#apologies this took so long to finish ;_;

[gotchibam]

Haunter and Mimikyu ko-fi doodle for NovaHollis! 👻

[non-un-topo]

To the next adventure...

Image description and details under cut

I.D.

[A drawing of Nicky, Joe, Quynh, and Andy from The Old Guard. They are all in profile, walking in a straight line facing the sun. They are dressed in medieval clothing and armour, and each carry their own weapons and bags. Nicky has his sword, a crossbow, a quiver of bolts, a dagger at his belt and another strapped to his ankle. Joe is holding his sword, a bag, and a coin purse. Quynh's bow is over her back, and her quiver is at her hip. Two daggers are strapped to her belt, one of them matching Nicky's. Andy is holding her axe, two bags, and a dagger. They each have serene expressions and closed eyes, as if they're not in a hurry. In the background, the seasons change from winter to spring, summer, fall. There is an old tree behind them, and its branches change with the seasons.]

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[necrotic-nephilim]

as an apology for being gone for a month, have a uquiz i spent a week making! pls feel free to reblog with which character you got, i worked way too hard on this silly little thing. there are eight different characters you can get that are varying levels of unknown, with comic recommendations for each character <3

[onegroovyrose]

Akira if you don’t hold on you’re going to fall off!! 😋

[ind1c0lite]

Happy pride!!

close ups!!

[ravens-loft]

A few months ago I found a pose on Pinterest and was struck with divine inspiration, and now I have finally finished it

[askorensprunki]

*squint* do he have claws

”Damn straight I do! Yer probably seeing the claws on my thumbs most of th’ time, but I can retract the others whenever I want! Rad, huh?”

[rinisdrawing]

workin’ on stuff… ✍️

[project-sekai-facts]

Do you have info on commissions in general? such as 2dmvs, songs, etc. Anything released by the devs about stuff like what it takes to commission artists for content that’ll be used ingame, how long in advance the creator that’s being commissioned has to be contacted, have there been any rejected/remade commissioned songs, etc etc.

I’m particularly wondering if there’s disclosed info about the song Order Made and any other commissioned songs that had the Sekai version vocaloid tuned by the producer, because how would the game’s management arrange for that?

Here's some stuff I know

Most of this is taken from the Corocoro producer interviews, and you can find them all here. I mainly just skimmed them for trivia, but they're worth a read and there's probably some stuff I missed.

According to devs, the process of commissioning and producing songs can take around 8 months, though according to individual producers, the production of the song (not including recording vocals and mixing) can take anywhere between days and about a year. Producers are given a story summary, along with some words and phrases that staff would like to be reflected, and then given free reign on the rest (though management does oversee things)

In addition, event plot outlines have to be finished by the time the producer is commissioned for the event song, although this definitely didn't seem to be the case earlier on in the game, as you'll see further down this post.

According to Project Message vol.15, earlier commissions would have their SEKAI version Virtual Singer picked based on the producer. This is why Nijiiro Stories has two Virtual Singers, as staff decided that MEIKO and KAITO fit the image of OSTER Project best.

Both TONDEMO-WONDERZ and Showtime Ruler had their first drafts scrapped. Tondemo was because Sasakure didn't like his early drafts, but Showtime Ruler's first draft was rejected by staff because they didn't think the style was right.

Surii actually made two versions of Kagirinaku Haiiro e. He asked staff to pick which one they preferred and that's the one in the game.

DIVELA wrote two songs before Tenshi no Clover

Depending on the artists, the song can take a matter of days to compose, or months. For example, DECO*27 composed needLe in 3 days, but it took Giga 6 months to finalise Ready Steady.

Here's an interesting one. Karasuyasabou looked at fans talking about WxS stories to help him with writing the lyrics to Showtime Ruler, alongside reading the stories himself. He describes the song's lyrics as being "written with the fans".

There's a bit of a grey area in how things were handled early on. For example, DECO*27 mentions in his Corocoro interview that he was given character illustrations and he talked about story, suggesting that he was given something to work with there. However, PinnochioP mentions only being given the prompt of "abandoned theme park" and some character designs, and NayutalieN mentions only being given character designs because things weren't set in stone at the time (I think NayutalieN was approached very early).

