#but the way the fan artists depict her don’t really acknowledge anything

[blackbrrytea]

Am I the only one who doesn’t headcanon Basira as wearing a hijab?

I mean she is a cop. Regularly kills people. Her religious faith or lack thereof isn’t really mentioned.

It’s not impossible, and people have their own private relationships to wearing hijabs. But it just feels off to me.

[ofdreamsanddoodles]

Hey idk if you’re the best person to ask and I’m not trying to start anything, I don’t mean this disrespectfully but why is the new poster artist art problematic?? I’m just not very educated on the subject :)

first of all, i'd recommend looking at this post from thegrinningwheels going over the mistakes people make when drawing peter because this definitely plays into some of them. also, disclaimer that i am white, and if anyone else wants to jump in, feel free. before i start, i'd like to mention this screenshot:

[id: a screenshotted twitter thread containing three tweets. 1. jay onetiredboy (@onetiredb0y) can i ask why you'd want to distance the official art from your previous artworks? is there a particular criticism you'd like to directly address? or... ... 2. Ellison Estephan (@/ellisonestephan) I like to draw goofy stuff as a fan! I thought it would be more professional to make sure people remember that stuff isn't "official art" or something now, just because I'm drawing some posters haha!! 3. *sighs* hyperion city... (@junosteel [rest is cut off]) with all due respect, you can just say that your art perpetuated racism/transmisogyny/ableism without hiding behind "haha its goofy." better to at least be transparent and address it than dancing around the issue an acknowledging it as goofy. own up to your mistakes pls. /end id]

as well as this response to harley kaner saying that people sometimes called others racist to justify bullying them (a post made about an hour or so after the artist was announced)

so they know they messed up but... yeah they're not gonna apologize

(a link to the junoverse designs for anyone who wants to follow along)

for starter’s, the way peter is drawn feels a bit like a caricature, to the point of drawing on transmisogynistic stereotypes. (stereotypes that are like, ten times more visible in their art of vespa, who is actually trans fem which i’ll get to in a second) the intersection of what it means to be a feminine gnc person and being a poc are many and varied, and there is definitely a lot to say about femininity being seen as wrong and shameful. there's a lot of history in how Asian men's femininity has been portrayed and sexualised, both in fandom & in the world at large, and sometimes white authors just aren’t capable of handling those points with care. as much as i would love to celebrate a gnc character design,  i think it's safe to say that this artist's depiction of a hyper-feminine nureyev feels like a mockery rather than honest representation

also, it may not be intentional, but when you have a line-up & you're drawing the lighter characters (or at least nureyev and buddy) much more sultry & sexual than the darker ones.... that tells me something about how you view people of color. especially when the sexual way you draw those lighter characters has nothing to do with their character

a line up like this is supposed to give you an indication of character personality. this is supposed to be how you're going to present them to the world. both buddy and peter use their charisma to their advantage sometimes, but that charisma is based on their personality! though he's absolutely flirted to get what he wants, peter tries to give off the vibes of a suave gentleman. if he’s wearing a tie, it’s not going to be haphazardly put on, because he cares about his appearance. peter can be sexual, but it’s not really the way he presents himself to the world at large, and this version of him goes so far it feels like some kind of parody of ouran host club or something, which makes me feel like it’s mocking him rather than trying to honestly portray his character. 

buddy meanwhile has never flirted with anyone but her wife and gets her way with confidence & force. that exaggerated body type would already be a bad look on its own because of the hypersexual way people view women of color, but with added context, it kind of feels like there's the implication that the only way these characters could be as cool & charismatic as they are is if they get their way with sex, which is just... incredibly racist

some of it is just an issue with the art style in general. a lot of cartoonish styles have exaggerated features, but there's a limit to how much you can exaggerate those features without just drawing actual stereotypes. alessandra's design makes me uncomfortable for the exact opposite reason as buddy's: cartoonishly gigantic muscles aren't really a great sight when black women are constantly seen as hypermasculine. i might be a bit too critical on this one? i feel like it was worse when i first looked at it, but there's still the fact that exaggerating an asian character's eyelids is racist. it's like. racism 101. both peter and quanyi have incredibly slitted eyes in the majority of their art & personally the way quanyi specifically is exaggerated makes her seem more…. manic, somehow? the way her eyes are lidded aren’t only racist, but make it seem like she’s constantly giving everyone bedroom eyes which is just. Oof

vespa i wanted to talk about in more detail, because there is literally not one element of this design that doesn’t scream bigotry. It reminds me so much of every terrible caricature of a trans woman i’ve seen in horror. The wild bloodshot eyes, the bloody nose, the dagger, the unkept hair & hairy armpits, the wardrobe malfunction revealing a bare chest for no other reason than shock value alone—because how else are we supposed to know what kind of woman she is? There’s already been so many films & just, media in general linking trans women to mental illness and violence. We absolutely didn’t need a vespa design that looks like she belongs in silence of the lambs. If this was just vespa holding a knife, that’d be fine! She does, canonically, have a knife that she uses. But everything about this vespa is designed to look as offputting as possible. She doesn’t look dangerous because she’s part of our cool crime family, she looks out of control. Which is exactly how vespa worries the world will see her! Taking a character who says, pretty up front that she wants to be seen as more than her violent urges & mental illness and then drawing her in a way that screams “look out! This person is dangerous and mentally ill!” is honestly unforgivable. Add that to the fact that everything about her appearance implies she’s doing womanhood “wrong” (obviously, not shaving should be considered a neutral thing, but when it’s only a trans woman character you show with hair, it’s worth considering why you feel the need to do something like that) including the fact she’s going around with her shirt slipped like that, which looks obviously oversized to fill a chest she doesn’t have. One of the first things i learned about writing trans characters is that you should never reveal a character is trans by taking a moment to emphasize how different their body looks from a cis person, be it through having someone else walk in on them in the shower or this. It’s voyeuristic and serves no purpose but to make someone’s gender seem like a dramatic twist instead of an identity that deserves respect, and if a trans artist can’t even understand that, then there’s no hope of them accurately representing literally anyone else.

according to a friend, this art had been drawn before vespa was confirmed as trans (but reposted after, so clearly they didn’t see an issue either way) but that just means they saw an angry, schizophrenic woman & decided to not just make her a harmful stereotype of a pyschotic person, but add insult to injury by making her trans as well.

This has gone on too long & i can’t type anymore, but i wanted to say the second citadel designs really aren’t any better. Every character they chose to make a poc implies something negative, such as making marc and tal the only knights of color & then placing them as nothing more than comic relief. Maybe i could believe this was part of an effort to show the white characters as part of the oppressive class if it wasn’t for didn’t seem clear that we’re supposed to see the brothers as a pair of bumbling fools. Not to mention every single other bad thing they did

EDIT: i want to emphasize that just because i’ve only talked about the junoverse designs doesn’t mean the citadel designs aren’t also worth an apology. so far, the only thing ellison has said (aside from them calling the initial line up “goofy”)  is this tweet, but when they say “i wouldn’t draw those characters like that now,” that apology doesn’t acknowledge the fact that multiple people on twitter have criticized quanyi’s design for some of the reasons mentioned above. it also rings a bit more hollow when they say “i wish i could go back and design things different” because this citadel line-up was posted in late august. if you’re incline to go “well, this was in the past, and they apologized” (and i do see some proof they changed their vespa design) i’d like to remind you that some of their most recent drawings were in fact, last month, and there has been no acknowledgement they understand what was wrong with that. whoever was involved in getting a new artist for the penumbra saw these racist & homophobic designs and agreed that someone who drew that material was someone they wanted to align themselves with.

And remember, this is the second time the penumbra podcast has worked with an artist with blatantly bigoted art (the first being tumblr user disasterscenario) and i remember plenty of people explaining exactly what was wrong with that art as well. Whatever chance you think they have to learn and improve—they had it! And in response, this is what they gave us

[justasimplesinner]

YEEAAAH REQUESTS OPEN do you have any hcs of ak Eddie and year one Jon with an artistic s/o? Bonus if they do graffiti 😎

Arkham Knight!Eddie with an artist hcs:

when he was younger, Edward kind of enjoyed art. but independent art. art with a hidden meaning. art that made you think when you looked at it, that entranced you and made you wonder what was the reason for making this piece, what's the message that the artist wanted to convey. he knew a lot of classical art and the greatest artists of all time but that doesn't mean he enjoyed their art. finding out about all the things the "greatest painters to ever live" did really prevented him from enjoying their works. there's not many people that know about the shit Picasso has done, but he's one of them and it always makes him research the artists he stumbles upon. only Van Gogh was legit. and he's not fond of most modern art either. even if it has no meaning, it'd be great if the art depicted at least something. he doesn't really like people painting a few dots and lines and calling it spiritual art, he thinks it's lazy and clashes with his logic

he's on the fence when it comes to graffiti. if it's for sending a message and making a difference, he's able to appreciate it, but if it's just mindless spray-painting, he isn't the biggest fan. sometimes, it doesn't look half-bad, but there are buildings ruined by bad graffiti and he hates looking at it. however, he's kind of an graffit artist himself, even if he doesn't realise it/doesn't wanna admit it. i mean, c'mon, he painted half the city with green paint and most of it was question marks or insults towards Batman. but your spray-painting skills really came in handy when it comes to that. you've offered to help him with painting his locations and at first, he was neutral towards it, just letting you do whatever you want, but soon enough, it turned out ot be the most fun he had in years. he would've never thought that running around and spraying walls with his partner would be so enjoyable. you were so creative too! it was amazing. and he loved when you climbed up onto his shoulders to spray paint higher points because you refused to use a ladder when he was right there. he genuinely hasn't laughed this hard with anyone ever, it's honestly one of his favourite memories with you

he doesn't mind going to art galleries with you if you like it, but just so you know, he's doing it just to shit on most artists. not because of their art, but because of the kind of person they were. no, he's definitely not doing this to make you happy and spend some quality time with you while showing off his knowledge. no, why would you think that

he fucking loves sculpting though. he loved it since he was a kid and laid his hands on plasticine for the first time. if you like to play around with clay, he's fucking got you. there's so many possibilities! he could do anything! shaping clay or making pots or whatever with you makes him so incredibly happy it's ricidulous. he enjoys it way too much. no one should be this happy about having their arms in clay up to the elbows, and yet here he is

he's honestly willing to try a lot of things with you. despite being very critical, he does enjoy art now and then. he enjoys spending time with you while doing something creative. it allows him to let his mind loose and just create shit. his hands are really skilled and steady, so he's not half-bad at it either! and maybe he won't admit that out loud, but he wouldn't mind you teaching him more things or new techniques. every time you two make art together, it's like he turns into a child again. he can't explain it, but it makes him so happy. he lacked such entertainment and encouragement as a child, and now you're making up for it and he couldn't've been happier

Year One!Jon with an artist hcs:

Jon's relationship with art is complicated. as a kid, the only paintings he's seen were the ones in Granny's house, and he hated them. they either depicted biblical scenes or Granny and her ancestors, and he had to learn all about them. Granny had a lot of morbid art hung in the corridor leading to his room and it always reminded him how sinners go to hell. he wasn't allowed to make art himself outside of school either. he kind of enjoyed it, but other kids often ruined his works and that's where his distaste started. when he grew up and was finally free of the horrible woman, Jon wanted to try a lot of new things and one of them was visiting an art gallery, but it all felt... pompous. the people there were vain and shallow, and he didn't quite see the art for it's meaning but for it's worth. he saw art galleries as places people went to to show off their wealth, and that art was an entertainment only for the upper class. that made his distaste grow

you made him realised that he didn't really hate art, he just had bad experiences with it. it's not about the art but the way it's showcased and the way people treat it. and that's when he started truly appreciating it. when he watched you work, he didn't see all the pompous people. when you explained your works to him, he didn't feel the same dread and disgust he felt at the paintings in his childhood home. when you encouraged him to paint, you let him go wild, didn't give him strict instructions like his school's art teacher and didn't criticise what he did like his classmates. you made him realise that he didn't need experience and skill because art isn't supposed to look nice, it's supposed to mean something, make you feel something. he still doesn't indulge too often, but you made him see why people made art and even showed him how therapeutic it can be

he enjoys listening to you talk about art, and is amazed when you specifically look for things that'd suit his own tastes and introduce him to new artists. he likes sculptures and paintings that fuck with your mind, sometimes even straight out gore and horror, and you always go out of your way to make sure he has a chance to interact with such art, be it an art show or a book about a certain artist. you acknowledge what he likes and you don't criticize him for it, instead encouraging him to pursue it

when it comes to graffiti, he always associated it with the bad kids. the ones that steal lunch money and fuck shit up. as he grew, he realised it was actually more of social rejects, the rebels, the people he always wanted to hang out with because he thought they'd understand him. he's on the fence, because on one hand, it's just kids letting loose, but on the other, it sometimes ruins the architecture and he hates how some buildings look. but he understands the need to disrespect your surroundings when you're constantly disrespected by your environment too. so he certainly won't stop you from doing it. and he maybe kinda sorta dreamed of spray painting an abandoned building as a kid. and you maybe kinda sorta can make those childish dreams come true. he won't ask though. you gotta offer that yourself

he may not be an art conessieur, but you taught him how to appreciate art, you taught him how to make art. he doesn't indulge you often, he'd prefer it if you just worked on your thing while he worked on his/read a book in the same room, but sometimes he gets the weird urge to just... paint with you. one time you made him paint with his hands and maybe he didn't enjoy it as much as his younger self would have, but he did feel his inner child come to life at that moment. he honestly got more paint on himself and you than the canvas, but he had fun. he genuinely had fun. he was allowed to have fun now. he could let loose. nobody held him back. you only encouraged him, and it made him fall in love with you more every day

[project-paranoia]

Let’s Watch: Yin Yang Master: Dream of Eternity

I have watched this movie 85 Whole Entire Times and I do not regret.  The only thing wrong with this movie is that it wasn't a fifty episode series.  I cried, I laughed, I fell in love.  The cinematography is on point, the acting is amazing, the crew member who put snow on people's eyebrows did an amazing job, and the acting!  The subtlety, the gentleness, the love and affection, the discussion of race is one of the best I've ever seen.

As people have pointed out before in series like X-Men that fear of mutant's is practically if not thematically justified due to the laser eyes in a way that fear of ethnic minorities just isn't in real life.  In Dream of Eternity however humans are equally if not sometimes more super powered than the yao they hunt.  Demons - very much not in the Christian sense - are a mixture of spirits, resentful souls, and animals and plants who cultivated to human form.  They often appear human at first glance and in some cases the extent of their power seems to be the limited to turning into a smaller more vulnerable animal.  Qingming's deliberate care and gentleness not only reflects his upbringing as a Yin Yang Master, but parallels the experience of racial minorities labelled as aggressive.

The movie takes particular care as well in the way it looks at trauma, grief, and love.  The three of which haunt the main characters and send out ripple effects into the world around them.  In the world of Dream of Eternity no loss is purely private, it spools out into the world around the person effected until they make an effect to acknowledge and deal with their experiences.  Qingming's warmth and gentleness isn't just marked by his behaviour but by the orange light he's lit by and his variety of shishen - but he is also separate, standing alone in frame and facing away from the people around him.  Boya's loss has made him unforgiving and as cold as the blue light he's lit in, and yet he is open and instinctive, talking and acting as soon as the thought enters his head.  The Empress is lost and drifting, trapped and grief stricken, vulnerable to those who profess to love her.  The film is simple, it says and shows what it means when it means it - but it is also as complex as the very human characters it depicts.  

The movie is made even more complex by its pull from theaters.  Claims of plagiarism drench the edges of the movie, which as true as the assertion that Fan BingBing went on a spa vacation in 2018.  Although this blog is about Chinese censorship dealing specifically with BL content, Chinese censorship also effects those who criticize governmental policy.  I hope that supporters of this blog will also support Chinese media threatened by censorship for many reasons so that artists and others involved in film making can continue to make meaningful content.

