#i hate to say MoDeRn AuDiENcE because only a specific type of person says it these days

[freshcut-chetney]

Unpopular opinion but I just can't get to liking Taash. They've got some funny moments but it's like they wrote this character thinking they should have the personality of a moody teenager which is a... choice.

[heartrender6]

most of the kuwei hate in this fandom is absolutely racially motivated and most of it is probably subconscious but i NEED to talk about this.

and not because i think people r thinking "i hate kuwei!! he's asian and i hate asians!!" tbh most anti asian racism on the internet goes way deeper than that.

basically, what i believe to be the most prominent type of racism against asians, especially on the internet, is stereotyping. specifically "uwu-ification." the east asian entertainment industry likes to paint asian people as cute, submissive and sweet because it markets disturbingly well to american audiences, and whether people mean to or not, they internalize it and it affects the way they think of asian people as a whole. This mostly happens to east and southeast asian women, but definitely a lot with men too, especially in more recent years with the whole yaoi culture thing (i fucking hated typing that) becoming more popular. simply put, it's fetishization.

so how does this relate to kuwei? well, when kuwei is introduced to us, and im not gonna dance around it— he is pretty stereotypically asian. he's shy, innocent, small, good at math/science and— you guessed it— no speaka engrish. leigh bardugo lays the perfect trap for fandom white girl weeaboos to gush over this guy. once i came across a modern au where kuwei's whole northern chinese-mongolian ass is a "shy japanese transfer student." i really wish i was making this up.

but then we find out that kuwei is actually a conniving little shit who is really quite terrible at science and spends all day making shitty drawings of his crush instead of doing math or wtv. The turning point where we are told this is the jesper kiss. This is the point where we find out kuwei is not the yaoi uwu baby we thought he was. and how does fuckin 2/3 of the fandom react?? hate. instant hate. If you search "i hate kuwei" on twitter there are tweets both defending and attacking him, but there is significantly more of the latter.

most of them claim to hate him for kissing jesper but like... jesper kissed him. He doesn't say anything because, in his own words, "we're all probably going to die anyway." does no one see how tragic that is?? he let his first (probably) kiss be taken by someone who he knew didn't even like him because he thought it would be the only one he'd ever get.

and yet the only thing people see is that he "got in the way" of wesper and he's evil. throughout the series kuwei is given no agency, and that's the point of his character. everyone on the planet treats him as a weapon or a bargaining chip. he gets tossed around like a rag doll and to white (or otherwise not asian) audiences, that makes him the perfect picture of a little asian cutie i almost vomited typing that holy shit. but the moments where he takes something for himself— insisting on going to ravka, kissing jesper back— that's what makes people hate him. and don't even get me started on the way people project their hatred onto the other crows, especially wylan. yall will act like wylan loathes kuwei with all his being. he doesn't!! wylan is not a hateful person and he always defends kuwei!! but nooo, kuwei sucks and he deserves it for daring to be a person instead of an idea.

and hey?? guess what?? kuwei was NEVER in the way of wesper. there was no love triangle. narratively speaking, there was never any threat that kuwei would end up with jesper instead of wylan. never ever. the kiss was literally only put there to create drama for wylan and jesper. we never even hear how kuwei feels about it. stop using that as an excuse to hate on kuwei when we can all see it's because you're subconsciously mad at an asian person not being nice.

also disliking kuwei does not automatically make you racist, im just saying a lot of hatred towards kuwei is rooted in racism.

tagging my fellow aapi moots (that i know of) because i wanna hear yalls thoughts on this! @hauntedacousticversiontv @dramaqueentruther

[rruhlreviews]

Film Review - IT Parts 1 & 2 (2017 and 2019)

I have not read the book IT or watched the older movie adaptation, so my only point of reference for this story is the two films from 2017 and 2019. I suppose I should preface this review by saying I wasn’t a huge fan. In general, I’m not a horror movie watcher, despite writing horror and reading it. There’s something about the visual aspect that takes it to a different level from the written word, where the fear feels more imaginary because it really is all in your imagination; you can’t see it or hear it. Horror is a genre, like romance, in which personal boundaries and tastes play the utmost role in one’s enjoyment of a story. I’m not a fan of stories that involve kids getting hurt, so this was never going to be for me. The Shining was different, maybe because it was more focused on the adults and Danny was never hurt too bad. The casual ableism and homophobia, especially in Part 2, left a bad taste in my mouth with the escaped mental hospital killer and “bury your gays” tropes. Anyway, while this movie was not for me, clearly it was for a lot of people given the blockbuster success. I’ll say right away that Stephen King’s name was a significant player in the success of IT. He's such a well-known horror author that someone brand new to the genre is likely to pick up something by him first, and longtime fans are going to eat up anything that comes out with his name on it. Let’s focus on the story, though. In a character driven story, it is the strength of the characters and the compelling dynamics and motivations between them that turn IT into a popular tale.

People love an underdog story. The group call themselves “The Losers,” and you can’t get more underdog than that. In this unbelievable world with alien fear entities, the characters’ motivations are touching and perfect in their simplicity. Someone wants to know what happened with his little brother’s disappearance. Someone wants to escape her abusive father. Someone has hidden romantic feelings for someone else. I remember when IT Part 2 came out, I had a friend who was obsessed with the characters, specifically Richie and Eddie. They don’t get a happy ending, but there’s enough potential there to capture an audience’s imagination, especially an audience that wants to see more LGBT+ characters; 2019 wasn’t a long time ago, but still in 2024, there aren’t a lot to choose from. Catharsis is an appealing emotion for an audience to crave, and has been for all of human history. Tragedy is one of the oldest artforms, going all the way back to Ancient Greece, progressing through Shakespeare, and coming to our modern emotionally motivated genres. For an example on this timeline closer to IT, there’s Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes with the unsettling circus that preyed on a fear of aging. Compared to First Blood, IT has a pretty simple perspective on the good vs. evil theme, and it works wonderfully for the story being told. IT shows that you can have a book or movie with very popular, very old plot types and themes and still make it unique and appealing.

Even more basic than anything else mentioned before, down to the roots of the horror genre: IT is about people who want to confront a fear. The 21st century has been characterized by widespread anxiety. Economic downturns, climate crisis, wars across the world, censorship, backwards movement in human rights, and an entire plague. An audience seeks a safe environment to process fear and see it defeated in a tangible sense. The different ways Pennywise manifests in the film reflect our cultural fears: disease, hate crimes, loss of loved ones that we felt should have been preventable. And yes, the less abstract and existential ones like spiders and clowns. IT permeates our pop culture. I knew who Pennywise was long before delving into the movies. I wonder, were clowns a big fear before IT, or did it cause a surge in clown related fears? Does anyone remember the weird scary clown incidents from 2016?

There’s something interesting to be said about horror movies, which contain characters who are meant to be so grotesque and avoided at all costs, being turned into cute consumer goods. I was at the mall today and saw two different stores with displays with backpacks, shirts, and plushies of horror movie baddies like Jason, Chucky, and Pennywise. If you go online, you can find hundreds of results for smut with these creepy villains in less than one second. I am not shy to say I’m a monster enjoyer, but I can’t say I personally get the appeal of some of these more gruesome things like Pennywise. I never watched a horror movie like IT before and I don’t intend to again. I’m content with tamer shows like The Twilight Zone, and my Halloween decorations include classic monsters like skeletons, ghosts, and vampires. This all being said, I salute those with an interest in the creepy clowns and dolls and demons that I avoid, just like I’m sure there are others who like visceral horror but shy from the gothic tales and psychological thrills I prefer. Maybe preference doesn’t have to have an explanation. There doesn’t have to be deep literary analysis or audience psychology to study— “I just think it’s neat” is reason enough to enjoy a character or story! The horror genre is so varied, and it’s a wonderful thing. There’s a story for every fear that anyone is trying to confront, a story to excite anyone’s macabre fancies, and a special villain for every villain lover.

[thowawayuntilfurthernotice]

So, I finally watched Velma.

Before I go any further I just want to make something clear, no I’m not defending this show against criticism, nor am I trying to convince you that it’s some sort of hidden gem. I’ve watched all the episodes that have been released at the time of writing, and in all honesty, I think Velma is pretty mediocre. 

Not good, but nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. So, if you just wanted my honest thoughts about Velma, there you go, you can stop reading now, go back to whatever it is you’re currently doing. As for everyone else, get comfy, because this is gonna be a long post.

I wanna get the positives out of the way first, I genuinely like the show’s artstyle, in an era where every single “adult” cartoon has to look like Rick & Morty, this show stands out from the rest by having its own unique artstyle, that being said, Norville does look weird whenever he’s facing forward. But that’s a minor nitpick. 

Kinda wish the quality of the animation was a bit better though, but it’s an animated show made specifically for streaming, so the animation quality was always gonna be so-so.

As for the characters, I didn’t find them as unlikable or annoying as other people did - mostly because I never really had that much of a personal attachment to the Scooby gang to begin with - though if I had to pick a favorite I’d have to go with Norville, I find that his optimism and general good nature is a breath of fresh air, as I’m so sick of every modern adult animated series having every character be an unlikable asshole or a complete dumbass.  

Nevertheless I do agree that the “Look at how much of a loser Fred is!” jokes got old real quick, and I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t even like Fred. But those jokes weren’t bad enough to make me want to quit watching. 

As for the other jokes, they’re super hit and miss, I do feel like if the first two episodes just toned down the raunchy/”meta” jokes then the backlash wouldn’t have been so bad, because there were some jokes that made me chuckle, like Brenda’s funeral, Norville’s hair brained schemes to win Velma over, the school fighting tournament name being too long etc. But sadly, those types of jokes are few and far between. 

Oh, and the hallucination sequences are pretty cool. 

Now that we got the positives out the way, let’s talk about the negatives. I really don’t understand why this show needs a recap at the start of each episode. Did the showrunners think people were gonna watch the show out of order? Or did they do that because they were planning on airing the show on Adult Swim in the near future? Either way, it’s super annoying.

Also, I really hate how the show just awkwardly cuts to the end credits. I know Harley Quinn also did this, but it’s way more noticeable here. Almost like the end credits are trying to jump scare you to death. 

But I think my biggest issue with the series as a whole is its obsession with trying to be as “meta” as possible, it really got on my nerves, to the point where I legit wanted to yell out “I get it! You’re self aware.” 

Thing is, I don’t mind meta humor. Archer and American Dad are two great examples of how to properly implement meta humor into a sitcom narrative, but what makes those two shows work is that they’re not trying to impress the audience by showing how smart they are. 

Simply having the characters point out tired old cliches and tropes isn’t clever, it’s taking the easy way out. I honestly wouldn’t have minded this as much if Velma was the only character who was making “meta” references, but every single character does this. To the point where I was expecting someone to look directly at the camera and say “Are these self aware meta jokes doing anything for you?” 

Look, I get it, the reason why they’re doing this is because of Rick and Morty, a network executive most likely looked at the meta humor from that show and said “Do that for a Scooby Doo spin off aimed at adults.” 

If the show would just tone down the “We’re so meta” gimmick and put more effort into fleshing its characters and story out, then I honestly think it could be pretty decent. But as of this writing, it just feels like it’s struggling to find its own identity. 

Who knows, maybe the writing will get better down the line, but as of right now it’s a mess. 

Alright, time to talk about the “controversy” surrounding this show - because that’s all anyone wants to talk about - so here goes……

I don’t give a shit about any of this culture war nonsense, nor do I give a shit about these Twitter threads over analyzing every single joke, and I certainly don’t give a shit about Mindy Kaling or her political views, so why am I bringing any of this up? Because the discourse is annoying. 

It’s okay to just admit that you don’t like the show, or that you think it’s “cringe” or whatever, but all this discourse has become unbearable. You cannot go anywhere online without running into someone complaining about the show. It’s Ghostbusters 2016 all over again, and I’m just so tired. 

I’m tired of the internet latching onto a piece of media and creating never ending discourse about said media, I’m tired of seeing people who genuinely liked working on shows/movies get bullied and harassed. And I’m just tired of people being unwilling to say “Wow, this looks like shit” and moving on with their lives. 

Yes, no media should be immune to criticism, but going out of your way to ruin someone’s livelihood because they created or worked on something you hated just makes you an asshole who deserves no sympathy.

[sergeantsporks]

As someone who isn't white I find it very odd thay people are insisting Hunter is only liked because he's white. He's liked because he's an incredibly complex character, who represents a good person working on the wrong side.

As someone who has been through many fandoms and has liked many sympathetic villains, I've noticed this seems to be a crit trend with villains specifically. I even saw a post once saying that writers should "stop making their villains children cause people will like them and excuse their actions" as if making a villain a child isn't an intentional narrative tool by the writer to specifically have the audience react that way on purpose. Some people just want to feel like they have the moral high ground, I guess.

I think a lot of people forget that characters like this are no longer a classic Disney morality of "good guy bad guy", but stories are now much more theme driven than they used to be. This character doesn't represent a specific moral standpoint, they represent a theme, an ideal, a unique type of conflict. Villains are no longer just obstacles for the heroes to stop, they're narrative tools, meant to represent something, generally a theme of some sort, and dismissing them as "this guy is a villain so I must hate them" is dismissing all the effort thay the writer put into the character, and is just generally poor literary analysis.

Oh! I actually read an interesting book about this a while back called "the witch must die." It was about how in fairy tales (and by extension, classic Disney) the bad guy, the witch, whatever, was often killed AS a theme. The bad guy represented a part of the protagonist, a flawed part. For instance, in Grimm's Snow White, Snow White is tricked first by allure of laces to put on her dress, then by an ornamental comb laced with poison. She is vain, which is, of course, ALSO the main trait of her evil stepmother. The villain in a fairy tale often must die because they reflect a flaw in the hero, a flaw the hero must overcome in order to grow. By killing the villain, they are killing their own vices. Ergo, the witch must die.

BUT! Like you said, themes have shifted over time. Heroes are no longer paragons but with one glaring flaw, stock characters easily projected onto by a majority, but more complex characters. In the case of the owl house, Luz's flaws are usually good things taken too far. A caring for her friends that leads to self destructive behaviors, an imagination that often causes her to go too far for the fantasy. Imagination and selflessness are not bad traits, but Luz takes them to an extreme that is unhealthy for her and those around her. They're too much of a good thing. And a lot of more modern heroes follow this path, where they don't have an obvious glaring flaw that needs to be "fixed." Ergo, the villains have ALSO changed. And killing them isn't the same option! We don't want Luz to stop being imaginative or selfless, we just want her to tone those traits down so that it's not unhealthy! So Hunter, the secondary villain who cares too much about Belos to his own undoing, is a villain we don't want to see die! Because that would be thematically a close to Luz caring so much! If you have a more 3D hero, you need a more 3D villain to match, or it's just comical. Villains are often the hero consumed by their flaws (like Belos going MUCH too far for "protecting humanity" and his witch hunter fantasy) or else are dynamic opposites that clash against the heroes. Thus we end up with more sympathetic villains.

Villains are created to make you look inwards, or sometimes outwards at your world. Even 2D "pure evil" villains usually had something to make you think, in their insistence that they're right, or that they deserve to rule, they often point at some facet of society OR they showcase just how ugly character flaws can get if left unchecked. Nothing wrong with being a LITTLE vain, Snow White isn't evil for wanting to put a pretty ornament in her hair, but if you're going to kill your stepdaughter over it, that's a problem. More 3D, sympathetic villains allow you to look in at how there often aren't "good" choices to be made, that people are just people: every bad person had a childhood, and while you shouldn't support bad actions, you should root for people to get better.

Which is the thing with child villains, isn't it? We WANT them to get better. We WANT them to get to experience a better life, to be a better person, because we know that's how it SHOULD be. Most of us know that kids (and everyone, but especially kids) should be treated with kindness. That it's never too late. I was working with a kid at summer camp who tended to hit and name call other kids and by god do I want her to grow up better than that and I want to help her do so. I'm not going to let her hit the other kids, that's not okay, but I'm not going to dismiss her as a lost cause and just hope she quits coming to camp, either. Like you said, that's the POINT of child villains. We're supposed to want them to be better, because we know they can. Feeling sympathy for villains is GOOD, it means we're probably capable of sympathy towards REAL people.

TL:DR: Villains have always been thematic devices rather than an obstacle to overcome, but as heroes grow in complexity, so do the villains, making more sympathetic villains than used to be the case, and that's a GOOD thing.

[masqueradeball]

I have seen a lot of hate for BotBots on social media sites so I want to share my thoughts on it. Please note that I have consumed every cartoon, movie, and almost every comic over the past 30+ year history of the franchise and that variety is key to have a long lasting fandom like Transformers.

I think it's very refreshing when my kids (17 and 9, respectively) and I (an older 30 something) can enjoy the same Transformers show. We are 3 very different Transformers fans in terms of what and who we like, but there we were this morning laughing hysterically over BotBots. We binge watched the entire 10 episodes. My kids and I have nothing but love for this show, and if you go in expecting nothing, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

But why are some fans so hellbent on hating a show like this? Why constantly demand all shows cater to one specific type of fan? It seems silly to limit the potential of bringing in new young fans. Times change, and you have to accept that Transformers has to change with it.

Because let's be real, Transformers wasn't always a dark, dreary colorless drama for adults. G1 was a bright, colorful toy ad to appeal to the youth of the 1980s, and the characters were filled with humor and personality relevant to that generation. Botbots nails that very same concept for a modern day kids audience and I applaud this show for not being another depressing, edgy, heavy political drama full of stuffy and pretentious dialouge in some half assed attempt to please snooty geeks who want to gatekeep children out of a fandom that is based on toys.

Alien robots are for everyone. There is no rule that states all Transformers content must cater to adults only all the time. There's also no rule that says Transformers is just for kids. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Botbots did whatever the heck it wanted to do (there's a whole episode centered on LARPing, another one about going to Prom, and one episode has Burgertron admitting he writes fanfic!) and it all works great because it doesn't care what "hardcore" or "real" fans think. The levels of chaos and insanity in this show is glorious, but so is the relatable-ness of the main chatacters. It's truly heartwarming to see those little bots trying to find their way amongst their own kind that repeatedly rejects them for being too different or for messing everything up just by existing. Kinda like how I feel in the Transformers fandom most of the time.

