#basically hyperfocused on getting them a better setup

[aihoshiino]

chapter 149 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 6

anybody else here unironically love getting yuribaited or just me

Honestly I kind of don't know what to think about this chapter lol. As it stands I didn't really hate it - in a lot of ways, it feels like a return to the humour and emotional focus of early OnK which is something I've honestly been missing in the manga while revisiting the anime. Mengo's art toys chapter was great and getting some proper Akane focus was nice. On the other hand, transitioning into this style of writing with no cushioning after the last arc is so incredibly jarring and the Akane stuff we get here is… well, we'll put a pin in it for now and address it later.

In general "put a pin in it" feels like the right energy for this chapter. As the second chapter of a new arc it's primarily setup for the stuff we're going to be dealing with for the next however long, I think it's going to be something we can really only chew on when we have a more solid idea of what exactly it's setting up, long or short term.

Anyway…! We start off with an explanation of why Kana seemed to flip so suddenly last chapter which does patch up some of that logic a bit. I think it's a little silly that she didn't actually overhear the conversation and thus clue into the actual goings on with how close she was standing but that's basically romance misunderstandings 101 so…

Her leaping to assumptions and giving up so quick also feels a bit abrupt but tbh Kana has always been deeply insecure and quick to leap to it's so over when it comes to her feelings for Aqua. Not only that but as others have pointed out since last chapter, from Kana's outsider perspective, Aqua was at his happiest and most at peace while dating Akane and has been in a mental health spiral to the point of expressing suicidal ideation since they broke up. Obviously we, the readers, know the extenuating circumstances at place but from Kana's POV it makes perfect sense to conclude that Akane makes him happiest and is uniquely equipped to do so. It just feels clunky in execution.

On the subject of clunky… I won't lie, it really bugs me that the first really significant AKKN interaction we're getting is love triangle shit entirely centered on Aqua. One of my biggest complaints about the series post TB was the way the end of that arc set up a huge status quo change to Akane and Kana's rivalry and then kind of failed to expand on it at all and that continued to be true all the way up to the Movie Arc. I'd hoped that them both working in close proximity as actresses on the same project would give us opportunities to dig into that. We got some lip service in that regard and then swerved hard into suddenly hyperfocusing on Kana's insecurities regarding Ruby while Akane got all of zero meaningful focus during the back half of the Movie Arc even though she was one of the characters with the most potential to bring interesting things to the table.

Honestly, one of my biggest fears with Akane's declaration that she'd stop Aqua's plan was that even though the two of broken up, she would continue to orbit Aqua at the expense of being allowed an arc of her own that focused on her relationships with the wider cast. Like - even if what she says about not being romantically interested in Aqua anymore is true, she is nevertheless entirely revolving around him to a really frustrating degree. It really feels like Akasaka realized Akane would have solved everything going on in the Movie Arc and had to panic and offscreen her as a result lol.

tho akane dismissively talking about the idea of clinging onto a past lover did make me do a very mean chuckle. ouch, better hope ruby didn't overhear that one, girl!

That said, for all my complaints, I didn't hate their little talk. Yes, it contained an absolute mountain of transparent-to-the-point-of-cynical KanaKane shipbait but it was pretty gay so who's to say if it's really good or bad or not. It's also just nice to see Kana and Akane being able to have a talk that isn't entirely hostile even if I really wish it was under different circumstances, or even that we'd just seen the road they took to being able to be so civil with each other. But whatever - we're here now, I'll take what I get.

Circling back around a bit, I am intrigued by the idea of Akane framing herself as having 'moved on' from Aqua when she very clearly hasn't lol. Like I indicated up there, I don't quite think this is the case nor do I think we're supposed to uncritically accept this as being the case - it reads moreso to me that Akane is trying to convince not just Kana but also herself that she's moved on from Aqua so Kana doesn't feel like she's in Akane's way if she tries to shoot her shot. As for why… well, that's something to talk about at the end of the chapter but I do think it's interesting either way. Akane wildly overshooting in her scrabble to convince Kana it's totally just platonic and going for sonzoning Aqua was also about the most insane thing she's said in a while but her utterly panicked and deranged expression as she said it made me bust a gut laughing.

In general, the expression work this chapter was on fire and there was a ton of really funny and really cute moments - Akane's blushy pout after Kana's quasi-confession, the fish-eye lens effect on her when Kana sees her outside her door and especially her and Kana's expressions in the second to last page… jesus i lost it so bad.

I've been gushing about Mengo's panelling and expressions for the last ten or so chapters but she really is amping it up lately. It definitely feels like her art for OnK has been getting really refined during the last few volumes and while this chapter was a little whiplash-y coming off the end of the Movie Arc, I also think it's a really impressive display of Mengo's range, too. Her horror and drama chops were on full display while all that was going on but in a more lowkey chapter like this, she brings a lot of life and charm to even simple things like the little montage of everyone wrapping up their day of the beach - it's three silent, tiny panels at the bottom of the page but she crams a ton of detail and character into each one.

