#cause his OG design just does not look the part of a lawyer at ALL

[ninjagirlstar5]

This is for my mutual that requested that I do Kakeru next, so I did! I actually had this finished all in one day but it was very late where I was by the time I was done, so I had to shelve it for today instead.

Kakeru's OG design is just...funny, when you find out his Ultimate Talent. This man does not look like a lawyer and looks like any other muscular guy that probably does sports. Which makes it even funnier when you find out that, no, he doesn't actually do sports, he was literally just born like this! This man was blessed with the best health possible, and yet he feels ashamed for this because his sister was born very sickly, so he blames himself for "taking away her health" when it's not his fault. It's just how life goes sometimes. But anyways, back to his redesign. I chose to base this redesign off of his splash art as he actually looks like a lawyer in that than his in-game sprite, but changed it up and added details to it since I didn't want to straight up copy it. Based off of his OG design, he was dressed pretty casually, so I decided to have his shirt collar slightly unbuttoned and kept it untucked, his suit jacket open, and his tie a little more loose. I gave him boots to add a bit of flair to his design, gave him small earrings, an attorney badge, and a tie pin to keep it attached to his shirt and prevent it from flying off. It's to show that while he's casual, he's still a professional. Also, in his splash art, he's shown wearing glasses, so I'm questioning why LINUJ didn't let him keep that??? What, are those reading glasses, fake glasses to make himself look smarter, or are those glasses that he actually needs to see from? Imagine that those are prescribed glasses, and he's walking around the killing game with blurry vision the whole time he was alive, lmao. But seriously, it's weird cause in one of LINUJ's sketches where he drew what the 79th class would look like if they survived, he has his glasses again so the state of his eyesight is just one big question mark. So I just said, "Fuck it, he has glasses" and that was it. It honestly adds to his professional and smart aura, which actually adds to his intimidation since you'd expect him to be very serious...and then it turns out he's super sweet and shy outside of court. And what helps hint to his softer, sillier side would be the flame design on his tie, as ties with goofy designs like that can show that this person can be silly if they want to be (at least, character wise). And I didn't want to get rid of the flame design on his shirt completely, so I decided to call back to it by moving it onto his tie instead. A tie that his sister probably chose for him, so Kakeru would wear it all the time, hehe. His hair barely changed, I just adjusted it so that it has a better shape. As for the colors, I made Kakeru's tanned skin a bit more obvious, and kept his colors quite monotone aside from the tie and gold metal of his earrings, tie pin, attorney badge, and the buckles of his boots. Fun fact: I originally made his suit blue, but decided that he looked too much like Phoenix Wright and desaturated the colors to look more gray, haha.

Anyways, I love Kakeru. I just wished he acted more like a lawyer in-game, you know?

[bananaofswifts]

Taylor Swift Turns on a Facsimile Machine for the Ingenious Recreations of ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’: Album Review

Swift recreates her entire 2008 album literally down to the last note, then gives herself room for stylistic latitude on six never-before-recorded "vault" tracks.

By Chris Willman

Swift recreates her entire 2008 album literally down to the last note, then gives herself room for stylistic latitude on six never-before-recorded "vault" tracks.

There is no “best actress” award at the Grammys, perhaps for obvious reasons, but maybe there should be this coming year. And the Grammy would go to… Taylor Swift, for so persuasively playing her 18-year-old self in “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” her beyond-meticulous recreation of the 2008 recording that did win her her first album of the year trophy back in the day. It’s impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the new version is intended as an exact replica of the old — all the way down to her startling ability to recapture an untrained teen singing voice she’s long matured and moved on from. It’s a stunt, to be sure, but a stunt for the ages — mastering the guile it takes to go back to sounding this guileless.

There are two different, very solid reasons to pick up or stream “Taylor’s Version,” regardless of whether you share her ire for the Big Machine label, whose loose ways with her nine-figure catalog precipitated this, the first in a six-album series of remakes where she’ll be turning on the facsimile machine. One is to marvel at her gift for self-mimicry on the album’s original tracks, where she sounds as possessed by her younger self as Regan ever was by Pazuzu. The other reason is, of course, to check out the six “vault” numbers that Swift wrote during that time frame but has never released before in any form, which dispenses with stylistic fealty to the late 2000s and frames her “Fearless”-era discards in production and arrangements closer to “Folklore.” Those half-dozen (kind of) new tracks really do sound like modern Taylor Swift covering her old stuff.

But those original lucky 13? It’s the same damn record… which is kind of hilarious and marvelous and the kind of meta-ness that will inspire a thousand more think-pieces than it already has, along with possibly efforts at forensic analysis to figure out how she did it.