And of course the serious political drama side of Transformers has a place in the fandom too. Just because I love TFPrime and the MTMTE/LL comics, doesn't mean I have to stop loving Car Robots and Cyberverse.

This post is not bashing those who enjoy the Netflix trilogy/Combiner Wars trilogy or the current comics. I love them dearly, as I love all TF media, and they deserve to exist in the fandom. I'm glad they do.

This post is about how some fans have been trying to keep out new or younger ones by being hyper critical toward a show with a different target audience than what they are. Bashing the fans who enjoy stuff like BotBots or Rescue Bots is ultimately unhelpful. It drives people away from participating in fandom spaces, making diversity of thought in those fan places stagnant.

New fans = growth. Growth = more cool new stuff. It's not advanced science folks. (Leave that to Brainstorm and Shockwave please.)

This post is about making room for a variety of shows and being inclusive to all fans, whether they like IDW, Bayverse, the Unicron trilogy, BW, RiD2015, or whatever. And for a fandom that revolves around characters physically changing their bodies, some of y'all ironically have issues accepting changes.

It's sad that adult fans can't appreciate humor and joy in animated shows anymore and feel the need to rip on stuff like BotBots or Rescue Bots Academy to somehow make their own nerd butts look superior. Because in their minds, why should Transformers be fun or inclusive for everyone?

I've been told numerous times that those who don't like the more mature content within the fandom don't matter or belong here 🙄 which brings up something else I've been wanting to say to some adult fans on various TF Facebook pages:

Black Lives Matter. If you have a problem with two black kids being the main characters in the upcoming new show Earthspark, then gtfo of this fandom and go die mad about it you racist twatwaffles. It absolutely enrages me to see adults make gross racist comments about children, and hate like that has no place in this fandom.

I look forward to watching Earthspark with my kids and giving it a chance, as well as seeing Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback in the new live action Transformers movie 'Rise of the Beasts' next summer.

Because at the end of the day, if I can get a cool action figure to add to my collection, see the joy in my kids eyes as we spend time together watching a cartoon, read people's indepth analysis of characters, or give likes to cool fanarts by talented people inspired by Transformers, then it's all worth it. That's some of the stuff that makes our fandom so much fun, and that is what keeps me coming back for the past 30 years now, and hopefully 30 more years yet to come.

Until then... Til all are one! ❤

[avlillustrations]

I wanna make it clear that Ping is a screenwriter only part-time and he's always gotten his jobs through connections with Jermaine and Omi. Of course he's only one of many screenwriters in the room.

Now, excuse me while I go on a ranting tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with this au.

Why the hell is ge called Ping Pong? He does have an actual name. I get that it's a super long name, and supposedly that's the joke. You give a character a super long and overly complicated name so the other characters are forced to give them a nickname. Kinda like Fez from That 70's Show. But see with Fez we, as the audience, don't actually know his real name. In the flashback scene where he first introduces himself to the other characters there's a really loud and long school bell covering up what he's saying. Not to mention the actors not actually saying a complicated name. He's just listing the names of his coworkers. So the joke in Xiaolin Chronicles really falls flat when we actually hear and know Ping's real name. Maurice Antonio Rolf Jean-Pierre Gaulle LeGrand IV. Just shorten his name? It's really not that hard. You've got a bunch to choose from.

Also, I really hate his character design. I don't dislike Ping as a whole. Not as much as other people seem to have disliked him. But this is still one of my 3 major issues with him (not including the stupid nickname). His design is just so lazy. Whose bright idea was it to just make him a smaller Omi with glasses? I hope it wasn't Christy Hui herself. It's especially weird since he's not even chinese? At least I don't think he is. He was born in Europe, nowhere specific, just Europe. Although given the origins of most of his real name I'm gonna guess he's meant to be French. I could forgive the design if it was revealed he was a literal relative of Omi's. Like they were actually brothers or something but none of the other characters even react to the fact that he's Omi's little mini me. Seems like a wasted opportunity to explore Omi's backstory since he's an orphan raised at the temple. Heck even the original Xiaolin Showdown only had one episode exploring it and it doesn't offer any actual answers. Just an evil plot by Hannibal, Wuya, and Jack to split up the monks.

Second problem I have with him is the convoluted backstory. Keep it simple. Ping is an orphan (like Omi) raised somewhere in Europe (for some reason I kinda remember him being brought up in a temple, not too sure though). He idolized the monks and when he heard they were looking for new recruits he seized the opportunity and went to China. See, simple enough. That's the only bit of information we need. Heck it's more than we got for Kimiko, Clay, and Raimundo. But no apparently he also worked as a messenger delivering mail across Europe due to his immense speed and he lost his job because the mail system evolved to no longer need him. Excuse me? Seriously? Kimiko has a cell phone in this show! The series takes place in modern society. I'm pretty sure majority of the world's mail systems were already developed waaaaaaay before the invention of the cell phone. He shouldn't have even had this type of job to begin with. Speed or no speed. Thirdly, I just don't like the use of his supposed element and just his distinct lack of personality. Ping is the very definition of a Mary Sue character (or a Gary Sue whatever). Perfect in almost every way, instantly befriends main characters, proves to be better than them morally, sad backstory (not too sad in this case thank God), etc. Seriously give the boy some kind of actual personality and feelings. Omi's a total assailed to him in part of the first 3 episodes, let the boy be angry, give him some character flaws like the rest of the monks! And please define what his actual abilities as the dragon of wood are. I swear the only time this stupid reboot let's him use any elemental ability is when he copys the others! What is he the avatar?! It's not enough that Xiaolin Showdown is wrongfully considered a rip off of the last Airbender? You've got to go and actually rip it off in the reboot?! Ugh seriously, I think this upsets me more than my dislike of shadow because Ping is a character with potential. The writing with him was just stupid.

Rant over. Also I officially headcannon Ping to be mixed French-Chinese. Like Marinette Dupain-Cheng from miraculous. God I can't believe I've got an actual headcannon for this show.

[doshmanziari]

Architectural Criticism in 2021/2022 || Part 1.5

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked two articles of hers (more accurately, one article and an image from another), and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “...a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing criticism that takes pleasure in tackling “dry” subject matter with breathless, Meme-heavy sarcasm. I find the tone off-putting, but I appreciate it as one attempt to invigorate and broaden the audiences of architectural appraisal. My issue is that by now the joke has overestimated its capacity for judgmental clarity. Really anything can be made fun of if you’re determined enough, and the more of an unquestioning audience you have the easier it is to believe everything you say is true or coherent.

The image was from this 2018 Vox article: “Betsy DeVos’ summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell” (a title likely devised by the editor; given the other residences Wagner has lambasted, I would be surprised if she truly believes this is among the worst). My observations won’t make sense unless anyone who is reading this reads her article as well, so please do that if you’d like to follow along. It should take only a couple of minutes.

What I’d first draw readers’ attention to is that Wagner spends the first four paragraphs on the United States’ beyond-vast inequality of wealth. Two of these paragraphs are the article’s largest, and the article is twelve-paragraphs-long, meaning that 1/3 of it is devoted to establishing a socio-economic context -- at least, that is the pretense. Once Wagner writes “...getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better”, it is clear that her personal intent is a kind of vengeful mocking, and that her intent for readers is to prime them to associatively, knee-jerkingly despise anything which could come next with flat-affect “lmao”s. It’s hardly irrelevant to mention economic realities when examining luxury items (and what else is a mansion?), but Wagner’s subsequent analysis is not really architectural or even artistic: it is rather about looking at several photographs of a building, knowing who lives there and hating that person (and also imagining that they were responsible for all design decisions), and then mocking this-and-that in whatever ways one can devise. These grievances are understandable, but understandable grievances do not automatically lead to perceptive criticism.

Please look (perhaps again) at the first image. Note that only four, maybe, of the fourteen details Wagner chooses to focus on -- “no wry comment needed”, “these look like playdoh stamps”, “when you love consistency”, and “oh my god is this a shutter” -- approach anything vaguely resembling coherent criticism; and the other four images fare even worse (with the exception of the highlighting of an apparently absurd interior balcony). The rest are inane attempts at saying anything at all. Writing “hell portal” by an upper porch area may be funny for a moment, but what does it actually express? Well, nothing, except the author’s own irritation which will find whatever it can to announce its contemptuous sarcasm. Wagner’s captions will land only to the degree that the reader is humorously sympathetic.

The aforementioned remarks, excepting the one about the embedded chubby Tuscan columns’ Play-Doh-likeness, suggest that the worst thing a building can do is be formally heterogeneous. The implicative corollary here is that good architecture is eminently justifiable in all of its parts -- consistent, unified, rational. This is as fine a personal belief as anything else, but when it is wielded as dogma against architecture which has no interest in being a Petit Trianon it can only reveal its intellectual self-limitations. Wagner writes that “there is a difference between architectural complexity and a mess”, yet what that difference may be is hand-waved away. We just have to believe that thirteen different windows styles is too much. What’s the threshold? Does it depend on the size of the building? The types of styles used? Who knows.

Now of course bad architecture exists, and sometimes the failure indeed points to deficient editorial acumen; for architecture, like any other art, is as much about what’s included as what’s excluded. But in saying so little about the shingle style itself, Wagner seems to have given no thought to readers concluding that all shingle style houses are freakish -- more specifically, concluding that this freakishness is a damning transgression, and that no self-respecting, punching-up class-warrior would ever be caught dead sincerely enjoying their geometric, “exquisite corpse” escapades. In fact, the freakish tendencies of shingle style houses are just what make them such great fun to see, visit, or reside in. Wagner’s article, as far as I can tell, omits this possibility. When she writes, “Betsy likely went with this style because it is very popular in New England and in coastal enclaves of the rich and famous in general”, one is being pushed to presume that the only probable reason the shingle style exists or could be preferred over another style is to signal élite solidarity.

The photograph right above is of Kragsyde, a Massachusetts shingle style mansion, designed by the US-Northeast-oriented firm of Peabody & Stearns, completed in the 1880s. It was demolished almost a century ago, but the few exterior images of it which remain are, I think, fascinating -- maybe most of all for its enormous archway, possibly a porte-cochère, which has a thin, overextending keystone bizarrely driven into the top like a nail puncturing a petrified rainbow. I bring the building up because Wagner gives us no reason to consider why Kragsyde may have been a genuine architectonic accomplishment and not merely an oversized farce of contiguous pretensions. To the layperson hot off of the Vox piece, there may be no artistic difference between it and DeVos’ place, except that perhaps Kragsyde has a more consistent fenestrative application (would that make it better? if so, why?).

I appreciate that only so much can be said when you’re limited to less than a thousand words, especially when the issue is “complicated” (as the byline for Vox’s First-person series advertises). But the problem I keep coming back to is how DeVos’ mansion is treated as a stand-in for DeVos herself. This makes any architectural critique, no matter how pressed it is for size, flimsily presentist: its durability starts and ends with how alive the architecture’s resident(s) and political presence are. On some emotional level, this is pretty sensible: if we despise monarchical institution, we can find a sort of loophole to enjoying Versailles palace on the basis of it no longer being the residence of royalty. Our awe over its decadence and scope is intersectionally “admissible” on the basis of its having become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Similarly, one can imagine DeVos’ mansion being appreciated in a hundred years (should it still exist then) because the passage of time will have rendered DeVos’ person a historical fact, and perhaps more separable, and then tolerable, in that regard -- even if the building remains private.

But if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources. I doubt Wagner actually believes this, because it would betray the entire premise of her McMansion Hell project, which is to demonstrate how so many modern day mansions are deeply unpleasant mounds of visual illiteracy, and cannot hold even a stump of a candle to the luminously learned and eclectic talents of prior great architects such as Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Lutyens, or Ledoux. So what’s the takeaway here? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that if you hate Betsy DeVos, and if you care about class, you should hate her house too. And I do not think that that is architectural criticism.

[sanstropfremir]

ok alright alright alright kingdom episode two

kinda disappointed that they only showed half the stages, but that's just an editing thing to draw out the content so you can air for longer, i'm not super surprised about that. i would have liked to evaluate them all at the same time, but at least this gives me time to go more in depth for all of them since they're full stages this time and I wrote 3000 words for last episode when they only had 100 secs. so this format will probably keep me sane for longer, i think. 

solid stages all round for them, none had especially glaring flaws on the whole. i'm not gonna do a full ranking for this episode since we haven't seen them all, but i will say that btob’s was my favourite from this set and both ikon’s and tbz’s stages were about equal; they both had things i liked and disliked in equal measure so i'm tentatively giving them the same ranking. full opinions and analysis on each stage below the cut, plus another section of general notes because hey what the fuck did you do to that stage mnet???

and for anyone that’s wondering yes i do have the qualifications. also seriously grab a drink or something because this is LONG.

some general notes

and here i thought this section wouldn't be as big as it was last time because mnet was going to get their shit together about the stage design, but noooooooooooo they had to go and make it worse! thanks mnet i hate it! remember how i said you shot yourself in the foot last time? well ya fuckin kneecapped yourself AND all your idols with this one ya dumb fuckin idiots. alright folks welcome back to stage design 101, my recurring segment where i explain the different types of stage layouts and their effectiveness for kpop idol survival shows, i guess.

ok so last week i covered the basics on theatre in the round and traverse staging, which i’ll link here if there’s anyone new or just wants a refresher. i mentioned that its likely that mnet will switch to an in the round style staging because it offers a lot more freedom for camera movement and also for directional blocking. well, i was wrong. so i'm gonna give you a quick rundown of prosceniums. a proscenium, proscenium arch, or just prosc, is an architectural feature that sits around the front ‘opening’ of the stage that delineates the stage from the audience. if you've ever been in or seen any pictures of old european style theatres it can be quite ornately decorated with scrolling, but it's almost always there in most western theatres. it basically provides your ‘wings,’ which are where you exit off into to get offstage, they provide cover from the audience sitelines. pretty much any theatre where the audience is directly opposing the stage across the 180 degree line is a proscenium stage, even if it doesn't physically have the arch. hell, movie theatres are prosc stages. now, there's a secondary architectural feature/device called a false proscenium, where you set a second, smaller archway inside the first prosc, usually done for a specific effect. think of it like a literal framing device; it's often used to visually signify that ‘this is a play, we are telling a story, please be aware that this is a play thank you.’ but sometimes, it can be a semi-permanent structure that’s set in place to narrow the prosc opening. we had this at my university, there was a false prosc set just inside the actual prosc because the stage had a hilariously big prosc opening for a university that never had casts larger than 24 people. so they set false prosc in to make the stage slightly narrower and to widen the wings, because it doesn't matter what size theatre you're in, you always need more wingspace. makes sense? ok, now here’s a very quick drawing of what i'm pretty sure the kingdom stage looks like:

before you get lost: stage directions are oriented to a person standing on the stage, hence SL and SR being reversed. a quick tip for remembering which way is upstage and which is downstage: if you go too far downstage you fall down (most stages are raised between 2-4’ from the floor, so if you step off the end you will actually fall.) the arrows on here signify the entrances i observed during the performances, which is not necessary in this explanation but i just thought it was interesting to note. still not entirely sure what the surrounding architecture is but it appears that the stage is a raised platform inside a room, and not actually built as part of the building. the ‘house’ is just a technical term for where the audience is, and in this case it's where it looks like most of the film crew and the producers/staff are. there’s pretty clearly a platform upstage centre, and i think there may be some others but i don't care about those right now. what i want to talk about is this dumbass false prosc they set IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE. now i suspect that they did this to solve some problems that they could have had that i don't know about, since i don't know who the stage designer was and what the actual limitations of the space are. but basically they've built two stages and stacked them on top of each other to create one very deep stage, and then separated it off with a false prosc in order to control the size of the space a little better, and possibly to add some visual interest. this stage is functional for its purpose, absolutely, and i think, if mnet actually gave a shit about point of view and camerawork, it could produce some really interesting performances. however, because this stage is so deep, it kind of has the same properties as the traverse stage from before, but just with some big led screens in the middle for reasons. you extra have to pay attention to the directionality because you have all the staff and cameras concentrated in one specific cardinal point, so you have to get creative if you want to crossover between the two sides frequently. again, this is not necessarily bad; restrictions often produce some of the most creative decisions.  but! we have not seen a lot of consideration for camera and sightlines and audience pov, hence why i think this setup is dumb: it’s not facilitating the best performances it could.

ok now to the actual performances

btob

this is my favourite of the group because it's very clean lined and utilizes a few simple devices to pretty good effect. i realize these reviews are making me sound like i only like simple performances but i promise this is not at all true i'm just very critical and very picky. let’s start with the costumes, because why not. 

costumes

i like these very much, i love modernized traditional clothing in all forms, and these are very well tailored and well coordinated. they do the bulk of the work establishing the theme for the performance, along with the costumes on the backup dancers. personally i would have liked them to be a bit more colourful, à la the teal detailing that was on minhyuk’s final look. i'm getting a bit tired of the whole trend of having groups only wear all dark or all white, or maybe sometimes red if they're feeling spicy. obviously uniform colour is the easiest way to tie a group together visually, but on a show like this i think the groups would actually benefit more from looking distinct from each other internally rather than establishing the group as whole.

i liked that minhyuk had a costume change but i didn't really care for how it was how it was broken down. this is a very personal quibble because i literally have spent years prepping quickchanges but the method it broke down wasn’t the most visually compatible with the garment and felt kinda clunky. please ignore this anecdote it's just me being picky.

set

i loved the forest! a very excellent way to divide the stage area and obscure the weird stage lines/architecture that mnet has made. plus the snow, flowers, and fog? makes a really sharp and immediately indicative atmosphere, a very good use of visual shorthand to establish place.