Doing a watchthrough of a movie is not feasible, but please enjoy a few thousand words - with spoilers on Yin Yang Master included:

* That gentle chiming and rain soundscaping is so soothing, what a great way to calm and lull the audience before the movie even starts * Qingming is so small and isolated in the frame - cinema! * The lighting and cinematography is just so good * Shifu, soft gentle teacher * So much love stored in the Shifu * Instant grow * This boy is Sassy * This theme of deflection in Qingming's character is established early * Deflection with a teleportation portal and then immediately deflection verbally * Shifu is certainly an attractive man aged up, but his face is also soft and gentle, something to note when his double pops up later * Also the awkward question of don't you have someone you want to protect, maybe part of the problem is that shifu is just really bad at wording things * The answer that yes he does has several meanings, one of which is immediately apparent when Shifu acts out one of those Father Saves Child By Yeeting them youtube videos * ACtion MuSIC * I love them your honour * The spirit guardian's design is so specific and elegant, absolutely superb you funky little shishen * I wonder if Qingming ever thinks about that if he didn't come back with all his fellow disciples that Shifu would have been fine * Maybe it's not that he doesn't have someone he wants to protect and more that he believes that he's not capable of protecting those he wants to * subtle indication Shifu's qi is corrupted * Precious Magic Childe ;-; * The framing, I'm living for it * The Serpent graphic is lovely * Also the way they set things up * Qingming cares so much about his shifu * Mark Chao just has the ability to crumple his face like paper * Sad Time exposition involving the corrupting influence of desires * "When you're gone I'll be all alone" in just about all you need to know about Qingming at this point in the story * Also like, sympathy for Shifu in raising this lonely child.  By all accounts he was an absolutely superb father figure, and Qingming I'm sure was not an easy child to raise.  He's the sort of kid that would take a lot of calm and patience. * Slumber party! * It's kind of interesting that this is an activity Fangyue and He Shouyue are doing together.  He's definitely obsessed and in love with her and she's just doing friends and family activities with him * Also yellow/gold lighting is kind of their thing * It's interesting how they do the make up for He Shouyue.  The actor is very attractive, but they make him up to look doll like, a little too pretty, a little too shiny.  Like a porcelain doll. * Cool lit Boya and warm lit Qingming appear! * Camels! * The framing is so good, they're careful to be sure he's shown as obviously isolated as much as possible * And it should go without saying that I adore the City * The matte painting is outstanding * But there's also the lighting, the vignettes, the clusters, the foliage * It is a supremely beautiful set * The irony that Killing Stone is playing along with Boya's music and then it's Boya who kicks him around * A small note, but one I appreciate - even when Boya has warm highlight's they're red instead of orange * "It's Jason Bourne!" * I hope Qingming paid for that water taxi * It's interesting how Killing Stone goes from the safety of Qingming's orange light to the danger of Qingming's blue * Colour related foreshadowing! * Look at this poor sweet man, how could anyone suspect him of anything.  He's just a sad man who loves his dead wife * Qingming's use of a fan is interesting - battle fans show up all over wuxia and xianxia, but it feels like it also ties into the way he's so very careful in how he presents himself.  There's that quote that a sword can only be a sword but other weapons are also able to serve other purposes - not a perfect quote but the point is got across. * The way Qingming just knocks Boya back, like get An Clue, my dude * The way that Killing Stone curls around the pipa ;-; * So the movie is based on the book series 'Onmyoji' by Yumemakura Baku.  The books start with Seimei (Qingming) and Hiromasa (Boya) already in a relationship talking about various cases Seimei has recently experienced.  Plotwise, obviously the stories are different, however thematically Seimei and Hiromasa discuss why some yao stick around and solutions to the difficulties and dangers they might cause - which is generally from Seimei's very successful perspective to listen and treat them like humans.  So in that way the plots of the books and the movie are quite different, but the themes are just about identical. * Boya says Don't Talk Me I Angy and also that demons don't have feelings and Qingming's face takes out a billboard that's just like Ah, Another Fantasy Racist, Excellent * Qingming also does what should be done in this situation, taking care of the victim not the racist * Fight scene!  Fight scene! * Qingming's first few moves aren't to attack, they're to distract and just hold his fan up to block Boya's way and his view - it's only when Boya persists in attacking that Qingming fights back * Qingming's sassy smile, he is very much deliberately irritating Boya as much as he's refocusing his attention and distracting him * "nICE sWORD" * I've sighed that sigh before * This boy is taking great pleasure from teasing Boya, but also he makes a really good point * I understand and relate to what Qingming did, but also I can understand why Boya was ready to throw rocks at Qingming when he saw him again * Killing Stone lit in Qingming's orange light again * Killing Stone, my beloved * A good gauge to the state of the world for yao is no one has told this sweet boy before that demons have feelings too * There are several lines like this in the movie that just drop kick you with Implications * The same way Qingming clung to Zhongxing, Killing Stone wants to join up with Qingming to have some compassion in his life * The way he asks to be a spirit guardian is so formal too, and Qingming is so gentle with him, I cry ;-; * The warm orange light of Qingming's love ;-; * He heals the wounds * It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise it's the actual imperial degree speaking and not one the of Jingyun Temple Masters * The mutual this guy again is delicious * "Is it because of your pretty face" * Boya draws his sword so fast and Qingming is so amused by it * Longye!  Queen!  I love her! * The two of them seem to understand each other instantly * Those sassy little smiles * He Shouyue looks even more like a doll than before * Longye has her head on a swivel from second one, she plays the Maiden so well like she's not a skilled master * And her customer service smile * Qingming is shooketh

* What happens next?  You'll have to watch and find out!

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

The Laura snapes tweet made me had a range of reactions. The first was, why assume they’re straight and not think they’re queer and that’s why there’s queer subtext? Then I thought well I probably wouldn’t say that as a journalist with access to celebrities. Then I thought, but is it right to not acknowledge the existence of the closet? Then, but should this conversation not happen at all then, that feels wrong.

I was just watching the Longpond Sessions the other day, which brought me back to this ask.

Laura Snapes has deleted her twitter, so I can’t find the original tweet, but I’ve thought about it loads.  It was something like: ‘With so many mainstream pop artists putting queer subtext in their work, does that reinforce the idea to young fans that queerness is something that should be hidden and obscured’.

The first reply was: ‘She’s gay your honour’ (The timing made the connection with Taylor obvious, although I can’t remember why).  And in general the discussion was very good (Harry was also explicitly mentioned), but I found that my thoughts were kind of going off in completely different angles.

Because my first thought was - perhaps it’s the hiddenness of queerness that people are responding to.

More than anything else it made me think of a Happiest Season review that really bothered me.  I haven’t seen Happiest Season (I’m now watching whole series of half hour shows, but I’m still not up to movies), but one of the reviews really stuck with me. It opened by covering the promo that Kristen Stewart and Clea Duvall had done in the lead up to the film.  In particular, how they both talked about identifying with MacKenzie Davis’s character and having felt like that was role they’d had to play because of their careers.  The writer then proceeded to absolutely trash the movie and particularly how terribly MacKenzie Davis’s character had navigaged the closet and treated Kristen Stewart’s character.

I’m not suggesting the reviewers assessment was wrong or unreasonable.  But it seemed to me a pretty horrific thing to do to take quotes where the creative team making a movie talked about how much they identified with this particular way of navigating oppression, and then tear into the fictionalised version.  I think if you’re going to write about what people have said about the way they navigate oppression in the context of art they’ve made, you don’t have to like the art, but you do need to treat their lives with compassion.

I think there’s something more going on.  I think there is an experiential gulf, between queer people who write about culture, and queer people who make certain types of culture.  The way homophobia operates in many places is changing, most notable the closet is not a necessity to navigate many workplaces now.  While queer people writing about culture will have a whole range of experiences of homophobia - it’s not necessarily a common experience to be told that being open about your sexuality will do a huge amount of harm to your career.  Whereas actors and singers (and directors and writers who were actors or singers), that is still an incredibly central part of their experience of their sexuality.

I thought about this more when I learned that Robbie Rogers, Greg Berlanti’s partner and one of the producers on My Policeman, had been an out football player. I’ve seen the idea that we’ve had ‘enough’ sad queer stories, mentioned over and over again.  Robbie Rogers called My Policeman a passion project; Harry Styles seems to have put quite a lot on the line to play Tom.  It seems like My Policeman is story that resonates with people who have experienced the idea that their ability to do what they loved would be destroyed by being open with their sexuality.  And I think there’s something slightly obscene about people who are unlikely to have experienced that, to somehow call enough of sadness or depictions of oppression. (To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with not liking particular kind of stories, but lots of people go beyond that and suggest that therefore those stories should not exist - and I think that’s very loaded).

Clea DuVall and Kristen Stewart acted professionally before they were 20. All professional football players have to be serious in their teen years.  Harry Styles, became a public figure when he was 16. Their experience of their sexuality is going to be very different from their peers. In some ways easier, money always helps.  But that specific dynamic of being very successful at doing something you love, and being surrounded by people who tell you everything would be at risk if you came out - that’s a different set of threats than those a lot of other queer people experience.

In this context, I think there’s something quite grotesque at looking at artists who have been teen celebrities and saying ‘make happier queer art’.  

For those of us who want more queer joy in popular culture - I think there are two choices. Make it ourselves, or fight for a better world where nobody feels like they have to make it. As long as there's queer pain in the world, there must be space for it in art.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.

They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.

Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”

Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.

The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 

When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.

I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 

I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.

Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 

The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.

Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.

This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.

Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.

I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 

We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.

I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.

This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.

[sepublic]

Unpopular King Opinion

           Unpopular opinion I’m about to repeat AGAIN; But King actually has a lot more depth and nuance than people give him credit for, and he has that depth regardless of whether or not he was an actual king of demons or has some mysterious, all-powerful backstory or whatnot. If we look at him just as-is, at face-value, with what we actually have in canon, no speculation; King IS a very interesting character, actually, with a surprising amount of darkness!

           There’s the parallels with Lilith that I’ve brought up in the past. King is a very artistic individual who wants glory and recognition, but on his own terms; He wants to be appreciated for stuff he cares about and feels he has agency in, not because he’s superficially adorable or anything! But at the same time, King DOES want to be coddled and cared for, given a sort of childhood he never really got- But he just wants some respect and agency with that as well, is that too much to ask for?

           And that fits with how Luz babies him, but in a way that respects and listens to King’s requests, taking heed of his advice and lessons; Eda treats them both with respect and a proper level of accountability, while also protecting them because they’re both kids who don’t deserve that. This contrasts with Amity who’s kind of forced to grow up and is superficially taken seriously, but on the downside, she’s severely emotionally stunted and feels like she has to do all of the heavy-lifting for herself and others, by herself.

           King is kind of coming to age in his own way like Luz, learning to take accountability and responsibility for his mistakes, as part of that quest to be taken seriously and respected, while still getting to be treated kindly and looked after, and then looking after Luz by himself occasionally. He wants power and control, but he sometimes has issues with the responsibility that comes with that, with demanding attention from Luz in Really Small Problems, and how King has to step up to his alleged leadership role by owning up to his mistakes, how we see him be a great teacher at Hexside for a day. 

          We see him start as a terrible teacher in I was a Teenage Abomination, before he improves in The Intruder, and by The First Day he can win the hearts of an entire class of teenagers, kids he once thought were terrifying after Once Upon a Swap- But who he grew to better understand thanks to his experience in Luz’s body, as well as learning to understand Luz herself and be a better person to her! Even when his fears of judgment aren’t fully conquered during Grom, no thanks to Eda’s own personal experiences and warnings- Gus manages to encourage King’s eventual confidence to speak out!

           King’s got a disconnect with Luz and Eda in that both are only really demonized or looked down upon, as criminals and troublemakers, a cursed witch and a human, dehumanized… While King has been mostly fetishized, but that too is also dehumanizing, reducing him to a prop and a toy, a doll and a pet; One that people like Roselle, Dottie, Tibbles, and Boscha think they can just buy and own without permission. Just a cute animal to own and be carried by his collar by say Lilith, who also dehumanizes Luz as another one of Eda’s ‘pets’.

           And as I said, that disconnect about being fetishized and seemingly ‘wanted’, to Eda who was cursed and ostracized and seen only as a monstrous freak; It means she doesn’t quite understand and even downplays King’s issues with that, which it’s why it’s important she literally walks in his shoes during Once Upon a Swap, that Eda realizes that being fetishized isn’t fun either, that her and King both just want respect and agency and to be treated by people with their own agency, and not like, say, someone’s younger troublemaker of a sibling who doesn’t understand what she’s getting into, as Lilith sometimes feels about her.

           Likewise, King has issues with feeling outpaced and left behind by others, we see it literally happen in Covention and Really Small Problems. And this inferiority complex makes King convince himself that it’s okay if he acts against his friends, THEY can easily handle a minor loss or two when they’ve got so many wins under their belt, when they’re much farther ahead; King just wants to catch up, to be on equal footing with them! And he IS, Luz and Eda do respect and care for him, even if they sometimes forget to, but it doesn’t justify King working behind their backs, using Eda’s owl-beast form to get revenge on a toddler, or taking the credit for Luz’s work and even trying to make her friends disappear.

           He’s got very artistic inclinations, if King were a witch he’d easily be a Bard AND Beastkeeper at least, maybe in Abominations as well! It provides a sense of control over mindless, obedient people… But honestly, I don’t think King is THAT obsessed with power. He just wants to feel in charge when for so long he’s just been brushed aside, ignored, and talked over. When he’s in a good environment and feels safe and in control to a reasonable degree, I don’t think King would actually care for an army to command as much, if at all.

           I’ll say it again, but it’s hilariously meta that people ignore King’s depth and personhood, his individuality often, and just boil him down to the cute pet, a borderline shallow mascot; Just another pretty face, a garnish to a more important criminal like Eda on her Wanted Poster, or as Luz’s little furry animal companion and sidekick. That’s what the characters in-universe do… And it’s what the fandom kind of does, in a sense? People in-universe don’t even have the luxury of getting to know King intimately as an audience member.

           …Mind you, I STILL love adorable King fanart and memes to death! I am not at all trying to fault anyone who doesn’t recognize King’s depth this way, I can see why you’d miss it in a sense, and I’m not implying that anyone is somehow a ‘bad person’, or a ‘fake fan’, or whatever, for not considering this a lot more. You do you, and I’m not saying it’s a personal requirement that people intimately discuss and consider King, I will always enjoy the cute fanart and depictions of King, the Incorrect Quotes, all that stuff! I just kinda wish we could have that, AND more acknowledgement of King…

           So I want BOTH things, so even if I’m missing out on one- I’m definitely going to enjoy the other, and it’s okay if one wants to as well! Go ahead, enjoy King as you please, guilt-free… I just wanted to get this out there, and anyhow, I’M not the boss of anyone, it’s not like I can tell anyone else how to engage with this show, its characters, or the fandom through the content that’s produced! I’m just another fan and viewer.

[the-queer-observer]

The TOXICITY of straight dating culture: Do you even realize what you teach?

A few months ago, a straight teenage girl explained her crush to me with the sentence “He’s so toxic.”

I know a 17-year-old girl with a little to no clue of how a non-toxic relationship should look like.

I started noticing a certain pattern online and in my real life too.

Now it’s a time for my first disclaimer: I am not straight myself. Nope. Not at all. Perhaps that’s why I see through it.

To this point, all I have done about this is that I have complained to some friends, got over it and went on with my life.

Today, a girl, no older than twelve, has told me about her crush on a “bad boy” and we talked about him for a second. He really did seem like what the definition of a bad boy is for tweens.

I snapped.

And here I am, writing my first tumblr post ever on this very topic.

I want to make clear, this is not an attack on those girls. This is an attack on the society, what it taught them and what it failed to teach.

The youngest girl and me, we talked about music. She said she liked “dramatic” songs and played me some of her favorites.

Disclaimer number two: I did know both the artists, but I don’t actually listen to them. The closest to mainstream music my playlists get is Take me to church by Hozier, the rest being a wide range of songs, interprets and genres from pop punk to death metal and everything in between.

I was actually surprised. One of the two artists she played for me was Billie Eilish. The beginning of the song went:

Don't be cautious, don't be kind

You committed, I'm your crime

Push my button anytime

You got your finger on the trigger

But your trigger finger's mine

The second song was by Maroon 5.

It was even worse:

So what you trying to do to me

It's like we can't stop, we're enemies

But we get along when I'm inside you, eh

You're like a drug that's killing me

I cut you out entirely

But I get so high when I'm inside you

Yeah you can start over you can run free

You can find other fish in the sea

You can pretend it's meant to be

But you can't stay away from me

I can still hear you making that sound

Taking me down rolling on the ground

You can pretend that it was me

But no, oh

I am not going to argue about whether it’s appropriate or whether she understands the lyrics the way I do. It doesn’t even matter. She understands the drama in the song. She understands it enough for me to be concerned.

There are other songs like that. There is a whole culture teaching pre-teen and teenage girls, that “they can’t get away”, romanticizing toxic people and toxic relationships, blurring the lines of consent and guess what? The girls believe it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I texted my girlfriend and we spent some time looking for straight love-songs, celebrating healthy relationships. None of them were mainstream, but we found things like:

That the world is ugly

But you're beautiful to me

Are you thinking of me

Like I'm thinking of you

I would say I'm sorry, though

Though I really need to go

I just wanted you to know

I wanted you to know

I wanted you to know

I'm thinking of you every night, every day

(My Chemical romance)

And

Desperate for changing

Starving for truth

I'm closer to where I started

I'm chasing after you

I'm falling even more in love with you

Letting go of all I've held on to

I'm standing here until you make me move

I'm hanging by a moment here with you

Forgetting all I'm lacking

Completely incomplete

I'll take your invitation

You take all of me now

(Lifehouse)

First of all: Those are 4 extracts of songs, chosen by me to demonstrate my point and they may or may not reflect the reality, you (the reader) see: those two songs might be just an exception, but in that case this post is still not canceled, because there is enough of other correlations and causation for me to have a reason to write this.

Those songs are “dramatic”, but the drama shifts from the relationship itself and its toxicity to the circumstances and environment. My girlfriend even recommended a punk song called Ne touche pas moi (Do not touch me), which is entirely about consent.

I am not explicitly saying that the songs she played for me are bad. It’s not for me to decide.

But all Billie Eilish’ fans I ever met were in the age range between eleven and fourteen, so I am supposing that’s her target audience. As for Maroon 5, I have no idea. However, music influences us. The girl is old enough to know what kind of music she likes and wants to listen to and with the peer pressure going on there, her parents do not really have a say in what she listens to and they are not to be blamed for this.

It’s the culture.

Toxicity is not a positive trait to look for in a potential partner. Even if he is a good looking one.

Enough of music.

Do you know who the toxic crush was?

Draco Malfoy.

One of the most famous of all characters in media, famously portrayed by Tom Felton in the Harry Potter film series.

Disclaimer number four: I have a problem with the books and movies and I also have some issues with the author.