It would not be surprising if, as we speak, Big Machine was putting a combined team of scientists and lawyers on the case of the new album’s waveform readouts, to make sure it’s not just the original album, remixed. Honestly, it’s that close. The timings of the songs are all within a few seconds of the original tracks, if not coming in at exactly the same length. The duplication effort doesn’t allow any detours. If “Forever and Always” had a cold open then, it’s going to have a cold open now. If the 2008 “That’s the Way I Love You” had slamming rock guitars with an almost subliminal banjo being plucked beneath the racket, so will the 2021 “That’s the Way I Loved You.” A drum roll to end the old “Change”? A drum roll to end its body-snatcher doppelganger. And if she chuckled before the final chorus of “Hey Stephen” 13 years ago, so will that moment be cause for a delighted giggle now.

Of course, much analysis will be put into whether the new laugh is a more knowing-sounding laugh. And that will be part of the fun for a certain segment of audiophile Swifties who will go looking for the slightest change as evidence of something meaningful. When “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” first came out weeks back to preview the album, there were reviews written that swore she’d subtly changed up her phrasing to put a contemporary spin on the song. And maybe they were right, but, having done a fair amount of A/B testing of the two versions of the album, I found myself feeling like I do when vinyl buffs insist there are significant sonic differences between the first stamper version of an LP and one that was pressed a year later. If you can spot those very, very, very modest tweaks, go for it.

But my suspicion is that if Swift has decided to turn a phrase a little differently here or there on this album, or done anything too differently aside from brighten the sound, she’s doing it more as an Easter egg, for the people who are on that kind of hunt, than anything really designed as reinterpretation. Because the last thing Swift wants most of her fans doing is A/B-ing the two versions, the way I did. The whole point is to have folks retire the OG “Fearless” from their Spotify playlists, right? The Swift faithful were already threatening to rain down damnation on anyone caught sneaking an audio peek at the old version after midnight. What she intended was to come up with a rendering so faithful that you would never have a need to spin the vintage album again. In that, she has succeeded beyond what could have been imagined even in the dreams of the few self-forgers who’ve tried this before, like a Jeff Lynne.

Is there any reason to find value in the new versions if you couldn’t care less about the issues of masters and contracts and respect in business deals that made all this strangely possible? Yes, with the first one being that the new album just sounds like a terrific remastering of the old — the same notes, and you’d swear the same performances, but sounding brighter and punchier just on a surface level. But on a more philosophical one, it’s not just a case of Swift playing with her back catalog like Andy Warhol played with his soup can. It’s really a triumph of self-knowledge and self-awareness, in the way that Swift is so hyper-conscious of the ways she’s matured that she has the ability to un-mature before our very ears. With her vocals, it’s virtuosic, in a way, how she’s made herself return to her unvirtuosic upstart self.

On Swift’s earliest albums and in those seminal live shows — at the time when she was famously being told she “can’t sing,” to quote a song from the follow-up album — there was a slight shrillness around the edges of her voice that, if you lacked faith, you might’ve imaged would be there forever. It wasn’t. That was partly youth, and partly just the sheer earnestness with which she wanted to convey the honesty of the songs. She’s advanced so much since then — into one of pop’s most gifted modern singers, really — that the woman of “Folklore” and “Evermore” seems like a completely different human being than the one who made the self-titled debut and “Fearless,” never mind just a woman versus girl. It wouldn’t have seemed possible that she could go back to her old way of singing at the accomplished age of 31, but she found and recreated that nervous, sincere, pleading voice of yesteryear. And maybe it was just a technical feat, of temporarily unlearning what she’s learned since then, but you can sense that maybe she had to go there internally, too, to the place where she was counseling other girls to guard their sexual virtue in “Fifteen,” or wondering whether to believe the fairy tale of “Love Story” or the wakeup call of “White Horse,” or proving with “Forever & Always” that writing a song telling off Joe Jonas for his 27-second breakup call was better than revenge.

If at first you’re not inclined to notice that Swift has re-adopted a completely different singing voice for the “Fearless” remakes, the realization may kick in when those “vault” tracks start appearing in the later stretch of this hour-and-50-minute album. The writing on the six songs that have been pulled up from the 2008 cutting room floor seems primitive, even a little bit by the standards of the “Fearless” album; there are great lines and couplets throughout the rescued tracks, but you can see why she left them as works-in-progress. But she doesn’t use her youthful voice on these resurrections, nor does she employ the actual style of “Fearless” very strictly. Of course, she feels more freedom on these, because there are no predecessors in the Big Machine catalog she’s asking you to leave behind. Her current collaborators of choice, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, divided the co-producing work on these fresher songs, as they did for the two all-new albums she released in the last year. (The “Fearless” recreations are co-produced by Swift with Christopher Rowe, someone who worked on remixes for Swift back in that era.) They co-produce the vault songs in a style that sounds somewhere between “Fearless” and Folklore”… a more spectral brand of country-pop, with flutes and synths and ringing 12-string guitars and a modicum of drum programming replacing some (but not all) of the acoustic stringed instruments you’d expect to be carried over from “Fearless” proper.