i didnt love the screens, they reminded me a bit too much of rolling whiteboards from grade school, but they are thematically relevant. also, i feel like we didnt actually get to see about half the choreo for them? fuckin mnet and idiocy again. fun use of rear projection with the dancers’ shadows, and also good use of them to direct traffic, if you will. 

personally i think that the sheet gimmick from tbz’s performance would have been a better fit here instead of the screens, especially since the fabric motif was already established at the very beginning of the performance. plus you can do some really fun shadow work with a stretch fabric screen. 

personally i think there could have been a little bit more integration between the forest area and the screen area, or they could have done the whole thing in the forest space, but that would require a bit more consideration of camera and choreo maneuverability

sound

really liked this arrangement, obviously the song is iconic but they added a more traditional instrument sound. has good structure for the loose narrative that they had and they were well to label this as ‘theatre’ version because this did follow very closely to a traditional musical theatre sound and style

lighting

no complaints. the overall theme for this episode is apparently blue and red? again with them i like their dedication to a limited colour palette and i especially like the blossoms at the climax

staging

there was pretty clear camera choreo and a minimum of nausea inducing moves. i think some of the effectiveness of the staging got chopped by the editing but that’s not really btob’s fault.

i was just saying i wanted them to give minhyuk some time to shine, i was not expecting to get it so soon! this is a very smart choreo that proves you can be interesting without doing a lot of tricking. minhyuk obviously did a lot of practice and work with that sword, his movements are very fluid and he knows how to handle it. and it looks like its either a blunted proper blade or a correctly weighted replica. a lot of the times when sword choreo looks fake it's because the person either hasn't had enough practice or the weapon is not weighted/weighted incorrectly. only complaints are that you would never hold your fingers/palm that close and un-anchored over the edge of the blade, which is just a safety thing. also you would never scrape your blade on the ground like that, nor toss the thing like dead fish but that's a respect thing with a live blade and this is clearly done for dramatic effect so i’ll forgive it. please ignore this anecdote also it’s just my third dan getting uppity.

ikon

costume/set

smart thematically to go with the sort of miscellaneous 30s-40s (western) aesthetic because it's the fastest way to make it look like you built a theme with mnet’s weird pseudo art deco nonsense they've inexplicably got going on in the set dec. however, they should have stuck the theme all the way through, it would have been more visually cohesive and more interesting. we expect more hiphop/electronic sounding songs to come with these kinds of 4th gen costumes, it would have been anachronistic in a fun way to have them do that second half in 40s style suits. here’s a performance from sdc3 that uses that kind of anachronistic play (this was a combo stage with two ballroom dancers and it has a 20s aesthetic but close enough.) also here’s another routine from sdc3 that does a similar effect on a much more abstract scale, and also it’s a fucking incredible performance and it got slept on by the captains. also yes i know these are incredibly experienced career dancers but they way they construct narrative within their routines and their stage presence is SO GOOD. 

do not speak to me about the backup dancers costumes, holy shit i hate them. i hate them so much. how do you manage to hit too shapeless AND too fitted in the same fell swoop? i'm so mad at these. i'm neutral on bodycon dresses on the best of days but these were absolutely the wrong choice for this stage. generally kpop has abysmal costuming for female backup dancers on the whole but this is just like.....especially lazy. the point of the costume are to help give an indication of where and when you set your performance. they started off with a vaguely 40s theme and then jumped abruptly modern. why? also skirts like that are the literal worst choice for dancing in, hello?? the men’s looks are just sloppy, when you have a garment that big you want it to serve a purpose within the choreo, whereas with this it's just hiding the dancers’ movements.

as for ikon themselves, see everything ive said about black on black on black styling in the previous two reviews. 

the actual set is minimal and that's tragic. i mentioned mnet’s weird art deco theme and it was smart of them to try and play off that with a lack of stuff. definitely a mismatch of stuff pulled from yg’s prop storage, but they made it work as well as they could. no other meaningful comments i’m just kinda sad about it.

sound

the arrangement is fine, no complaints from me. they keyed up the old hollywood style musical theatre sound in the beginning which i really liked. i didn't mind the song/tone switch, i think they pulled it off.

staging

same as btob they learned more towards a theatrical style, which is smart for this particular format of show. i think this was the smartest staging of these three, and also i think the only ones to not get the crew in shot.

despite seemingly leaning into a more old hollywood style the narrative was a bit too loose for my taste. i'm not sure what i would have done to make it clearer at this moment since they had so little to work with, but i did get by on my previous knowledge of the songs. that shouldn’t be the only indication of narrative though! all elements need to support it!!

also like btob they had a pretty intentional point of direction and there weren't a crazy amount of spins. they also used the camera cuts the most effectively that i've seen so far. the first half is actually all in one take!!! incredible!!! thank you!!!! this is how you do it!!

the lighter flick gimmick was well pulled off and a good example of how to use a couple of simple tricks to good effect.

ikon as a whole has really great stage chemistry with each other, and they're extremely cohesive performers. this is a really strong physical performance from them, the dance was very solid and clean. good use of levels without verging into acrobatics. this might be the best group choreo i've seen so far, but we’re not very far so that's not a very high bar to clear.

it's a shame they had the budget of 1 banana.

tbz

i liked this stage better than their intro stage, but i still think they have a long way to go and they're still over ambitious. personally i find stages based on specific pop culture properties to be kind of twee and ineffectual, because it requires a specific knowledge of that pop culture property to work. sometimes the specificity can help with a narrative but you're at risk of alienating a larger portion of your audience out of sheer non-knowledge than anything else. 

costumes

again, interesting garments physically, but not much clarity of relation to the theme other than the colour. also the backup dancers???? another case of backup dancers being from an entirely different stage, what is up with those coats/dresses? looked more like they belonged in either sweeney todd or a vampire movie. 

hands in front of the camera again, but these were used much more effectively.  i'm not the biggest fan of mixing metals and i’m partial to silver on the whole so i didn't love the jewelry, but at least it was vague and stereotypical enough to denote ‘fire magic’ even if it does rely on a derivative middle eastern shorthand.

set

the stage set itself is fine, although definitely feels a bit haphazard to me. doric columns and frozen rocks and whatever that cover for the pyrotechnics was at the front, combined with the candles and the chaise lounge? like ikon, it felt a bit like they were pulling out of the props/set storage. not that all these things do not work together, it's just that you need a thread to tie them together, and this didn't have that for me.

sound

it's a crime they have a song called ‘no air’ and its not a jordin sparks cover. just saying.

i didnt really like this arrangement, again like their intro stage it didn't have a strong structure that suited the narrative, because they were pretty clearly trying a narrative on this one. also were most of the adlibs playback? they were singing live but there were so few shots of anyone specific singing. 

lighting

probably the weakest of the three. the projection design was a bit too tacky for me, and although i appreciated the small amount of variety in colour, it felt way too concert-lighting for me.

staging

the editing on this stage is wack and did no one any good. the hands leading/pov was a really smart device and they should have stuck out the one takes like ikon did, it would have made the whole stage feel a bit more cohesive. a lot better directional camerawork from them this time around, well done. again with the hands in front of the camera gimmick which i actually preferred this time, since they were a part of the narrative. the stretch/silhouette fabric i think they pulled off quite well, even if it didn't really fit thematically with the piece. i actually worked on a show a very long time ago that used this exact same effect with dancers and also rear shadow projection, and it requires a lot of rehearsal and trust to pull off well, so props to them. i think it was the wrong choice because there isn't an established motif for the fabric, so it kind of appears out of nowhere for one specific visual moment and then disappears, and i think that time could have been better served for something else narratively relevant.

again, these 4th gen groups are overly focussed on gimmicks as a way to make up for the lack of experience. personally i think this will be detrimental in the long run, and a reliance on gimmicks means that you don't trust your performers. tbz have the manpower to be doing some pretty cool collective dance work and i dont think its being trained or utilized correctly. they are suffering from a lack of cohesive stage presence right now and that can be fixed with training and time.

this might be because the group sizes are so different between these three but this choreo is very directionless. mnet is also providing to be absolute garbage at editing and i feel like i can't see the choreo at all.

this is a thing i've noticed with kpop camerawork in general, there’s very little regard for actually viewing the choreo as a singular work. and for some reason the camera always needs to be moving???? people do actually want to see what’s happening on the stage. the choreographer can only see from one spot, so from that spot is how they are intending it to look. you wouldn't need to upload full cams of every music stage if you just filmed the choreo properly in the first place. if you watch the two sdc3 clips i linked you can see a clear difference in maintaining the integrity of the choreo, even though both shows use several cameras and a lot of cuts.  obviously for kpop you want the money shots of idols’ faces but i definitely think there’s a healthier middle ground than what we have now.

ill wait for full subs but i want to know where in the fuck in sk you can rent a tank thas clearly been custom made for underwater photography, because that’s extremely cool even if it was absolutely unnecessary to the actual stage itself. i can think of several ways off the top of my head that would have achieved that same freezing effect without any of that wasted time and effort.

mnet decided to drop full cams while i was writing this and despite watching those my opinions are the same.

in conclusion, some more general thoughts:

i think ikon and btob got it right by leaning more into the theatrical than the cinematic, if that makes sense. i might be talking up my own ass here but these are theatre performances, and they should be treated as such. trying to do things that you can do on film isn't going to do you any favours in the long run, and it makes it harder to make a cohesive performance. i’m harping a lot about narrative but it is so important to performance. although it is not technically necessary, when doing big theatrical performance stages like this it does help with clarity of intent and general success. humans have brains structured around storytelling, it is literally the way our history has been passed down for tens of thousands of years. the atlantic published an article recently on narrative and memory, and it's a really excellent read for maybe after you've taken a break from this behemoth, oh dear god. 

tldr: the stages were good but disappointing in their own ways. mnet continues to sabotage via weird stage design decisions and bad editing. see you next week! (or in my ask box if you have questions)

[fandomlurker]

A Ponderous Rewatch: Bubba Bo Bob Brain and Cameo

Can I just say that I think I’m somehow getting worse at keeping the screenshot count down?

Neither the cameo nor the main episode in this post are animated by TMS, so that’s not the reason for the surprisingly high screenshot count. However, the regular episode is animated by Wang Film Production, who are the same folks that animated the very first PatB segment and have done most of the episodes I’ve covered so far, including the previous one. I can tell they’ve gotten a better handle at animating our main duo in the skit we’re looking at today, especially Brain. Wang Film Production is no TMS, but they’ve gotten very, very good at expressions. They’ve also seemed to settle into a rounded and soft design for Brain, something that they’re kind of known for among fans if I recall correctly. Pinky can still be a little…off at this point in time, though.

Moving on, the cameo that we’re starting with is animated by Akom Film Productions. They’re the folks who usually do the animation for the Chicken Boo and Goodfeathers episodes, and they usually do a pretty good job with those characters. As far as our mouse duo go, though, Akom has only done “Opportunity Knox” so far. You know, the one with the oddly nightmarish Brain close-ups. Thankfully we get none of that since it’s only a short bit.

So yes, onto the cameo in “Noah’s Lark”!

So this is actually a Hip Hippos episode, but luckily we don’t have to deal with them at all right now. The premise is the story of Noah’s Ark, obviously, but the character of Noah is done as a parody of the stand-up comedian Richard Lewis, who was somewhat popular in the 80s. The most modern and notable media he’s been involved in that people on Tumblr might know him from (or at least, what I think folks here might recognize, it can be a little hard to gauge that since both millennials and gen z folks are the main demographic of this site) are Robin Hood: Men in Tights where he played Prince John, and Curb Your Enthusiasm where he plays himself.

Noah is rounding up two of every animal to go onto the ark (which is a popular depiction of how the story goes, but is actually false: it’s supposed to be seven male and female pairs of “clean” animals of each species and one pair of “unclean” animals of the same species, but that’s as far as I’m going into that topic). He’s nearly finished the list and has just been mauled by the wolverine pair, and…

“Lab mice?...”

The fact that he’s specifically asking for a pair of lab mice raises a lot of questions that I don’t think we have time to unpack.

The pair of lab mice that he gets is, of course, Pinky and the Brain.

And Pinky is, for the very first time in the series, crossdressing, presumably to pass as a female mouse so he and Brain can survive the great flood by boarding the ark.

…This is also a lot to unpack.

“Check!” they both exclaim, although Pinky does it in a very deep voice for some reason.

Wow, look at the surprise and then hostile suspicion on Noah’s face there!

Their outfits are very 1950s, with Brain even carrying a suitcase. Anachronisms aside, these two really went all out for the “we are a normal, heterosexual pair” ruse, didn’t they? Not only is Pinky in a dress and a blonde wig, but Brain even put on a little bowler hat. Why did he feel the need to do that? Did he feel left out of dressing up otherwise? Was he afraid he wouldn’t look “manly” and hetero enough without it? I have so many questions…

“Whew! These pantyhose are killing me, Brain!”

Wow, for once it’s Pinky physically hurting Brain, even if it’s a relatively minor tug on the ear.

“I think I prefer knee-highs…”

…Pinky, you’re not even wearing pantyhose. What the hell are you talking about?

Assuming that this is just the result of an animation oversight (which, honestly, I’m certain it was), we now know that his disguise went so over-the-top as to include pantyhose which Noah wouldn’t normally see…and also it’s a type of pantyhose that Pinky doesn’t even like wearing, which implies to me that this is something Brain acquired for him.

There is just so much going on in cameos like these if you think about them for even a few seconds.

Also, I agree with Pinky. Knee-high pantyhose are much less uncomfortable to wear.

BONK!

So the mice are allowed to board and the audience is left to think that their little ruse worked, but immediately after the two run off and are out of listening range Noah rolls his eyes and says

“Who am I to judge?”

Heavily implying Noah completely saw through it and let them on anyway. Wow.

That’s the end of their cameo. Who’d have thought that this little scene would be the precursor to Brain having Pinky crossdress to disguise him as Brain’s wife so many times in the series? And who’d have thought that this very first time wouldn’t fool anyone at all?

But now let’s move on to the meat of this rewatch post:

We open to Acme Labs at night, as usual, though I’ve never noticed until now how lonely and eerie the place seems if you ignore our mouse duo.

“Pinky… I believe I have conceived my most brilliant plan to date!”

Oh boy, we have another first for today! Brain is very much a fan of using temporary mind control for his plans. It’s the method he falls back on the most, which is very interesting when you consider his various psychological issues involving having control taken away from him all his life.

“I shall use subliminal mind control to take over the world!”

“…Pinky?”

The hand-on-hip pose here is great.

“Today’s inside story is country mega-star Willie Ray Cypress!”

Uh, Pinky? Considering that this is pretty much the expression you had while looking at Pharfignewton, I am very, very worried about you looking at the Billy Ray Cyrus parody the same way.

“Don’t tell my head, my empty hollow head!~”

“You know I wouldn’t understand!~”

Same, Brain. Same. It’s just like Pinky to enjoy a song as earworm-y as this (not to mention how relevant this parody is to his everyday experience with Brain’s plans), but lord was the real song this is making fun of annoying as hell back in the day. Like, I was a small child at the time this song came out, and I still hated how often this would be played on the radio.

Luckily, Brain pounces on the remote’s off button and puts an end to the nonsense.

But oh, the look of sad betrayal on Pinky’s face is heartbreaking! I’m sorry, sweetie!

“It must be inordinately taxing to be such a boob.”

Heh, Brain said “boob”. /inner six year old

“You have no idea…”

“Pinky, do you know what a subliminal message is?”

“Something you leave on a subliminal telephone answering machine?”

Nice try, Pinky.

“No. It is a recorded message perceived only by the subconscious human mind.”

Two things here:

This diagram bothers me because my mind always interprets the way they’ve drawn the bottom of the cerebellum as the person shutting their eyes extremely tightly.

Brain using his own tail as a pointing stick is very, very cute and I love this detail.

“I have recorded such a message.”

He’s still holding his tail, aaaa!~

“Citizens of the world, you are under my control. You will do whatever I say…”

“Nice mix, but it’s not exactly danceable, is it?”

Oh, Pinky. Only you would sincerely compliment Brain’s incredibly dry mind control message and then immediately point out a flaw that has nothing to do with its purpose. Bless you, you stupid and wonderful little mouse.

I like how Pinky’s interjection startles the hell outta Brain for a moment, too.

“If people heard this message enough times, they would succumb to my control and we could take over the world!”

Notice that despite Pinky being a minor annoyance and despite the fact that Brain claims that everyone will be under his control, yet again it’s still both of them taking over the world.

“What do you think, Pinky?”

And he still wants Pinky’s input. It’s small and scattered and very, very subtle, but in my opinion this is Brain’s most frequent way of showing that he cares about Pinky. Brain likely isn’t even aware that he does it. Pinky might not be aware, either.

“I think I’m getting dizzy and I rather like it! Ahahahahahoo!~”

“Sometimes you hurt my head, Pinky…”

And yet, Brain. And yet…

“The only problem: How to get this message repeated worldwide airplay…?”

Offscreen, Pinky turns the TV back on and startles Brain again, but only for a moment.

Another great pose and expression here: Mildly annoyed, but interested and on the verge of an idea.

“I just adore Willie Ray!”

“I listen to his song twenty times a day!”

I…really don’t know why they chose to have this shot done with Brain walking over the “camera” towards the TV so we get a brief close-up of Brain’s mousey behind. It made me laugh, though, so I thought I’d share.

“Pinky… Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”

I’m also kind of obsessed with this brief expression of Pinky’s I unintentionally managed to capture. It’s a bit of a smug, knowing, and yet endeared look. I’m sure it’s completely unintentional on the animators’ part, but I love the idea it gives me of Pinky knowing exactly what Brain’s thinking but purposefully saying something entirely unrelated to playfully tease him.

“Well, I think so, Brain, but burlap chafes me so.”

To be fair, Pinky, I think burlap chafes everyone. And were you thinking about doing a potato sack race? That’s the only connection to burlap I can think of that would be in any way relevant...

“Country music, Pinky. I will go to Nashville and become the biggest country music star of all time! Everyone will hear my record and my subliminal message and I will take over the world!”

