#But that's beef for its own post

[shiroselia]

I know going onto the “We like Sabine” site and going “Wow I really dislike everything about the Eq festival and what it’s doing with MC and Sabine” is brave at absolute best, but alas

Like here’s the thing, it reeks of fanservice for the detriment of the actual main plot, which I have way too much familiarity with from other franchises, and it’s Really obvious that this is a thing only because SSE knows that people a) want a morally ambiguous MC and often headcanon theirs as such (nothing wrong with this at all, y’all do y’all you’re doing great) and b) that people find Sabine Really Fucking Hot (if they know people thirst for Ydris, they know people thirst for Sabine, and once again nothing bad about this, y’all do y’all)

But it makes Absolutely no sense to the current narrative that SSE are writing in the main story quests that MC would actually be morally ambiguous, the only instance of that we’ve seen comes from Mr fucking Sands of all people, so MC suddenly being all #Bad and #MorallyGray just doesn’t make sense in the current place where the main story is, and therefore it just makes me go “Oh y’all only did this for fandom cookie points” (which is fine for the fans, but it always feels very dumb for a company to go against their own established canon to appeal to fans because it makes their story and narrative look weaker if they have to literally go against it to do something like this)

It’s just a huge case of having your cake and eating it too, either MC is ambiguous and then you fucking commit SSE, or they aren’t and then you don’t pretend they are for an event which you Really can’t decide if it is actually canon or not

(It also makes Sabine looks less threatening by comparison, very similar to what happened with Jessica and the Beeper plot, where she just looks silly because she can’t even sabotage One Event with fucking Fireworks, so much for being a part of the big bad squad)

[bugbbear]

[gjsxj0]

mindless rambling in tags don't mind me

[andro-dino]

an accumulation of sodo twins doodles I’ve made in the past few weeks/months bc I’m obsessed with them

[fatgrowlithe]

the fact that kendrick is trending on tumblr has me fucking dead fr

[mirrortouchedsea]

Okay but like... the way in Night Club when Hinata starts opening up to Rinne and Rinne sees who he used to be so so clearly in Hinata. Feeling like the world believes your entire existence is wrong, nothing is going right, you just want to give up but you can't. Hinata comments that it's easy to open up to Rinne and I think part of that is just that Rinne intimately understands what Hinata is going through, trying to find himself in a world that he feels like an alien in. And while Rinne obviously doesn't like to be so upfront about his feelings, you can tell he's watching out for Hinata and encouraging him to act up and act out, to be loud because someone is proud of him and is glad that he's there (and now Rinne is in Hinata's corner and he's less alone than he was before).

[frostbite-the-bat]

talked w/ a friend about this and wanted to post something similar yesterday after a convo i saw also

about people criticizing ttcc / ttcc fans for just... being cog fans? being cog centric? usually coming from people who only like the toons.

and everyone likes what they like! it's okay! but saying that people who like the cogs are horrible and support the bad things they do, is just blatantly wrong. i thought we knew that enjoying villainous and morally Bad / grey characters is... okay? it doesn't mean you support what they do. it's interesting to explore these topics.

i've seen many people just... paint anyone who likes the cogs as horrible because they're "apologists of x and y" and... i dunno. rubs me the wrong way! you do have a point and recognize the cogs do bad things, but liking them as characters means nothing about who you are as a person.

and this is not to say that people who are in toontown for the toons are bad. hell! they are right this IS toontown. i may be on the cog liker side but i like the toons! maybe ocs more than the npcs - mostly because i like my friends and the sheer creativity the toons can bring out!!

