#i don't really have a 'tales of' tag for liveblogging

[bi-hop]

my thoughts on rgu ep 3

we're baaaack! my previous posts are all now under my rgu liveblog tag

lord, here we go with the extended recaps even though it's only episode 3-

it's interesting how memory is being played with here with Utena. such a formative moment is reduced to a strange fairy tale, a piece of gossip with faceless characters. the only proof of it is vague recollections paired with a single physical piece of evidence: the ring. but said ring is also associated with other elements of the world that she is still not fully privy to... just hm

the running gag of Utena being like "you need a friend" and Chu Chu being like "?" and Anthy being like "?" amuses me but also doesn't... can't put my finger on why though so I'm just gonna note it down and circle back to it

the Utena-sama stuff is funny. like, oh, okay, it's fine when girls are admiring you from a distance because you can write it off as a joke, but a girl insisting she's engaged to you and referring to you reverently is when you're finally like "actually I desire men, I totally want to date a boy, the masculinity has nothing to do with being gay, I want a NORMAL BOY" OADJODSJODS OKAY SURE UTENA

Girl, you claim to want to date a guy and then a guy flirts with you and you're immediately like "let's keep it platonic, dude". alright-

^ NOT AT ALL IMPLYING ATTRACTION TO DUDES MEANS YOU'RE RECEPTIVE TO ALL ADVANCES. just kinda funny immediately following a scene where she's like "erm actually I'm totally straight! I am a heterosexual!!!"

"is the prince bi too. did he kiss all of the duelists orrrr..." - riveting commentary from the girlfriend. I have no stance on this, I just think he seems like a creep

communication? in MY anime? it's far less likely than you'd think. (Touga is annoying but what else is new)

the council finally clueing in to the fact that Utena is not in fact in contact with End of the World (whoever THAT is). Saionji is also hiding or something? good fucking riddance

Anyway, I think the use of a prince as the model Utena bases her appearance on and also simultaneously the vague object of her desire is compelling in a compulsory heterosexuality narrative because it's a perfect analogue to how some lesbians I know would simply invent an idealized guy to project feelings onto due to the insistence of heterosexuality as a regime that a girl MUST desire a man. the easiest man to desire is the one you only vaguely remember from your childhood and have no real chance of meeting-

can everyone just leave Anthy alone????

Nanami looks nice, but I've watched too many shows with blonde mean girls to trust that she really has Anthy's best interests at heart...

circling back to the girls and how they treat Anthy (which includes Wakaba of course because Wakaba is meant to be a window into what the other girls are thinking IMO), there's this continual theme of everyone viewing Anthy as like... this seductress almost who is ruining the lives of boys like Saionji over nothing. She's 'shameless', she's a 'creep', whole time she's being abused and treated as an object. the relatable brown woman of color experience, I fear

Touga: I don't care about Utena. I care about a feminized fantasy of her I have in my head, even though my attraction to her started with how she regularly dresses. This is because I can fix her aesthetic-

Anthy and her social anxiety... man... just let her sit in the dorm and play cards with Chu Chu

and sure enough, Nanami sabotages her out of misdirected jealousy. girl, you need to be freed of the idea that girls are competition for your brother's affection. also, you need to kill your brother. you will do this for me and become a feminist-

I'm not surprised that the retaliation against Anthy is called a prank that maaaybe went too far. I'm especially not surprised this commentary is directed towards a moment of sexual violence. ty to Utena for intervening

gay people be dancing on loop... that is all

fun episode! much to chew on! on to the next

[eerna]

the ask you answered about your design process for the lunar chronicles girls made me curious - i've never read and don't really know very much about the series, but i've been sold on many of your other recs so i was wondering if you'd ever made a dedicated post about tlc!

Yayyy!!! I don't have a dedicated TLC rec post, but I've been blogging about it and doing fanart for the past 8 years so my liveblog and ask tags are full if you're willing to risk spoilers. If not, my short rec pitch is: TLC is a YA sci fi futuristic series written as several fairy tale retellings that add up to a greater overarching story. The story followes Cinder, a cyborg mechanic who accidently gets involved in a war between the Earth and the Moon. It doesn't have the strongest worldbuilding and sometimes falls into pitfalls of being written by an American, but it has very memorable, loveable charaters whose friendships you will treasure forever. It is simply too adorable, the vibes are so nice and it is so funny and it's about the power of love and friendship and truly the epitome of good teen girl books. Also read Fairest before Winter

[csthefirst]

Hey so about 10 years ago (literally give or take a week) I read a funny little visual novel called Umineko no naku koro ni. I have been irreversibly changed for the better and to this day I have never read anything that comes close to being as good as Umineko. Honestly, there's a part of me that believes I never will.