In all honesty, that would probably be easier to do in the early 90s when this takes place since country music wasn’t such a…well, “dead” is a bit of an exaggeration, but country music as a genre is incredibly unpopular nowadays with the occasional notable exception. In the early 90s? Not so much.

“Egad, Brain!”

This is the most enthusiastic swoon I’ve seen and heard from you yet, Pinky.

“Oh! But no, no… It takes people years of hard work to become famous, Brain.”

Well, that or they’re born into a famous family. Or they’re just rich.

“Why, take Kathie Lee Gifford for example: She did community theatre, and—“

I actually can’t find anything via Googling about Kathie Lee doing community theatre before she became famous. She seems to have studied music and drama in university, and had a folk music group in high school, but the only reference to theatre I can find is professional musical theatre in the late 90s.

It’s possible Pinky’s right, though.

BONK!

BRAIN! …Wait, where did you even get that tiny club?

“Stop talking, Pinky, I must think.”

You… Brain, I think I’m starting to see why some fans believe you may be as neurodivergent as Pinky is, but in a different way. I can’t in good faith elaborate on that myself, since I haven’t been diagnosed as such and it would be completely disrespectful of me to do so, but if anyone wants a good little theory on that, try here.

“I have calculated every ingredient necessary to become a country music mega-star. Read me the list, Pinky!”

He’s typing by hopping from one key to another, aww!

Eeeh, the lettering work on that computer is pretty bad, though.

“A cowboy hat.”

“Check!”

“A southern dialect.”

“Check, ya’ll!”

“Nice, Brain.”

The way Pinky says “nice” here reminds me of this meme. Also, aww, Pinky’s always ready with the compliments.

“Working class values…”

“I enjoy beef jerky and the comedy stylings of Gallagher. Check.”

His visible cringe at having to say he enjoys Gallagher is wonderful. I first heard about Gallagher through My Brother, My Brother and Me, but for anyone that doesn’t know, Gallagher is a frankly terrible prop comedian whose most famous act was smashing things on stage (usually fruits of increasing size) with a large mallet that he called the “Sledge-O-Matic”, ending with smashing a watermelon. It was apparently a mildly popular bit of comedy in the south. Does that sound entertaining? No? Yeah, that’s…that’s why Brain is cringing so hard.

“A song.”

“Check!”

A song titled “A Song”. Brain, sweetheart, I think you’re going to need to put in a little more effort than that.

“A name consisting of not less than three words.”

“From now on, I shall be ‘Bubba Bo Bob Brain’. Check.”

I would make fun of him for this name, but honestly it’s kind of genius in its bland simplicity.

“And…a height of at least six feet!”

“Aaa--guebuh…”

Whoops. Forgot about that one, huh?

“Drat!”

“There must be some way for me to increase my height…”

Gee, if only you had a fully operational mechanical human suit just laying around.

“Hmm, let me think…”

“Don’t hurt yourself, Pinky.”

He is trying his best!

“Faster, Pinky! Faster!”

…Why does Pinky have to spin the thread? The whole point of sewing machines like this is that they’re powered electrically, Brain. Are you just making him do this so Pinky feels included?

Oh. Oh no…

Brain’s “WTF?” face is great. He’s surprised and yet not at the same time, because things like this just happen when you have Pinky around.

“You amaze me, Pinky.”

“I do my best…”

A very cute exchange.

So instead of using the mechanical human suit they usually fall back on in times like these (maybe it’s under six feet tall?), the mice instead come up with…this.

“Proceed, Pinky.”

I have to give them some credit, regardless of how ridiculous this is, as sewing denim to make a very bizarrely thin and tall pair of jeans must have been an absolute nightmare.

“Ki-yi-yippee-yi-yo. How do I look?”

I’m getting flashbacks to the similarly deadpan singing of “Camptown Races” from last episode. Brain’s really on a western kick lately, isn’t he?

“Oh, very nice, Brain!”

Your finger-framing may be focused on the back of Brain’s head for some reason, Pinky, but your pupils are definitely pointed a bit���lower.

“It’s ‘Bubba Bo Bob Brain’.”

“You are my manager, Colonel Pinky.”

This is a reference to Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who was honestly quite the bungler when it came to managing Elvis’ career. I honestly don’t think Brain’s making a subtle jab at Pinky’s competency here for once because Brain’s grasp of pop culture he’s not already interested in is surface level at best most of the time.

“You discovered me playing the guitar on the front porch of my humble pig farm. Any questions?”

“Oh, just one: When you farm humble pigs, how far apart do you have to plant them?”

“…If I could reach you, I would hurt you.”

Hey now, you’re the one that asked, Brain.

“But for now, on to Nashville!”

“On to Nashville!”

BONK!

“This is a pain that is going to linger…”

That’s what you get for rolling your eyes at Pinky’s enthusiasm.

No perilous car trips this time! Instead, the boys are getting bus tickets to Nashville.

“Two tickets to Nashville, please.”

“Ooh-wee!~ You’re a tall drink a’ water, aint’cha, darlin’?”

…Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am? Ma’am, are you flirting with The Brain?

Like, sorry, that “tall drink of water” saying is not just to point out that someone’s tall. It’s specifically for flirting with someone who is tall and gorgeous and a refreshing sight to see, like a tall glass of water on a hot summer day.

This lady is flirting with a mouse on stilt legs.

I know that Brain’s disguises are prone to inexplicably work even when by all rights they shouldn’t, but…

“Actually, I am a lab mouse on stilts.”

Brain does his usual bold and plain truth shtick and I’m a little surprised that he didn’t react to what she said beyond that. Then again, this is Brain and he’s quite terrible when talking to women in general, so maybe we dodged a bullet here.

“…At least he didn’t ask me to pull his finger.”

I’ve worked in retail and food service for years, ma’am, and if that’s the extent of your experience with unpleasant men, consider yourself lucky.

“EGAD, Bibby-boo-bop-Brain! Round trips are so exciting!”

“It’s ‘Bubba Bo Bob Brain’, Pinky.”

“Right! Sorry. Zort!”

Honestly, Pinky’s version is much cuter.

“Concentrate, Pinky, concentrate!”

BONK!

“YES! This pain will definitely be with me a while.”

Brain out here looking like a bad Minecraft texture.

Hello again, Warner Siblings! Gosh, that little fringed western skirt on Dot is cute.

“’The Rowdy Ranch Nightclub’… What are we doing here, Boobie-baa-baa-Brain?”

I checked the official subtitles for this and yes, that is exactly what he mistakenly calls Brain here. We have had both of these two call each other “boob” or some permutation of it this episode.

Pinky and the Brain sure is a show that exists.

“…It’s ‘Bubba Bo Bob’ Brain. And according to statistics, and inordinate number of country western superstars have gotten their start at this very establishment.”

You probably didn’t need me to tell you this, but there’s no Rowdy Ranch Nightclub in real life. There is, however, “The Rowdy Ranch”, uh, ranch in Texas.

“Egad! [gasp] Do you suppose Minnie Pearl performed here?”

“One can only hope…”

Man, Brain, you are really laying the sarcasm on thick this episode. Come to think of it, he’s been slightly more sassy towards Pinky than usual this episode as well. I suppose he’s still sore about the end of the last one. You know, for reasons.

BONK!

At least he’s getting some karmic punishment for it, I guess.

“I am a telephone repairman from this area!~”

This little ditty this man is singing has bugged the hell out of me for quite a while, as it certainly sounds like it’s a reference to something but I never knew exactly what it was referring to until just now thanks to an old Animaniacs Usenet group from way back in the day: It’s a parody of the song “Whichita Lineman” by Glenn Campbell. The writers are really giving it their all with the pop culture references this time.

“When I give the signal, play the subliminal message tape.”

“Right-o, Bippie Bebop Balloola!”

“…Sometimes you frighten me, Pinky.”

Why, though?! Despite it being a mistake it’s honestly a goddamn adorable one. Why must you fear affectionate, innocent, unknowing malapropisms, Brain? Pinky’s still going to do what you told him to.

Anyway, Brain is ushered onto the stage as a newcomer and he’s…not exactly any more eloquent than Pinky was just now.

“Howdy, you all. Here’s a little…ditty I wrote. Hope you enjoy it…you all.”

Here’s the thing: Brain’s not one to get stage fright, and while he’s not the best actor he’s still usually better than this. He was saying “ya’ll” and getting the country-isms perfectly fine beforehand, although he was still doing it in his deadpan Brain way.

Now, suddenly, after hearing Pinky cutely screw up his fake name and going on stage he’s starting to mess up. It’s like Pinky’s error is still in the back of his mind and flustering him enough to throw him off for a bit.

He gets back into the swing of things when he starts singing his song, though.

“I am a lab mouse, I escaped from my cage

Never had a job, never earned minimum wage.~”

“He ain’t half bad.”

“Ain’t half good, either.”

OUCH. That’s a little harsh. Sure, the lyrics are kinda blah but he’s a decent singer here. Really, it’s just not a genre of music that his voice fits very well.

Also, lady? You’ve got a suspiciously busty doppleganger in the back there. That’s got to be a bad omen for you.

“But you will respect me, YES, once my plan is unfurled!~

You will call me your leader, I’ll be king of the world!~”

Careful, Brain. Your complicated emotional complex is starting to show in those lyrics.

There’s some more nice facial expressions here too. I can’t really capture it with still images, but Brain’s got a very tender demeanor when he sings about being king of the world.

“Now, Pinky!”

…I just noticed that Pinky’s wearing a completely different outfit here at the nightclub than he was when boarding the bus to get to Nashville. He was previously in an all-white colonel outfit and now he’s in a more generic yet very sweet cowboy get-up. Did you make yourself an entire wardrobe, Pinky?

Another minor detail is that while Pinky’s cowboy hat is a generic tan colour (although before, it was white), Brain’s hat is completely black, which as per western film traditions marks him as a clear villain.

You and I know he’s not really a villain and is, at worst, an anti-villain…but I thought this was worth pointing out anyway.

“Citizens of the world, you are under my control. You will do whatever I say.”

I love how he does this completely unneeded strum on his guitar in the middle of his subliminal message. It's for the drama!

“Buy my record and listen to it twenty times a day.”

Corporations be like…

Who am I kidding? Corporations nowadays would have you pay a fee monthly to have a song on your phone playlist and you would never really own a copy.

“Let’s buy his record…”

“And listen to it twenty times a day…”

Lady, that doppleganger is still over there. Do you need a distraction while you sneak out the back?

This smug lil’ jerk. Gotta love him, though.

And so Brain’s cassette tapes fly off the shelves at record speed.

Man. Cassette tapes. I feel so fuckin’ old…

“I don’t know ‘bout ya’ll, but I can’t get enough of Bubba Bo Bob Brain. Let’s hear it again!”

JFC, that spittoon. Blegh! And just what do you need that rope for?!?

“Well, he’s the hottest thing to hit Nashville since my mama’s jalapeno grits! Here’s Bubba Bo Bob Brain!”

Having just recently learned what exactly “grits” is, I am very disturbed by the idea of jalapeno grits.

“I’m your biggest fan! What d’you say to that?”

Hi, Dolly Parton! I’ve gotta say that the animators nailed the caricature of 90s Dolly here pretty well. She’s instantly recognizable, unlike some other celebrity parodies Animaniacs does. It’s not just because of Dolly’s, uh…most renowned physical characteristics, either. That’s a very Dolly Parton smiling face.

Not much to say here other than that Dolly’s a sweetheart of a woman, from what I know about her, especially for a celebrity. She’s a staunch supporter of Covid relief and Black Lives Matter as well.

That said, she’s sadly—both in the 90s and now—most well known for…

“I’d say puberty was inordinately kind to you.”

BRAIN!

Well, yeah. That.

I guess now you can see what I mean about Brain not being very good at talking to women. Like, he’s definitely not ogling her here. In fact he’s just kind of…stating something he’s noticed and looking absolutely done with this whole celebrity thing. But Brain you don’t just make a joke like that about a woman’s bust size no matter how deadpan you do it, you ass!

“Haha, go on.”

She takes it well, though, just like Dolly seems to in reality.

Still, though! Brain, you retroactively deserved all those run-ins with doorframes.

Continuing on the buxom southern women thing this episode has decided to run with (seriously, what’s going on here?), we now have a brief parody of a Hee Haw skit.

“Hahahahaha!”

“Hey, Bubba Bo Bob Brain, I just got back from France!”

“How’d you find it?”

“I used a map.~”

“Hahahahaha!”

Yeah, that’s an accurate depiction of Hee Haw style humour.

“And the Country Tune Award for best male vocal goes to…”

“Bubba Bo Bob Brain!”

Here we have Garth Brooks and Crystal Gayle emceeing this awards ceremony. I had to look up who these two were supposed to be, though, since the caricatures are pretty vague this time.

“EGAD! YIPPEE! Narf! Ah hahahahahaha!”

Aww, he’s so happy for Brain! And oh, is that yet another outfit I see? And a much more appropriately sunshine-y yellow and flamboyant one at that! Pinky really went all-out for this.

Again with the tongue hanging out too, except this time it’s more understandable.

“You’re embarrassing me, Pinky.”

And you’re continuing to be a jerk, wow. Someone needs a nap or something.

“Pardon my effervescence, but your accolade is more than any bucolic mouse merits.”

“What’s he sayin’?”

“I don’t know.”

Yes, Brain just used the word “effervescence”, much like in that one Tumblr Twilight meme. To those reeling from the fact that this compares Edward to Brain via their shared pretentiousness: You’re welcome.

Also, a Brain-to-common English translation: “Pardon my bubbly enthusiasm, but your award is more than any countryside mouse deserves.” Would that have been so hard to say, Brain?

“…I’d like to thank my mama and Elvis.”

I wouldn’t thank Elvis. He was an asshole. But that’s probably not wise to say at a 90s country music award show, so I guess it’s understandable.

“Oh, how nice!”

“Well isn’t that nice!”

“I’m outside the Grand Ol’ Opry, where tonight’s concert featuring country music sensation ‘Bubba Bo Bob Brain’ is being televised worldwide.”

“In two words: Bubba is hot!”

I… That’s twice in this episode where a human woman thinks a tiny, big-headed mouse on stilts is hot.

Furries, come get these poor, confused women.

“You gotta know how to cut ‘em

Know how to shuffle

Know how to deal the cards, before you play Fish with me.~”

Hello, Kenny Rogers. I only know the song parodied here, “The Gambler”, again through “My Brother, My Brother and Me” and the long and hilarious conversation about it.

It’s kind of weird to have a song that was made famous by Rogers in 1978 sung like it’s a recent hit in an early 90s awards show, but ehh. Maybe the shelf life of hit country songs is a lot longer than songs of other genres.

And then you die in your sleep~

“Do you realize what will happen if the world hears my song just one more time?”

“An angel will get its wings?!”

If only, Pinky.

“NO, Pinky!”

I think all this country stuff is really getting on Brain’s nerves. He’s being snappy and irritable and lashing out an abnormal amount ever since arriving in Nashville, and there’s not a lot of joy in the minor successes he’s had so far. Like, compare Brain smiling and praising Pinky for his work during the alien encounter spoof they did together, the last episode with Brain cheerfully singing to himself when he was certain he’d win the race…to now where he’s yelling at Pinky for minor mistakes that no one but himself is aware of and being joyless and faking pleasantries and rolling his eyes at the country stars he’s surrounded by. This mouse is crabby as all hell, and I don’t think it’s just because he finds the whole country western thing stupid and below him. This is a mouse who’s done and will continue to do degrading things to achieve his goal of world domination without this much jerkishness.

I think he’s still fuming about the whole Pharfignewton and Pinky thing, and the current plan being a very rural, country-focused plan like the last one with the Kentucky Derby is just exacerbating it by reminding him of it. Like, you don’t even have to take it in the gay way I am and instead take it in a “how dare that goddamn horse take the complete attention of my friend/world domination partner away from me and my plans, this sucks and I can’t believe Pinky’s just being his usual dumbass self like everything is fine and the same” sort of way.

But the gay way makes way more sense, fight me.

…Okay, don’t fight me, I’m tired and old and I really don’t want to get in internet fights about cartoon mice.

“My subliminal message will take permanent hold, and the world will be under my control!”

Ooof! We’re back down to “my” control and not “our”. Jeez, Brain. You really are spiraling right now, aren’t you? Your attitude has quickly devolved from the beginning of this episode...

“Oh, that.”

And dang, even Pinky’s enthusiasm is starting to get deflated.

“Now, do you remember what you have to do?”

“Yes. I need to make a dental appointment. I have horrible plaque buildup!”

Pinky, you do realize that unlike a regular, non-sapient mouse you can just brush your teeth, right?

“The tape, Pinky, the TAPE!”

“Oooh, right! When you give the signal, I play the tape.”

“And now, I’d like to introduce…”

“This is it, I’m on.”

“Good luck, Booba Bip Bop Brain!”

Folks, I swear to you that I tried to get a decent screencap of Pinky slapping Brain to figure out if he slapped his back or his ass and for the life of me I could not get it. The slap goes by just that fast and I’d honestly have to go frame by frame if I wanted to get it, but my video player will not go that slow.

Either way, Brain is certainly startled by the contact but is fixated more on the continued mangling of his fake name.

“How many times do I have to tell you, my name is--!”

Uhh, Brain? Getting a liiiittle close there.

“—Bubba Bo Bob Brain!” exclaims Kenny Rogers. And oh boy are these screencaps exploitable. Again, you’re welcome.

“Yee-haw! Let’s start this hootenanny!”

Better than last time you came out on stage to sing at a show, at least.

This time the crowd even sings along with him, and they’re not even hypnotized yet. Much better.

“Now, Pinky!”

“You are under my control, you will do whatever I say…”

“I will do whatever he says… Whatever he says… Whatever he says… Whatever he says…”

A confusingly consistent detail here: Every woman in the crowd has swirly red hypnotized eyes and every man in the crowd has swirly green hypnotized eyes. Why? Who knows!

“Way to go, Blubber Boo Bean Brain. Narf!”