SO what i wanna say... i dunno. let's not point fingers...? let's have fun in a goofy cartoon game together??? also complaining about people liking VILLAIN ROBOTS on TUMBLR is kind of funny to me. do you realize where you are. but then again a lot of this i see on discord and in-game as well since i avoid things on tumblr... i am a sensitive little fella i avoid misty fight bc of One Really mean "Critic" guy i saw there and i have been shivering in my bootsies since. so you get me

but like yes ttcc is more cog centric but... that's okay? things could be written better and i still wanna speak on it, and i do thing the toons deserve attention and better writing... but the fact it focuses on the cogs isn't... bad? if you don't like how con centric it is you can go play ttr...? god forbid people have fun and explore the villain's side of things...? i'm not saying either toontown server is better or worse than the other... and everyone can like their own things!!

but like... people will just like the cogs and that's okay and it doesn't make you bad. let's all be friends okay? both sides may be going at each other's necks in-game and the cogs in fact do horrible things - but it's what makes them fun, and it gives the toons things to do in the game!! but we don't gotta !!!!!!!! i may be really sarcastic and sometimes mean in private but like that's me just privately sassing, deep down i think people should just... y'know..? enjoy things.

so yea that's the guzma / cathal thought of today. toon people cog people both people are all awesome as fuck and you keep doing what you're doing i love you toontown isn't toontown without you

[maukiki1]

u said u have reqs open uhhrmmmm um im throwing king mfb ur way :3

I tried a different rendering style w this and got a little excited about trying it and ended up spending more time onnit than i intended😭😭😭KING WHEN I CATCH YOU KING….

Heres my absolute confusion-struggle-madness page of me trying to figure out how to draw him . Like idk what it is but his blitz striker fusion wheel lookin-ass hair looks so easy to draw yet it got me ripping my hair out wtf ive never struggled with drawing a mfb character ever before KING WHEN I CATCH YOU KING….

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach’s Issue with Queer characters (2/3)

[1][2][3]

Dordonii might seem like a weird one to point out here, compared to some of the more overt examples, but I think he had a fairly evident queer codedness to him.  His more overwhelming quality was his kind of Spanish flair, what with the tap shoes and Flamenco-esque poses and gestures, the devil horns in his greased hair and on his mask shard, and his little Mephistopheles mustache and beard.  But the ear ring, and Flamenco adjacent sex appeal mixed with the way he kind of baby talks Ichigo strikes me as contributing to a certain daddy-ish gay character type.  Also, I’ve never been 100% sure that it’s not just crosshatching, but I’ve always read it as some chest hair peaking out from his low v-neck.  But I feel like that assessment needs some qualifying context...

Western sensibilities tend to read effeminate features on men as a chief indicator of homosexuality, Japan has never been quite as narrowly focused with its own gay stereotypes.  There is definitely a particular character type in anime and manga that pins the preening vanity of smooth faced and long haired effeminate men on homosexuality, but it’s not really the go-to.  Tracing back to media trends of the 1970s the long haired, smooth chested pretty boy (even the gay ones) very much became the domain of female audiences and creators, where as the prevailing trends of gay portrayals by and for men actually settled more firmly on the hairy and muscular image that bara is associated with now.  I'm not about to do a whole big breakdown of the japanese gay subculture behind the bara thing, because that deserves more time and attentio that i can give it here, but you've got a keyword to work with now, so I encourage you to do a little googling yourself.

Also he has his right ear is pierced?  I don't know if this was ever a thing in Japan, but in America it became kind of a wide spread myth(?)  Originally it actually was a functioning kind of code within the queer community in the 1960s and 70s, but after it became somewhat more generally well known the practice more or less stopped, for pretty obvious practical reasons... but weirdly enough by the sheer power of stupid homophobia, straight people continued to scrutinize and be paranoid of men with pierced ears for decades following.  Again, though, I have no idea if either the original intent or the misinformation of that trend was ever anything that had any kind of Japanese presence...