Of the previously unheard tracks, Swift was right — she’s always been her own best self-editor — in putting out “You All Over Me” first, in advance of the album. With its imagery of half-muddy stones being upturned on the road, this song has advanced lyrical conceits more of a piece with the level of writing she’s doing now than some of the slightly less precocious songs that follow. Still, there’s something to be said for the sheer zippiness with which Swift conveys teen heartbreak in “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” which has a lyric that shows Swift had long since absorbed the lessons Nashville had to offer about how to come up with a high-concept song — the concept, in this case, being just to stick the word “mister” in front of a lot of phrases relating to her shallow ex, as if they were honorary titles to be conferred for being a shit, while she employs the “miss” for herself more sparingly.

Some of the remaining outtake songs go back more toward the sedate side of “Fearless”-style material; she didn’t leave any real bangers in the can. “We Were Happy,” the first of two successive tracks to bring in Keith Urban (but only for backgrounds on this one), employs fake strings and real cello as Swift waxes nostalgic for a time when “you threw your arms around my neck, back when I deserved it.” It’s funny, in a good way, to hear Swift at 31 recreating a song she wrote at 17 or 18 that pined for long-past better times. The next song, “That’s When,” brings Urban in for a proper duet where he gets a whole second verse and featured status on half a chorus, and it’s lovely to hear them together. But, as a make-up song, it doesn’t feel as real or lived-in as the more personal things she was writing at the time — and the fact that its chords are pretty close to a slightly more balladic version of the superior “You Belong With Me” was probably a pretty good reason for dropping it at the time.

the 18-year-old Taylor Swift is a great place to visit, but “Folklore” and “Evermore” are the place you’ll want to return to and live, unless you have an especially strong sentimental attachment to “Fearless”… which, sure, half of young America does. It’s not irreconcilable to say that the two albums she issued in the last year represent a daring pinnacle of her career, but that “Fearless” deserved to win album of the year in 2008. Has there been a greater pop single in the 20th century than “You Belong With Me”? Probably not. Did the album also have lesser moments you probably haven’t thought about in a while, like the just-okay “Breathe”? Yes. (I looked up to see whether Swift had ever played that little remarked upon number in concert, and according to setlists.fm, she did, exactly once… in 2018. Because she’s Taylor Swift, and of course she did.) It’s not certain that her duet with Colbie Caillat really needed to be resurrected, except it’s fun, because hey, she even roped former duet partners back into her time warp. But there are so many number that have stood the test of time, like “The Way I Love You,” an early song that really got at the complicated feelings about passion and fidelity that she would come to explore more as she grew into her 20s… and just kind of a headbanger, too, on an album that does love its fiddles and mandolins.

It doesn’t take much to wonder why Swift put up “Fearless” first in this six-album exercise; it’s one of her two biggest albums, along with “1989,” and it’s 13 years old, which does mean something superstitious in the Taylor-verse. In a way, it’ll be more interesting to see what happens when she gets to more complicated productions, like “1989” or “Reputation.” But maybe “Fearless” did present the opportunity for the grandest experiment out of the gate: to recreate something that pure and heartfelt, with all the meticulousness a studio master like Swift can put to that process now, without having it seem like she’s faking sincerity. Let the think-pieces proceed — because this is about six hundred different shades of meta. But, all craftiness and calculation aside, there’s a sweetness to the regression that’s not inconsequential. It harks back to a time when she only wondered if she could be fearless, before she learned it the harder way for sure. What they say about actors “disappearing into the role”? That really applies to Taylor Swift, playing herself.

[lesbian-in-leather]

So it's a little late but I finally made the extended version of this post

I'm just going to rewatch the trailer and write down all of my thoughts, but actually expand on everything this time (and it'll actually be mostly in order)

Maybe it's just the cut for the trailer, but the lawyer scene feels very rushed. BBC made it comedic in its own right, not just a setup, but here it feels very much like "have some exposition so we can get to the ghosts". The ghosts should not be the only point of comedy - they're important, sure, but "Samantha" and "Jay" should be able to carry a scene by themselves

"Samantha" doesn't think it through. At all. She cuts off the lawyer after his first buyer suggestion, and "Jay" doesn't seem to be on board with the idea. In the OG, they were both into this (admittedly bad) idea, so the responsibility was on both of them. Yes they rushed into it, but it was way more thought out than just hearing the words "bed and breakfast" and deciding that's your new plan

Why did they age down Pat for "Pete". I hate it. He's younger and skinnier and there's no reason. Like yeah, the OG doesn't have AMAZING diversity, but it's better than this - don't take out diversity in a remake. Didn't think I'd have to spell that one out

The sage joke is admittedly funny. However, it gives us some insight into the ghosts that I'm not the biggest fan of, and let's us see a lot of their new designs. Let's go across, shall we?