Heh, that hand flip.

It looks like Pinky is trying hard to suppress his verbal tic here for some reason? Or maybe he’s just realized that he’s messed up the name again and is cringing in anticipation of Brain yelling at him? Either way, poor guy… You really don’t deserve any of what’s coming.

And what’s coming? Well, given Brain’s heightened pissy attitude and his mental issues with not having things go exactly the way he wants them to, plus his obsessive need this episode to correct Pinky on this one thing that doesn’t need to even be addressed because no one else hears it, plus other repressed emotions…

“Do me a favour and forget my name. While you’re at it, forget you ever knew me!”

Holy shit.

…Now you fucked up, Brain. Now you fucked up.

Man, I hate the one thick facial hair on the dude in the middle. It’s so unsettling.

“Hey, who’s that skinny guy on stage?”

“Who is he?”

“Get him off!”

“Boo!”

“We wanna see someone famous!”

Yup. Look at what you did. You messed this up all because you were having a temper tantrum about Pinky messing up your stupid false name. You hang that head in shame. And you apologize to Pinky.

Later...

“Tonight’s inside story: A complete unknown somehow made it on to the stage at the Grand Ol’ Opry.”

“…Turn that off, Pinky.”

You know what? Keep it on for a bit, Pinky. Let Brain wallow in this humiliation just a bit more. He needs to have the lesson set in.

“I’m trying to concentrate on a better plan for tomorrow night.”

“Why, Brain? What are we going to do tomorrow night?”

“Same thing we do every night, Pinky:”

“Try to take over the world!”

Hey wait just a minute! You can’t just reuse this excellent ending from “Win Big” on this episode! Brain doesn’t yet deserve to get back to being cocky and determined after being such an ass!

Ahh well. He does get better, folks, I promise. This is just a rough patch. Brain is… He’s going through some things, I think. He’s not processing his emotions in a healthy way and it’s really coming back to bite him.

Listen, I understand this whole thing with Brain being extra grumpy and hostile after the whole Pinky dating Pharfignewton thing is largely coincidence. We don’t actually know what order these episodes were made in, after all, and the Animaniacs writers were not big on continuity.

Here’s the thing, though: I still find it fascinating that these episodes were aired one after the other…especially with a random cameo with Pinky and Brain disguised as a married couple in between. It makes for the beginning of a strange sort of arc that occasionally reminds us that, hey, these two mice are a duo and something is amiss when that duo is broken up or there is a strain put on that relationship.

I’ve read that after a while, network executives at the time tried to push for these mice to settle down and have families and for the skits and the eventual spin-off to largely abandon the whole world domination thing. They wanted it to be more sitcom-like to rival and imitate shows like The Simpsons.

That obviously doesn’t work. It can’t work. The writers, especially Peter Hastings, very much pushed back against the idea. When you have a duo of characters who fit together and play off one another so well, when the basic premise of a story is of a pair of characters working together to achieve a goal, and when those characters just mesh so perfectly and basically complete one another…trying to add another main character just puts the entire story completely out of wack and/or changes it into something unrecognizable. You can add reoccurring characters off to the side, sure. You can have a nemesis or two pop up and return every now and again. But with something like Pinky and the Brain where the main story is a small pair against incredible odds working towards a singular goal, disrupting that core relationship is going to cause a domino effect that will ruin the whole thing.

All this to say that I like this approach that’s going on here much more, even if it was completely unintended by the creative team: There is the element added of Pinky, off-screen, dating someone. It’s not something that’s brought up a lot and whenever it is brought up, Brain is irritated. We’ve seen at the end of the last episode where this development was introduced that Brain is unusually snappy, and now in the next episode he continues to be angry more often than he was before. It’s a more subtle and smooth way of seeing how these characters react if something or someone threatens to come between them, in a way that doesn’t immediately break the entire premise to pieces. Of course, it helps that Pharfignewton is…largely absent for all this and is only brought up every now and again. It’s not a perfect way to explore this kind of thing, but it’s preferable when compared to something like Pinky, Elymra, and The Brain.

However, after this episode Brain’s temper begins to de-escalate, and we won’t pick back up on this accidental “arc” for a few episodes. So to folks who are maybe a little bit bummed out about his behaviour here: don’t worry. We’re getting quite the breather next time with a very odd alternate universe skit courtesy of the Warner Siblings  messing around with character placement, as well as an entire Animaniacs episode devoted to a Pinky and the Brain skit…fantasy style!

[chenziee]

Swipe left, please

[Read on my AO3 (link in blog description) or by copypasting link below, or under the cut]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26932909

Fandom: Shingeki no Kyojin Ship: Jean/Armin Rating: General audiences Words: 2643 Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Airports, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Minor Levi/Eren Yeager, jean is smitten, Because of course he is, Tinder, but not really, jean is a very responsible working adult, armin is a very responsible PhD student, you can interpret those words however you want, hanji is not a responsible lab boss, don't be like hanji in a lab

Summary: Getting stuck at the airport for hours because of the weather was the last thing Jean wanted today, but it was what he got and honestly, if it meant he could chat with this cute guy who swept a hard 'no' on Jean's Tinder for longer, he wouldn't say no to a few more hours.

Based on a twitter post which I don’t know how to dig up.

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This is a birthday gift for the sweetest, most precious @roxi4 <3 I’ve said this a lot of times but I love you so much and I wish I could personally beat 2021 into submission so that it’s the best goddamn year of your life for you. But, sadly, I’m not a god yet so I gotta settle for writing fics for now. 

Also yes, I am posting here like two weeks late because I’m lazy I’m sorry.

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Jean glared at the departure board, wishing he could set it on fire just like that. He understood things like this happened; he could see the heavy rain and wind outside—and people called this spring? Jean demanded a refund—so really, it could have been much worse, but a three hour delay for his three hours and thirty-five goddamned minutes flight was absolutely ridiculous and only slightly rage inducing.

He sighed in frustration and, grabbing his suitcase, he turned away to head to the closest coffee shop. He needed a damn coffee. Preferably spiked or with 8 shots of espresso, he’d decide in the line.

This was seriously so stupid. He had spent an entire week on this business trip and he was tired and the only thing he wanted was getting home to his cat and passing the hell out. At least the Melbourne airport was decent enough and he could safely be bored out of his mind with as much coffee as he needed without worrying he’d catch tetanus like he was at a certain American airport a few years ago. He would take his comfort where he could at this point.

Finally, he managed to order his coffee with only two extra espresso shots—he didn’t want to seem like that much of a psycho but the barista didn't even blink at his order and Jean had to wonder what weird shit the people at a busy airport had to deal with—and headed to the corner of the departure hall that seemed the quietest. There were only a few people loitering around there, all looking just as exhausted as Jean felt. Seemed like Jean would fit right in with their collective coma.

Making his way to one of the empty seats, Jean had to weave his way through the maze of suitcases until one of them caught his attention. Or, more specifically, the book laying carefully bookmarked and discarded on it. Who in their right mind read what looked like an entire fucking encyclopaedia full of words Jean probably couldn't even pronounce while waiting on their plane? No wonder the owner put it aside eventually.

Jean inadvertently looked up at the person sitting next to the suitcase and he did a double take. He had expected some old fart, the type that just screamed of a dreadfully boring college professor who preferred his test tubes or calculations to his students—or people in general, really—not this… tiny, adorable, small animal type of guy who, from his profile, looked around Jean’s age or even younger.

He took in the young man’s small frame, the short, blond hair, and the way he sat cross legged on the hard, uncomfortable airport chair and Jean couldn’t get over how cute the sight was. He was really glad the other man was so engrossed in his phone because even Jean could tell he was staring      .  

And then something else caught Jean’s eye.

Was that Tinder on his phone? Was that… Jean’s ancient Tinder he was looking at?

Jean felt heat coming up to his face. He hadn’t used the stupid app in years, probably since like... his second year of college. He didn’t even know why he didn’t delete his profile but now he was glad he didn’t because it would be really nice to know if he should even bother trying to strike up conversation here.

With bated breath, Jean waited for the verdict. He watched as if in slow motion as the blond’s thumb moved to touch the screen and swiped—

Left.

Of course it was left.

Unable to stop himself, an awkward laugh forced its way past his lips and he heard himself say, “Hard no for him?”

Even the way he jumped at Jean’s words was cute. And when wide, impossibly blue eyes met his own, Jean felt his stomach drop. Damn, this left swipe really hurt. Jean really had a talent for getting his heart broken before he even had the chance to try. First Mikasa, now this. Did someone up there have something against him?

A few silent, painfully awkward seconds of the two of them just staring at each other passed, until the blond opened his mouth to speak, “If it makes you feel any better, your profile pic really doesn’t do you any favours.”

Jean groaned. Of course. He knew he shouldn’t have let Eren choose his picture, the absolute asshole. He couldn’t believe he still called this guy a friend. Getting roomed with him at the dorm in college was seriously the worst thing to happen in his life.  

“Thanks, I guess,” Jean said lamely, sheepishly scratching at the back of his head. Could this get any more awkward?

The other guy laughed then, and it was the sweetest laugh Jean had ever heard. “You’re welcome,” he said, smirning at Jean as he held out his hand. “I’m Armin. Jean, right?”

Jean shook Armin’s hand, almost asking where he had learned his name but managing to stop himself at the last second. They literally just talked about Jean’s embarrassing Tinder profile for God’s sake.

“Nice to meet you,” he said instead, hoping that was a better way to go about it than making a bigger idiot out of himself.

Thankfully, it seemed like it was, as Armin gestured to the empty seat next to him and Jean gratefully took it, making himself as comfortable as he could in the stupid airport chair. Seriously, why were airport chairs always so uncomfortable? People were sitting on these for hours at a time every day, one would think someone would make sure their asses were not hurting. Although, now that he thought about it, cushioned chairs probably wouldn’t last very long—or stay reasonably sanitary, for that matter. It was probably a good thing his ass hurt already.

Jean took his first, long-overdue sip of his coffee before he gestured towards Armin’s suitcase. “Interesting book you’ve got there. Wanted a bit of light reading?”

Armin paused, looking at Jean as if he was trying to figure him out. “Please tell me that was an intentional Harry Potter reference,” he said after a moment. Oh, Jean was so happy he had caught that.

“Maybe,” he only replied, hiding his smirk behind his coffee cup.

Huffing in amusement, Armin glanced at his terrifying looking book instead. “Just trying to do some research for my final thesis. But I have to admit some people really can’t write in an interesting way even when talking about interesting topics.”

“Hear, hear,” Jean muttered. “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to publish books, especially if they then make people study from those.” He still remembered the pain from school. He particularly enjoyed the teachers who required the students read their own God-awful books. It was always a guarantee for the most boring read of the year.

“I know!” Armin cried, gesturing around in frustration and Jean couldn’t help but smile at the sight. “I can’t wait to finish my Ph.D. so I that can not read the things I don’t want to.”

Jean chuckled at his enthusiasm. He really had to love his field of study to get this passionate about shitty books. “What are you studying?” he asked curiously.

“Marine biology,” Armin beamed, making Jean gulp.

Ocean. Fish. Corals. That was about as much as his humble business management brain knew about marine biology. Couldn’t really impress with that, could he? “And you’re doing a PhD. in that?”

Armin nodded. “Yeah. Actually, I’m just coming back home from giving a guest lecture at the university."

"Melbourne university?" Jean asked, raising a brow. He kind of hoped he was wrong and he wasn't just casually chatting with some up and coming scientist celebrity.

"Yeah," Arming confirmed and blushed slightly.

"Damn, that's impressive," Jean admitted, though now he was positive that if Armin started talking science to him, he wouldn't understand a word.

Armin's eyes dropped as he looked away, obviously embarrassed by the praise, then he shrugged and quietly replied, "Not really. This stuff is really easy when you have good teachers."

Jean shook his head. "Nah, if you don't have it in you, it doesn't matter how good a teacher is. You can kiss any degree goodbye then, never mind giving lectures."

He heard Armin huff in amusement and goddamn it, it gave him butterflies. He was so fucked.

"Thank you," the blond said, smiling at Jean brightly before he continued. "How about you? Where to?"

Jean sighed wearily, sagging in his seat as he remembered his exhaustion. "Also home. On my way back from an absolutely stupid business trip."

"Why stupid?" Armin asked as he turned around in his seat to face Jean properly.

Jean mirrored him immediately, hooking one arm behind the backrest as he leaned on the chair sideways. He really enjoyed talking to this random, sweet stranger and he was really glad it seemed to be mutual. He was going to hate saying goodbye.

Suddenly, he wouldn't have minded if his flight got delayed a few more hours.

"Just, you know, people," Jean muttered in distaste. "One would think only customers can be complete idiots. Turns out coworkers can sometimes be even worse."

Armin laughed at his words, nodding along enthusiastically. "God I know. Sometimes I want to kill the doctor leading my lab. Hanji’s a genius but there is so much energy and she can be so stupid. She almost blows up or floods the lab at least once a week."

"I'm sorry, that must be so hard to deal with—" Jean cringed in sympathy at the mere idea of it— "Reminds me of my team. I love them but once in a while, I just want to fire them all when they start organizing paper boat races in the bathroom. Paper boats made from paperwork they don't want to do, by the way."

"Ouch." Armin sounded solemn but Jean could hear the hidden laughter and he just knew he found Sasha and Connie's stupid ideas hilarious. Which… Jean could admit they were, just not when he was the one who then had to explain the mess and unfinished work to his boss.

“Stop laughing,” Jean hissed, though with no real venom in his voice.

“I’m not!” Armin defended himself, but then burst out laughing when Jean glared at him so he quickly corrected himself, “Okay, yeah, I am. Sorry.”

He didn’t sound sorry at all and Jean sighed. “Everyone always finds my suffering funny.”

Armin let him grumble to himself for a bit, the two of them sitting in relative silence for a moment and… it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was actually relaxing and Jean really didn’t want this to end. “So hey—” He paused, glancing at Armin carefully, almost afraid to ask— “when is your flight?”

“Hopefully, in like two and a half hours. Got delayed almost as long as the flight itself.”

Jean almost said it was the same for him but he stopped. Could it be…? “You’re not flying to Auckland, are you?”

Armin visibly startled, blinking at Jean with eyes full of surprise. “Yes, actually,” he said slowly and Jean couldn’t believe it. He had thought he would never see this this cute, fun person ever again but—

“Me, too,” he said quietly and the two of them continued staring at each other in shock for a few moments more until they both burst out laughing.

Incredible. They were both flying to the same place and they would be within reach of each other and maybe there was a point in actually pursuing this. “So, uhm, wanna grab a coffee?” Jean asked awkwardly, pointing in the general direction of the food court.

And only when Armin looked pointedly at his pointing hand, did Jean realize he was still holding his over-caffeinated coffee cup. He really hoped his face wasn’t as on fire as it felt.

Armin only chuckled, thankfully not commenting on Jean’s blunder, and rather suggesting, “How about some actual food instead?”

-------------

By the time they got off the plane in Auckland, Jean was on cloud nine as he gently squeezed Armin’s hand in his. Jean was still not sure this was real; they had spent the entire time at the airport and during their flight chatting—not that they had miraculously had seats next to each other like in the movies, but Jean did bribe an older lady with wine to switch seats with him—and it was the best damn flight delay he could have asked for.

It felt so natural and easy being with Armin, he couldn’t wait to get to know him more during their date tomorrow, and hopefully many more after. Because Jean would be lying if he said he wasn’t completely gone for this charming, adorable genius already.

As they walked through the exit into the arrival hall together, Armin immediately waved at his friend who was picking him up. Jean had offered to give him a ride since he had his car parked at the airport but Armin had said this friend of his would be worried if he just suddenly cancelled and—

Oh hell no.

Jean stared at the tall, young man with long hair tied up in a messy bun who was walking towards them, watching as his wide smile froze when their eyes met. Of fucking course. Jean just couldn’t have any nice things in life, could he?

“Unhand my best friend, Horse Face,” Eren growled and Jean took a deep breath in an effort to calm down.

It didn’t work. “Unhand my boss, then,” he shot back, throwing a pointed stare at where Eren had his arm wrapped around the short, grumpy man who just so happened to be both Jean’s boss and his ex-roommate’s boyfriend. Levi was already sighing and rolling his eyes at them and Jean really hoped this wouldn’t affect his bonus this quarter.

But Eren started it.  

“You have no say in that,” Eren hissed, visibly bristling as his hold on Levi only tightened.

“Oh, so you admit it’s unreasonable?” Jean asked, his voice dripping in sarcasm.

Jean could hear Armin gasp as he finally realized what was going on. Obviously, he also didn’t expect this to happen and Jean was glad he wasn’t the only one. Although, really, how did it not occur to Jean that Armin was that Armin? It wasn’t exactly a common name around Auckland…

Just as Eren was getting ready to snap back at him, both Levi and Armin sighed before Levi intervened, “Shut the hell up, both of you. Have this fight when I’m not around for it or I’m talking Armin and leaving your asses here.”

“I second this movement,” Armin said firmly tugging at Jean’s hand for good measure.

Both Eren and Jean closed their mouths then, both knowing full well that was not an empty threat coming from the short grump. Not that Jean wouldn’t get back by himself but he would be stuck with driving Eren, too, without anyone there to mediate, and that would be a disaster.

They glared at each other silently for a second, until Eren hissed at him, “Usual bar, tonight. We’re having a talk.”  

“I’ll be there, I need a fucking drink after this,” Jean muttered back, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

Giving Armin a kiss on the cheek, Jean quickly retreated out of Eren’s glare’s range and towards his car so that he could get some fucking sleep before he would go out and get drunk while Eren threatened him with violence for apparently seducing his best friend, or whatever Eren would take out of this… situation. How did shit like this even happen in real life? He seriously wondered what he did in his past life to get karma like this.

At least Armin was worth it.

[off-in-the-moors]

It is not the responsibility of art to be morally instructive. It is 100% YOUR responsibility to research something if you know you are a sensitive person, take responsibility for your self. Art does not need to be some clinical sanitized morality play, get over your weird Puritanical obsession that all art must conform to your specific world view. Either engage in challenging works or stick to children’s cartoons where you can feel ‘safe’.