Anyway... What I’m getting at is Dordonii feels very queer coded to me, just not in ways that everyone picks up on.  But speaking of muscular hairy gays...  Let’s talk about an elephant in the room:

Charlotte Chuhlhourne:

Obviously, Kubo doesn’t quite have the tact to make use of queer identities in a totally respectful way, so it’s hard to tell how much is attributable to Kubo making a character exactly as they appear, and what could be argued to be a character’s theoretical self-identifying terms filtered through Kubo’s limited vernacular.  But the word to know here is Okama[オカマ], which has traditionally referred to gay, AMAB transvestites.  Obvious stumbling point here is that prior to more widely codified and accepted trans identities this term applied to both transwoman and drag queens.

Granted until fairly recently(by which I mean within the relatively short spand my own lifetime) even the queer community at large didn’t always differentiate the two very well; presentation was presentation, the circumstances for it and the specificities of achieving it were personal choices, not taxonomical crossroads; some moonlit as queens and that was it, others would’ve lived as women and never walked a show in their life if that had been a practical option, others still were happily gender fluid, but the scene had one look and one label.  We made due with what we had.

Anyway...  point being that Charlotte’s character is specifically a play into an Okama stereotype.  That is to say, the archetypal look of Okama in Japanese media for many years has been a middle aged, square jawed, often broad or even muscular, drag queen.  Although Charlotte doesn’t actually have one, they are also frequently shown with a muzzle of stubble growing in.  Despite what you might think about jabs at the beard as a masculine feature betraying their feminine presentation, it’s actually not (usually) the reason...

The image comes out of Japan’s gay bar scene --in Tokyo, Shinjuku-Nichoume in particular-- which has long been a cultural centerpiece of Japan’s gay culture.  The larger Shinjuku ward as as whole is itself a commercial district.  So, to the general public who didn’t have any interaction with gay culture itself, the small glimpse they had was from the crossing paths of salarymen commuting into work as straggler okama headed home from the bars the morning after, still in drag and makeup but with unshaven stubble growing in after a long night.

(Also, just a side note on this, but if you’ve ever seen an older (usually bigger) woman with a deep, brassy voice in kind of sultry night attire at a bar referred to as “Mama,” it’s because that’s the owner of a okama bar.  She’s not literally anyone’s mother, she’s the defacto den-mother of sorts for the patrons of her bar.)

It’s still definitely not a flattering portrayal, but it’s one with a very specific history that doesn’t communicate to Western audiences at all.  But there is a certain strangeness to how the Japanese handle this, comparatively.  While Western rhetoric has its hangups with moralist preaching and bitching and moaning about “degeneracy” and “deviancy,” those judgments just aren’t baked into Japanese culture in quite the same way.  In fact, while most of these okama caricatures by and for cishetero creators/audiences are definitely not what anyone would call “good” representation, they do lack a certain expected malice.  Sure, flamboyant bafoonery is a constant in exploitation of gay culture on either side of the Pacific, but where as the West uses this as a means to disarm gay men --to make them non threatening, or to rationalize not taking them seriously-- anime manga and even videogames tend to fixate on the curiosity of it.

(although one enduring, generally positive case of this that actually seems to fly super under western audience’s radars are the great fairys in Zelda. which have maintained their extremely obvious dragqueen inspired look since OoT)

One of the first encounters with the okama charactertype that I only learned to identify looooong after the fact is the Magypsies (haha oh boy that localized choice of slur...) in Earthbound. On the one hand they were treated as a bizarre spectacle and literally not human, but they were magical and benevolent and a little comical but not in the way where they were relegated to being the punchline of a joke and nothing else. And I've found over the years that that tends to be the tone of these kinds of characters.

Another very similar case of this is Ivankov in One Piece, the Kamabakka kingdom Okama and Newkama, including Bonclay/Mr.2. (His "okama way" gimmick being a play on the hardboiled gritty actionhero cliche of a "man's way.")  Where on the one hand, it’s a disgusting, tacky use of the familiar okama cliches, but also their very existence as okama is painted as the basis of their unique form of super power?  Really, it’s just so wildly divorced from reality that it’s hard to even call it “representation,” harmful or otherwise...  Still, in impossibly poor taste based on optics alone, though.