"Issac" is so much less dignified than Thomas. I understand that Thomas isn't always as poised as he'd like to think, but there's a level of class that's missing from "Issac", right down to the way he stands

"Flower" looks high. How can a ghost be high, you ask? No idea. But here we are.

"Sasappis" (I read in an article that this is a character name and I believe tis the Native American guy) has such a tiny reaction I almost missed it. He barely moves while everyone else freaks out. I'm hoping they didn't create this character out of the 'emotionless Native American' stereotype but... I guess we'll see

"Hetty" is the replacement for Lady B, and she's super expressive, protective of the others, and so much younger. She was supposed to be a grumpy mother/grandmother figure - why is she literally leaping in front of the others to protect them? That should be the Captain's job but they've axed him so I guess it falls to her now. Also, why did they make everyone so young?? Like, none of the ghosts look over 35. Why. This was unnecessary and, quite frankly, stupid. Why is everyone at this house dying so young? Just so they can market them as fuckable???? L o a t h i n g

Viking Man also barely moved. He seems interested in the sage and is basically a "cooler" version of Robin as far as I can tell. They seem to have taken away the joy of Robin's character, leaving only Some Guy which would be bad in any genre, but ESPECIALLY a comedy. He has potential in theory, but I feel they aren't going to utalise it

"Trevor". I have so much loathing for this man. Let's have some overall analysis, shall we? First of all, we'll start with, what I hope is a well known fact: Julian is not a good person. I love him as a character and he is starting to learn and grow, but at no point does the BBC or the other characters try to justify his behaviour. CBS saw this, and made Trevor. Trevor is younger than Julian (because for some reason they AGED EVERYONE DOWN), which also makes people far more likely to excuse his actions. They seem to be trying to make him a 'loveable fuckup' who makes bad choices because of privaledge, and I am. So worried. That they're going to try and excuse his actions. He already feels like a writer's self-insert and that never bodes well, especially in this type of character. Mark my words, they're going to market him as the 'relateable' one while having him spout misogynistic views (probably also homophobic and maybe even mildly racist/xenophobic ones too)

MOVING ON

Why is "Pete" sarcastic? I don't like it. Pat wouldn't be the one yelling aggressive comments while everyone's actually doing something together - he should be happy! Encouraging! He should be trying to catch up to the moving group instead of attempting to draw attention away from it!

Everyone looked so happy for the dead relative when she moved on. Hate that - it was so funny in BBC when they were like 'fuck off why does she get to leave' - having "Pete" be happy is fine, but the rest of them? WHY IS "HETTY" HAPPY.

Oh look, "Travor" actively flicks "Pete's" arrow to cause him pain. Why. That was so unecessary. None of the ghosts should try to hurt each other out of pure malice, and they certainly shouldn't get joy from it. It feels like CBS is trying to turn us against "Pete" and put us on "Trevor's" side, which I called, but am not a fan of.

And here she is. "Alberta". What the FUCK did they do to Kitty. She has Kitty's colour palette and fits the diversity demographic, but that is where the resemblance stops. Kitty is SUCH a wonderful character because she was an upper class black woman who was allowed to be soft and sweet and innocent and the others all protected her and I LOVED IT. Do you want to hear some fun descriptors they gave to "Alberta" in this article?

"In her time, she dated a bootlegger and has “seen it all,” and is a bit of a diva. Though tough and not one to take crap from anyone, she has a maternal streak and often acts as the protective den mother to the “family” of ghosts"

This is not only far closer to so many stereotypes, but it's the polar opposite of Kitty!! Having a flapper was a pretty cool idea but she could have had the same character traits as Kitty! Why change that! There was NO REASON TO RUIN HER. Also is it just me, or does it seem like they've made way too many of them sarcastic? Like, they've taken away Alison's snarky streak but given sarcastic lines to way too many of the characters

Also can I just take a moment to question the sheer amount of ghosts they've included. I understand that technically there's about the same amount. But with so much less of American history to draw on and the questionable character choices they've made, it feels like there are so many undefineable characters. Like, how do we differentiate them?? Even in the trailer there are so many scenes where most of them are just... standing around. In BBC, they're all so distinct and you get so much out of rewatches because they're all always doing something - look in the background of any shot and the ghosts who aren't talking have a reason to be there! But in this they're just... standing around. Do better.

I've just realised I'm only 0:59 seconds into a 2:16 trailer so I'm going to split this into two parts

Part two is here