Still, I see a fandom celebrating the love of Severus Snape for Lilly Evans Potter. Except it’s not love and it’s not a crush either. It’s an obsession. One that has become so iconic, the word “Always” is one of the main symbols of Harry Potter.

It shouldn’t be.

It should have never happened.

Draco Malfoy is quite the same thing. He is a racist, a bully. He is raised to be one, sure... That’s not an excuse. He doesn’t actually have a canonical redemption arch (not counting the deleted scene from the last movie and the Cursed child). If he came up to Hermione, acknowledging his mistakes, apologizing for his behavior, then maybe. Perhaps... That’s another story though. My point is, Rowling fails to actually depict problematic characters as actually problematic, they are romanticized by her, the filmmakers, the fandom and the wider audience.

Girls are taught to be the ones to make the redemption arch happen, irl or in fiction. They are supposed to date whoever is into them, regardless of whether they like the person back, and it’s unbelievably often I see them crushing on villains and problematic people like Draco Malfoy, because they are taught, he would change for them or that they could change him.

Toxicity is not a positive trait to look for in a potential partner. Even if he is a good looking one.

Those together result in a complete lack of knowledge of how a healthy relationship should look like. That’s the case of the third girl I mentioned. Being best friends with both her and her current boyfriend, I had three points of view on their relationship. It’s only been the past few weeks, not more than two month it has shifted to a more positive, healthy relationship.

It’s not the girl’s fault. They learn what a healthy relationship is the hard way, mostly after going through a toxic one(s).

WHY?

The sentence: “I always fall for the bad guys.” lacks the essential: “because the society taught me to” part.

It’s so common.

It’s too common.

It’s not even that we wouldn’t talk about it: we do. But you celebrate it. And that is not okay and that is the reason I am typing this.

Disclaimer number 5: The gender roles in this post are based off of my observations. I do acknowledge the fact that girls can be and sometimes are the toxic person in the relationship and that the lesson boys are thought is no way better (more freeing perhaps, but not right either) . It might not be specific to the straight culture either, but again, my observations were.

I was about thirteen, when I figured out I was gay and I had to learn everything on my own. How the relationships should work out, what is healthy and what is not... I had to learn on my own because the society failed to teach me anything. I am yet to decide whether that’s better or worse than teaching the wrong one.

[nobody-wants-ice-cream]

Everything Wrong With The Umbrella Academy. Episode 4, Man on the Moon.

We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals

Run Boy Run

Extra Ordinary

Disclaimer: This is all in good fun! I wanted to do a really nitpicky re-watch of the series and found some really cool and interesting things I didn’t notice before. This is meant to have a Cinema Sins-esque tone. However, I did take off a lot more sins than Cinema Sins would have because I do genuinely like the series and the people that made it possible. So all of the good things got one sin off and all the bad things got one sin added. This is a really long post, so grab some popcorn. If there’s anything that I missed, feel free to add it!

I would also like to add, that normally you wouldn’t watch a show this way. I am purposefully looking for mistakes, easter eggs, and other things that we’re not supposed to notice. To be honest, I am seeing a lot of the things I’m pointing out for the first time because I am watching not with the goal of entertainment, but for analysis. 

Man on the Moon

Tom Hopper’s workout routine. -1

What was Luther holding in his hand? A lighter? A toy? I can’t tell. It’s weird that they put something there at all. +1

Klaus knocked down the wall between his and Vanya’s rooms. That was the one thing in the house that said Vanya ever lived there and he destroyed it. +2

However, Klaus’s room looks really, really cool. Set designers, you win this one. -1

The bike. I have questions about that bike. When did Luther get it? Or did it belong to all the children? Sinning because no way Reggie would buy Luther a bike. Or give one to the children. +1

The shot following Luther directly gave me a bit of motion sickness. +1

Netflix subtitles have Reginald saying “Attention, Master Luther” when it is clearly Pogo. +1

“Mission alert” +1

Everyone else is gone! Luther has no backup. Reggie is a dick to Luther. +1

I know I should have mentioned this in the last episode, but Reggie put five young children in leather catsuits. Potentially six, but we never see Five in one. And he still makes Luther wear it as an adult! +6

Luther never leaves the house and keeps going on missions for Reggie because of a sense of responsibility. I can understand that. -1

However, Reggie was the one who fostered that in Luther. He made Luther think that he was responsible for saving the city, when in reality that’s up to law enforcement officers. +3

Why didn’t Luther go to a real hospital? Did Reggie take him home? How did Luther end up back in the Academy after that mission? +1

Was Luther dead? Reggie feels for his pulse and says “dammit”. Did the ape serum bring him back to life? +1

How long was Luther on that table? We see him with a beard in episode one, but it isn’t as crazy as this one. Also, does Luther bleach his hair now, or what? I am confused by Luther now being a brunette with impressive facial hair. +1

Tom Hopper nails ‘dawning horror and shock at now being an ape’. -1

Pop goes the weasel. +1

Who wound that box and placed it there? And why? The only other people there are Reggie, Grace, and Pogo. No way they did something so cruel and juvenile after permanently disfiguring him. +1

The umbrella the monkey-in-the-box suddenly has the title when it didn’t earlier. +1

“There’s something you have to see”. Yes Allison, continue to be vague. I’m sure Luther will appreciate it. Why not “I think the assassins killed Mom. Come take a look.” Is it because that would have been too logical? +1

Luther is still calling her “Grace”. +1

“Poor Diego. I mean this is gonna be so hard on him”. Choke on that irony, everyone. +1

 “I don’t wanna discuss it”. This family. Allison said the same thing about Claire moments before telling Luther everything. Parallels. +1

Vanya spent the night at Leonard’s house. Sigh. +1

“For one day I’ll think you’ll be fine”. What makes you think that, Leonard? +1

Vanya takes one sip of her coffee and never touches it again. Leonard doesn’t even drink his. What is the point of the damn coffee? +1

“When I was a kid I felt like I had to apologize for even breathing.” Reggie is a dick. +7

“I don’t think my Dad ever forgave me for being born” foreshadowing patricide. +1

Vanya and Leonard talk in front of the Icarus Theatre. Comics fans, you know why that’s significant. +1

Helen doesn’t acknowledge Vanya’s greeting like a normal human being. +1

People are already tuning, Vanya! Get your ass in the theatre so you can do the same! +1

Leonard is stupidly charming. I hate that he’s sort of likable, but it makes sense for what they’re using him for. +1

The kidnapping of Klaus Hargreeves. +4

Klaus is too kinky to tourture. -1

Where is that blood on his chest coming from? +1

Ten hours of tourture! Fuck you show for making Klaus go though that. +10

 “He’s a freak like his brother”. Which one? You met Luther and Diego. And they presumably know Five through the Commission. But which one is the freak into kinky shit? Diego? +1

“Remember Trinidad”. Noodle incident. (if you don’t know what that is google Noodle incident TV Tropes)+1

This motel has a surprising amount of towels in the bathroom. Some of the nicer places I’ve stayed don’t have that many. +1

Patch lives in house 204. “2” and “4”. Hmmm. +1

Does Diego show up on Patch’s doorstep being emo often? +1

Why is she still thinking about the 1938 fingerprint? We know that it’s plausible because of Five, but the police department should have thrown that out. It doesn’t make any sense and fingerprints can be alike. +1

She mentions the 30s cold case and Diego starts to look up in recognition. Even if he doesn’t know about the Commission or the Apocalypse, he does know about Five’s ability to time travel. He even mentions “The Boy”. Diego thinks that it was Five based on the fingerprint and his examination of the two crime scenes. -1

“For once, just try things my way”. Foreshadowing. +1

Diego hasn’t bothered to clean up the blood on his face from last night. Weirdo. +1

Allison is already forming a plan to kick Leonard’s ass the moment she sees his silhouette. Good. -1

Also, not the first time the audience has seen Leonard creeping around. Remember when he stole the journal? +1

Allison takes him down easy. Character moment showing that her superhero training hasn’t left her. Also, Allison is a badass. -1

Allison sees right through Leonard. This scene is excellent. -1

Lance has a really cute dog. -1

After seeing the shady deal while tailing Meritech, Five decides to tail Lance instead of just watching the building. Good job, Five. -1

How do you bill insurance companies for fake things? You need an insurance ID or SSN to have a patient. Where does Lance get these fake numbers from? +1

Why are eyeballs such a hot commodity? +1

“Names and numbers and I need it NOW” Five is scary. -1

Five jumped into the seatbelt. Did his powers secure it for him? +1

Five has a really organized desk. I wish I could read what he labeled the binders. +1

Luther decided to search Five’s room for clues. Pogo would be excellent at cinema sins. +1

For all we make fun of Diego’s stupid outfit, just remember, comics Diego has an even stupider one. This is the stupidity turned down. +1

The labels are now upside down on the binders when they were right side up in the last shot. +1

Either Five was a really good artist, or Reggie let Five have a poster above his bed that didn’t feature the academy. No explanation is given. +1

Five’s wallpaper depicts a boy pulling a mannequin in a wagon. -1

Luther punches a hole in Five’s wardrobe. This is never mentioned again. +1 

“When you watch those nature shows does it turn you on?” Diego is a dick. +1

If you look really closely, you can see something that looks suspiciously like the ending to Apocalypse suite in Five’s room as a piece of art taped to the wall. I checked with the comics. It looks very, very similar. -1

There are two cylindrical things on the wall. One on Five’s wall and one we can see through the doorway on the wall across from Five’s room. What is it? Nightlight? Loudspeaker? Alarm? +1

Ben Hargreeves enters the chat. -1

“Stay calm, Klaus” stay calm. +1

Hazel and Cha Cha spent over 10 hours beating the crap out of Klaus but they didn’t think of the training manual, something Cha Cha clearly has memorized, until now. +1

When did they grab his coat? Klaus was wearing nothing but a towel. Did Hazel decide to grab it on a whim? +1

“Asthma medication”. Klaus is still coherent enough to come up with an okay lie after 10 hours of tourture. +1

“Amputee hookers”. Nice call back to the comics. -1

Hazel and Cha Cha don’t hear Klaus say “not until they're high as kites” when responding to Ben. +1

“Klaus, be strong”. Ben’s facial expression was really weird with this line. +1

Klaus cracks after 10 hours of tourture while going through withdrawal. Impressive. -1

The multi-screen effects look really cool. -1

Watching Hazel and Cha Cha burn down Meritech while high as kites amuses me. -1

Watching this later while knowing that Meritech doesn’t really matter means that I don’t really care about this building. I wish there was something to make this more interesting instead of just making the eye a red herring. Leonard hasn’t lost an eye yet, so it doesn’t matter. +1

What were Hazel and Cha Cha dancing to in universe? Was this song playing on the radio or something?? +1

Luther goes through the door that’s too small for him because he’s Number One and Diego goes through the door that would actually accommodate Luther’s size. +1

Vanya’s book should be way more beat up than that if it survived the literal apocalypse with Five for 45 years. The ink looks too fresh, too. Unless this is another, newer copy of Extra Ordinary? Sin for confusion. +1

Five got way too close to that explosion. Five survives this without injury. +1

We see him lying amongst the shrapnel for crying out loud! +1

Gossip magazines. “We’re doing fine!” +1

Tween Hit is still a popular magazine seventeen years later. -1

“Vanya, she’s gone” is the vaguest wording ever. +1

However, Vanya understands this. Sin on the writers. +1

“It was those psychopaths last night” weird delivery. Allison’s tone is off. +1

Does Vanya not have any students other than Leonard? She’s perfectly free on some random afternoon so she can have a drink with Allison. +1

Hazel and Cha Cha coming down from their high. -1

Cha Cha hates doughnuts. +1

Reginald Hargreeves put his eight year old son in what amounted to a tourture chamber so he would stop being afraid. Reggie is a dick. +8

Why is Ben stuck in the closet with Klaus? +1

The cleaning lady (her name is Claudia, according to a card she leaves) has one of her ears uncovered. She totally would have been able to hear him. +1

Callback to the screw Hazel threw away to remind the audience that it’s important. -1

Ben’s whiny bullshit. Now is not the time, asshole. +2

We know why the dog ear is important, but why would Patch? At this point it’s a random piece of fabric that might look like something she saw on surveillance footage (Cha Cha’s mask). Point is, that could be something from Meritech and not necessarily urgent. +1

Patch gets the message intended for Five about Klaus. When Diego thinks that the missing brother is Five and that’s who he meant when he was talking to her. Choke on that irony and miscommunication. +1

This show is shot like a comic book and I love it. -1

“That’s what you do when you’re 17” in this specific circumstance, yes. In others, not so much. You don’t have to leave when you’re 17. +1

Luther calls out Diego for not being a real grown up while also not being a real grown up himself. +1

Diego asks ���You ever even been with a girl”. Diego is a dick. +1

“We’re orphans again, dude”. When were you ever orphans? Sin for the writers for writing this or to Reggie for making them believe that they were regular orphans he adopted legitimately instead of buying. +1

“Do you ever stop talking. Wow that was easy.” I wheezed.-1

Five is drunk in the library with Dolores with equations scribbled all over the place. No one stopped him when he started writing on the walls in sharpie. +1

Five has two bottles of hard liquor with him. +2

 “Drunk as a skunk” +1

The comedic timing of Five’s hand letting go of the bottle. -1

“Jerk off on your Mr. Snuggles teddy bear”. First of all, eww. Second of all, yeah, Vanya these are all valid points she’s making. You just met this dude! +1

“But sometimes men are unredeemable shits” yeah. Sin for men and for the fact that Vanya doesn’t know this. +1

“Yay sisters” -1

What are Allison and Vanya drinking? Seriously, what are their drinks of choice? It looks like Vanya has something like a gin and tonic or a vodka soda and Allison has a rum and coke, but I can’t really tell. This is a sin until I know for sure. +1

That is a lot of extra blood on Klaus with no explanation. +1

Draw Ben like one of your French girls, Klaus. -1

“Is your brother here now.” “You’re gonna have to be a little more specific on that” -1

Ben’s wink. -1

Reggie is a dick to his adopted children. +7

Torturing a literal child and calling it training. +4

Reggie, you dramatic bitch. +1

Warrants exist for a reason, Patch. +1

Also, Patch decides to follow Diego’s shitty advice without any backup. +1

Drunk Five being carried bridal style by Luther. Aidan Gallagher being carried bridal style by Tom Hopper. -1

“I’m going through puberty. Twice.” Sucks to be you. +2

You had two bottles, Five. And you somehow didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. +2

Diego’s face. -1

Aidan Gallagher doesn’t play drunk very well. To be fair, he’s never been drunk (or at least I hope he hasn’t), but it’s still a sin. +1

“You know I hate code names”, okay Spaceboy. +1

“I’m the four frickin horsemen” or Gabriel’s horn. -1

“You haven’t been this sober since you were a teenager, since you decided to keep the ghosts at bay”. I hate the delivery on this last line, but to be fair to Justin Min, it was a shitty line in the first place. Sin for delivery and for the writers. Also, gee Ben, I thought he was just doing drugs to be contrary. +2

Zoya Popova is so underrated. I love her. -1

Ben’s lil smile. -1

Vanya’s apartment is so warm and nice with all the lights on, but this is the only time we get to see it that way. When she is on good terms with Allison. Lighting cues. -1

Allison, you’re too tall to fit in Vanya’s sweatpants. They’d be sweat capris. +1

Have I mentioned how much I love Allison’s jacket in this episode yet? Because I really like it. -1

Creepy flowers are creepy. +1

“She knows it was a misunderstanding”  Allison’s face all but says. “Do I?”. Emmy Raver-Lampman rules. -1

Also, Vanya speaks for Allison. +1

This is where they decide to show just how much of a creep Leonard is. Well done, show. -1

Leonard is a creepy, manipulative little bastard. +1

Sin off for the gory sfx makeup in this episode. The ghosts look brutal! -1

Syd the tow truck driver is back. Too bad he’s dead. +1

The dead cheerleader is disturbing. +1

This episode sort of confirms the headcanon that Klaus can speak/understand many languages. -1

The gore on Klaus keeps changing. +1

The switch in camera angles shows the shift in point of views, hence why the ghosts disappear. Clever. -1

Ben voice: Nicely done. -1

Patch waited a pretty long time. How long was the walk from the library to thy gym? +1

Chair scoot. Klaus is smart. -1

Klaus gives himself a concussion. Sinning because he had to give himself more trauma to escape from touture. +1

Claudia gives Patch the key to the room without question and then runs.+1

Klaus is coherent enough to think to hide in the vent. Klaus is a smart cookie. -1

The death of Detective Eudora Patch. +1

The Klaus theme -1

Kenny’s mom appearance! Her hat and jacket have matching flowers that also match her pants. Cute. -1

Klaus’s wink. -1

Kenny’s mom definitely saw a lot more of Klaus than what was already on display. +1

Time traveling briefcase! -1

Kenny’s mom looks for Klaus under the seat. What??? +1

Diego gives Dolores a chair. How nice of him. -1

Diego’s Prime 8s poster. If you know, you know. -1

Aidan Gallager sucks at pretending to sleep. +1

“You throw another one of those goddamn knives at me, I’m pressing charges”. I love Al. -1

It was a half hour walk from the library to the gym. Patch waited a really long time. +1

Now you remember Klaus after you found Five, who wasn’t really in any danger. +1

The little pat Luther gives Dolores. -1

Diego takes his gloves off. It’s like he wants to get framed. +1

This scene is really emotional and made me cry the first time I saw it. +1

David Castaneda is a really good actor. -1

The fridging of Detective Eudora Patch. +100

Overall Review:

This episode starts off on a really high note. I follow Tom Hopper on Instagram. He’s really fit. There is no denying that. I also appreciated the way he played Luther this episode. The scene where Luther realizes what his body looks like was heartbreaking to watch and really well acted. 