So, after ruminating about that, and noticing how eerily close we were to October 4, Umineko Day itself, I've decided to dive back and read the whole thing from start to finish with all the knowledge I've gained since then (both of the tale, and as a person). I've really enjoyed seeing some other people liveblog their thoughts about it (both for first time readers and re-readers), so I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring for that as well!

I've made a sideblog to throw the posts in (as not to annoy the dozens of followers here, who I'm already on thin ice with), and I'll be tagging all the posts with #umireread to keep them organised that way. Apparently no one has used that tag yet. Very surprising!

I'm a stickler for organisation, so the plan is to give each Chapter their own post, with scattered and formulated thoughts throughout. I'll probably have some end of Episode reflections as well to mark each milestone. Also, obviously, heavy spoilers ahoy. Don't touch that blog if you haven't finished reading it yet. I honestly think your first readthrough of Umineko is one of the most magical things you can do with your life, it'd break my heart to ruin that for anyone.

Anyway back to never posting anything and just reblogging things on main. Overly long analytical posts of my favourite piece of media ever on the side. Zip zap zoom

[tyrannuspitch]

thor meta directory

hello and welcome, i'm lucian and i've been analysing mcu thor in excruciating detail since march 2022. this directory is intended to help me and anyone else interested to navigate my backlog of thor posts, which were all initially grouped under one umbrella tag.

a few notes:

my main focus is on the asgardian royal family, and my favourite portrayals of them come from 2011-2013. i have a bit of a loki-centric bias, but i do my best to be self-aware. i think all members of the family are terrible people and i love them for it <3

older posts should be taken with a pinch of salt. my opinions have developed a lot since i first started posting, but i've left pretty much everything up for archival purposes.

sometimes my opinions are strong, but they're never personal, even when i express them in hyperbolic ways. i promise i don't really hate you because of a marvel movie :3

to prevent clutter, source, character, relationship and theme tags are only applied to posts that also qualify for a meta or concrit tag.

some of the theme tags overlap a lot, but i'm doing my best.

most of the theme tags don't have an immediately obvious "thesis" post, but hopefully you'll get a sense of them by scrolling through. i'm also happy to answer any questions on this!

at the point when i organised this archive, it contained 1600 posts, so please excuse any tagging mistakes or typos, and let me know so i can fix them :D

finally: my inbox is open and i love talking about thor! comments, questions, suggestions, discussion, and lighthearted/friendly debate are all very welcome :D also, if you send me music associations or fanart, i'll love you forever - i probably haven't seen it, since i hardly follow anyone in this fandom. (just please no th-rki - i'm firmly in the familial relationship camp.)

okay that's all. have fun! 💚💙💜

main tag (textposts, almost all of them original, ranging from liveblogs and off-the-cuff jokes to meta. 2000+ posts)

asgardian art (umbrella tag for visual fanworks: art, gifs, graphics, etc. almost all reblogs. 1000+ posts)

by post type:

meta (800+ posts) - meta highlights (100+ posts) - concrit/negativity - text reblogs - fanart - gifs - stills - jokes and silly posts

by source:

thor 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - avengers 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - loki tv - other mcu - comics - thor: tales of asgard (cartoon) - other marvel - myth + history - fandom - other

by character:

thor - loki - odin - frigga - laufey - hela - malekith - thanos - the other - sif - warriors three - heimdall - valkyrie - jane - erik - sylvie - mobius - kang - avengers - fury

note: tumblr has a link limit! i've had to remove the links to supporting characters' tags to stay within it, but the format is: /tagged/ch:%20laufey, /tagged/ch:%20hela, etc.

by relationship:

thor: frigga - loki - odin - sif - w3 - jane - erik - avengers - fury

loki: frigga - odin - laufey - sif - w3 - thanos - the other - sylvie -mobius - kang - erik - jane - avengers

odin: frigga - laufey - hela - kang - fury - bor

house of odin (for when it's really the entire family at once - not an umbrella tag)

by theme/topic:

abuse + empire - fate + hierarchy - suicide + sacrifice - imprisonment + exile - devotion + treachery - honour + villainy - cycles + scapegoats - manipulation + mind control - order + chaos - war + apocalypse - undeath + afterlife - the threefold death - trickster loki - jester loki - servant prince

childhood + immortality - gender + sexuality - ergi - sorcery - prophecy - disability - ethnicity - godhood - monsterhood - playing the monster - mirrors + masks - eye motif

expressions of love - love as horror - neck/throat motif - grief - codependence - odinsons as twins - redemption - mjolnir - saint thor - thor's sinister side

worldbuilding - modern psychiatry - etymology - mimesis

and finally, my ao3 is here. i'm not as active as i'd like to be, but i'm working on it!