So yeah, MORE! JUMP! MORE! was written with no knowledge of story. NayutalieN was informed of things as they progressed, but it was still vague details that he was given. Also mentioning fragments of feelings in the lyrics was a complete coincidence.

OSTER Project mentioned in her interview that On A Holy Night, This Singing Voice had not been completed when she was commissioned, so she also worked from very vague details.

40mP was another producer who was approached long before release

SEGA specifically asked 40mP for a song with a "serious story" but "not too dark" (same link as above)

Meanwhile, HachiojiP was advised to add classical elements to RAD DOGS fit the event story

Ayase was contacted long before the release of the game as well, despite his song not releasing in-game until quite a while after release.

Ayase also was given the privilege of choosing what unit he got to make a song for. He chose VBS because he thought they fit hit vibe most and because he thought they were cool.

Police Piccadilly was requested to make a song that wasn't "too agressive or over-the-top"

Aqu3ra was given a bit more free will though, and was just told to make their comm sound how they wanted it to

They also made two demos, and after consultation with staff, chose one of the demos to finalise

TOKOTOKO was told to make "a song that would be exciting in live performances". As you can probably tell at this point the prompts received can vary greatly between producers.

there's not a huge amount of information outside of the corocoro interviews, and they've only done up to Yuukisan (Mirai) so far, so there's limits on how much i can tell you. Also not every song got an interview, so now Nulut, no Mafumafu, no Neru unfortunately. I suggest to keep an eye out for new interviews if you're interested; they seem to be going at a pace of one or two per month.

[gotchibam]

Crobat and Aegislash ko-fi doodle for @indecisivepsyche! ⚔️

[shrinkthisviolet]

So obviously in the updated AA canon we know that it was the events of 1-5 that led Edgeworth to fake his suicide (or more likely seriously consider it before backing out) and go dark for a year...but what about in the original canon? Because 1-5 didn't exist then and 1-4 ended on a somewhat good note...what do you think Edgeworth's reasoning was in that 'verse?

YESSSS omg I’m so glad someone asked me this, because I’m delighted to talk about it! This got long, so more under the cut:

So one of the benefits of watching an Ace Attorney playthrough of JFA is getting to hear the players’ and commenters thoughts about Edgeworth’s disappearance…especially since a good chunk of them played the original DS version of the trilogy that did not include RFTA (1-5), while others played the new version (or a ported version, like me) that did include RFTA. And it changes a few things about Edgeworth.

For one thing, a change that I don’t really like is that it takes away Edgeworth knowingly forging evidence. It’s not technically contradictory because only Phoenix states it as fact and bases it on rumors he’s heard/read about and rumors can exaggerate…but it does diminish his arc a bit. I won’t go on and on about it (I could definitely do that another time), but I’ll say this to put it concisely: the arc still sorta works, it’s just weaker.

But anyway, on to the second change, and the topic of your ask: in the original version, we jump from 1-4 to 2-4 in regards to Edgeworth appearances, whereas in the new version, it’s 1-5 to 2-4. And this…is a point of contention for some.

I think in both situations, Edgeworth “choosing death” makes sense. In both cases, his entire worldview is upended. In 1-4, his mentor who he thought he could trust and greatly respected turned out to be evil and hateful enough to prosecute him for two murders, one of which von Karma committed himself (granted, von Karma wasn’t a great father himself, emotionally abusing both Edgeworth and Franziska, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t love him, strive for his love, and respect him highly as a prosecutor). And in 1-5, Lana revealed that she forged evidence during the Joe Darke trial, which Edgeworth presented believing it was legitimate, while Gant undermined and manipulated Edgeworth throughout the entire trial (and also for years before that) and directly compared them, which surely would’ve shaken Edgeworth to his core.

So to put it simply, I think in either case, the explanation is more or less the same: Edgeworth is pushed so far that his mental health suffers for it, he questions his entire career as a prosecutor, so he leaves that note and disappears. I think with either case as the final tipping point, it works…however, I think 1-5 explains it much stronger.

See, in either case, Edgeworth’s worldview is shattered in 1-4, right? It has to be. No doubt he starts to question his path after 1-4, but his responses are different.