Speaking of heartbreaking to watch, the fridging of Detective Patch pisses me off. For those who don’t know, “Fridging” is when a female character is hurt or killed in some way in order to move a man’s story/emotional development forward. Considering that Patch’s death is what starts Diego’s character development, I would say that this applies. I am genuinely disappointed in the writers for doing this to Patch. I think it’s been established that I respect Patch. She doesn’t take any shit and she follows her moral compass. That is her real character. She only screws up when it comes to Diego and this is no different. She decided to be reckless like him and paid the ultimate price. However, this is completely out of character. Based on what we’re shown, Patch should have brought up her suspicions to Beeman (the other detective) and went from there. But instead, she had to die. That injustice done to her character is what deserves 100 sins. The show really dropped the ball with this one. 

Moving on, Vanya and Allison have some really good interaction in this episode. I think it’s a little weird how quickly Vanya forgave Allison after the shit she said last episode. Diego and Allison treated Vanya like a fragile object, which is what led her to Leonard. To be fair, Vanya was pretty stupid that last episode when she didn’t run away, but that doesn’t excuse what Diego said and Allison agreed with. Overall, the yay sisters thing was a good, but sus moment. 

Next, Klaus and Ben. Almost everything Ben said in this episode pissed me off. The “that’s the real tourture” speech was awful. For all the fandom loves him, Ben is a prick. However, Ben was also able to keep Klaus calm and encouraged him to control his power over the many, many ghosts in the room. So it’s kind of a wash for me this episode. I hope season 2 explores more of his character and why he would choose to say something so awful while his brother is being literally tortured. 

As for the main plot, Five’s only lead, not that it really matters yet, has been destroyed. Hazel and Cha Cha realize that they’re going to end the world if they complete their mission. And Leonard has finally been revealed to be a creep who wants something to do with Vanya’s pills. On a rewatch, we know why that’s significant, but a first time viewer would be confused in a good way. The show wants the audience to ask: Why? Vanya’s pills have been there for important moments up until this point. And now there are being forcibly taken out of the equation. Why?

Total: 193

Sentence: Getting drunk in the library with your mannequin wife while trying to do math. 

[mindseyeinkarnate]

Portraits of a Serial Killer - “The Cell” turns 20

I've often reflected how the influence of Art is a key component missing from Modern Horror. The Xenomorph we all know and fear came from the painted nightmares of Swedish surrealist H.R. Giger, the Screamer is said to have influenced the Ghostface Killer mask.  For a further rundown of art's musings over the genre, I would highly recommend 2017's Tableaux Vivants for a look at 60 such portraits and the films they inspired.

In the summer of 2020, The Medium video game appears to correct that oversight with the recent trailer dropping, adapting Polish painter, Zdzislaw Beksinski's frightening paintings.  In the same season of the same year is when The Cell celebrates 20 years (8/17/2020).  This film appeared to feature as many artistic influences as possible into its near two hour runtime.

The sight of chains freaked me out upon watching my first Hellraiser movie, so the sexual perversion of their use in this film did little to alleviate such apprehension, especially as they pulled so tightly to suspend human flesh in the air. Despite a previous scene showing the villain having drowned his victim, this was the true introduction to his villainy - the former showed what he did, that latter why he did it.  Even re-watching this film so many years later, I had to look away from the screen, recoiling from such a grisly display.

Typically, in Horror or any film that assumes a particular aesthetic, it is color that makes the impression to set mood.  Instead, the use of white in this film, from the K9 to the bleached state of the victims is used to ghoulishly haunting effect.

I remember critics remarking that because of Vince Vaughn's comedic history they couldn't take him seriously in this role and relegated his involvement to stunt casting. I take the opposite stance since, for me, every role after this film simply serves as a reminder that he starred in The Cell.  I've always felt that comedy actors do well in dramas - see Robin Williams in "Good Will Hunting" - and I thought that Vaughn did a serviceable job in this film, never distracting from either tone or plot.

I was happy that they just dove into the mechanics behind entering one's mind as an accepted reality, that they didn't get bogged down in techno babble or exposition of the technology.  There is a time and place for the virtual journey into the cerebral frontier, such as The Matrix or a good adaptation of the Lawnmower Man, but for the Cell, I'm happy that they focused more on the story and not so much the science.  The suits do look like Twizzlers, but it was made by Eioka Ishioka (who passed away in 2012), the same costume designer as Vlad Tepes' suit from Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I do like that the two participators are suspended in the air while their minds are linked.  It's an eerie callback to the killer's suspension from chains for sexual release. Also, it does give the technology that space age feel as though they are in a weightless environment.

Since the 90's, special effects have been criticized as dominating films to the point Stephen King is quoted as remarking that "story supports effects instead of effects supporting story". Similarly, an argument can be made that at times The Cell becomes too indulgent with its usage of famous art that serve no plot function, e.g. the Horse Split, the Three Women of Odd Nerdrum's Dawn painting, Mother Theresa and her Hallmark card, etc.  As the director is quoted as saying "The thing about this film is it’s an opera, and there is no such thing as a subtle opera.”  I don't believe that the script was penned as an excuse to pack in as much gallery portraits as possible or is an hour and fifty minutes of a music video.  I just wish the director would've used each art piece he seeks influence from to develop the story or the character.  The imagery doesn't always portray the killer's psychology or the psychologist's therapeutic technique.  If he wasn't going to utilize subtlety, he should have implored restraint.  He later added "Anyway, I missed the whole plot, just been talking visual all along, ah, where are we?”

Once in the killer's mind, his depiction as the master of his domain is a hauntingly accurate depiction considering the previous scenes of suspension rings in the back of his body, which unwittingly foreshadowed to the audience his royal appearance to come.  Even the name, King Stargher, is a daunting title for a movie monster.  When rising and descending from his throne, the violet robes receding from the walls and tracing along the room is hypnotically unnerving.

As tiresome as the "we're still in the dreamworld" trope can become (The Matrix, DS9 Season 7 episode 23 "Extreme Measures"), this film not only flips it when the psychologist realizes that she's "already in", but does so in a cleverly visual way.

King Stargher

Horned Stargher

Court Jester/Vatican Clown  

Serpent Stargher

It is interesting to think that a single actor would assume many distinct monstrous characters.  Unlike a Freddy Kreuger or a Pennywise that turn into manifestations of their victims' fears, the figures that Stargher assumes are all avatars of his own warped psyche, his own inner turmoil.  Vincent D'Onofrio really does put in his all with this role.  He's soft spoken and understated when he needs to be and malicious and heartless when the scene demands it.  Along with the visuals of the film, D'Onofrio's performance is worth the price of admission.  It's a shame that his acting as well as the movie's stunning artistry are what have gone overlooked all these years.  Speaking of...

One invalid criticism that has been levied against the film is its attempts to persuade the audience to sympathize with the killer.  My intention with the following statement is neither to flaunt my Horror insight nor to divide the lines between fans within Horror and those without.  Having said that, even as an adolescent seeing this movie in theaters, I at no point felt remorse for the serial murderer and I chalk up this long-held misconception to a bad read on the film.

So off-base is this "critical analysis" that it can't even be regarded as a Jekyll & Hyde dynamic.  The villain is not split down the middle between binary good and evil, where both halves are at war over his soul, or the repressed impulses of his Dark Passenger are manifesting in a heartless butcher.  If there is any distinction, it is between who the antagonist was when a victim as a boy and what the man became as an adult victimizer.  If anything it is the good that is repressed, not the evil.  Furthermore, along with using the film's plot to force Alice down the rabbit hole of the Mad Hatter's mind, this film does address the nature of evil.  When referring to Stargher, even Jennifer Lopez's character remarks "The Dominant side is still this horrible thing".  The Vince Vaughn detective states "I believe a child can experience 100 times worse the abuse than what Gish (a different killer) went through, and still grow up to be somebody that would never, ever, ever hurt another living being."  Thus, these serve as acknowledgement that the abducted criminal is firmly in the driver's seat to the point of its reference as a "thing" and a condemnation of what the killer has become, respectively.

Along with exploring the psychology of the killer, the film does not qualify the villain's innocence, it questions it.

The critics probably missed that pesky detail that would've debunked their headline before they pressed a single word of their denunciation.

These same professional critics wouldn't give a second's hesitation towards throwing Horror under the bus and condemning Scary Movies for inspiring violence if it meant their jobs were only the line, yet they would balk at the notion that continued mental trauma and physical abuse can cause psychopathic behavior.

There are classics and icons worth praising for their plot and performances, respectively, and then there are some Scary Films that Horror Fans view with the understanding of their heavy material and without your typical fanfare because they're a hard watch.  I can see where people would be fans of Hannibal Lecter not because they or the film glamorizes cannibalism, but because of Anthony Hopkins' acting chops (excuse the pun).  Conversely, John Doe, the serial killer of Se7en, has and will likely never enjoy such admiration because of the cold purity of his calculated evil.  The 2 decade critique of The Cell's villain portrayal is a dark cloud that has unjustly hung over its head.

The motif of "the eyes of a killer" was something applauded in Rob Zombie's Halloween 2, yet ridiculed in The Cell 9 years prior?

This film's premise and the fact that it wasn't fully effectively executed makes it primed for a remake.  Hollywood needs to be issued a Cease and Desist order of such wholesale dependence on Remakes in general, let alone in the Horror genre.  When you consider that so many remakes can't outdo the original and even tarnish the films they attempt to emulate, why not fix the problems of a film that went wrong and take the credit when you get it right?

[lechevaliermalfet]

In the Name of the Moon – A Look at Lunar Legend Tsukihime

There’s a popular joke in the Type-Moon fandom that there is no Tsukihime anime, but boy it sure would be great if there was one.

I had only ever been dimly aware of this attitude toward the Tsukihime anime myself.  Watching it fansubbed for the first time in the early 00s, I wasn’t really plugged into the fandom, and the joke seemed like a minor thing to me.  I had all but forgotten it by the time I was with my wife at Otakon in 2012, and we went to a panel about Type-Moon for fandom newcomers.  

The panel was pretty salty about the Tsukihime anime, taking the joke about there being no such thing so far as to refuse to acknowledge it or discuss it.  If I recall, they insisted on this refusal even when directly asked about it by someone in the audience.  I also don’t recall them being all that complimentary about the Fate/Stay Night anime (the original 2006 series) for that matter.  We had a long drive home after the convention – fourteen hours, give or take – and our discussion about the convention kept circling back to that panel.

She’d gone mostly to accompany me, I think, and because she didn’t have anything she wanted to do that conflicted with it.  She had some minor interest herself, as she’d seen this supposedly nonexistent Tsukihime anime, and like me, she enjoyed it.  So it was pretty irritating for her to go to this panel ostensibly for newcomers and then have them trash the one thing she’d experienced in the fandom.  It was all the more irritating when you stopped to consider that at that point that it was, in all probability, one of the handful of things real newcomers might have experience with.

In its way, though, the panelists’ hostile and disdainful attitude toward the most accessible works in the general Type-Moon oeuvre did make for a suitable introduction.  If not to Type-Moon and their work, then to the fandom, and the high levels of toxicity most of its assholes could and would display given the opportunity.

But I’m not here to talk about the Type-Moon fandom, except as it amuses me, or is relevant to the subject at hand.

The subject being this supposedly non-existent anime: Lunar Legend Tsukihime.

My own relation to the Western Type-Moon fan community is tangential at best.  A couple of guys I know (one a good friend, the other an acquaintance), back in the early to mid-aughts, were moderators for the Beast’s Lair forum, basically the center of the English-language fandom community at the time.  Of course, at the time, the fandom was almost brand-new.  Tsukihime was all the rage then, because Tsukihime was almost all there was. Fate/Stay Night was new enough that there hadn’t really been time for the discourse around it to even form, let alone evolve much.  And in those days, Beast’s Lair was basically the forum owner and a few of his online friends, and I feel like half the reason it existed was because at that point, it was more convenient to just have a forum than it was to get a bunch of guys together on an AIM group chat with that level of frequency.  This was before Mirror Moon created a translation patch for any of these games.  These were guys who bought the game direct from Japan, paid the outrageous import fees, referred constantly to a GameFAQs walkthrough, and died like men.  It was that, or learn Japanese.  Most of them opted for the walkthrough. Thank Whoever you believe in that the game runs windowed, I guess.

Fate, which has been the bread and butter of Type-Moon’s success for well over a decade now, was a commercial game.  But it was one built with on the base of the huge support Tsukihime had garnered following its launch.  Tsukihime itself was a doujin game, made when the guys at Type-Moon were a bunch of nobodies and had no real money to speak of.

Because they were nobodies, and because they needed the game to sell big if they were going to make the kind of money they needed to make, they did what a lot of Japanese doujin developers have done and continue to do, and will probably do until the end of time, and put porn in the game.

This is not unknown in Western development circles either, just for the record. But Japanese culture is in some ways more permissive when it comes to depictions of sex or sex-adjacent topics and material in their mainstream entertainment.  Porn can net you a decent career, or at least a halfway-decent living, and it’s generally easier over there for porn artists in any field of endeavor to “go legit” and make the jump to the non-porn version of their field.

That doesn’t happen in the West, or at any rate not in America.  Or very rarely. We have (for better or worse; there’s a whole separate debate there) a much sharper division between the porn and non-porn sides of the entertainment industry, and that barrier’s much less porous. But porn fans will support you.  If the success ceiling is far lower than in the legitimate side of the industry, it’s also true that the floor is likewise lower.

So here we have Tsukihime.  Not “porn with plot”, or even “plot with porn”, but “plot (…with porn)”.  It’s there because they were worried the game wouldn’t sell without it, and so there’s not much of it in the first place.  What I’m saying is that if you’re wanting to get your rocks off, you’re going to be a while.

Which is not to say that Tsukihime as a game is inherently like… progressive, or woke, or anything like that.  Oh no. Nonononono.  It’s horror (-ish, depending on your route), for starters – a genre that thrives on objectification and exploitation.  And then it’s Japanese, which gives it an extra few layers of seeming weird to American sensibilities.  So this is less like going down the rabbit hole and potentially more like falling into a snake pit.

I say all this to lend some context.  When we think of Type-Moon today, we tend to think of this highly successful production house with a star franchise that’s rapidly hitting the market saturation point.  If it hasn’t already (and I have a friend who maintains that it has). And that is absolutely not Tsukihime.  Not the game, and certainly not the anime.  No ufotable animating, no Yuki Kajiura composing, no Gen Urobuchi directing the critically acclaimed and popularly loved (and irritatingly overpriced) prequel.

This is Tsukihime.  This isn’t the property that launched Type-Moon to stardom.  That would, again, be Fate.  This is the property that let them make Fate the way they did.  Tsukihime is the visual novel world’s equivalent of some garage band you never heard of releasing their demo tape as their debut album, and the demo tape is actually pretty good, even as it suffers from having basically rock-bottom production values.  It’s one of those things where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  You have to look at what it tries to be and tries to do, and like it for that. In that much at least, even as they differ in many other ways, that much is true of both the anime and the visual novel.

It’s worth it, though.

Phantasmal Fantasy

If we’re being honest (and why wouldn’t we be honest?), Tsukihime, at least going through the main route, is a little bit less straight horror and a little more what I think of as horror-fantasy.  It isn’t horror because it’s rarely if ever actually frightening.  But it uses horror aesthetics in a fantasy setting (urban fantasy, in this case), which may lend things a generally eerie and unsettling sense of ambiance and a particular feeling of threat to the main characters without ever quite getting your pulse up.  It’s a hybrid genre I happen to have a huge soft spot for (I’ve been reliably informed that this is sort of My Thing).  The entire Legacy of Kain series falls under that banner for me, as do most of the Castlevania games.  The Dark Souls games all have it to some extent, and Bloodborne leans into it hard enough that it actually is kind of legitimately scary at various points.  And then there are movies like Vampire Hunter D.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime, the anime based on the visual novel Tsukihime, was released in the early to mid 2000s.  On a technical level, it’s very middle-of-the-road, with a bit of a generic visual style and workmanlike animation.  But we’re talking about an anime based on a doujin hentai game.  More mainstream visual novels’ adaptations tend to get better treatment.  Tsukihime is well-regarded, but probably not really “popular” in the same sense as something like, say, Da Capo or Little Busters or Air, or...  Look, Type-Moon’s getting the star treatment was pretty much going to be impossible at that stage.  It took Tsukihime and the first Fate adaptation before we got to that point.  That the Tsukihime anime happened at all is honestly kind of remarkable, and a testament to how much of an impact the game made.

Tsukihime takes place in the modern day (well, modern for the date of its release, which for the game was 2000, and for the anime would be 2003 or so).  It’s a vampire story, of sorts, though the only creatures we’d recognize as traditional vampires are a minor threat at best.

Our main character, or at any rate, our viewpoint character, is Shiki Tohno.  He’s part of a large, wealthy, and presumably powerful family, though he lives with an aunt and uncle whose ways and means are much more middle-class than his father, the head of the family.  He was banished from the main estate eight years ago, shipped off to live with his aunt and uncle after an accident when he was about eight.

He doesn’t remember much about the accident.  He (and therefore we) are initially told it was a car accident, and that it damaged his heart. He has fainting spells occasionally if he over-exerts himself, and otherwise generally anemic symptoms.  Something to do with damage to his heart after the accident; it’s not really clear.  The weakness makes him an unfit heir to be head of the family, hence his being put aside.