This all is not to try and sweep under the rug that these are still ultimately problematic stereotypes and caricatures to have to debrief each new generation of viewer on just to avoid the slippery slope of total misinterpretation, but I've noticed that there is a distinct difference in how that tone is read. The overwhelming attitude I see from these creators is that these long standing cliches are how okama look and act, but that it makes them interesting or funny, and yes “other,” but rarely lesser.  Obviously that's still rooted deeply in ignorance on part of these non-queer creators, but you can see how it lacks the teeth that the western equivalent has, where such caricatures are explicitly there to defame and demonize, and I think that’s an important distinction to make.

(And let’s not even get into the issue of fake “woke” white people struggling to wrap their tiny brains around the idea of another culture by framing it as that culture’s unique idiosyncrasies as if they’re just failed attempts at conforming to white anglo-centric western values, because THAT is a whole other can of worms...)

To maybe put this into some better perspective here, Tier Harribel has blond hair and tan skin, and given what the Arrancar are and how they live she is presumably naturally dark skinned, and naturally blonde.  But her design is clearly based on gyaru/gal (or possibly ganguro) fashion, which makes use of fake tans and bleached hair.  She looks the way she does because she's made to look like that aesthetic, but looking the way she doesn't doesn't imply she bleaches and tans(presumably those colors are both natural on her in-world). 

That same relationship of image inspiring image while being divorced from meaning is just kind of how Kubo makes these kinds of aesthetic decisions, all across the board, problematic or not.  But of course no one really cares about it when it’s a weird recontextualization of the gal aesthetic because no one’s offended on their behalf.

And in general, I think a lot of these things are just so outside the Western perspective that even when they definitely are problematic, some people can’t even begin to grasp what about it is, and end up fabricating just nonsense arguments against it to rationalize a kneejerk kind of discomfort and confusion over the subject...

Anyway...  having said all that, the next one actually IS a huge problem...

[1][2][3]

[thevexinator]

starting to realize that davmin affected a lot of the ships i have now

examples below:

i call this little number "oh my God they're so in love but one of them is so gonna kill the other"

but also

me when i know. [help]

[7roaches]

not to be controversial on main but as much as i think hcs are cute where killer is young nd pranks nightmare whos old i think nightmare and killer should be old 4 middle aged, killer is like 30s-40s in my book and i think they would laugh at millennial humor and yet nightmare would still find a way to be like “you young people..” (<- referring to a guy who is old enough to be a us president)

[mettywiththenotes]

Tomura going from "I'm not interested in you anymore" to Bakugou in war arc to then taking an interest in him only because he's the closest person to Izuku and therefore injuring/killing him will set Izuku off (which it did)

He is just continously taunting Izuku to get a reaction out of him so he'll slip up in the middle of the fight

[pbnmj]

Ur tags about how Miles and Pavitr are the ones who say "I can do both" because it IS quintessential spiderman thinking AND because they're too young to have seen that devastatingly not work yet. BUT the thing is they are RIGHT but only if it's "we"! Spiderman's mythos is inherently a lonely one reinforced by Miles and Gwen's isolation and by every. single. intro. reminding us that every spider person is the "one and only spider person"! And yet!! These films are just about relationships (1/2)

YES YEAH YOU GET IT !!!! and (quite recently rewatched it and mentioning it here cause i can't believe i forgot to mention it in the post you're talking about) it really gets me that gwen also says 'i was doing both' in regards to protecting miles and protecting the canon event, and i love that the phrase was reflected like that, even tho (at this point of the movie) miles and gwen pretty much oppose each other in views/priority !!

it also absolutely kills me the way that gwen begins (like you say) atsv quitting the band and isolates herself, and then throughout the whole thing she finds something/someone that she wants to take that leap for, all over again :') she (and the entire spider-team!!) is willing to bet everything on miles and is ready to fight for him, and i really just love the idea that miles just is a force that inspires good !!!! IT REALLY IS ALL ABOUT LOVE!!!

