgic soft spot for the (not so) good Inspector, so he gets a pass at the end of the day.

For those who don’t know, “Inspector Gadget” was a 1980s cartoon series, which focused on the adventures of its titular character: a clumsy and dimwitted cyborg, who was part of an elite group of law enforcement agents. The organization’s goal is to take down a mysterious mad scientist, Dr. Claw: the leader of an evil gang of international felons known as M.A.D. Gadget would be sent out on missions to defeat Claw and his minions…and he would always louse it up, because Gadget is a complete moron. This was the great, humorous conceit of the series: Gadget is a bionically enhanced living superweapon, with all kinds of gizmos at his disposal…but the combination of him having two left feet and only half of a brain cell ultimately renders all that power thoroughly worthless. He’s too busy tripping over his own “Go-Go Gadget Oil Slick!” to have any HOPE of catching the perpetrators or solving any mystery thrust before him.

Ironically, it’s Gadget’s sidekicks who end up being the REAL saviors of every episode. One was the Inspector’s own niece: a precocious and cheerful young girl named Penny. While she loves and looks up to her uncle, Penny is actually a MUCH better detective than he is with far less high-tech gear (and a significant age gap). It’s usually she who ends up TRULY figuring out the case and finding a way to stop Claw and his cronies. Brain, meanwhile, was their talking, bipedal pet dog (don’t question it, I’m not going to). While Penny was cracking the case, this poor mutt spent most of his time making sure that Gadget didn’t get himself killed, with much slapstick buffoonery happening as a result.

While everyone pretty universally agrees that Inspector Gadget, himself, is a complete and total clod, the show and the character turned out to be extremely popular. The series not only sold a boatload of merchandise, but gave way to a Christmas special, two (terrible) live-action films, and even a recent Netflix reboot (which I haven’t seen). He may not have been a truly great gumshoe in the sense of…well…actually being a great gumshoe, but as one of the most wonderfully silly sleuths to ever sweep across the small screen, Inspector Gadget has definitely made his mark. “Go-Go Gadget Legacy!”

Tomorrow, the countdown continues with Number 30!

CLUE: “Your vast corrupt future is draining away as we speak.”