The real change in him is far stranger, and far harder to understand.

While recovering in the hospital, he begins to see odd lines running through everything, making the world look fractured.  He discovers that if he cuts along those lines with a blade or other edged implement, the object will simply fall apart along those lines.  It takes little to no force to do this.  He could cut down a tree simply by dragging the edge of a knife along a particular line on its trunk, a line invisible to anyone but him.  His attempts to convince others that these lines exist fall on deaf ears, and only cause concern for his mental state.

One day during his recovery, while wandering around outside, he runs across a woman named Aoko Aozaki who not only believes him, but understands what’s happening.  She explains to him that he has a rare ability – perhaps the only one in the world with it – known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception.  What he is seeing is the inevitable destruction and dissolution, the “death”, of every person and object around him.  The lines are the only way his brain can make sense of it, as this is something the human mind doesn’t readily grasp.  She gives him a pair of glasses which make the lines go away while he wears them, and which therefore allow him to go on with his life as normal.  She tells him that he mustn’t use this power of his unless absolutely necessary.

Shiki lives his life normally from that point forward, until one day while he’s in high school, he receives notice that his father has passed away, and Shiki is to move back into the main estate.  Said estate is in the same town, so much of his day-to-day should remain the same – same friends, same school, same daily routine.

But a strange thing happens on his way to the manor after school.  While resting in the park, he sees a young woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a white sweater.  From out of nowhere, he is overcome with a furious, murderous impulse.  His body seems to move on its own, with no input or control from him.  Off come the glasses, out comes the knife he carries with him, and he’s off chasing her.  Bad things happen.

He wakes up in the Tohno mansion, having blacked out and been retrieved by Hisui, one of the two maids of the home.  She dresses as a Western maid, while her twin sister, Kohaku, also a maid, prefers a kimono.  

But his arrival at the manor comes with significant culture shock.  In the wake of his father’s passing, possession of the manor and the position of head of family have both fallen to his younger sister, Akiha, whom he hasn’t seen since his accident some eight years ago.  His memory of her is a little hazy, but he seems taken aback by the polite but stern young lady she’s grown into.  Altogether, the four of them – Akiha, Shiki, Kohaku, and Hisui – are the only inhabitants of the house.  

Shiki finds its size and sense of isolation intimidating, all the more because his daily life in and around the house is in for a massive shake-up.  For starters, there’s a strict curfew, and also no television.  When Shiki objects, Akiha puts her foot down, and seems determined that he will live according to the family’s ways and rules, or…  Well, there is no “or else”.  He just will, end of story.

So he sneaks out to go buy some snacks and magazines.  On his way, he is accosted by one of his classmates, Ciel.  But here, she’s dressed in an odd outfit, carrying a set of deadly-sharp swords, and seems intent on killing him until she satisfies herself that he poses no threat.

The next day, further weirdness ensues.  He encounters the blonde lady, the one he thought he killed, very much alive and well.  His initial relief that he didn’t actually kill her is quickly undone by her assertion that actually, he did, and with rare skill and gusto.  She then goes on to describe the exact cuts he used to slice her into seventeen separate pieces.  

Then it gets stranger.

She is, she tells him, a vampire, albeit not all that much like what you’d think of when the word comes to mind.  And no, she doesn’t sparkle.  Her name is Arcueid Brunestud, and she’s hunting an enemy of hers who’s in the area, and is responsible for a string of murders and mysterious deaths that have been occurring lately.  She was doing well enough until Shiki came along murdered her.  While she was able to recover from this inconvenience, their encounter has left her in a weakened state.  Now she needs help, and who better than the one who put her in this position in the first place?

Twists, Turns, and Dead Ends

I’m a little conflicted about the problem with the Tsukihime anime.  I can’t decide whether its creators overestimated what they could do in twelve episodes, or underestimated the material and the time it needed.  I supposed it really doesn’t make much difference.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bad news first.

There are some technical issues with the show, which are probably the least of its problems.  The art style is kind of lackluster and workmanlike, and the animation is overall pretty by-the-numbers.  There are numerous moments where you can see drawing or animation shortcuts were taken, and there are lots of long shots where the camera lingers on one place or on one person well beyond what’s necessary for drama.  On the other hand, the more important action scenes do see a slight jump in quality, so maybe the producers were keeping something up their sleeve for when it counted.  

The English voice work is serviceable.  The actors’ voices are by and large a good fit for the roles, but the acting is occasionally a little wooden. The writing is somewhat off as well.  Shiki disappears from his normal life for a while in the third and fourth episodes, and his friends’ and family’s discussions of it once he resurfaces don’t seem to agree on the times he was gone – at one point, even within the same conversation.  This may be a translation or dub writing error, though.  There are other weird gaffes (this time in the original script), such as that Shiki doesn’t notice that Kohaku and Hisui are identical twins. This despite the fact that their only notable differences are eye color and wardrobe.

But these are mostly technical troubles, and they’re things I can overlook pretty easily.  The writing errors are never so serious that I get confused about what’s going on, and the artwork issues aren’t too out of line, either.  Certainly I’ve seen other shows from the time that did worse and more often.

The real issues \with Tsukihime, and the problem most of the original game’s fans have, stem from the way it’s adapted from the game.

Like a lot of visual novels, Tsukihime has multiple routes, and many if not all of them are mutually exclusive.  In fact, some don’t even involve Arcueid, who you’ll remember is one of the main characters. This presents some difficulties when making a TV series.  On the one hand, there is a canon route, and you could probably make a decent twelve-episode TV series out of just that.  On the other hand, there are lots of fans who prefer the alternate routes, who would be pissed if their favorite characters showcased in those routes weren’t given some screen time, and so you want to give them something.  And, too, one of the intriguing things about a game like Tsukihime is all the lore and world-building that makes these divergent plotlines possible and interesting.  Even when not pursued, elements of those routes may come up one way or another, and lend a certain richness and depth to the story.  It would be a shame to leave that on the cutting room floor.

Another possibility the show’s creators could take is to craft their own continuity, essentially creating a story hybridized from multiple routes from the game while not adhering strictly to any one of them, and create a single story that way.  This hypothetical hybrid story would then be better able to explore more of the background and lore, and incorporate that richness into its own new canon.  But that would take probably more than twelve episodes, and twelve was all Tsukihime got.  For anyone who’s curious about what this approach might look like, there’s a manga adaptation that incorporates elements of the other routes into the main story.  It’s out of print now, sadly.  Originally published by ComicsOne, it was taken over by DrMaster after ComicsOne went out of business.  Then DrMaster themselves went out...

Anyway, the compromise measure that the show’s creators eventually decided on was to largely tell one story (the Near Side routes, particularly the Arcueid route), while throwing in bits and pieces from other routes… and then never following up on them.  There wind up being a few non sequiturs and narrative dead ends or red herrings, almost as a kind of wink and nod to say that the show’s makers at least know those possibilities exist.  But this results in the show being unfocused.  For instance, a couple of episodes build up the Problem With the Tohno Bloodline, but this ultimately doesn’t figure into the story.  This material comes from what the game refers to as the Far Side routes, and those developments largely go unnoticed during the Near Side routes which the anime’s plot focuses on.  The problem is, again, that these are mutually exclusive as the presented in the original game.  Weaving them together in the “new continuity” approach would be fine – maybe ideal for the anime, even – but it would take an amount of alteration to the continuity that the anime never makes.  It winds up being less of a problem than it sounds like, but it does manage to be frustrating.

The main story, meanwhile, hints at interesting elements from the broader cosmological background that the game establishes (and which later Type-Moon games borrow and build upon), but many of those elements never quite leave the background.  This leaves a frustrating sense of massive, powerful forces and entities moving in the background, that there is something far larger happening that we are not even quite glimpsing, but only being given hints of.  

But if it sometimes seems that Tsukihime only scratches the surface of the greater and deeper lore of its setting, that lore and setting are still compelling.  There’s an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic scale to the supernatural as it’s presented in Tsukihime.  Arcueid, Nvrnqsr Chaos (no, that’s not a typo; it’s the real name of an adversary in the game, though the anime presents it as Nero Chaos instead), and her ultimate enemy, Roa – all of them are connected to higher forces and entities.  The murders occurring in Shiki’s city are the most minor of problems in the grand scheme of things.  This is what makes the anime both fascinating and frustrating.  It shows us this conflict, but refuses to give the full context for it.  So much seems to be held back; the full natures of these characters goes unexplored.

I like a little mystery.  I like it when some things are unexplained, or when the answers are there to be found rather than to be given.  It’s one of the things I love about Dark Souls and Bloodborne.  But the story of Tsukihime fails to explore these mysteries in a way I find really satisfying.

I feel like this is the root of why a certain overly vocal segment of the fandom chooses not to acknowledge the anime.  Coming to it from the game, I can see where it might seem a little disappointing.  Many of these hooks can seem like teases to those who understand their significance enough to be upset that they ultimately don’t deliver.

But that’s not the experience that either I or my wife had watching the anime.  We both came to it before we ever knew anything of the game.  For us, those odd hooks were just moments where we went, “Huh.  Weird,” and carried on watching the show.  Sure, there was clear and unaddressed significance, but it wasn’t a problem.  If anything, it made me more curious about the game.

The show may seem meandering to some, but to me, I just tend to think of its pace as sedate.  It doesn’t really dig into the characters’ backstories, but it does help to develop them and give them room to breathe.  

In particular, the anime spends a lot of time developing Arcueid.  We see that despite her power, and her potential for wrath and violence, she’s surprisingly cute and innocent-seeming at times, and actually innocent when it comes to some things.  You can see her interest in Shiki grow, but she seems unable to express it.  Her attempts at being normal can come across as almost mocking, when they are instead sincere and well-meant, but hopelessly clueless.

What we learn of her story is somewhat sparse, but we know that she spends most of her time asleep, awakening only to deal with threats like Roa.  The reasons for this are complicated, at least enough so as to be beyond the scope of this writing.  Suffice it to say that there’s a wiki if you’re after more information.  Just be warned: The writing there is pretty iffy.  Anyway, Arcueid is capable of getting by just fine on her own (when some inconsiderate dick doesn’t just up and murder her, anyway), but it’s also clear that, thanks to spending most of her time asleep, she doesn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on around her.  There’s a kind of obliviousness to her that might be frustrating in another character in a different show, but is somehow just endearing here.  Like my wife said at one point: You just want to hug her.  Which is not, you know, the normal reaction you have with vampires.  “Aloof”, “compelling”, “seductive”…  These are the words we tend to think of when it comes to vampiric “affection” in fiction.  “Huggable” doesn’t really show up on the list.  And yet, here we are.

There’s a certain cat-like quality to her.  Elegant, graceful, mysterious, sometimes selfish, frequently endearing, and occasionally ridiculous.  There’s comedy in her situation.  Shiki, despite his powers, is otherwise kind of a dork who could not be more clearly in over his head, at least at the start.  He spends most of the series bewildered, confused, scared, and very occasionally snapping and completely losing his shit against some eldritch horror.  And yet he’s the one who has to keep Arcueid grounded (to the extent that this is really even possible) and basically explain to her how the world works.  In some ways, it’s really Arcueid’s story.

The pace of the series helps it build a sense of brooding mystery as it explores the twin dilemmas of finding a way to stop Roa and figuring out Shiki’s uncertain place in and relation to the rest of the Tohno family.  And as you might suspect, these two problems aren’t as separate as they first seem.

If nothing else, the opening theme is just about perfect.  Subdued, mysterious, haunting; it sets the mood of the show almost perfectly, in a way that comes close to over-promising on what the anime actually delivers.  It definitely sets a mood.

That mood is one I tend to get into around this time of year.  I’m normally a night person in the first place.  No amount of working mostly first-shift jobs over the last two decades has changed the fact that there’s some part of me that wakes up when the sun goes down, and wants to stay up until the sunrise.  I like to be out and about in the dark.  I can remember back when I was in college, I would be out with friends trying to find any reason at all to stay out as late as possible.  Later in life, I’d duck out long after everyone else was asleep and go for roaming walks at night (at least, back when I lived in a reasonable neighborhood).  With fall here, the urge just gets stronger.  

There’s something of that feeling I get from Tsukihime, large portions of which involve that same nocturnal roaming, and take place in the nighttime times of life.  And I enjoy stories about monsters and the supernatural – I went through something of a vampire fascination phase when I was younger, and still maintain a certain amount of interest – and so those things alone might have gotten my attention.

Fuck the haters; the Tsukihime anime exists, and it’s good.  Not great, and not as good as it might have been, but it’s fine.  If it’s not exactly gripping, edge-of-your-seat suspense, it’s still an entertaining way to spend the better part of five or six hours.  Certainly worth a watch if you can track it down.  

Tsukihime tells an odd, interesting story – moody, dark, weird, mysterious, fantastical – all things I like.  A story of supernatural threats, monsters, mystery, and marauders in the night.  It’s hard to think of anything more appropriate for fall – for October – for Halloween.

Availability

The DVD release for Lunar Legend Tsukihime was originally handled by Geneon in both Japan and the U.S., since they were part of the original production committee.  After they folded, it was picked up by Sentai Filmworks, one of the several splinter companies that rose from the ashes of ADV’s implosion in the late aughts.  

Geneon’s release was evidently a multi-volume affair.  Which seems ludicrous today, when you typically buy an entire season of twelve episodes or so all at once these days, in a single set.  But Geneon (which had previously been Pioneer) had been around since the VHS days, and a lot of those companies in some sense inherited the mindset that had governed the VHS release schedule, which was to release a volume every couple of months or so, with three or four episodes on each one, and that was that.

Sentai Filmworks’ version is a two-disc, single-volume set, so that would probably be the way to go.  Especially if shelf space is a concern.  

There is no Blu-ray release, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine what Blu-ray would really do for the show.  At any rate, it seems to be out of print currently.  Geneon, of course, folded about a decade or so ago. And although Sentai Filmworks lists it in their catalog, there’s no option to buy.  And it doesn’t appear to be available for legal streaming anywhere.  Like a lot of older (and I hate to think of this as “older” – I remember being an adult when it was new) – maybe I should say somewhat older anime – Amazon and eBay are your best bet if you’re interested.  

Postscript the First – The Anime versus the Game

Tsukihime, as a visual novel with multiple routes, contains far more material than the TV series.  HOWEVER, please consider this paragraph your giant, flashing, neon-lit trigger warning for content potentially involving sex, assault, sexual assault (of various kinds), incest, violation of consent, and more violence than the anime producers could show even with the series airing at otaku o’clock.

Just to be up-front for a moment, I haven’t played much of the game.  Much of my information comes secondhand, or else is the result of reading the Type-Moon wiki and talking with friends who’ve played through it. I’ve yet to finish a single route.  I’d like to, and I occasionally chip away at it here and there, but the problems are twofold.

The first problem – probably the main problem – is the low level of engagement.  I get curious about visual novels from time to time, but they’re always a little too easy to put down, and a little too hard to pick up.  And that may seem strange, since there’s so little to do in one.  The amount of effort involved is nil.  But that’s just the thing.  I often wrestle with whether or not I even consider them to be games at all.  And, look: It’s not like I think visual novels are unworthy of anyone’s time.  They’re fine.  Largely not my cup of tea, but fine.  But what you do in a visual novel could hardly be called playing, any more than you “play” a Choose Your Own Adventure book.  There are no mechanics, no maneuvering through the world, no use of skills.  Just decisions to make, and those not very often.  The thing about an actual game is that I’m mentally engaged, fully occupied and firing on all (or most) cylinders.  When I want to play a game, that’s what I’m after.  And visual novels just don’t offer that.

Of course, I do love to read, and so it would seem like they should be right up my alley for that reason at least.  But no.  The writing is actually my second problem.

So far as I’ve observed, which admittedly isn’t much, most Japanese visual novels translated into English are pretty awkward, and this is probably a combination of factors.  One is that what constitutes good writing (in terms of how the language is deployed) in Japanese differs considerably from what constitutes good writing in English.  It’s not just visual novels, mind you.  The couple Haruki Murakami books I’ve read have both also seemed off to some degree as well.  I think it’s just something in the translation, some difference between English and Japanese in the matters of word choice, rhythm, and flow, and the sense for how these things work in each.  I sincerely think that making a Japanese work really sing in English would involve a level of change that most translators (and visual novel fans in particular, given their greater likelihood of being total Japanophiles) are deeply uncomfortable with.

But beyond the general problem of Japanese-to-English writing, there’s the problem of Kinoko Nasu in particular, who is Type-Moon’s writer.

Nasu is, I think, something of a Lovecraft disciple, with his cosmic-scale sense for horror.  But he’s also like Lovecraft in another very important and distinct way, which is that despite having really interesting ideas that set my imagination on fire, he actually can not fucking write.

I’m sorry, Lovecraft fans, I really am, but it’s true.  Deep down, you all know it.  Lovecraft, for his part, was a man who at some point earlier in his life swallowed a thesaurus, and was then hell-bent on vomiting it out over every page he wrote ever afterward.  He never used one word if he could find a way to use five or six to say the same thing, never used a simple, elegant, and concise word when he knew a more complex one, and his style has so little flow you’d need an electron microscope to find it.  You could make a workout of running back and forth to the dictionary while reading his work.  Or you could make it a drinking game.  And then die, of alcohol poisoning.