I also am Extremely Shrimpterested in the note this chapter ends on. Something OnK does occasionally is use genre trappings as a smokescreen for what is actually happening on page and Akane's words at the end here seem to indicate this is happening here, too. This entire chapter goes extremely hard on the romcom tropes and dynamics but the way Akane's energy totally changes once she's on her own makes me think this is intentional and a reflection of the way Akane is setting up to use Kana.

Because I do think it's undoubtable that she is setting up to use Kana. Her sudden leap to captain of the SS AquKana is not about wholeheartedly supporting two people she loves (at least not primarily) and more about her continued efforts to save Aqua from himself. Kana just happens to be a convenient pawn in making this happen.

If I'm making this sound very cynical and cold of Akane: it is! But that's why I think it's so interesting. Akane is very like Aqua in a lot of ways and seeing this tendency of his to perform cruelty and manipulation to the greater end of doing the most good (or at least in their eyes) mirrored in her is very juicy and potentially very deadly in the hands of someone as smart and perceptive as Akane.

It's also kind of telling and kind of really sad to see Akane asserting that Aqua wouldn't be able to take revenge if he had a girlfriend at his side when that certainly didn't stop him back when he and Akane were dating. It's subtle but it's consistent with just how little faith Akane seems to have ever had in Aqua's feelings for her. Kana's not the only one struggling with long term insecurities in that regard.

I also can't not address the elephant in the room that is the story setting this up while the resolution to whatever the hell is going on with Ruby is still dangling over everyone's heads. I mentioned this last chapter but it really is getting to be bizarre just how much of a nothingburger that has been turned into, not just in terms of the characters' lack of reaction to it but the way the narrative has just entirely failed to give it any weight or significance whatsoever. I can only assume that one of the other girls making a move to pursue Aqua (if it does end up happening) will kick Ruby into action and we'll get god knows what sort of resolution there but a dark and evil part of me that loves to start shit thinks that the funniest possible resolution would be for it to never come up or be referenced ever again just for the sheer frenzy of confusion and bafflement it would cause. everybody loses!!!

[waitingonthewind]

less than a year ago i took a photo of the rushed setup i did of a fish tank to house the feeder fish we'd just bought for our turtles, and looking at it compared to the tank now is so objectively funny like

its also worth noting that One of thise five feeder fish managed to completely fuck up his job and now lives in our larger tank

[kanralovesu]

When Bosses Fail: Gameplay and Story Synthesis in Persona 4

I recently was absorbed into Person 4 Golden now that it got released on steam. Since the game is a few years old at this point I’d normally say that this is ground covered by people better and smarter than myself and not write about it, but when fighting the first boss a moment occurred that completely changed my perspective on video game bosses as a whole and that revelation is just too intense not to write about! I’m of course talking about the moment Shadow Yukiko tries to summon her prince charming for a second time and the spell fails. I want to take a look at why a boss trying and failing an attack is probably the single most amazing synthesis of story and gameplay I’ve seen and why it tells you more about that bosses character than anything else could.

For those of you who haven’t played Persona 4, I’ll quickly run down the setup to this boss. I wouldn’t consider it a major spoiler since it is only the first real boss of the game. Anyway enter Yukiko, a girl who is born into a family that runs a famous inn and will be forcing her to carry on the family business when she’s older. She’s not at all into this life and this manifests as the thought that she needs to find a prince to whisk her away and get her out of this life. The boss of this section of the game is her inner feelings manifested into a monstrous phoenix in a cage. Sometime into the fight this monster uses the summon ability introduced earlier via normal enemies to call forth a prince monster that looks like a puppet and which fights alongside her. However, when you defeat it or it runs away, she attempts to resummon it only for her to completely fail and we get a bit of dialogue along the lines of “Why? Why won’t he come!” After you defeat the boss and Yukiko solves her inner turmoil she learns she needs to seek independence by herself and not wait to be passively be saved by someone. 

So its pretty clear the designers have baked extremely important narrative details into this fight, but most of the time when you see this its the villain's strengths being turned into their primary abilities. Why is it so important that this boss tried and failed to do something? Well when we’re talking specifically about villains, we’re talking about people who we know have flawed views of the world. These characters are defined by their flaws first and foremost and in most media these flaws directly lead to their undoing. Voldemort in Harry Potter didn’t anticipate Harry’s mother’s love protecting him and accidentally turning him into the Horcrux that would be his undoing. President Snow expected the fear of the Hunger Games to keep people in line not lead to rebellion. The Joker in the Dark Knight didn’t anticipate the two ships not immediately blowing each other up because he believed people were inherently corruptible. Villains by there very nature are meant to have flaws that directly lead to their downfall and this is often how stories present moral lessons. 