In the original version, the von Karma case (1-4) breaks him (understandably) and he disappears, leaving his note behind, with everyone else none the wiser that he was struggling at all.

However, in the new version, in 1-5, we see him attempting to push down his emotions and keep going. This is very consistent for him because he’s been doing it for years (he repressed the events of his father’s murder so hard that he didn’t entirely remember what happened that night—his memory became a nightmare that twisted Edgeworth up and made him think he killed his own father, after all), it’s all he knows how to do, and he’d lean on it even harder after losing the man who raised and trained him for years. And it works…but then something else breaks him, because even someone as repressed as Miles Edgeworth has a breaking point.

The stuff with Damon Gant and Lana Skye, the revelations about the Darke forged evidence, Gant saying he and Edgeworth are the same after patronizing and manipulating him all trial (and for years prior), on top of everything else…yeah, that being the final impetus to break Edgeworth once and for all and make him flee absolutely makes sense and hits so much harder.

I will say, the only thing that doesn’t really make sense is Phoenix attributing Edgeworth’s disappearance to him being upset that he lost his perfect win record. Considering he worked with Phoenix in RFTA, considering Phoenix saw Edgeworth being patronized and manipulated by Damon Gant (and was there for the forgery revelation), it’s strange that Phoenix would then conclude “oh yeah he left because he got mad that his perfect streak was broken, and definitely for no other reason that merits my sympathy.” It doesn’t entirely make sense that he says that in the original version either, though (dude, you just watched Edgeworth’s mentor and guardian be convicted of murdering his dad, you think maybe that had something to do with it??), so I can let that go.

Phoenix was emotionally fraught at the time, and hurt about Edgeworth leaving without saying a word to him, so I can believe he was just venting and being unfair in his anger. Edgeworth does say that Phoenix sealing him off from a perfect win record caused him to start to change, and he acts in such a way that seems to suggest it did inform his decision to leave, but again…whether it’s 1-4 or 1-5, Phoenix’s actions were never the sole reason for Edgeworth leaving. So this isn’t necessarily changed.

You can argue Edgeworth in 1-5 is kinda OOC in that he feels like post-trilogy Edgeworth, and you’re not wrong (that’s another change I dislike), but…strictly in terms of explaining his disappearance and its circumstances, I prefer 1-5.

(sidenote: I know a lot of people consider that he contemplated suicide, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that reading, I think it’s very reasonable and possible.

However, I’ve also heard the interpretation that Edgeworth wasn’t suicidal, he just couldn’t continue to prosecute, and couldn’t stay in America with all its bad memories, so he left to go elsewhere and find himself again…hoping that when he returned, the prosecutor he once had been, the “Demon Prosecutor,” would be dead—and that’s an explanation I consider possible too, especially since his return is never really treated with the gravitas of “oh, I was suicidal, and I went to therapy while I was away, and I’m doing better now.”

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time Ace Attorney was flippant about something serious, so I find either explanation to be plausible.)

This was a looong one lol but hopefully I addressed your question to the extent you wanted!

TL;DR: I prefer RFTA’s version of events preceding Edgeworth’s disappearance because I feel it fits better with his characterization, but I also understand people who prefer the original, and I don’t think they’re as different as people might claim.

[burningcomputerpersona]

Pick a song for each letter of your URL, and then tag that many people! Much thanks to @angelthingy for tagging me <3

Bird, you can fly - Eyemèr Untitled - Knuckle Puck Re-emerging Signs of the Apocalypse - Spanish Love Songs Never Meant - American Football I Was Hiding Under Your Porch Because I Love You - Waterparks Nightmare On Southfield - Action/Adventure Green Squirrel In Pretty Bad Shape - Hot Mulligan Cigarettes & Saints - The Wonder Years Overstepping - Belmont My Life For Hire - A Day To Remember Pints Of Guiness Make You Strong - Against Me! Understanding In A Car Crash - Thursday Thank God It's Friday - Ice Nine Kills Early Sunsets Over Monroeville - My Chemical Romance Right Choice - Can't Swim Paradise Lost, a poem by John Milton - The Used El Niño Considers His Failures - Spanish Love Songs Rationalize - Action/Adventure Sick Of It All - Magnolia Park One Step at a Time - Four Year Strong No Children - The Mountain Goats And Now I'm Nothing - The Wonder Years