He had some great ideas, once you got past the writing, and the multiple onion-like layers of intense racism.  And he was intensely racist; let’s not forget that.  Not just “racist because it’s the 1920s or ‘30s and basically everyone white is racist right now,” I mean racist even for those times.  People back then were a little weirded out by how much he hated the Jews, and black people, and anyone else who wasn’t the right shade of paper-white.  But even just focusing on his writing, the feeling remains that he was not the best vehicle for his stories, and that’s just how it is.  The most aching, taxing, fucking grueling reading I have ever done on stories I still actually liked is mostly found between the covers of the various Lovecraft compendia I have lying around the house.  I like his stories; I just don’t like reading them much.

Nasu may well be his reincarnation (and oh, would it ever have horrified Lovecraft to be reincarnated as a Japanese person).  A common complaint I’ve heard about Nasu’s writing (from people who’ve read it in Japanese) is that he has good ideas, but just isn’t a skilled writer.  Now, I’m not qualified to really dissect how he comes across in his own culture, but when translated into English, he’s a painful read.  Maybe it’s the fault of the group responsible for the translation (Mirror Moon), but at the very least, I can confidently state that he should stay out of porn.  His sex scenes have some of the least sexy and most unintentionally hilarious writing I’ve seen in my life.  It’s why I think that even Fate didn’t really take off to become the absolute phenomenon it is until after we started to get anime adaptations of it.  Those adaptations would all have been written by other people, or at least had some amount of editing or collaboration to dilute the worst of his influence, letting the good ideas shine through without Nasu’s own writing griming everything up.

I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison, but I feel like on a technical level, Tsukihime is pretty basic.  The character artwork is nice enough, with a distinct style.  The backgrounds, though, are in most cases very clearly photographs that have been filtered or otherwise manipulated so as not to clash too badly with the character art.  This was probably a shortcut to save time or money, or both.  

On the balance, I’d say it’s worth looking into, with the major caveat that there’s a lot of stuff in it that didn’t (and couldn’t) make it into the anime, that makes the story overall much darker and more sinister than the anime could manage.  Unfortunately, it’s going to be hard to find.  There’s only the original version released in 2000.  There’s talk of a sequel and a remake, but the amount of time that’s passed for no more attention or work than the project has received, to the extent that these things have become running gags in the fandom.  They probably are things that the higher-ups at Type-Moon really do mean to create at some point, but which aren’t a huge priority for them, and so are very, very back-burner projects.

As I mentioned above, the anime and the game are both similar in that their quality persists despite somewhat lacking production values.  But the anime’s middle-of-the-road budget and somewhat generic style was never the problem.  The game, meanwhile, was pretty clearly made on a close-to-shoestring budget, but this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much.  Visuals novels live and die on their writing, ideas, and artwork, I think.  Rarely if ever do they rely on really cutting-edge graphics for their impact.  And in truth, Tsukihime the game was always going to be marred far more by Nasu’s writing than anything technical.  

A nice upside is that, since we’re privy to Shiki’s internal monologue, he comes across as a more interesting character.  He seems to sometimes just float through the story in the anime, with bouts of intensity here and there when things go wrong or he’s totally lost it.  But the game gives us his thoughts, and we get a better handle on why he does the things he does.

For English-speaking fans, there are walkthroughs, of course.  But if that understandably sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, there’s also a fan translation (unauthorized) by Mirror Moon.  In addition to rendering the game into English, I believe it also introduces an option for removing the sex scenes.  So for those who are uncomfortable with those, this will answer that concern, at least.  

Postscript the Second – Alternate Takes: Kara no Kyoukai

Frequently referred to in English-speaking circles by its subtitle, The Garden of Sinners, Kara no Kyoukai (which Wikipedia tells us means something like “Boundary of Emptiness”) is an interesting story from Kinoko Nasu’s early days.  It began publication (independently) in August of 1998, and is set in that timeframe.  Originally a series of novels, it’s primarily known in the U.S. as a boxed set of seven movies (plus a stand-alone eighth) priced exorbitantly by Aniplex USA (the Blu-ray boxed set for the first seven will set you back a cool $400).  These movies tell the story of a different Shiki, this time a young woman who wears a kimono, boots, and red leather jacket, named Shiki Ryogi.  

There are pretty clear linkages between it and Tsukihime, though these are thematic rather than narrative, and the result of ideas being reused.  Nasu began writing Kara no Kyoukai first, and seems to have cannibalized some of its concepts for Tsukihime. The two stories take place in alternate universes.  As with Tsukihime, this version of Shiki also has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, although Kara no Kyoukai’s Shiki does actually come by them after an automobile accident.  There’s also a redheaded sorceress with the last name Aozaki (Touko instead of Aoko), and I want to say that I’ve read somewhere that they’re sisters, and that Touko traveled to this alternate reality from the “main” one where Tsukihime and Fate take place. She was initially envisioned with sort of pixie-cut blue hair, but was converted for the movies into a redhead like her sister Aoko, and Nasu decided he liked the change so much that it became canon.

But although it features a Shiki with the Mystic Eyes, she shares the spotlight with Mikiya Kokuto, who’s a dead ringer for the Shiki of Tsukihime. His personality’s different – he lacks Shiki Tohno’s deeply buried killer instinct, for a start.  Mikiya has no special abilities beyond a knack for information-gathering and a better-than-average capacity for deductive reasoning.  Moreover, even without any special powers of his own, he seems to move with relative comfort in a world full of sorcerers and mystical murderers, in part by keeping an open mind, taking nothing for granted, keeping his assumptions in check, and taking everything as it comes.  He works as an investigator for Touko’s paranormal detective agency, Garan-no-Dou. Shiki is mostly the muscle.

Mikiya has a younger sister, Azaka, who in her turn looks an awful lot like Shiki Tohno’s sister Akiha.  Except for in flashbacks, where she looks like a young Rin Tohsaka from Fate instead.  As with Tsukihime, she is attracted to her brother.  Unlike Tsukihime, the two of them are actually blood siblings, so... At least with Kara no Kyoukai, this profound failure of the Westermarck Effect is entirely one-sided; Mikiya has eyes only for Shiki.  TV Tropes would undoubtedly describe it as Single-Target Sexuality.  

There are any number of other parallels between the two, but these are the most obvious.  Much of the background lore seems to be similar between the two series, although Kara no Kyoukai doesn’t use the same parts of it, and doesn’t dig into the parts it does use quite as much.  It’s much less concerned with cosmic entities like Arcueid or Roa or Nvrnqsr Chaos, and more concerned with its characters as individuals, and how they relate to each other.  That isn’t to say that it doesn’t dive into the sort of metaphysical strangeness on display in Tsukihime and Fate – Kara no Kyoukai is aggressively weird – but its metaphysical struggles are more self-contained, connected more directly to the characters and less tied to the cosmological backdrop.

The movies were released in Japan beginning in 2007, almost a decade after the novels began publication, and well after the successes of Tsukihime and the first Fate series. They’re animated by ufotable, and feature Yuki Kajiura as the composer.  I’d encourage anyone interested to track them down, though I know the price tag can be offputting.  Aside from high-quality video and sound, the set is pretty bare-bones.  There’s no English audio track; in fact, the impression I get is that this is basically just the Japanese Blu-ray release, re-encoded for Region 1. This includes the movies’ proper titles not being displayed in English anywhere on the discs or cases, so you have to do a little sleuthing to figure out which movies are which.  This is doubly aggravating considering that the intended viewing order isn’t chronological, so it’s not immediately apparent if you’ve started with the wrong movie.  If you feel totally lost and like you’ve just come into the middle of things, then it’s highly likely you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.  Thankfully, the menus are in English, and the subtitles are serviceable.

There’s a DVD version of the boxed set that costs less – I want to say the whole boxed set went for something like $200 – which is still a decent chunk of change, but more reasonable for a set of seven movies. Unfortunately, a quick browse of Amazon makes it seem even harder to find than the Blu-ray set.  And, sadly, there are no legal streaming options for this series.

[velveetacrackncheese]

Hey, Rad... Alex... Alexlememe? I know that's the name you used to go by and I know you've kinda disconnected yourself from Viv's fanbase after ZP ended, and I remember your memes and such but I kinda just wanted to get your take on the Hazbin drama since you reblogged the headcanon blog's post on the subject. More or less regarding the issue of her being uncharitable to fans and non-fans alike, plus that one callout post on twitter?

So this is weird. I wasn’t expecting to get asks on the subject since like you said, I’ve generally been disconnected from the fanbase aside from the few reblogs here and there retaining to Hazbin and its more recent developments. But yeah I guess I could give my take on this since I mean.. old fans still follow me. Idk why, but they do!So, really. In regards to that callout post (which is now deleted) I really, really don’t care that much. For one thing, Initially I did because I really hated to see someone be slandered so viciously with inaccurate and uncharitable attacks, but I kinda just stopped because even when I linked the addresses from both Viv, and the Ken dude regarding all the drama mentioned, it was either ignored and resulting in me being called a “pedo sympathizer” or “It wasn’t even an apologyyyyy weh” and like, whatever. I stopped giving a shit.

Terms of the traced animation thing... Lol, ok. I mean homages do exist, and her animation thingy was based on a meme so whatevs.

Anyways,I knew from the very start that the whole “tracing” and “stealing designs” stuff was nonsense since there was an entire like, tumblr drama arc on the issue, and albeit Viv’s post is gone, there’s evidence of legal contracts regarding Jiji and that whole nonsense that was years ago. In regards to her drawing pictures of Blaire White and Shoe… Eh. I mean, yeah, fuck em, but she’s made it clear that she doesn’t support those views anymore, and she wasn’t even really aware of the other things they’d done at that point, and I see no real reason not to believe her because what does lying about that gain her? Yeah her comment on the “blackface” thing if you wanna call it that was dumb as shit, but considering 2016 was a rough year for her in terms of trying to find where she fell in the political sphere, I can relate because I was in the same boat. A lot of sjw cringe comps, shaming feminists, and purposely misgendering transpeople… Not a good time for me either! Course I’ve changed. I went from being a reactionary alt-centrist to an anarchist so. Whether that’s an improvement is up to you.

As for the whole pedo/zoo shit, I really don’t see it. I mean like, look, obviously porn art portraying people fucking feral animals is disgusting right. Not saying it isn’t problematic or anything, but to be fair, she did draw this shit like 8 years ago. I’ve seen worse from even more well-established artists and I don’t see people trying to cancel them? Also, the art was suggestive for one thing and not necessarily 100% porn. I mean it’s still creepy and gross, and I’d understand scolding them if they continued to do so but a lot worse, but I haven’t seen anything like that from Viv past those 2 drawings. As for the pedo shit… The relationship between a 17 year old and a 19 year old is… hardly creepy and reminiscent of pedo shit. So yeah no fuck that. Now with the drawing of Mirage and Kestrel and the tag that said something jokingly like “Mirage and her pedo tendencies” or whatever… Yeah idk, I can’t defend that lmfao. Again, Viv said she disapproves of those drawings and doesn’t care to think about them, but that one piece of artwork definitely had some baggage to it that made me feel uncomfortable after reading the tags.Only issue I took in terms of her addressing that, is that she was very adamant about it being an inside joke… Which if that’s true, you must’ve had some fucked up friends like damn.

I would also like to state that cub art is legitimately disgusting and I am of the belief that it can cause harm depending on the context since I assume the consumption of cub art can reinforce the urge for pedophiles to act on their desires instead of finding healthy coping mechanisms for it through therapy. There have been stories from younger users on the internet that older people have tried to groom them and have the notion of pedos preying on them be normalized by sending them art depicting kids in sexual acts with adults. Of course in isolation cub art isn’t as harmful as the actual act of raping a child, and I would argue that people have their priorities kind of messed up since the illustration being acknowledged should be part of combating pedophiles preying on children. However, people, typically twitter wokescolds tend to focus on the art solely and I don’t know why. There’s a lot of MAPS trying to find their way into LGBT spaces and it’s fucking gross.

Now with Hazbin itself… It’s meh. Initially I watched it with rose-tinted glasses and loved it. After watching it for like… the 3rd, 4th, 5th time? It’s alright. I don’t hate it, but it’s far from perfect. Now ofc I know it’s a pilot but a very lengthy pilot I’ll say. My biggest gripe with the pilot is that the editing is really fucking weird. Like the editing where Angel tells Alastor “I can suck yah dick!” and the scene that followed was really off. It seemed like too many cuts were made in that instance and seemed very cluttered. It also feels that way during Charlie singing “Inside Every Demon is a Rainbow” and how many little animated bits were like almost wiped off the screen by how fast it came by, and ntm there was just so much happening all at once on screen as well. I had to pause at points just to process everything that was happening. The palette is also very, very, verrrry red. There’s so much red going on and like… I get it, it’s in hell. But lemme rest my eyes on something else besides red, please. The palette they use needs to be better diversified, and the same goes for the characters too. Every character seems to have red on them. Whenever Baxter shows up later he’s gonna look really out of place. Some of the jokes were ok, and others seemed non-clever. I didn’t think Angel’s joke about sucking Al’s dick was funny. I did like the joke with Pentious and Angel though. “SON??” Some of it could’ve been written better too.

Regarding the drama with the show itself… Personally I don’t get it. Like, I don’t feel as if Angel is homophobic as a character since his queerness isn’t at the face of the jokes he makes? He just happens to be sex worker which… sex workers are fine? Support sex workers y’all, seriously. There’s also nothing intrinsically wrong with being sexually active either? As long as it’s within reason and you’re being trustworthy.The issue lies in the fact that people viewed the things I just mentioned as negative, and associate it with gay people as said negatively portrayed thing to push the sentiment of “Gay man do sex a lot therefore the gays bad” or that sort of thing. Also there’s a bit where it shows there’s more emotional depth to him and I’m hoping they’ll expand on that later. Honestly though, the criticisms in regards to that have been pretty uncharitable. Same with the criticisms for Vaggie. Apparently Vaggie is racist because… she’s loud and angry? Again, this is a case where people assume those traits are negative, and because it’s assumed to be negative, the negatively portrayed thing pushes the sentiment of “Being a loud fiery woman made, and latina women are that, therefore latina women bad” or some shit.  There are stereotypes that are bad no matter what the context is like sambo-esque caricatures of black people. Then there are tropes that are applied to certain demographics that have the capability to be written well into characters without it being offensive or disrespectful. Vaggie is literally angry because she’s protective of her gf. Like. C’mon.

So, I think that settles what I think about that? It honestly seems like superficial shit to me tbh, and I’m saying this as an sjw-y beta cuck anarchist.

The only REAL gripe I have, is with what the mod from @zpheadcanons posted. Because I know this is probably true as much as it hurts me to say it. Faust def has a history of being pretty petty and bully-like to people she deems undesirable, and Viv harbors it by not criticizing it, and if anyone else within their friend group does it then you’re scolded vehemently and treated like garbage. Her attitude also stretches to harboring an audience full of white knights that I personally don’t approve of.

There’s also this

Faust has hurt distant people I personally know and… yeah. Maybe I’m biased but I can’t vibe with that. Sorry. If you don’t make an effort to criticize abusive behavior within your own friend circles then that makes you just as bad, because then you’re just a bystander to things you could have prevented.

This isn’t to say Viv herself hasn’t dealt with bad faith actors, or people who had the intention to hurt her, or very uncharitable criticism. Particularly from the badwebcomics forums which is honestly 4chan like in how they operate. It’s vicious as hell, and a lot of their criticisms boil down to insults and personal attacks, which serve to be nonconstructive. That’s not to say Viv has been kind to even the more charitable criticism though. I know because when I happened to send an ask to the zoophobia criticism blog (where did it go???) regarding something relatively minor and superficial, she blocked me from her blog. I’m still blocked lmfao. I’m not blocked on twitter though! (not yet anyways). Faust has me blocked there though, and I have no idea why. She’s had me blocked for years even though I haven’t spoken out against her till recently. So, there’s that.

As for her apology itself, I feel like it was fine. I think it could’ve been worded better? The take I disagree with in terms of that is like… If I made a mistake in the past, and I make it clear that I don’t care for what I did, I don’t feel as if me explaining why I felt compelled to do certain things negate me from still not caring for my past actions? That’s just me providing context. That’s a really weird take, but I guess that could be viewed as an excuse idk. Personally I think people are holding the bar super high to a state of irrationality.

*sigh* So yeah there’s that. I miss the old days where honestly I could be ignorant about this, but at the same time I look at my old obsessive posts and I kinda just… cringe. I was such an irrational stan I almost hate myself for it. Fuck XD

Edit: I’d also like to point out that I’m not saying Viv or Faust are totally awful or totally good people, and I know they’re capable of being better. It’s a matter of whether or not they wanna be better.

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe Graphic Novel Camp Pining Play (2019) - Outline & Review

The fourth original graphic novel for Steven Universe, Camp Pining Play, is a new story for the Lapis and Peridot fans, presented as a theatre project but focusing on relationships and emotional resolution more than anything. It’s new content–unlike some of the trade paperbacks that collect previously released individual issues of the comics. It is written by Nicole Mannino, with illustrations by Lisa Sterle and a cover by Francesca Perrone.

This graphic novel involves Peridot and Lapis falling in love with a piece of Camp Pining Hearts fanfiction--which turns out to have been secretly written by Lars--and after they get permission and have auditions, they put on a play that becomes ever more loosely based on the original fan work. Everyone involved seems to have input that takes the story farther from its origins, but they're determined to still present its heart . . . which becomes difficult when Lapis is uncomfortable with a central facet in the finale--a pretend fusion--but doesn't feel empowered to speak up about it even though Peridot keeps checking in with her. It's actually pretty nuanced throughout despite also having a lot of pretty superficial gags, and every character works pretty well as themselves on more than one level despite this being written by people outside the show team. As usual with my reviews, I'll discuss the story and then present a list of notable items.