-

Dear Anon,

I’m truly confused by this. I have no idea what are you referencing and what “inspired“ you to send me this “ask“. But I will do my best to give you something.

(It only took me this long to answer, bc I don’t log in very often.)

Let’s start with your assumption of me.

I’m not a sensitive person, in any meaning. I actually love reading and engaging in media that’s morally questionable or straight up morbid and disturbing. Some of my favorite thing are: paintings by Goya and Beksiński, folklore/mythology (in it’s most unchanged form), “Perfume“ both film and book, Hannibal tv series, true crime, to name a few. Your assumption that I’m just “a girl obsessed and only enjoying modern cartoons“ is insulting.

I actually do agree with you that art, in any form, isn’t responsible to be morally instructive, but every work of art is made to send some form of message, be an obvious one or hidden between pages. In my opinion, authors and writers should be aware of what message they want to send with their works and what messages they are sending with what and how they’re presenting.

On your “It is 100% YOUR responsibility to research something if you know you are a sensitive person, take responsibility for your self“ this is also true. But on the other hand, given media should provide you with some kind of warning and not a third party entity. For example, if I pick-up a YA book from a bookstore, bc of its synopsis or someone (be a person I know or a creator) recommended it to me, I don't expect "spicy" scenes or blatant a*use of a character by its love interest or just "torture p*rn" scenes in it but here they are. With no warning. Is it my fault? Partly yes. Is it the media's fault for not giving me any warnings? Also yes.

Even with researching "warnings" isn't that simple. When it comes to books, the only way is reading reviews or recommendations. With reviews, they're either positive and say nothing book related or are negative and full of spoilers. Recommendations nowadays most of the time don't even give you what the story is about, just "it has x, y and z in it", let alone "warnings". From my own experience, they either don't tell you about "unappropriated" stuff (be r*pe, d*ug a*use, a*use, etc.) or they down play them and in worst cases, excuse it or say "it gets better/it's addressed in the next book/later in the series".

But if you feel the need to micromanage everything you engage in, go for it. But most people don't and a warning would be nice.

(This of course doesn't apply to thing and character's actions deemed "problematic". If said stuff is well handled and addressed, it's perfectly ok to portray it. But again, if it addressed and/or showed as wrong, and not ignored, excused, or played as a joke.)

I don't know from where you took the "your weird Puritanical obsession", bc 1) I never petitioned for that in my posts, and 2) I'm actually against censuring and sanitation of media.

Now, on to what "inspired" you to write this.

Again, I have no f-clue. So here are my best guesses:

If it's about Pathologic: I only have problem with people forcing their politics, modern sentiments and opinions/interpretations on to something they don't fully understand, because they're from a different cultural climate. An American can't fully (or in some cases, refuses to) understand something made by Europeans (in this case Russians) for Europeans in mind. I don't want to mix myself into the fandom discourse/drama, because I don't care what people think or how they interpret stuff, even if it's taken from something minor or from nowhere with no support (or even is debunked) in canon. I don't care if people like or hate this one character. Just don't police people for liking things, you don't like. Nor do public shaming or send people on those you don't agree with. You don't like a pixel man on platform shoes? Fine. Just don't bully and attack people who do.

If it's about my post about B*rdugo's adult book: I will admit, the wording and presentation wasn't the best. I was writing it from a place of strong emotions, but I'm still standing by my opinion that some things should not be presented with graphic details in a book without any type of warning. Here we could have a discussion about trigger warnings in books, hers response to the idea of putting them on her book and what is consider "too far", but this isn't about that. I actually have a lot of problems with B*rdugo and her fan-base, besides that. Her use of Russia, it's history, religion iconography and culture only for aesthetic and not doing proper research (she called her series "Greg's trilogy") or showing any respect for it (with characters, how are not main and secondary characters, a Slavic stereotype); her portray of dyslexia and how the fandom likes to use it as a joke in relation to this character; or people shielding her from any form of criticism with "She's is xyz, so she can write this". But I don't care about her and her works.

I stopped reading YA books, because I can't stand them any longer and their "handling" of topics, with people holding up every-single-one as "the best book ever written", not because of the quality or story but because the author is xyz, and spitting at every book written before 2000s. I'll get flag for it but YA novels are the Pulp fiction of our times (of course not all, but most of the popular ones are). I stopped trusting people recommending them to me, because 90% of the time, I'm just disappointed by them.

If it's about K and TRC: I already said so much about this. Margaret isn't aware of her audience, she writes for herself (which she admitted on a podcast) and refuses to change it to please anyone. She created and killed K for two reasons: to further Ronan's character arc (to be used for teaching him to dream better and a (not working) foil of him (or Adam... or Gansey)) and as her weird catharsis of killing everything she hates (who she apparently was; "fratty boys and chortling men") personified as one boy (and yes, boy, because this fandom likes to forget he’s only seventeen, the same age as the Gangsey. If you excuses their actions, like Ronan and Adam’s racist jokes or Gansey’s toxic behaviors towards Adam with “they’re just teenagers”, why K is excluded from being a stupid teen?). With Jordan, it's now obvious that she has a bias of suffering/dealing with your trauma (and addiction) "in the right way", of which in her eyes, K wasn't. She could not create K or she could not make him a harmful stereotype of a Slav, but she did. In a book targeted at 13-18 year olds, we have a drug-addicted boy committing a public s*icide and being demonized and forgotten by everyone.

But I'm done with this fandom, I never had a place in it. TRC fandom is 80% P*nch with a 1% being about K, but even this little corner is "too much" for the stans. I left for a reason, the only thing I regret is not apologizing for my out-burst. If someone who knows what I’m referencing is reading this, I’m truly sorry.

So, yea. I hope, I addressed your issue, Anon.

[littlemisssquiggles]

Hey squiggles ! I’m going around sending asks to blogs I want to get to know and I was wondering, what are some of your favorite tropes ? Just in general

Hey Dame. Pardon the late response. Umm…my favourite tropes? You mean like in general or for like anything specific---like romance tropes?

Well I guess to give you somewhat of an answer, when it comes to hero protagonists, this squiggle meister is a sucker for the “Spunky Happy Go Lucky---My Friends Are My Power” type of hero.

I love the type of carefree hero who is able to inspire and make friends with any and every one they meet; inclusive of villains. I like the type of protagonist/hero who is always able to see the good in others and is willing to stand by their beliefs even if it may not be the wisest choice.

I love a protagonist who thinks more with their hearts than their minds, y’know what I mean? To do what they believe is right because it’s for betterment of others.

While some may find those types of characters or even heroes boring and overdone, for me, I’ve always favoured those types of heroes overall since I find them more endearing and relatable in my opinion. They may not be the strongest fighter or the smartest strategist but due to their determined spirit, tenacity and sheer strength of will, they’re always able to overcome the odds through their hard-work and perseverance.  Since you know me mainly for my involvement in the RWBY FNDM, this helps explain why I love Ruby Rose so much as a protagonist. She basically embodies what I like most in a protagonist character. (I just…wished her development and overall story was handled much better…)

Bottom-line, I’m more or less open to pretty much any kind of character if their story is done right and handled well-enough that it engages me as the audience.

These days, I’m noticing a lot of modern day shows and media having this weird trend of making their protagonist or title characters “too perfect”. Meaning that there never really seems to be any hard work to how they achieve their newfound abilities or other accomplishments. Everything just gets handed to them without any kind of real effort and they’re always beloved by everyone they meet without any real need to establish a relationship; even when said title character has no good or redeeming qualities.

Lately I’ve noticed a weird trend where there doesn’t seem to be any kind of effort being put into actually developing stories or ideas.

Things just happen as they need to for that certain point in the plot even if it may contradict previous developments in the story. I’m not saying this is the case of all stories but I have spotted a couple. And it’s such a shame since that type of storytelling always falls flat to me. In my eyes, a well written story is no different than a well-cooked meal or dessert.

If it’s prepared well, there’s no need for the chef to really boast to me as the person dining how delicious their meal will taste since the proof will be in the pudding. In respect to stories, I’m not a fan of folks telling me that I should like or dislike a story just because it has X, Y and Z in it. If that is the case then as the reader or viewer, I should be able to see that in the story and judge it for myself as I see it.

That’s like telling me I should love or hate a slice of double chocolate cake just because it was made with a certain brand of chocolate that was known for its unique flavour because it was made from coco beans that were grown from the dung of some indigenous animal.

A cool artsy-fartsy titbit, yes, but….it doesn’t really tell me anything about the overall taste of the cake. That just mentions one of its ingredients which isn’t enough to tell me how much I’m going to enjoy said cake. The only way I will be able to know whether or not I’d like said cake is if I eat it for myself. Thus, if it was made with a certain type of ingredient---particularly one that’s described to be a key factor in its taste then by common sense reasons, I should be able to taste said key ingredient the moment I take the first bite, right?

The same can be said about stories. Going back to my food analogy, it’s exactly like I said---a great story is no different than a well-cooked meal. As I’ve mentioned several times in the past, I’m a glutton for detail, mainly in art but it’s the same for my interest in stories and writing. I love it when writers take their time to carefully craft their stories; perfectly blending all the key elements to their story together to make sure that everything---even the most minute of details---lines up and thus builds up to whatever narrative they’re trying to tell. Not sure if this counts as a “trope” but I guess it can help justify why I become so invested in certain types of stories and why I’m so adamant to certain elements of storytelling such as the importance of consistency.

I’m not too keen on what some might call “poor writing” or rather “sloppy storytelling”. Unlike a well-crafted story which allows for a bit of fun with literature when deciphering the tale (if you’re into that kind of stuff like yours truly when I’m coming up with theories), sloppy storytelling has the opposite effect. Sloppy stories aren’t nearly as fun to indulge in. Like their title suggests, they’re a mess. And from my observations, sloppy stories are always obvious in where their true problems lie and always result in hurting the narrative and inevitably killing the enjoyment or overall interest a viewer or reader might have in said story.

Again, not sure if this counts as a trope but hopefully my response at least lives up to helping you (and anyone else curiously reading this) in getting to know more about me and how I tend to think about certain things. Let me know if this answers you, fam.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2021)

[your-brilliant-lady-m]

South Korean music industry at a glance: an outsider perspective

I watched one particular AMV last week. The song used for the video was “I’m afraid” by Korean rock band DAY6. I was pleasantly surprised as someone who values lyrics in song first and foremost. The music itself was great. I’ll listen to their songs again. It’s a nice fit for my music taste. Naturally, YouTube’s algorithm decided that I’m a fan of everything Korean after 1 video and started spamming my recommendations with k-pop songs, documentaries and everything in-between. 

I watched a couple of videos, listened to some songs and discovered fascinating patterns. So, I went down to the comment section. And it was rather interesting experience, should I say? The concept of entertainment industry in South Korea simply begged to be explored more after this. I dug deeper and visited Tumblr k-pop tags and briefly glanced upon Instagram and Twitter. And, oh...

I am a big picture person and I enjoy both studying and creating systems. This one was particularly fun to explore. I discovered a lot of new things for myself. Perhaps, you can discover something new for yourself too or take a step back and look at this from a new angle. 

Disclaimer: it’s impossible not to offend someone on Tumblr, so keep that in mind. That being said, I do NOT intend to insult of offend anyone. It’s just a little research done for fun, because I love research with a purpose. This post is NOT A HATE post. No hate intended for fans, artists or other people involved. It’s meant to be a discussion, nothing more and nothing less. If it sounds like hate, it’s just my sarcastic sense of humour.

Content Warning: I mention suicide, death, depression, rape in a couple of sentences. There’s nothing major or graphic, but it’s there. 

In this long post I decided to share with you my opinion, a so-called outsider perspective, on the world of music entertainment industry in South Korea and people involved in it on different levels. I use the word “outsider” mainly because, that’s exactly what I am in this case, as someone who is in no way involved in k-pop community. I can’t name you a single band or their members. I don’t know any solo artist and can’t neither sing nor name you any song. 

And to be completely honest, I don’t think I will set my foot into k-pop fan-circles ever again after everything I saw. 

Think of this as “In this essay I will...” meme, except there’s an actual essay.

As far as I know, in South Korea “k-pop” refers to all music produced in SK, including solo artists, various bands, singers-songwriters. It doesn’t even have to be pop music. Koreans include in this definition all genres of music. However, around the world “k-pop” means primarily music made by idol groups and bands marketed for children, teenagers and younger people. In this post I use the latter definition, because that’s how most people understand “k-pop” in other countries. Therefore, my statements, opinions and conclusions here would concern only idol music. 

The music industry in South Korea is heavily influenced by culture and traditions of the country, just like all things are. And there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, different backgrounds are what makes people so interesting and unique. However, when combined with consumer mindset, desire to generate profit at any cost and fast-paced nature of modern life these neutral cultural elements could produce something concerning, and it can lead to disastrous consequences. 

1. Idol

These people are called artists, musicians, singers, bands, groups, performers. In South Korea and in Japan, however, people call them Idols or Stars. I’ve also seen Muses, Princes and Queens. Interesting, isn’t it? The terminology used to describe these musicians in South Korea is one of the key elements in this whole entertainment system. You’ll see why.

But who or what is an idol exactly? Let’s take a basic definition from Wikipedia.

“In the practice of religion, a cult image or devotional image is a human-made object that is venerated or worshipped for the deity, person, spirit or daemon ... that it embodies or represents. In several traditions, including the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and modern Hinduism, cult images in a temple may undergo a daily routine of being washed, dressed, and having food left for them. Processions outside the temple on special feast days are often a feature. Religious images cover a wider range of all types of images made with a religious purpose, subject, or connection. In many contexts "cult image" specifically means the most important image in a temple, kept in an inner space, as opposed to what may be many other images decorating the temple.

The term idol is often synonymous with worship cult image. In cultures where idolatry is not viewed negatively, the word idol is not generally seen as pejorative, such as in Indian English.”

Cambridge Dictionary defines idol as follows:

And here’s the definition from Oxford Dictionary: 

This is a centrepiece of this tapestry. Surely, you have noticed by now what these definitions have in common. 

Idol = a cult image of a god, a deity 

By calling these musicians “idols” industry makes society and audience treat them in certain way, namely as gods. What characteristics do gods possess? They are beautiful, talented, funny, confident and graceful, blessed by eternal youth of immortality. Gods have no flaws, they do not bleed, they are above human concerns. They are an embodiment of perfection. They are stars, you could not reach. 

But real people are not like that. They can be sad and angry, insecure. People don’t have perfectly symmetrical faces. They can’t dance in sync without preparation. They can’t sing like angels at any given moment throughout the day.

What happens when idols accidentally reveal their humanity? What happens when people see, that they make mistakes and do stupid things, that they need to train hard to appear graceful on stage? 

I will tell you. And it’s not pretty. But, first, let’s look at other elements of this system. 

2. Y/N and Self-insert fantasy

Aside from the music, K-pop sells the self-insert fantasy to the audience. It’s carefully arranged to appear real, where the cracks are masked and every word is scripted. The reality is so vivid that one doesn’t even have to use imagination all that much, because all scenarios and decorations already exist. Countless interviews for TV and magazines, fan meetings, talk shows, reality shows made sure people are privy to all juicy details of personal lives and opinions of musicians. And also one word - merchandise. Some of that merch made me question my life choices. Some of it is, ah, creepy or has weird vibes. All of this provides plenty of material for people to work with. Fans can effortlessly imagine themselves beside their idols or even in their place. 

In a highly competitive society, where people throw themselves into studying and work since young age, forming deep and lasting connections with others is very hard, sometimes impossible. As a result, people long to have a group of close friends with similar interests, a loving partner who would cherish them endlessly. People want to be rewarded for their backbreaking efforts to succeed by the carefree life of fame and music, everlasting friendships and love. And in a way you can’t really blame them for his. 

Does this dream life sound familiar? We are looking at K-pop bands here. It doesn’t really matter if their members don’t always get along or that they can live in debt, that fame is fickle and adoring fans can tear your self-confidence to shreds. Audience wants the glamour of fantasy and the industry is more than happy to cater to these desires. 

Perhaps, knowing that even for idols this fantasy is sometimes unattainable makes the whole set up feel just a little cruel. 

3. Fans, stans and fandom culture

We’ve already established earlier that idols are gods in the eyes of people and listed traits they must possess. So, what else do gods need to exist? Worshippers. Because a cult is worth nothing without its followers. Gods need a group of people to worship them and spread their beliefs. The role of worshippers is performed by a fans in this case. 

Apparently, there is a running joke that girl groups need to win a general public popularity and boy bands need a big passionate fandom. It seems to be true according to my observations. 

In k-pop fandom people use the word “stan” to state that they like or support particular group. Now, I am sure everyone here knows that in other fandoms, dedicated to movies, shows, books and games there’s an important distinction between being a “fan” and a “stan”. What is it? 

A fan is someone who likes a ship or character, creates and/or consumes fandom content, supports certain ideas, discusses things they enjoyed and disliked, criticises canon. Stans, however, are a different breed. They engage in all typical fandom activities, but their support and enjoyment becomes obsession. Stans believe their favourite characters and ships are immune to criticism, that they are superior no matter what others say. Stans start shipping wars, send anon hate, death threats over fictional characters and hurt real people. Stans are considered toxic fans. And majority of normal civilised people don’t like them and try their best to let stans hang out in their echo chamber by themselves. 

In other fandoms and communities, to be a fan means to love, support and enjoy something, while to stan means to obsess over and hyperfixate on these same things. Words “I stan” rarely mean “I support” for most people, and if they do mean that, it’s only used in a joking manner (”We stan procrastination legend!”, “I stan our miscommunication kings”).

Everywhere else “stan” has only negative connotations, except in k-pop. But what has changed? What’s the difference? Why do international fans scoff at “shipper stans” and then turn around calling themselves “stans of X k-pop group” at the same time? Does it make you wonder? 