Good lord did that take a while to finish... time to start tagging uhhh *counts* twenty-two people now: @sucker-for--anything-acoustic @tradedsymmetry @broke-bruce-wayne @mackie-ds @juliens-bakery @breaking-justin @flashlight-smallknife @cemetery-pigeons @ogbulesky @dysphoria-things @eyemermusic @plainramennoodles @unnervinglyferal @ameliafromafairytale @aiam-maianaise @weirdpinkandmagical @crazyworkswell @kind-wizard @leonidele @thevictorianpirate @mira-kyria @cant-even-spell-my-own-url

Okay I think I tagged like all my mutuals and then some... suffice to say I am sorely regretting my longass username. Anyway these tags are low pressure and open as always, so feel free to join in! (or not, I'm not the cops)

[ambersky0319]

also fuckin hell mad props to my coworker for training me to close my very first day with just the two of us and the fact that i did well

cause FUCK is it hard

[pan-magi]

Another time for me to go into anime and manga differences, woop. This one is more technical in how some things cannot be simply adapted because different mediums. Somewhere out in the interwebs (outside tumblr) I saw someone claim that adaptations have to be 1:1 to be good and this is also a semi-refutation of that.

I go kind of in lecture mode I'm sorry ><. I try to keep the tone relatively informal so I hope it isn't too boring of the read.

Here is the manga panel in question:

(From when Aladdin and Alibaba are in Amon's dungeon and witness the slime reforming and regenerating. The text here is "A slime appeared (x3)." I believe in the official English release the translation is slightly different with "Here, a slime. There a slime. Everywhere a slime." I do think that one is slightly funnier which is important to this.)

(If any aversion to slime or gooey things this isn't the post for you. It's my whole example. Also some with Aladdin almost being eaten at my example at the end.)

You may be thinking what's the big deal with this simple panel? The anime has the encounter be basically the same. You are correct. However, the presentation is very different.

What I find funny about the panel is the repetition of the slime going splat and the accompanying text reinforcing it. It is so simple and so effective. The scene is basically like "oh, look, there's one here. And another one here. Oh no, they're coming together. We're in trouble." The delivery works best with a graphic novel medium as compared to an animated one.

The crux, in my opinion, is the emphasis the text and narration give. If Aladdin and Alibaba voiced the line out loud it would have been out of place and out of character for both of them. Neither are type to have stream of consciousness observations spoken out loud, which the above emphasis will be if given to a character.

Without the text emphasis, the scene doesn't really convey a joke. It's more of a standard action scene. That's fine. A way to attempt to add it in the anime is to linger on the slime an extra moment to draw attention to the uh oh funny.

Here is the equivalent in the anime:

The first column I set to a 150ms; the second is slowed to 200ms. The slightly slower one can add some foreboding. The meaning is not clear though and up to the audiences interpretation on why the camera chooses to linger on the shot, as it were. If someone watching does not get the visual joke and frame the whole thing falls flat. That is a failure to the action end of the scene that demands a quick pace.

What's the big deal for a straightforward joke? That is about it, really. I chose it because it has the clearest distinction in being a 1:1 scene and conveying two different tones due to the simple medium difference. I do not think the anime is weaker. The scene in movement lends itself to be more action oriented. Thus, that's the focus. If it tried a literal translation of that visual joke it would have fallen flat and ruined it.

The anime does still have the comedic (also horrifying) framing that is allowed to be translated more literally. See example two:

&

The above gif is set to 2 seconds per frame. I don't know what the timing is for the anime. I was lazy to check, eep. The important part is the jump cut makes it funny and makes it work so well. In my opinion at least.

That's a wrap~ Sorry for being a bit dry and lecture mode. Magi does a decent job and that means letting the show breathe as an adaption. I wanted to take the opportunity to be a bit of a nerd about it. haha. Thanks for reading.

[cordycepsbian]

@real-live-human she is very eepy right now