(I’ve got to cut for length, sorry. Please look at the amazing sample panels under the cut even if you don’t want to read all my rambles about it.) 

 [SU Book and Comic Reviews]

The story:

Peridot and Lapis are reading and enjoying Camp Pining Hearts fanfiction, relishing the author's faithfulness to the show while featuring their favorite non-canon ship (Percy x Pierre). Lapis indulges Peridot's desire to hear her "Percy voice," and they praise the fanfiction while kicking around ideas of how it could become more real--like maybe it could be made into a real episode or an animated adaptation. Soon, though, they decide a play would be a great idea, though they would have to find the author and get their permission.

Using her homemade app Find-A-Clod, Peridot discovers the identity of the fanfic author, and who should it be but good old Lars Barriga--the local "Donut Butler," as Peridot calls him. Predictably, Lars first denies his authorship, then requests secrecy while admitting it. Sadie, it turns out, also knew of his hobby, and she's edited his work tirelessly all along. Lars gives his permission for them to put on a play (as long as he gets to critique it from the shadows and not have his name attached in any way), but now they have another problem: How do you even put on a play?

Sadie jumps into the organizing chair, giving suggestions worthy of Peridot's title "Donut Master." She comes up with a series of steps, manages to get Mayor Dewey's permission, and receives a one-week planning timeframe. They jump into auditions next, and though everyone's enthusiastic, no one seems too fixated on what roles they want to play (besides Amethyst, who really wants to be a shell necklace used as a prop). Steven, as the most handsome human Peridot knows, gets propositioned to play Pierre, and Pearl becomes Paulette. Lapis is elected to play Percy even though she doesn't think she's actually as cool as the character is.

After the auditions, it's time for props. Lapis and Peridot make the actors create the props, though they soon find they need to give more direction or they'll get a bunch of junk they can't use. The sets and props become amalgams of what people can make and bring from home.

Finally, the rehearsals start. Everyone's struggling a little, from people who can't get their lines right to actors trying to destroy the props (well, Onion trying to destroy the props). But most of all, everyone seems to be awkwardly going through the motions, and Lars keeps shrieking "BOO!" because of how unlike his original story everything's going. Soon they come up with some ideas about making the presentation more their own so their characters won't be so awkward, and to help with the lack of chemistry between Percy (Lapis) and Pierre (Steven), Connie comes up with a unique idea. . . . 

She suggests Lapis and Steven should fuse!

Well, that's a controversial statement. Peridot's against it because she thinks their actions are enough to show their affection and they don't need fusion, and Garnet is opposed to fusion as a stage trick. But Connie isn't suggesting it willy-nilly; she thinks they'll need something big to really emphasize the characters' connection, and Amethyst thinks it'd make them seem "strong." But then everyone has ideas on how to change the story or characters, and the core creators of the production are split on how to feel about it.

The blessing is given to include more personal interpretation into the characters. Most importantly, though, Peridot decrees that the fusion at the end needs to be a fake fusion. Lapis isn't up for fusion, though she refuses to say so and ruin everyone else's time. Peridot believes this is a good compromise, but Lapis is still nervous. She keeps it to herself and the rehearsals continue.

The day before opening night, Peridot and Lapis have a heart-to-heart, because Peridot can tell Lapis is holding back a bit. She finds herself unwilling to be specific about her issue, while Peridot goes on a bit about how fun it's been to find a good balance between following rules and enjoying some flexibility. Lapis claims she's just a little shy, and pretends she is okay with the fake fusion scene. She clearly feels like she doesn't have any business objecting since it's not real, and Peridot simply takes her word for it. They distract themselves by fooling around doing voices of the characters.

Opening Night arrives and the audience is full of Beach City residents as well as some visitors. Peridot makes a speech backstage thanking everyone for helping (even the people who don't want to be acknowledged, like Lars), and she emphasizes that she appreciates Lapis's partnership. It's a very sweet moment.

But as soon as everyone scurries off to their places, Lapis gets nervous. The beginning scenes go on as planned, but then Lapis stalls with her entrance because she's freezing. She can't think about anything except how she'll have to fake a fusion. Sadie, as a background tree, gives Lapis a pep talk, and then Onion shoves her onstage and she tries her best. 

There are a few minor mishaps, but everyone mostly relaxes and carries out their roles. But then the climax occurs--Lapis's character Percy saves Steven's character Pierre from a dangerous lake after he's jumped in there to get Percy's special lost necklace. This is where they're supposed to have a moment and fake-fuse, but Lapis can't go through with even pretending. She lets loose what she's been feeling while on stage, forgetting about the play.

Peridot acknowledges that she knew about Lapis's discomfort with fusion, and she blames herself for approving the scene. But Lapis doesn't want Peridot to blame herself. She told Peridot that she was okay with it because she WANTED to be. It still didn't make her okay with it, though. And now she feels that she ruined the play through the very act of trying so hard not to ruin it for everyone else. But Peridot and Steven help Lapis understand that her feelings aren't irrational even though the fusion was "fake." Peridot only wants her to do it if she wants to do it.

With that, Peridot and Lapis embrace on the stage and exchange kind words, and then a smoke effect surrounds them. Some of the other actors get Steven, Peridot, and Lapis off the stage quickly and a pyramid of other actors assembles. Mr. Smiley and Greg begin playing a "Pierre and Percy Fusion" song, and the audience watches it blankly with little understanding, but Lars is emotional and clapping.

Finally the audience applauds, Lapis takes her bows, and everyone is grateful for the lessons learned and the wonderful experience. The End.

Notable:

1. The only Camp Pining Hearts characters whose faces have been shown on the TV show are Percy and Paulette. Pierre is mentioned frequently--since Peridot ships him with Percy--but we never see what he looks like. So it's pretty cool that the artists chose not to take artistic license with his appearance and drew depictions of him in shadow.

2. Peridot's analysis of why some fanfiction is better than other fanfiction--notably, that they fulfill the desires of the readers to see ships completed while still feeling like an episode of the show--was pretty spot on!

3. The fanfiction author--Lars--uses the handle xx54d4nd10ne1yxx. Even if it's private, I'm surprised Lars would use something that translates to "sad and lonely."

4. This graphic novel probably spends the most time outside Steven's perspective that I've ever seen; Steven is only marginally in the story, and we're used to seeing things from his perspective. This is quite a departure.

5. Peridot's app, "Find-A-Clod," was so unexpectedly funny to me that I almost choked on my sandwich.

6. As Dewey is still Mayor, Lars is not pink, and Sadie is still working at the Big Donut, we can assume this takes place before the episode "The Good Lars." That feels a little weird now, considering this book is fourth in the series of graphic novels and the one that came before it (The Ultimate Dough-Down) used Sadie's departure and Lars's space adventure as a plot point.

7. Lapis's negativity manifests in this comic as insecurity and frequent naysaying/pessimism. I thought it was really well done because it wasn't obnoxiously presented--as in, it felt genuine and appropriate for someone with her past and personality, not tacked on as her defining personality trait. You could really see her trying to have fun and not be the group's spoilsport, and you could tell she really felt those things.

8. Sadie says she's happy as a background character and that's kind of meta.

9. The shipping is strong in this thing. Peridot encouraging Lapis, the two of them solidifying their relationship, and the adorable compliments are so much fun. The Lapidot shippers have received their piece of heaven.

10. I couldn't get enough of Sadie obliquely insulting Lars when he acted like it was obvious he would take the "handsome guy" role if he didn't want to stay in the shadows. Sadie's like, "Oh, I vote for Steven."

11. Mr. Smiley and Greg are musicians for the play. I think that's cute, because we've seen Mr. Smiley as an out-of-work actor/R&B singer in the show. (And obviously Greg's an old rock star.)

12. New characters for Camp Pining Hearts have been invented: namely, Penelope and Parker, played by Connie and Onion, respectively.

13. Peridot is weirdly mean and disrespectful to Amethyst in this story? It seems to really come from nowhere. First she reluctantly lets Amethyst audition and grants her that she guesses she does have some talent after all, and then later when Amethyst comes in to impersonate a prop and "save the day," Peridot first voices her suspicion that Amethyst will not actually make anything better. It's weird; if you didn't watch the show, you'd think they had an ongoing rivalry or hated each other (or at least that Peridot disliked Amethyst). Hmm. 

14. The central conflict of the book's story is impossible to understand or interpret without a very good understanding of the show. The book does not explain what fusion is at all (though obviously in a stage play as a symbol for a fraught scene for an actor, it represents having to kiss on stage). It also gives absolutely no mention of why Lapis has trauma surrounding fusion. If someone were trying to read this without the show's context, they might think there was some kind of awkward past or bad feeling between Lapis and Steven, since she's acting reluctant to pretend to carry out a gesture of affection with him. And even though Lapis's past with Jasper is mentioned--by name!--on the back cover, Jasper is literally not mentioned in the book anywhere. As a fan I had no trouble understanding the source of her angst, but because of this pretty important detail, the book can't be enjoyed on its own without seeing several specific episodes of the show.

15. There are some fun Easter Eggs in the crowd scenes. Play attendees include Mr. Frowney, Mr. and Mrs. Barriga, Dr. and Mr. Maheswaran, Mayor Dewey, Yellowtail and Vidalia, Nanefua and Kofi and Kiki Pizza, Barb, Mr. Fryman, and what look look some extras. All the known characters are family or the actors . . . except Mr. Frowney. Does that imply what I think it does about Mr. Frowney and Mr. Smiley? Hey, maybe they’re married now. :) 

16. Lapis's speech where she emphasizes that she consented to the scene was powerful. She WANTED to be okay with pretending to fuse, but in the end, she wasn't. There are so many real-life scenarios that parallel this--when someone tries to downplay their own feelings because they feel like they're the odd person out and they will wreck others' good time if they express how they feel. But, as said in the comic, nobody there wants you to do that, and you not enjoying yourself makes it a worse time for everyone else too. Your real friends won't make you pretend.

17. You probably never thought you’d see Garnet in a squirrel costume. You thought wrong.

18. These two are too precious for words when they hug at the end of the play.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

[betterthedevilyouknowuk]

Cannibalism, Blood Drinking & High-Adept Satanism by Kerth Barker

We read this book so that you don’t have to. Upon discovering Satanism, one thing you might do, is browse Amazon in search of reading material. If, like many of our readers, you’re money savvy and like to hunt for deals, you may be tempted to find the cheapest satanic books. DON’T. This was one of the first to come up on the list. At only £5 for a physical copy, it looks like a bargain.  It is not. You will lose brain cells.

Please be aware that this book talks about child abuse, and so this review may be triggering for some.

Kerth Barker is a man who has written many fictional titles in which he depicts his own “Satanic abuse”, committed by various Satanists; most of which are apparently part of the illustrious Illuminati. They control everything in the world, want to see it destroyed, and yes, they all want to have sex with him. It is a classic example of Satanic Panic and is further proof that to this day, we still need to fight these unfathomable, despicable excuses of human beings who spread such codswallop. Spoiler alert. This guy (pictured below) is a con artist.

The Satanic Panic was born in the United States in the early 1980's. Evolving mainly from rumours of Satanic Ritual Abuse (commonly referred to as SRA). Allegations involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. By the late 1990's this epidemic of paranoia had spread to many parts of the world.

The first written account of SRA, which was a major trigger for Satanic Panic, was Lawrence Pazder’s 1980 book Michelle Remembers. Much like Kerth Barkers book, it was written in the form of an autobiography of Michelle Smith. Told by Smith and her husband to her Psychiatrist, Pazder himself. It is easy to see where Barker gained his inspiration. Michelle Remembers has now been completely discredited, but not before major uproar and accusations stemmed from it. Triggering what was essentially a mass witch hunt.

Mike Warnke is another example of how the Conservative Christian right added fuel to the fire. After appearing on ABC'c show 20/20 in an episode titled "The Devil Worshippers" Mike Warnke was frequently cited as an expert on the occult. After all he claimed to be an ex high ranking member of a Satanic organisation. He was debunked in 1991.

We bring up Warnke’s ‘The Satan Seller’, as it has the most in common with this month’s book. More importantly it's author Kerth Barker.  The whole book reads like twisted fantasies of repressed sexuality and identity. And is dangerous in its accusations. He seems intent in ushering in a new age of Satanic Panic! In a failed attempt to seem like he isn’t trying to create unneeded panic, he states in his first chapter that he is not talking about all Satanists. He ‘acknowledges’ that there are some Satanists, who are not into cannibalism. It is almost like he is expecting there to be a #notallsatanists trend as we cry out in anger about how we are being misrepresented.

After a warning that adorns one of the first pages, it's plain to see that this was not going to be a light read. Amy (who regrettably suggested this book), read the whole thing in one sitting, fueled by pure hatred. With Lynsey and Cato getting through it almost as quick, they found it to be equally as excruciating. It left Cato wondering what dark secrets the author is really trying to hide, and Lynsey feeling as though it had taken all of her white blood cells, which where then shat on. 

Going down the list of chapters, it becomes clear fairly early on that Barker is either insane, or he is  taking the piss.

The first chapter starts off with Barkers need to announce that he is a Christian and that Satanists ruined his life. It escalates at a rapid pace from 0-100. Paedophilia, murder, cannibalism and ritualistic abuse, none of which are a laughing matter, spring out of nowhere.  Barker, in all his inability to convey himself maturely sees it as an opportunity to put himself as the centre of an entirely fictional world. According to his book, from a young age he was a candidate, who was primed to become ‘one of the greats’.

The book is scattered with accounts of blood drinking, aliens, surgery and a resistance that communicates via discarded cigarette cartons and rubbish piles on the streets. Somehow Barker knows how to instantly interpret piles of garbage into something meaningful, which is more than we can say about his own work.

Barker often speaks of his enforced alter ego Kathy, and her special meetings. These ‘multiple personality disorders’ are still being used for fuel satanic panic today, and it is something that The Satanic Temple is working to fight against.

It is clear upon reading that this book is in fact less to do with actual satanism, and more to do with his lustful desires and need to be admired in a sinister sort of way. This comes in a range of forms, mostly being preyed on sexually, even talking of his own ejaculation and public sexual acts. Some of them are just laughable. At one point in the book, he tells of how the ‘Baron’ was walking up a set of stairs in front of him.

Barker sure does have a wild imagination. It is a shame the same can not be said for his choice in character names; the ‘Baron’ and ‘Dark Mother’ being the most excruciatingly cliché.

The deeper you get in, the more apparent it is this book is about spreading fear and attempting to force conservative christian opinions in disguise. One such example is Barkers take on the ‘Gay Agenda’.

This sort of damaging propaganda is not only inaccurate, but it is giving homophobes everywhere an excuse to stop the LGBTQ+ community having rights.

‘But where were his family?’ we hear you all ask. Conveniently all of Barkers close family are Christians, and only an older, lesser know family member was a Satanist. It begs the question, while he was being carted around by the ‘Baron’, what did his family think he was doing. There isn’t much talk of his actual family. He has been careful not to mention them too much or claim that they were in fact in on it, because that would be too easily debunked.

The worrying thing about all of this, is that there are so many people who believe the rubbish Barker has written. In fine-combing this book it is easy to see the tactics used by Barker to convince the reader. The most prevalent being the illusion of rationality. He states he believes in religious freedom, and that he isn’t trying to convert anyone.

The main tactic used in this book, is making the characters seem human. If you stand up in court and give a character assessment on someone whom you have spent a vast amount of time with, but only share with them the negatives, you may well fail in convincing the jury. It can make it seem like you are ‘trying to hard’. It doesn’t sound logical, but even Hitler was nice to people sometimes. By talking about some of the nice things that these so called ‘Satanic Abusers’ did for him, it makes his story seem more believable. Because surely if he was making up this whole entire story, he would make it all murder and horror. Wrong. He has added in these ‘niceties’ to make you think exactly that.

There are people out there, who genuinely go through sexual abuse as a child. There are victims and survivors of horrific crimes. This whole entire book is a kick in the face to the people who really have suffered. 

Towards the end of the book, he goes all ‘David Icke’ on us and claims some of these high ranking Satanists are part of a reptilian race that are controlling us and taking over (I don’t suppose that has anything to do with the fact he is a fan and David Icke recommended his books). Also in case you weren’t aware, the moon is actually a hollow space station.

The biggest contradiction written throughout, it whether or not we are actually doomed. At one point he claims we aren’t far away from being completely ruled by these high-adept, alien Satanists. Only to then write a whole entire paragraph as to why they’re going to fail. It's almost as though he knows it isn’t going to happen because he made it all up, so he has to write a reason why it doesn’t come true. 

If these Satanists were ever nearly as powerful as claimed, and the stories true, he would have never been able to write this book. All the time he happens to just know everything about the destruction of the world as we know it and has access to books that nobody could ever possibly prove existed because after all… Illuminati.

He talks of the weakness of others and how he can help them overcome their blood addictions. But the entire time he is on his own high. A throne of disillusion.

To sum things up, ‘Cannibalism, Blood Drinking & High-Adept Satanism’ is one of the worst books we have ever had the malignant displeasure of reading. There is just too much wrong with to be able to cover it in one blog. 

Again, we do not recommend you read this book. We read it so you don’t have to. But if you so wish, you can read part of it for free here or you can purchase it from Amazon here.