And this is another core theme of k-pop, in my opinion. In fandom where stan = obsession = support, you can see interesting patterns. 

Fandom loves their flawless gods. But watching them from afar is not enough for some people, because unlike deities in different religions, these gods live among us. People are very much aware of that. Industry has created a cult and laid the groundwork for worshippers to express their adoration in every way including personal contact. And who wouldn’t want to meet their god? Who wouldn’t want to know more about them or tell them how much you love them? In talk shows and fan meetings there is only so much one can do after all.

People desire to know more, to have more so much that their obsession transforms into concerning stalker tendencies. These crazy individuals follow idols, stalk them on social media, in hotels, research flight numbers, bribe security. Musicians were attacked and poisoned. I strongly suspect there were cases of rape that no one knows about. There is even a special term for these fans - “sasaeng”. 

Is there a definition for stalkers of actors or musicians in western world? No, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. They are just called “invasive/obsessive fans” or “stalkers”.

Also, there are sasaeng memes. Yeah, you heard that right. I enjoy some classy dark humour as much as the next person, but there is a fine line between normal and questionable. 

Back to the topic of stalkers. Do you realise how disturbing that is? Such behaviour is so common that there is a term for it. You create a fandom-cult, encourage people to worship k-pop idols as gods and then act surprised when members of said cult become fanatics and their adoration becomes obsession.

And it’s so easy to step on this slippery road. The system makes it ridiculously easy. Lines begin to blur. How much is too much? Where do you draw the line? 

While sasaeng fans engage in extreme real-life obsession, people online aren’t that far off, to be honest. I’ve seen it all: imagines, headcanons, fanfiction, real-person shipping, reactions. Real person shipping is a controversial topic. Some people support it, others don’t. I suppose I’m among those who don’t get it. I’m not exactly against it, but I find it strange. Mainly because it’s based on assumptions made by fans about personalities and behaviour of real people. 

Assumptions. Dear me! K-pop fandom has this thing with video compilations. I’ve never seen this phenomenon being so widespread in any other community or fandom. Basically people edit together a collection of short clips from talk-shows, interviews, Instagram stories, some YouTube videos, etc and then proceed to analyse every gesture, word, facial expression of idols and provide both audio and on-screen commentary. These videos and many other forms of similar analysis allow people to imagine what kind of personalities idols have, what kind of life do they live. It’s the source material for fanfiction, imagines and headcanons. 

But it’s not real. It’ll never be real. It’s an illusion, an image, a stage persona. They fall in love with a face and made up personality. And I think that when people create this content they can forget this. Fans can develop certain emotional dependence and unhealthy attitudes in the long run. In some YouTube comments even supportive and encouraging words sound whiny and obsessive. And semantics of being a “stan” of certain group or individual doesn’t help. 

4. Industry, companies and liars 

At last we arrive at the most important aspect of music entertainment industry - its creators.

Have you seen “The Road to El Dorado”? It’s one of my all time favourites. It has iconic characters, adult jokes that I didn’t get as a child and iconic soundtrack. I’ll quote “It’s Tough To Be A God” a lot here. 

In South Korea music industry is a factory, the production line to be exact. This kind of set up affects everything in the grand scheme of things. Companies and agencies play the role of training centres and record labels. And there are so many of them that a whole new scamming system developed based around fake idol agencies. It implies that there are people who fall for offers of these agencies and continue to do so. I suspect that victims must pay a fortune upfront before they realise their mistake. Are there any kind of legal protection against such scams? How can people verify the authenticity? Because a well masked scam can exist for a long time before someone discovers it and calls them out on their nonsense. 

As far as I understand legal companies work like this. After high school, which is often focused on performing arts (and private schools can get away with using talents of students for personal gain, which is totally not surprising), young people can audition for an agency and become an idol in training or idol-trainee. And passing audition is hard. But good recommendations can help, connections too. 

During training you don’t get paid. Only a few companies pay aspiring musicians. People can spend years in training and don’t debut. But rent, necessities, clothing and food (not that you need much of it, but more on that later) cost a lot. Where do you get the money to live then? Support from parents, one or two part time jobs at most and bank loans. Surprise! We found an unexpected (just kidding, it’s very obvious) party, who reaps benefits from the system. 

You need skill to be an idol. Natural talent helps too. The more skills you have, the cheaper and faster your training is. To level up your game you attend classes every month offered by your agency, which are not cheap (dance classes range from 400$ to 1000$ per month, sometimes more). There are four main categories in evaluation process: vocals, rapping, dancing and visuals. Idols are multitaskers, to have a chance on stage one must be perfect at everything. And people are ready to invest thousands of dollars into their kids training so that they could have a chance in entertainment industry. South Korea thrives on revenue k-pop industry generates every day.

Let’s pause here for a second and think about what kind of people come to these agencies. The answer is easy. People who have a dream, a desire, a real goal. You don’t wake up one day and decide to become a k-pop idol. Sometimes people get invited by agencies (after prior acting, modelling career or any other form of exposure). These people are usually very young. Some start straight after high school, some after university, but 25 years old is considered a late start. Compare that to western musicians who start singing at any age and still become famous. 

But why this age limit? Because idols are eternally young. So that in public eye musicians are remembered as 20 year old gods. People would listen to their music and imagine a young attractive face. Career in k-pop is short, it lasts 5-7 years, rarely longer than that. It’s even less than modelling or acting can offer. And professional sportsmen retire in their late 30′s. Some play longer, but usually, that’s it.

If you live in Los Angeles and say that you want to be an actor or performer, no one would bat an eye. It’s like saying that you want to be an engineer or accountant. Similarly, in South Korea becoming an k-pop musician is a real career. Because part of the self insert fantasy that the industry sells is the idea that anyone can be an idol. It’s easy after all. Anyone can pass auditions and become a trainee. A trainee with no guarantee of debut. But one should never underestimate the power of idol-dream. After all, idea is the most resilient parasite.   

“My friends started training in kindergarten. They have wanted to become idols since young”

“A lot of young kids get interested in Korean music” 

A 6-year old child sees the performance of k-pop group for the first time on TV. Let’s say it’s a girl. She is enraptured and decides that she will be like that too someday. She grows up, while being part of the fandom, just like all idols are in one way or another and whose fan-obsession transforms into desire to succeed. Her parents spend time and money to find her tutors, to fund dancing and singing classes. Perhaps in high school this girl decides to fix the shape of her eyes and make nose straighter. She trains hard and passes the auditions in her dream agency. And during training this girl faces the reality of behind the scenes life in music industry.

“Why are you crying? I’m not even pushing you”

“How many times have I told you? The rest are doing it perfectly”

“She is dancing like an elementary school student“

“I watched your performance as a spectator who bought a ticket to your concert. I want a refund“

“You make my ears hurt. I don’t want to listen at all”

“Listening to you was tiring”

“I’ll kick you out instead. You won’t debut”

“I thought I was going to die. That’s how determined I was” 

While I do understand that keeping a high quality standards in media industry is important, there are more productive and healthy ways to motivate someone to improve and be more passionate, you know? Constantly insulting people with sadistic glee and putting them down at every opportunity or calling them ugly to their face doesn’t do much. 

Do you think that children know about this? Do they know about soulless teachers and belittling managers? Do they know about friends who are really your competition, so you shouldn’t get attached? Do they know about living in debt? Do they know any of this? No, I don’t think they do. 

Children dream about the stage, about the sea of lights and crowds who chant your names. They want adoring fans and photoshoots. They want to appear on TV and magazine covers. Teenagers want the thrill of performance, they want to share their music and dancing with others. 

“I don’t know how many times I cried alone”

The truth is cruel. But they won’t give up easily even if it means sleeping 4-5 hours and consuming no more than 500 calories per day. Because giving up means that your whole life was a lie. One can’t afford not to be good enough. Giving up means admitting that all efforts and money your family invested into your dream were in vain. It means losing face before your family and friends - a fate worse than death. Imagine living this idol dream and building your whole future around it and then being told that you’ll never debut because of the circumstances outside of your control or something minor, like face shape or 1 kg of weight that your body refuses to lose. It can break you. Especially if you are like 18 or something. 

5. “And who am I to bridle if I'm forced to be an idol If they say that I'm a God, that's what I am”

“I don’t think there’s anything a tough as being a trainee in Korea”

Once you are a trainee at the agency your personal life does not belong to you anymore. You can’t go out without permission of the agency. You phone is taken away. Your diet and weight are monitored. Bad habits are not allowed (no smoking, drinking or drugs). Oh! I think I found the good thing in the system! Unfortunately, it won’t last. Trainees can’t date or meet with family without permission of agency. Dating is very taboo. Even established idols can’t openly date. 

Why is that? Because gods can’t belong to anyone. Their lives are property of the fandom. Because openly dating idols destroy the self-insert fantasy. There was a former idol girl who dated another musician. She was called a whore by her fans, her loving and adoring stans. You might know who I am talking about. Would you call an American actor or singer a prostitute for dating someone?

Trainees sign the contract. And how can a young person straight out of school or university know much about what makes a good contract in entertainment industry or what makes a good contract in general? Even if you do understand the terms fully you would still sign it because if you have come so far, you can’t let your dream slip this easily. There isn’t a choice. Not really. If you want to debut, you will agree to anything.

What about life after debut? You have to pay off your loans. And company takes 60-70% of your group’s earnings. Artists themselves get 30-40% and split it between themselves. K-pop groups have from 5 to 10 members or more than that. Each person gets less than 6%. Idols are not filthy rich. They are not. These earnings are practically nothing compared to the work you have put into this. 

Idols are musicians, who often don’t even write their own songs, music or create choreography. But if public doesn’t like the song and musical number the company created, they blame idols for the failure. Such an amazing logic we see right here. But people say that sharing music is the best part of idol life. But whose music? 

Models on catwalk are not there to demonstrate their physical beauty, they are blank canvas for works of clothing designers. Same with k-pop musicians. They act like puppets in a way, whose faces and voices are used to show audience someone’s music and songs. Some groups do write their own music and lyrics and it’s nice to know that. But those, who don’t are rather unfortunate. It’s a nice tool of psychological control and pressure for an agency. They can hold it over group and use the following rhetoric: “We gave you everything! Why can’t you follow the simple instructions” or “Where would you be without us? It’s not even your music!”

I called k-pop industry a factory. That’s true. Dozens of people become trainees every year. These talented young people are fully prepared to do anything to achieve their goal. They are ready to practice until they collapse, starve themselves and pour themselves into every song. Companies know that. Tell me why would they value their idols as individuals, as people, as human beings if they always have a replacement? Why bother with mental health of their artists if next year they could have a fresh set of people, who are younger and prettier? Why try to improve relationships inside groups if you could fire any member and replace them within a month or two?

In western countries famous bands have different stories. Some were friends since high school, who played in bars and during festivals and then they were noticed by some representative of label company, who offered them a contract. Some groups were formed by like-minded people who bonded and decided to share their music with the world. There are many stories, but ultimately the have one thing in common. Bands in the West often form themselves. These people had time to bond, connect, discover each other, solve some disagreements and learn to work around their differences. 

K-pop groups are formed by their agencies. They are their property in a way. Company selects the best and puts together these total strangers, appoints the leader with marketable face and personality and then expects them to work together like a well-oiled machine. No one has time to bond during training, because other people are you competition, not friends. And then you must learn to work as a team and be best friends on camera for the audience to support the self-insert fantasy. It’s no wonder that k-pop groups don’t get along sometimes. And every member knows that they are replaceable. It doesn’t help in forming connections. Groups can’t just terminate contract and go to work with another agency. I heard it happens sometimes, but it’s not a done thing. Unlike in other countries where bands just sign the deal with a different label and release their music under their name if they don’t like the old conditions. 

“It's tough to be a God But if you get the people's nod Count your blessings, keep them sweet, that's our advice Be a symbol of perfection Be a legend, be a cult Take their praise, take a collection As the multitudes exalt Don a supernatural habit We'd be crazy not to grab it So sign up two new Gods for paradise”

But is it really a paradise?

Idols are expected to act cute, to match personalities created for them by fans or media. They have to act according to the concept of their group. They have to be a symbol of perfection: skinny, single and with a face perfected by surgery. They are allowed to mess up, but only in a cute way. They can break down and cry, but only if it’s “aesthetic”.

Weight issues are a separate topic. Sometimes I wonder whether managers in companies understand how weight loss or human body in general works. To be honest, I think that scales in agencies are rigged. And only managers know that. I know it can be done from personal experience. Some beach resorts tweak their scales and make them show 4-6 kg less than actual weight, so people wouldn’t get upset if they gain some. There is no way a girl as tall as I am (173 cm) could weigh like 47-50 kg and be able to perform complex choreography on stage and sing without being out of breath, visit the gym on a regular basis and generally function as a normal human without fainting every other day.

“I developed a lot of eating disorders”

“I think I consumed about 300 calories today“

“Someone, please, trim the fat off her arms”

If you grow up thinking of idols as gods and then, when you become one of them you think that you must act as one too. But being an easily replaceable god is a heavy burden. The industry, companies and audience want you to be perfect, to always be on your best behaviour. And the thought of not being good enough or divine enough terrifies you, because stans have no mercy (black ocean concept is the most stupid thing ever by the way). This kind of pressure can destroy even the most resilient. And it does. 

Almost everyone knows that situation with mental health in South Korea is not the best to put it lightly. In many ways it’s a cultural thing. But in k-pop mental health issues are treated with even less care. Gods are not supposed to be depressed or suicidal. They are not supposed to have fears or insecurities, can’t be upset or angry. They try hard to be this deity, this image. So, even when they realise they need professional help or even a friend to talk to, they either won’t seek said help or reach out only to be met with silence. Some agencies disapprove or forbid therapy altogether. 

Sometimes fandom becomes self-aware.

“Don’t forget that idols are people too!”

“Your favourite idols are running out of breath just to keep you entertained“

“They are humans, who have feelings!”

Oh, but here’s the thing, my friend. The industry doesn’t want you to think of them as people. Companies and media repeatedly reinforce the idea that they are not people, they are your idols. And strangely enough, the audience supports this idea. People continue to call them idols, developing worshiping tendencies in the process, imitate them, scrutinise their flaws and triumphs. Because, you know, only “real and ordinary humans” can have flaws, not “idols”.

So people who say “they are human too” and people who say “wow, this concert was amazing, but vocals in the beginning were so off-key, I simply can’t” are one and the same.

This thought process would have been funny if it wasn’t so disappointing. But that’s just my observation.

And here’s another thing about sexualisation. I said before how appearances are everything, marketable face and body could drastically improve your chances to succeed. Companies know about this too and concepts and aesthetics of groups are designed accordingly. Girls are dressed in skimpy outfits, their dances are unnecessary suggestive, they wear heavy make up and try to have “mature” vibes. Boys don’t avoid such objectification either: suits, tight pants and dress shirts along with make up and hairstyle to give audience a promise of the things to come. Grown adults are not supposed to lust after 15-17 year olds. You can’t just create a sexy stage persona for teenagers. Do you remember my earlier words about creepy merch? Yeah. All of it neatly plays into the self-insert fantasy and encourages obsessive behaviour. 

This happens in western countries too. In some way that’s understandable. Beautiful and sexy image with a hint of innocence attracts more people and sells, because it caters to one of the base human instincts. But some things make your skin crawl. 

Sponsorships are another topic. Some k-pop bands seek out sponsors to provide financial aid and cover expenses, when earnings are not enough. Sometimes these sponsorships are fine, perfectly civil. But sometimes it’s a prostitution. Girl groups receive money and provide sexual favours to their patrons. It’s a way for the group to gain financial support and even find new opportunities in the industry. Companies can encourage such deals. Let that sink in for a moment. 

6. “Any advice to those who want to become a k-pop idol?”

A lot of former idols and trainees have similar responses to this question. 

“I don’t want to discourage anyone, but think twice”

“You only see the glamorous side, but don’t see all the hard work that goes into it”

“It’s not what you think”

“They think ‘Since I am good looking and can sing and dance really well, maybe I should become an idol?’, but there is much more to it“

“They think it’s something that is easy and will keep their family set for life financially”

And this implies that most people don’t know what kind of lifestyle k-pop stars truly have, despite the amount of information available online about “behind the scenes” proceedings.

7. Moving on

I am a practical person and every decision I make is subjected to scrutiny. And after seeing everything I can't help but wonder whether idols believe it's truly worth it. What keeps the industry alive is the idol-dream, the wilful ignorance of its reality and youthful idealism, the beautiful naïve belief that it'll get better, even if it never does in the end.

Sure no one would ever admit it out loud, because it's one of those things you never say on camera, no matter how sincere you have to be. It's the matter of professionalism after all, and idols have it spades. And also, because admitting this would equal admitting that you spent your best years doing something you both loved and hated, admitting that this was a mistake.

When you grow up in a society where appearances matter the most, where saving face and being polite is more important than staying true to yourself, where individuality is tolerated only to a certain point, it takes a lot of courage to admit that you need a break. I greatly respect those who decided that idol lifestyle is not for them and moved on.

8. Conclusion

To sum up, I hope you enjoyed my small research and this perspective, since you have read it all the way to the end.  

You have noticed that entertainment industry is an intricate system and its every component makes sure nothing changes. Companies have power over idols and audience, fandom has power over idols and their careers, and musicians themselves have fame and their music, but not always the promised fortune or happiness. 

It’s important to understand the big picture to draw your own conclusions and encourage positive and heathy attitudes in fandoms. Being open minded and allowing people to make mistakes and live their lives the way they want to is a part of being a decent person. People don’t owe anything to others. Art is about sharing your thoughts and feelings, promoting ideas and spreading beauty. It’s not always about money. And I think that this is what k-pop lacks as an industry. It turned dreams and human need for self-expression into business. Here everything is turned into a product. Everything idols touch can be sold, sometimes literally. Industry created problems, which can’t be solved anymore, because doing so would topple the system. And I find it tragic. Trapped in an endless chase after perfection creators of k-pop forgot that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. 