[autopotion]

tales of arise demo was very underwhelming. they really decided to showcase the most boring part of any given tales game, AKA the early part of the game where you're not allowed into the big city and have to go slay some random monster before they'll let you in. i got absolutely no sense of the plot or the stakes. none of the companions stuck out to me, but tbh that could be because all their skits were about explaining their abilities and didn't do a very good job of illustrating the dynamics between party members (or maybe the dynamics are just kind of cold and uninteresting, which is the worst case scenario).

the world was pretty but static and non-interactable (in typical tales fashion), where bushes just glow if you can harvest something from them. there's no physics when you walk into a bush or a fern either, which, for as pretty as a game this is, really took me out of it. also the new skit format of like... idk what to call it, animated comic strips? looks like mid-aughts machinima. it's really weird, i'm not sure if i like it.

combat was just okay. it's definitely part of the berseria genre of all free running and no rhythm, but at least there's a dedicated normal attack button instead of every attack being an arte. people were mocking it as "tales but dark souls" and at first i was like lol? it's a party-based game with all the typical tales artes and combo attacks, i'm not sure about that... but in the boss battle i had to do a lot of expertly-timed dodging and had to strike it when it was facing away from me, which felt a little soulsborne-y, so i could see it.

i don't know if you would strictly call that a "soulsborne" thing though, since modern rpgs have drifted away from slow, tactical combat and into fast-paced action based on reflexes. final fantasy's turn-based system, dragon age's tactical mode, elder scrolls' RNG combat, and tales's own rhythmic fighting game style have all evolved into much faster and flashier action, and while i think dark souls was part of that shift, every single genre has done it, in part 'cause tech can handle that kind of energy now i think. games with slower-paced combat are now niche, indie, or deliberately retro.

also there's a campfire mechanic, sure, but its utilization reminds me less of dark souls than of grandia ii, since it also includes little cinematics of everyone hanging out around the fire (grandia ii has little inn scenes if you stay the night in an inn and have dinner, which i've always adored and wished more games would do).

anyway. i'm not sure why they couldn't have compiled a demo with a tangible story hook. absolutely nothing about the classic "go slay the monster" story endeared me to any of the characters or made me desire more from the world. i had nothing to latch onto that would make me care about the characters and whatever their plights are.

i played the project triangle strategy demo recently, and while that game is undeniably not going to be very good, the demo was very solid insofar as introducing you to both the mechanics & the storyline. you had to figure out if you were going to sacrifice your friend or not. a king got beheaded. it threw you right into the story immediately, and was much more effective at keeping my interest.

meanwhile, if i hadn't read any of the game synopses, i would have no fucking clue what tales of arise was about. i understand that you get a different movie at the end based on the character you primarily played as, which might give me more hints as to their stories and dynamics, but i played through the demo once and felt like you know what that's enough for me. i don't think i'm gonna do this again actually. and that means your demo... wasn't very good lol.

[luo-yiguo]

Tag Game

I was tagged by @susuwatari-kompeito! Your blog tagline is a pile of knives and I love it! <3

Three Relationships:

1) Fu Shen x Yan Xiaohan (黄金台 / Golden Stage):

Where to even start?? Enemies-to-lovers power couple + arranged political marriage + heaps of flirting and romance. So. Great.

2) Xu Xilin x Dou Xun (过门 / Guomen):

I am a sucker for character growth and development, and these two don't disappoint on that front. This book made me ugly cry like nothing else, and I am still not over it. Also, they have THE most hilarious child (ok, fine, it's a parrot)!

3) Cui Buqu x Feng Xiao (��双 / Wushuang / Peerless):

These two are 🤡x🤡 24/7. They are SO funny and ridiculous. Nothing says, "I love you" like kidnapping, poisoning, and constantly plotting your lover's rival's downfall. Petty, scheming, might-die-at-any-moment, prickly control freak (with secret marshmallow center) whose favorite hobby is digging metaphorical pits for others vs. the most shameless, narcissistic mysophobe who secretly enjoys falling into said pits. E.g. FengCui, 100% head-over-heels:

Last Song

Ottorino Respighi - Pini di Roma P 141

Last Movie

I...haven't watched movie in so long, I honestly can't remember.

Currently Watching

Oh god, I am in the middle of so many things right now....Here's some highlights:

Link Click (donghua) - This is really good. Highly recommended.

Ugly Beauty (cdrama) - This one randomly popped up in one of my feeds randomly, and I decided to give it a go. It's actually pretty good so far. Really funny, good pacing, and the lead actress is excellent.

Ever Night (cdrama) - an epic tale of adventure, intrigue and revenge, featuring guest star Chen Feiyu's Eyebrow.

Mr. Queen (kdrama) - This show is really funny so far, and is starting to get into some good court intrigue stuff. The lead actress is a hilarious physical comedy genius.

Currently Reading

The Langya List - Finally getting around to reading this, and doing a bit of liveblogging along the way!