Ave Satanas!

This book was published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (16 Nov. 2014). It is copyrighted to the author, Kerth R Barker and we are not endorsed by him or anyone else to write this blog.

Kerth Barker image source Blood drinking image source Illuminati pyramid image source Alien image source

[natsspammityspamspamham]

1. Who’s your celebrity crush?

I don’t have celebrity crushes most of the time. I have people who I think are pretty and people that I admire, but I don’t have any of them that I crush on. Alongside my favourite voice actors (seiyuu), Emma Watson would definitely be up there. There’s something about intelligence that makes a person far more appealing.

2. Are you single or taken?

As single as they come! I haven’t even been in a relationship, and I don’t really have any interests in getting into one!

3. Rant. Just do it.

I’m nervous. I’m doubting. I hate this feeling in me. I feel so out of place, so uncomfortable, and it’s eating me on the inside. I wish I had friends in real life. I really wish I did, but it feels like I’m growing apart from everyone, and I’m pushing them all away because I can’t stand being reminded of my past, and I feel like every step I take is just a desperate attempt to get myself back on track, and I’m trying to be proud of myself. I really am. But I have a hard time acknowledging anything that I do. I never feel like I’m enough. I feel insufficient. I feel like I’m just a statistic. I feel inferior yet superior at the same time. My self-image is warped. I feel like I’m lying to myself and to others. It hurts. It hurts a lot, and I don’t want people to know but I do at the same time. It’s a pain unlike any other, and as much as I can say that I don’t feel lonely, I feel like there should be people in my life that I can call my friends, and I want someone that I can mutually call my best friend without them saying that they are just my “good friend”. I want to know that I mean the upmost to a person without feeling I’m burdening them. I want to be No. 1 at something. 

I dream about chasing dreams like becoming a medical professional, but I continue to realize and face my shortcomings that would prove that I’m not really fit for it. I want to do it, but quite frankly, I’m too stupid. 

I can’t even articulate what’s truly paining my mind. It’s difficult. I don’t know why my body and mind wants to destroy itself.

But sometimes, I think I fix myself better.

4. Do you think it's okay to separate the artist from the art?

Personally, I’m one of those people who usually say no to this question. Now, if you have weird kinks or like pineapple on pizza, that’s none of my business. I won’t hold it against you. However, I find it hard to separate when things are illegal or morally wrong.

Examples:

Net-juu no Susume was a really heartwarming anime, and it was one of my favourite anime that depicted a wholesome adult romance that unveiled many truths about the real world despite spending its time online, but I would’ve never watched the anime if I would have known that the director was a Holocaust-denier. The rest of the staff? I don’t know, but I felt extremely uncomfortable even reblogging content after I found out.

I was planning on watching Rurouni Kenshin, and to this day, I believe I’m missing out, but I cannot support or condone or even watch a series that has a creator as wretched as Nobuhiro Watsuki. If you don’t know, he was charged in February of 2017 for child pornography. He was fined 200,000 yen. It was a slap on the wrist. Even though Rurouni Kenshin wasn’t a reflection on his person according to fans, I don’t feel keen on watching a show created by such a man.

In regards to actors, this goes for them too. If they are not supportive of the LGBTQ community, if they are racist, if they have committed acts that are cannot be condoned, I wouldn’t want to watch them or anything. Again, I have a hard time keeping track of who’s actually clean in this world, and in Japan, there is a lot of covering up. It was recently revealed that a lot of Madhouse anime that people love were probably made at the expense of animators who are human beings.

5. How many accounts do you have?

I have a few.

@nsisbest385 - my main where I stockpile my music @natsspammityspamspamham - This one where I am really open and reblog everything that I want to reblog (no exceptions; if I don’t even think about it, I just reblog) @natsthinkitythinkthinkthonk - used to be for inspirational stuff/writing, but now it’s mostly seiyuu stuff. I post things for their birthdays. I should’ve made a separate account. @semitranslatedseiyuublog - Where I semi-translate stuff but mostly transfer seiyuu content from Reddit. @awkwardbsd - This account has more followers than all my other accounts combined. It’s for awkward screenshots, memes, and other stuff surrounding the Bungou Stray Dogs universe. @dragontypepropaganda - I didn’t tell anyone this existed until now. I’m generally not on it. I just queue and leave.

6. How many pairs of shoes do you have?

Let’s see... uh... 1 for outside, 1 for exercise, 1 for my house slippers, 3 for orchestra that I never use, 2 dress shoes that I really never use, and I’m supposed to get 1 pair of slippers for outside.

7. Opinion on…

I don’t think I can answer this.

8. How many accounts do you follow?

9. Favourite brand of clothing?

I’ve been wearing more Uniqlo lately, but my wardrobe has a lot of hand-me-downs despite being so sensitive tactile-wise.

10. Name a dog

Atticus (boy) and Haruko (girl)

11. What unusual talent do you have?

I can whistle. I haven’t tried in a while, but I can put my feet behind my head.

12. What’s the most interesting school's gossip you’ve ever heard?

Keep in mind, I was only in school until grade 9-10. One of my PE teachers Ms. Snow had really scary eyes. When she got mad at me (which is pretty frequent considering she didn’t know who I was and kept calling me by other Asian people’s names because “we look the same”), I swear her eyeballs would extend from her sockets a little. They looked like they were about to pop out of her head. My sister said that urban legend states that she once fell down the stairs and both eyeballs popped out. She put them back in and carried on.

13. Ever prank called a store?

I think I almost tried once until I got a scolding or something (wasn’t even my parents).

14. What’s your coffee order?

Don’t have one. I don’t like coffee. I’m generally open to tea.

15. What’s a question do you constantly get asked?

“How are you?” I usually choose the easy route to answer to this question. I just say “good thanks”. You want the truth? I lie to myself.

“Why did you leave school?” It was a living hell. I didn’t feel safe. I was breaking down years ago. School nearly broke me, and if I stayed there any longer, I would’ve died (not an exaggeration).

“What are your hobbies?” I usually just say music and watching cartoons* (anime). They usually ask what else, and I just stare blankly.

16. If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would you get and where?

I wouldn’t want one.

17. Google the top song from the year you were born

Apparently, it’s How You Remind Me by *gasp* Nickelback.

18. Rant about your favourite musician

I seriously wish I was able to go to Sara Bareille’s version of the Waitress. I wish I was able to see it on Broadway. She’s such a talented individual, and she deserves all the attention she gets.

19. What’s your favorite teacher you’ve ever had?

All of my best teachers have been outside of school. I would say that my favourite teachers are my current bass teacher and my taekwondo master who has taught me for over a decade.

20. Describe your blog in 3-5 words

Fando(o)m, ranting, anime, seiyuu, random

21. What’s a conspiracy you believe in?

I believe aliens exist. I don’t think it would be logical to assume that Earth is the only planet that has “intelligent” (I say that very loosely) lifeforms.

“But they don’t have water or oxygen” Bold of you to assume that said aliens would need such a thing. I would think they can adapt like humans and all that. I just think it’s dumb to close ourselves off to believing that there are people other than ourselves that exist in this wide and expanding universe.

22. If you could see any concert tonight what would you choose?

I would really want to see the Waitress. If that doesn’t count, I would want to see some seiyuu singing live. It would depend. Hosoya doesn’t sing much anymore, Maaya Sakamoto has a waitlist longer than my lifespan (I have no luck with lotteries), and Saori Hayami has the same issue. I would want to see Sphere live too, but I don’t know all of their songs.

23. If you could break one of your bad habits which would you choose?

My depression... or my anxiety. Actually, those aren’t habits. I guess the closest I will get is doubting myself and beating myself up.

24. Can you dance? Sing?

A strong no to both.

25. What’s something you can’t stop buying?

Uh… I don’t go out and buy anything. I don’t make money so I don’t buy. However, if I did, I would really want to treat myself to good food and anime stuff.

26. Crowds or small groups?

Small groups... obviously.

27. How long before a trip do you pack?

Depends on where. When it comes to the Philippines, weeks for the Balikbayan boxes and less than a week for my actual clothes (usually pack a ton of clothes because I sweat a lot and “we’re not doing laundry!”)

28. What celebrity would you rate a PERFECT 10?

I feel like I don’t have a good grasp of the culture so I actually can’t say anything about my favourite seiyuu. We don’t even know if that’s their true personality. However, I feel like my perfect 10s are Emma Watson and Robin Williams. They might not be my “crushes”, but they are perfect 10s. 

29. What quote or inspirational setting do you think is bs?

“When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up!” Nah man, you just don’t know what rock bottom looks like. It’s gonna get worse.

“Don’t fix what isn’t broken!” All because you can’t see what’s wrong with it doesn’t mean it isn’t broken. Yeah, I’m talking about the school system.

“Pain makes you who you are. It makes you stronger.” I can say that my trauma gives me anxiety.

30. If you had to dye your hair an unnatural colour right now, what would you choose?

I go by “Purple Dino” online so I’d have to say dark purple.

31. You can change one thing about your life right now. what are you changing?

I wish I could breathe properly. My allergies make it so hard for me to exist. It affects my breathing, sleep, dental care, and so much more. I think that’s the one physical thing I would change.

32. How old do you get mistaken for?

Apparently, I look like I’m in middle school even though I’m almost a legal adult.

33. What do you think about a lot?

Anime, seiyuu, my own shortcomings. 

34. Do you like your Hogwarts house or do you wish you were a different one?

I like Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. I haven’t done my test in a while. 

35. What does home mean to you?

Home is where you live. It’s where the heart lives. It’s where you feel safe, and it’s where you can take off the mask that you live in during the day. It’s the place where I don’t have to lie through my teeth. I can cry, I can laugh, I can scream, and I can finally be me.

36. What do you think you’d be arrested for?

I feel like I would be caught for pirating anime even if I don’t profit off it. 

37. Have you ever been called down to the principal's office?

I’ve been there, but I haven’t been called down there because I really wasn’t important in school.

38. Post a picture of the outfit you would choose if you could have any outfit you wanted

Probably a dark coloured hoodie with sweatpants. That’s my default during the winter anyway.

39. Describe your aesthetic

Tired dead eyes with existential dread and depression. That’s how I see myself.

40. Answer with one of your ‘school memes’ (inside jokes you have with your class/grade) with no explanation 

I’m not sure how to say this, but I was really not in the “right crowd” at school, and I was never let into any of these things. I can’t answer this, and it pains me just to read this because I’m missing out on so much of my youth and “high school life”. 

I’m tagging @caratheillustrious who reblogged the questions!

[nectarinejellyfish]

In this post, I want to address some of the issues of Powerpuff Girls Z, specifically related to the sexualization/pedophilic treatment of its main cast.

To be honest, I don’t consider this to be the only PPG show to have issues with pedophilia, so I’m not singling it out for that reason (the original is actually loaded with sex jokes, some of which involve the girls themselves, so it’s not exactly guiltless in this area). For now I’m just going to focus on PPGZ though, mainly because I’d brought it up at @safeanimations before, and I wanted to provide a better explanation of some of the pedophilic aspects of the show than I did previously.

Examples are under the read more, with screenshots/other images included.

First, I want to establish that in this adaptation, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are all 13 years old, and attending middle school. I couldn’t find any official character bios in English, but I found some in Japanese, which I’ll link to, since they confirm the ages of the characters:

http://www.toei-anim.co.jp/tv/ppgz/chara/index.html

As for the grade level, in both the Japanese and English language versions of the show, it’s specified that the girls go the same junior high school. I’ve seen some statements floating around that the girls go to high school/are in their older teens in this show, so I just wanted to clear this up briefly.

Before I get into scenes from the show itself, I’m just going to point out some official artwork produced for the show (mainly for DVD/CD covers and other similar merchandise)

All of these images have some...uncomfortable choices for depicting three middle schoolers. There should be so many ways to depict kids that don’t come off as vaguely skeevy, but this is...not it. I could probably write at least a couple paragraphs to point everything unnerving in these images, but the general problems with all of these is skimpy clothing and weird poses, which result in awkward things like Bubbles having her butt practically showing in the second image, which could’ve easily been avoided had the pose just been changed slightly

Getting to the show itself, there are definitely bits where the characters are drawn in really undeniably sexualized ways

This is a screenshot of Buttercup from the show’s second opening sequence. This is an incredibly pedophilic way to depict a 13 year old in a swimsuit, everything from the pose, to the way the highlights and shadows are used (I mean, what other reason is there for putting highlights on a kid’s crotch), to just the way the swimsuit is drawn (like no normal swimsuit would be absolutely skintight and suction to the body like that, for her chest to look that way)

Next, I'll touch on some episodic content. The first scene I’m going to bring up isn’t a case of sexualizing minors, but it’s...somewhat related, in a ‘not condemning harmful age gaps’ sense, and I’ll try to explain my concerns with it as best I can

In episode 46, Blossom tries to ask a guy who's clearly a good deal older than her on a date. (How far apart they are in age is unclear, but the screenshots below can kind of give an idea. It’s not obvious from the screenshots I took but he is wearing a school uniform, I think, so probably a high school student? Too old for a middle schooler at any rate) In other episodes, Blossom is frequently attracted to older/adult male characters, to the point where it’s something of a running gag, but usually it goes unreciprocated on the guy’s end - but, not in this episode. He initially turns her down, but after the villain Him uses his magic to possess him, the guy breaks up with his girlfriend, returns to Blossom to tell her that he’s fallen in love with her, and asks her to go on a date with him, which she happily accepts.

Once the other girls catch onto Him’s plan, they show up to undo the magic and snap the guy back to his senses, and then he goes back to rejecting Blossom.

Even though this all happens within the context of a guy being manipulated by a villain to do these things, I feel this was a pretty badly mishandled subplot. The fact that Blossom was romanced by someone who appears to be quite older than her, and he even succeeds on taking her on a date, without anyone else initially knowing about it, is ultimately really quickly brushed over. Nothing in the episode seems to portray Blossom as being in any real danger, she doesn’t learn anything from the encounter, even the other girls don’t really comment on it at all when they rescue her. If anything it almost ends on a gag note, like “haha Blossom almost got what she wanted, too bad it was just a trick”, as if we’re supposed to sympathize with her for having the date ruined. 

And this scene bothers me more in the context of this being in a show where underage girls are already being sexualized, because portraying one of them as being super willing to date an older guy and there being no consequences for it, ends up feeling like it was written with some pretty bad intentions (I realize out of all of these examples, this is probably the most ‘ymmv’ one, but considering this scene was troubling enough to someone to be censored in the dub, which I’ll touch upon later, I figured this was worth bringing up)

The other two scenes I’ll bring up both come back to sexualization again. The first is from episode 20, where the Rowdyruff Boys make their introduction, and pull a bunch of pranks on the Powerpuff Girls, including...running past them and flipping their skirts.

There aren’t any actual panty shots in this scene (what would otherwise be a panty shot in the above image is obscured by Boomer’s arm), but it’s still portraying sexual harassment of the girls as a joke. Also, it's pretty gross that Bubbles reaction is obviously supposed to look ‘cute’ here, like as if this scene wasn’t skeevy enough, this gives it even more a fanservice vibe rather than it just being a gag (not that I’d excuse it if it was portrayed in a strictly humorous manner, but I’d argue that trying to make the girls look ‘cute’ while being sexually harassed does actually make it a whole lot worse)

But, I can’t even say this show is free of panty shots, which brings me to what is probably the most glaring instances of sexualization in the entire show, even considering everything else.

In episode 36, Him is once again the main villain, this time using his magic to put the girls in embarrassing or uncomfortable situations that they end up blaming each other for, to cause a rift in their friendship. Him ends up using his magic to create a large heart-shaped hole in the back of Blossom’s gym shorts, right as it’s her turn to perform a vault, causing her to flash her underwear to her entire gym class, and then there’s a closeup of it

And it probably seems like it wouldn’t get any worse than this, but then, shortly after that, Blossom has a flashback to what happened, except in the flashback she’s in a different pose that’s somehow a thousand times worse?

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHOT? WHY DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IT WAS TRACED FROM PORN??

Seriously, what else was this pose supposed to evoke??? And if the plot of the episode required a character to be put in an embarrassing situation, the show could’ve gone with fucking anything else like messing up a presentation or falling asleep during class, it’s like they purposefully went with something that could be be construed as fanservice and then proceeded to execute it in the most blatantly pedophilic way possible

So yeah, that’s a lot of the bad stuff, and it’s...pretty fucking bad. All of this stuff mainly pertains to the original (non-dubbed) version of PPGZ, as for how the English dub differs - some scenes are heavily edited or removed. For example, the scenes with the older guy asking Blossom on a date, were completely rewritten in the dub so that he was merely a comic book artist that Blossom was a fan of, and they meet up to discuss comic books rather than it being a date. So any pedophilic/creepy age gap implications from that episode were more or less written out in the dub.

However, the skirt flipping scenes are still in the dub, all that was cut out was the moments where the boys hands reach under the skirts to flip them, but then the rest just plays out like it did in the original. (So for those two screenshots of the skirt flipping scene - the first one doesn’t make it into the dub, second one does.) Also, the first of those two panty shots made it into the dub too, they just removed the second one (for incredibly obvious reasons).

That’s everything that I wanted to cover, hopefully this was an adequate (if somewhat jumbled) explanation of the show’s sexualization issues. I realize the examples above are probably do not represent the entire show (or even the majority of it), but the presence of stuff like this definitely deserves to be acknowledged and taken into consideration when discussing/evaluating the show