[six-of-ravens]

Errant PM update of the day:

yesterday she met with a client and got revisions for their site that needed to be done for today since the client has to use this new stuff in another meeting

she did them herself instead of assigning them to the proper team (something that sounds nice but is actually a huge problem bc she spends too much time doing other people's work instead of her own, and also she's not very good at it.)

she did not communicate this with anyone. also did not immediately email the client and inform them she has done their work.

my boss, who is also involved with that account since Errant was fucking it up majorly, decides to email them, receives a reply saying "when will our revisions be done" and starts panicking after hearing the team doesn't know about them

(classic Errant move is to get a task and not assign it, so he thought it was rotting in her inbox)

Errant decides this is a great time to not reply to anyone on skype for several hours

Errant finally gets a hold of the boss, explains everything, but by now it's been so long he's royally pissed and gives her a lecture about communicating

She then complains to Lead Dev (who she thinks is her friend but actually files the most complaints to HR Boss about her lmao) about how he isn't praising her for doing WORK THAT IS NOT HER JOB ~just because~ she didn't communicate with him quickly or email the client, and how he's such a micromanager (extremely false, he's a pain sometimes but overall fairly chill) and overreacted horribly because uuggghhh why is any of this his business like she did the stuff right who caaaaares? not like he had to sideline her on this account for several weeks because she spent Literally One Hundred Hours bullying the designer (until she cried) and making her redo things for no reason, and then refused to assign the site for 3 weeks (until there was only THREE DAYS left before the due date) because she wanted specifically Lead Dev to do it (again, she thinks he's her buddy), while the client grew increasingly frustrated with the delays! noooo, it's not like she's lost the right to keep this client to herself at all!! not like over the past few months she's managed many accounts so badly they've put her on probation!

Lead Dev cannot find a way to explain to her that she's living in a really bizarre alternate dimension and like, of course everyone is upset geez, so he's just trying to ignore her. she then decided to start sending him a bunch of ig posts about bad management which he thinks is funny, because there's only one bad manager here and it ain't our boss.

[96percentdone]

actually like for real is "morally grey" just being used as a stand-in term for 'character who is well written and interesting and nuanced' as opposed to like a character whose morals and actions are too messy to be classified as either black or white? because if that's true i hate it here. like i really do.

there have been 10000 posts about how people can't be normal about fictional women, and that's true. often you see fictional girls talked about like they're the devil for like being mildly sassy at the fan favorite the one time, but truly like evil or actually morally grey women get fuckin morally whitewashed by so many of their fans like they also can't bear the idea she might suck shit.

that's not like a strictly fictional woman phenomenon, evil/morally grey men get this shit all the time, because i think on some level people can't like. cope with the idea their faves suck. i feel like a lot of people want to feel like the characters they like are good because they fear its a reflection of their own morals if they're not. and it's not. the things you like in fiction are not an indicator of your morality; they just are things you like in fiction.

but that said i find the phenomenon more interesting when it comes to ethically dubious/bankrupt women because truly for a website constantly screaming about how they want well written women in villainous roles, you guys do not know what to do with them at all even when you like them! When you are given the thing you've been clamoring for forever, you either want her to die or you're scrambling desperately to make her less what she is, and in the process desecrating the things that made her interesting and unique. often it just ends up dovetailing back into classic misogyny where if she's not perfect and pure then she's not worth it, but i just kinda don't think fictional women have to be 'good' or even 'not evil' to be worthy of attention, praise, and adoration.

[meteorherd]

"there's no way sega named the game sonic x shadow on purpose" have you listened to that one twitter takeover where the characters literally say "sonadow" out loud. it was absolutely on purpose. anyways my Actual thoughts on this are: 1) i like the idea of the original shadow story, it sounds like they're doing what they attempted in sonic forces with episode shadow but Better, by the looks of it, and 2) it's a really huge day for annoying people