However in games we find this far less often and its often reserved to finding the weak point is an enemy’s seemingly impenetrable armor. The twist identity of Doc Oc in the newest Spiderman game for example is one of the best interpretations of the character as a whole yet the fight devolves into you just damaging him in generic ways over and over with cutscenes showing you trying to disable his arms. His mechanical arms are certainly showcased to full effect in this fight, but not his superiority complex placing himself above people he wants to “help” in a perversion of Spiderman’s ideology. Arguably the best antagonist in Bioshock offs himself and you end up fighting against a guy who uses too siphons too much plasmids to himself to try to become super powerful. In this boss fight we do see the plasmids as the weak point you use to defeat him but only after a full phase of him wrecking house using said plasmids to good effect. In less story focused games, villains often boil down to really bad people who want power and thus it feels a bit counter-intuitive for the player to defeat them by powering up yourself (but you’re the good guy so don’t worry). Video games in general are less likely to present a boss’s failing during the battle.

When movies have villains who are defeated directly because of their flaws it provides a solid moral framework, but when video games fail to do that the moral lesson can fall flat. How do we know Doc Oc’s idea of thinking of those he saves as lesser is bad? Well he says it in a cutscene and he’s the bad guy so case closed I guess? In Yukiko’s case we know for a fact that her idea of a prince coming to save her is incorrect because we’ve observed visible effects on gameplay. This is far more impactful than if she just said it because in order to win the game we as players are hyperfocused on observing the patterns of gameplay that will lead to our victory. In other words, when something happens that helps or hurts our chances of winning that’s something we care a lot about immediately. 

The other reason this boss design is effective is because it gives us a better understanding of the character in a diegetic way which is basically a fancy way of saying its the “show don’t tell” rule applied to video game writing.

Now when making a boss fight like this you can either approach it from a bottom up or top down approach (to borrow magic the gathering design terminology). Top down would be writing the character first and then designing the fight to fit the character, but bottom up would be making the fight first and then writing the character. As always a bit of both is probably best, but lets imagine using bottom up to write a Pokemon gym leader villain. Many joke that the gym leaders are supposedly elite trainers but only use one type of Pokemon and therefore open themselves up to having clear weaknesses. This fact would actually work well if we wanted to write gym leader characters whose flaw is that they are rigorously set in their beliefs and won’t change. For instance the Fire gym leader would be always passionate and excited but not know when to calm down and rest and the Water gym leader could be always calm and not know when jumping into immediate action is necessary. In these cases, them having only one type of Pokemon is symbolic of their unchanging natures. Perhaps when you meet them later in the game they’ve learned and have other types of Pokemon?

So in conclusion most games that aren’t directly trying to create story and gameplay synthesis on every level often fall short when it comes to boss design. Bosses often have powers indicative of their strong points but don’t have mechanical failures based on their character flaws. Honestly the problem is not nearly as bad as I make it out to be, but despite that I still think that if there’s one thing the gaming space needs more of its bosses who make mistakes during battle.

[addeeznuts]

My pills don't work.

I've been doing a lot of reading about ADD lately. Been on my mind. I'm recently single and all this alone time gives me a better perspective on myself. One day it hit me. My pills don't work as well anymore. And by anymore, I mean they haven't for a couple years.

The big things i got done this year?

My garden. I tilled, I made boxes, I planted. Honestly after that I didn't keep up.

Things I wanted to do and couldn't?

Clean my house regularly

Clean and not have it take hours and a giant force of will still riddled with distractions

Work out

Get things done so I don't feel bad about relaxing or do that watch tv while i clean or this is just a break

Read books

Seriously, just keep my house clean

Paint. I'm an artist with ideas. I love creating. I don't have the drive to do it. Plus I'm an a type personality. I don't think I deserve to if I haven't done other things

And a bunch more.

I'd settle for just me being able to stay on top of stuff. But I realized with my current dose, it's been years since I was able to stay on top of basic shit without major stress.

I feel like my pills now take me to the point where I realize I need to do things but don't get me off my ass. So I just end up stressing about them. Major stress. Which leads to depression and feeling bad about myself.

As a test I doubled my dose. It wasn't the crazy super productive day I hoped for, but I was tired. I did end up doing a lot of planning for moving furniture around. I figured out my A/V setup which was a lot of figuring out. Some hyperfocusing there. A lot of notes. But I felt a part of my brain click. I made plans for shit I was meaning to do for weeks. No stress. Just doing. Little shit ADD guys would know about-no forgetting what I was going into a room for, easy easy flow task to task, I wasn't distracted by my phone, internet, tv. Fuck it was good.

That me would have a clean basement. I thought about working out. I would clean as I go and have real relaxed free time. I could fucking paint.

I feel so dumb for just realizing this now. Looking back it's been years since I could want to do things and then go do them.

It's like a need a laminated reminder to check monthly of a what a normal life should be like.

What a waste.

Anyway, onward and upwards. If I get pills that work better for my next month, by the end of the year my life could look totally different.

I'm calling my doctor tomorrow.