If you take a look at comment sections and posts on different platforms, what will you see? What kind of things resonate with audience? What makes people laugh and cry? When people start to appreciate the substance?

“Everyone needs to hear this song in their darkest moments”

“Thank you for your music!”

“They always deliver! These guys can’t make a bad song!”

“It inspired me to write again!”

“Their songs brought me and my sister together once again”

“This is what happens when you let groups write their own music - they make incredible things”

“They really are legends of k-pop! I love that they are not afraid to show their inner strength”

“Stay strong! You rock!”

I believe that the answer is quite simple: when it’s real, sincere. It’s all about the message you choose to send to your audience, because only superficial things cause obsession. When you say that the sparkly façade is all that matters, then that’s the only thing people will ever care about. Your audience will never give a damn about the meaning behind dancing, music or lyrics, if you tell them that performance is more important. No one would praise WHAT k-pop idols sing, instead they would prefer wasting breath to criticize HOW they sing or look or move. 

I dare the k-pop industry to prove people that it’s not just about looks or perfection, or laser shows, or being a branding machine. Prove to your fans that k-pop artists are also passionate people with big dreams and talent, who love every moment of their job, who live and inspire, who are human just like us and whose humanity is real!

Do it, you cowards!

And now, I’m finished. I can hear the raging crowd of k-pop fandom in the distance, which means it’s time to hide. See you some other time! 

[sakura-blossom28]

Modern Day Romance

Chapter 5

The date continues! Thinking about doing a small time jump to get their relationship moving! Let me know what you think! Don’t own Naruto 

Ch 1 / Ch 2 / Ch 3 / Ch 4 / 

The botanical garden was more magical than Sakura could have ever imagined.  Flowers bloomed all over and so many scents mixed in the space, it was a bit overpowering, but they got used to it as they moved through.  Everything was sculpted into different abstract shapes.  Sakura had never seen so many flowers at once.  They walked around in silence for a bit getting lost in observing the flowers.  

Soon they found a different type of arrangement of cacti off to the side.  Gaara seemed to have noticed them and headed right over to them but still made sure that Sakura was with him.  His eyes scanned all the different potted plants in front of them, there actually was excitement in his eyes.  Sakura thought he looked like a kid in a candy shop.  She remembered that Gaara had some cacti in one of his pictures on the dating app.  

“You really like them right?” Sakura finally asked.  Gaara slowly turned his eyes towards her and she smiled gently.  He started to blush a bit and Sakura found that so cute.  

“Sorry, yeah, I guess you could say I’m obsessed with them.  I got into gardening and desert plants when I was in school,” Gaara said as he put his hands in his pockets, “It was part of my rehabilitation while I was in high school.” 

He turned back towards the plants, but Sakura knew he was waiting to see her reaction.  She could ask a million questions but decided against it.  It would be so rude of Sakura to question his past when this was the first day, and she felt that she would come off as judgemental towards him and that’s the last thing she felt.  But she risked asking one question.  

“Are you healthy now since then?” she asked while turning to look at the plants like Gaara.  He took a few minutes to answer.

“I had a messed up past, but with the help of that school and my siblings, I can say that I am not the same person I was back then and have no desire to be how I was.  So yes, for years I’ve been healthy and now I help people who were like me,” Gaara said with clear pride in his voice.  Sakura slid closer to him so that their arms were touching.  

“You being healthy is all that matters,” she said looking up into his eyes, “So mister cactus expert, tell me about that one.” Sakura pointed at a small potted cactus that had a small orange flower on top of it, but the flower hadn’t bloomed yet.  Gaara followed her finger to see which cactus she wanted to know about.  He chuckled when he looked at it.

“That’s a cactus and that’s its stomata.  It doesn’t bloom during the day to conserve water.  Normally plants open their flowers during the day for the process of photosynthesis, but they open during the night to conserve water.”

“Oh, well that’s less exciting than I thought,” Sakura half grumbled to herself, “Tell me more!” 

Gaara seemed taken aback by her general interest in the plants around them.  The rest of the time Gaara led them around and talked about all the pants that he knew.  He was so invested in what he was talking about that he didn’t notice when Sakura slipped her arm through his and they walked around the rest of the gardens just like that.  Sakura was very much enjoying hearing Gaara talk about what he was clearly passionate about.  For thinking they would be awkward the majority of the date, all their stress melted off of them.  

Gaara was in the middle of discussing a particularly rare desert flower to Sakura when his phone started ringing.  Sighing Gaara went to pull his cellphone out.  Sakura wanting to give him some privacy, she slipped out his arm, but before she could get too far he reached out his hand to take hers to keep her close.  He had turned away to answer the call, but Sakura could see that the back of his neck was bright pink.  She laughed to herself about this but turned in the opposite direction to give him a little bit of privacy.  He finally hung up the phone and gave a light squeeze to her hand to tell her that he was done.  

“I guess we lost track of time,” he said and showed Sakura the time of 5:15 pm on his phone.  They had been walking and talking for about three hours and it felt like nothing to either of them.

“This may seem weird and feel free to say no, but my sister is a designer and has a fashion show tonight, and she just called to remind me.  Would you be interested to go?  I’m not sure if you’re busy or not-” but Sakura stopped him by squeezing his hand and laughed when she noticed that he was rubbing the back of his head similarly as how she did herself when she was embarrassed.  

“Gaara I’d love to go with you.  I don’t want this date to end yet.”  The look of relief in his eyes was so visible.  It was nice to see how Sakura wasn’t the only one who was enjoying her time and that he was clearly into her too.  

X

Gaara had failed to mention exactly who his sister was.  When he offered to drive them so Sakura could drop off her car at home, he filled her in on a few more facts about his older siblings and what they do for a living.  Temari being the center of attention tonight it did not take her long to figure out that the brand that his sister designed for is Tee.  An extremely high-end fashion line that was the closest thing to couture that was available to the common people.  Ino and Sakura had always admired Tee’s designs and wished they had a reason to wear these beautiful clothes.  

“You know I’m freaking out on the inside right?”

“I think you’ll be fine.”

Now that Ino had moved away to the city she had every reason to wear these clothes.  Sakura always browsed online and had the fashion magazine Shukaku sent to her home, she loved these clothes so much.  (Gaara made no comment that this particular magazine was almost run by him.)  

Gaara pulled his sleek black car (a company car) up to the valet of the abandoned building.  He explained that Temari got a kick of making the other couture designers squirm and picked the creepiest places to showcase a new line of clothes.  Gaara nodded to the valet who seemed to recognize him as they made their way inside.  He reassured Sakura that they were perfectly dressed in their casual clothes, “No one is going to be looking at us anyway.”

The inside of the building was completely redone in order to house this fashion show.  It looked exactly as Sakura had seen on TV;  a long white catwalk that went into the audience, large black curtains on the sides to hide the upcoming models.  On each curtain were large TV’s showing Temari’s previous works.  These were photos from different photo-shoots that Sakura could remember seeing online and in her fashion magazines.  As Gaara lead her to their seats on the side, a familiar face popped up on the screen.  

There Gaara was twenty feet up in the air posing in Temari’s clothes.  It was a fitted three-piece suit in a blood-red color that matched perfectly with his hair, making his teal eyes pop.  Sakura’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of him.  She had never seen this photo anywhere before and she would remember.  The look in his eyes was mesmerizing, they were hard but drew you in any way that you couldn’t look away.  Gaara finally looked up because Sakura had become so quiet. 

“Oh, she didn’t! I specifically told her never to use these pictures,” Gaara grumbled mostly to himself as he pulled out of his phone, probably to tell off his sister.  Sakura noticed that he was scowling and blushing at the same time.  

“I didn’t know you modeled Gaara,” Sakura said as she tried to focus on a spot on the floor and not keep drooling over the screen.

“Technically I’m not, but my siblings love to drag me into their business.  Temari knows she can push me around and I won’t crack like the models do when she yells at them for making her clothes look bad.  And my brother hates working with the models too.”

“You’re very good at it.  But I do prefer you as you are now,” Sakura said not being able to look at him.  Gaara seemed to relax next to her and Sakura peeked a glance at him.  There was a gentle smile on his face as he was avoiding her gaze as well.  They sat there like two blushing fools as the room around them started filling up.  Sakura finally relaxed enough that she got comfortable in her seat to sit closer to Gaara.  

X

As she took in the room she failed to notice a man in his 30’s sit next to her.  He was not much to look at, but his ego oozed out of him.  Checking Sakura out, he was about to strike up a conversation with the young woman, but a long toned arm wrapped around her shoulders.  When Sakura leaned into Gaara’s touch she did not notice the battle that was going above her head.  Gaara stared daggers into the man’s eyes.  The man went pale and decided to change his seat before the show started.  He did not want to cross a man with eyes like that.

Ch 6 

[epochxp]

Epoch Xperience Interviews Nordic Weasel Founder, Ivan Sorensen

Mr. Sorensen needs no real introduction to many miniature wargamers. His company, Nordic Weasel Games, has taken the historical miniatures gaming world by storm, and he’s become the force on Wargames Vault. His formula of “substance over flash” has produced good games for a very reasonable price, and he has taken full advantage of PDF technology to produce a quality product one can buy and have in your (virtual hands) the next day. 

Without further ado, I give you Ivan Sorensen:

Biography

My name is Ivan Sorensen, and I am a game designer and self-publishing writer of miniatures games, as well as the odd role-playing game. Under the moniker of Nordic Weasel Games, I have worked as a game writer for close to 7 years. 

I am an avid player of board games, miniatures games, role-playing games, video games, and anything else I can get my hands on. I have spent half my life on this planet in Denmark, where I was born, and half in the United States, where I currently reside. I am married, have one kid and two cats named Scruffy and Lancelot. 

Unlike a lot of historical games writers, many of my formative miniatures gaming experiences actually came from science fiction games, so I suppose that has given me a little bit of a different perspective.

So, how did you get started in writing rules? Was there an “aha” moment, or did you fall into it?

At the risk of sounding cheesy, I have basically always created little dice and board games for myself, using Lego pieces or other things that we had available, usually based on video games I had read about in magazines or other ideas like that.

When I was 12 or so, I remember getting a copy of White Dwarf magazine from a local gaming club I had joined, and it blew my mind. We had some limited exposure to the idea of space marines and all these things from the Milton Bradley Hero Quest and Space Crusade board games, but the idea of battle games played without a board, using miniatures and dice was too much to resist. I knew I had to get into this, and as I had no money for it, I sat down to write a game I could play with my Space Crusade figures, which would look as much like what I imagined Warhammer 40.000 would be like.

Since then, I had pretty much always been the “rules guy” in the gaming groups I was part of, whether we were playing miniatures games or RPG’s, so it just came naturally over time, I suppose. As I got access to the internet and later got access to ordering things from the UK or US, I devoured every game I could get my hands on and was even remotely interested in. 

The start to writing games that were any good was my own attempt at creating a World War 1 game system (titled Trench Storm). I had shared it online, and to my great surprise, it began catching people’s attention and got a (very) small following, with people even purchasing miniatures to play it. Eventually, I was contacted by the US distributor for IT Miniatures, who offered to print it to promote their 20mm figure range. The rest is, as they say, history. Once in a great while, a copy of that game still pops up on eBay, it seems! 

How did Nordic Weasel Games come to be? 

So that story took place right around the time I moved to the United States. After moving, I had a lengthy period where I did not have my work permit yet, so game writing seemed like an obvious distraction, resulting in Fast and Dirty, a sci-fi rules set that you still see mentioned online here and there.

As the years went on, I kept tinkering and building things but mostly for my own enjoyment. Sometime during the fall of 2013, I started seriously working on a new game system for WW2 skirmish actions that I felt had some real potential to go places. At the time, I worked at a relatively dead-end middle management job at an incredibly toxic information technology company. You know the sort of job, where you have been there for too long, and you hate every minute of it. 

Come the spring, I decided to take a gamble that I could make enough money from game sales to make it worth pursuing and quit. I figured if I could find a way to do it without putting money on the line, then if it all bombed, I could just walk away and find something else to do in life.

Consequently, Five Men in Normandy was released on June 15, 2014, and as of today, we are still here! 

What is in the future for Nordic Weasel?

Hopefully, many big things! The biggest priority for 2021 specifically is to get into print books, though there are a lot of stumbling blocks in terms of layout requirements and so on.

I always keep a list of projects I would like to do, though I try not to talk about them too much in case they fall through. I am the sort of guy who always starts with 20 ideas, so by the time the unworkable ones have been weeded out, there are 2 or 3 left. 

What I can say is that I am actively looking at fantasy miniatures battles, and I would love to do more WW1 and Black Powder era gaming material. 

The real big question is that I am also very much at a point where there are just too many things to do it all alone. I cannot write 4 or 5 new games, support an entire back catalogue, and update old titles all by my lonesome, so I look forward to trying to solve that in the future. I suppose this is a good problem to have, but it is certainly also an intimidating one!

Is there a period of history you want to write rules for but have not?

We have worked extensively with the two world wars and the black powder era in general, as well as 20th century-to-modern era battles, and with Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde we even delved into medieval warfare.

The one that stands out as something that would be fun to do is World War 1 air combat, complete with goggles and scarf flapping in the wind. A little romanticized sure, but great fun, and there is a lot of fantastic models available.

For a historical era I have not touched on at all, I would say that while I have done games that cover it among other 19th century conflicts, a dedicated American Civil War set is something I would be very keen to do.

There are a lot of fantastic rules out there for the period, of course, but I feel like the “Weasel” approach of being solo-friendly and campaign-oriented could carve out a nice space of that market. Plus, I find the era quite fascinating. Growing up in Denmark, I was never really raised with a particular view of the conflict, but having married into a proud Vermont family, it is, of course, unavoidable. 

Can you tell our readers what goes into rules writing?

I think this is something that is intensely personal, and the rationale for writing something can be varied: It may be due to sensing an opening in the hobby space that does not seem to be catered to currently. It may be that I have a personal passion for a given setting or era, or it may simply be that I have a clever game mechanic and want to build a game around it.

The process for me usually starts with sketching out a page or two of keywords, mechanics, and things I’d like to hit on a notepad. Then I work on building it out with simple sketches for the main areas of the mechanics: Activations, movement, shooting, morale, and so forth. Basically, carving out the cornerstones of the game system. At this stage, it is entirely possible it feels like it’s not going anywhere, and it goes in the bin. 

If the core idea seems to have merit in this skeleton form, it’s time to test it out with some generic troops and see if it actually feels fun on the table. From there, you just build out from it: Get other people to read and play it, read it out loud to yourself, etc. Figure out what parts need ironing out and improving and which are good. 

It is really all an iterative process. Once I know the game has legs to stand on, I start writing out the table of contents in advance, so I can “fill in the blanks” as I go. If I know I am going to have a section later for off-map support, I can keep that in mind when I am developing each piece of the mechanics and so forth.

Eventually, any project hits “The Suck (TM).” This is whatever part you hate doing the most, whether it is layout or proofreading or points systems or whatever. For me, it is terrain rules, funny enough. I never read that section of a rulebook, and I never enjoy writing it, but you must. “The Suck” is where your game will probably die because if you let it overcome you, you will put the book down, and every time you click on the word processor, you will immediately be faced with it. The best way to defeat “The Suck” in my experience is caffeine and not letting up: When it starts rearing its ugly head, it is time to keep going and don’t stop until you are through with it. 

Has desktop publishing and PDF only supplements changed the face of the hobby? Has it affected the quality of the product we see today?

Absolutely yeah. It’s not that long ago that a game being available in PDF was a novelty, whereas today, if a game is NOT available in PDF, you are going to lose sales. 

I think the barrier of entry has also dropped dramatically. Even a basic word processing package can churn out a PDF document that you can distribute online or sell. Of course, with proper page layout software, you can achieve much greater results (as some of my friends are rarely missing a chance to tell me), but you need to examine what your skill limit is. Any tool has a skill cap, to borrow a video game term. If you are not currently good enough at what you do to push up against the limitations of your software, burning 200 dollars on new apps will not make your books any better.

It is funny, though, because the wargaming field is so diverse in the type of things we see. You can pick up relatively big-name games that are incredibly plain-looking: Black and white, no art, rudimentary layout. Then right next to it, you see a PDF that is full-color, original artwork, and gorgeous. And the two can be viewed as equal value to the audience. 

Of course, eye candy DOES sell, but I think once you are beyond the Warhammer circles, gamers become a lot more content-focused. 

What are your favorite historical periods and why?

The 19th Century, the two world wars and the Russian Civil War. 

Really, the whole era from circa 1910 to 1925 or so is fascinating to me: It is, of course, the transition of the old, romanticized world to the world of modern warfare, as well as being incredibly diverse in the sort of things you can see. The Russian Civil War sees tanks and armored cars, partisan bands, nationalist militias, Red and White guards, Cossack cavalry armies, Anarchists, and anything else you can shake a stick at. It is really a wargamers heaven for finding odd units to model up on the gaming table.

Honestly, my love of history, in general, comes from one source: “All Quiet on the Western Front.” I think anyone with a passion for history has that moment where they realize that history is not about abstract concepts and kings and dates but is about real people who lived and breathed and had dreams and hopes. “All Quiet” was that for me, and it left a life-long impression on me when I read it as a teenager a few years from the age of the characters in the book.  

What do you see for the future of historical miniature wargaming?

Oof, that is a dangerous question. I think I managed to predict the rise of “Warband” level games (games where you play a small force in skirmish actions and with some level of character progression between games). Right now, that idea has set the fantasy and sci-fi miniatures scenes on fire, with everyone churning out their own version of the concept. 

In historical gaming, there are elements of it, but it has not been embraced to the same extent, possibly due to the grognard bias against skirmish games. I think if I had to put money on something, I would say watch out for historical skirmish games with campaign aspects or character progression in the next year or three.

I also think solo gaming is going to continue to gain in popularity and respectability, with more games developed primarily or even specifically for solo play. I am super excited to see this field because there is a lot of things that can be done here with how enemies arrive on the table, fog of war, and so forth, which is not possible in a conventional opposed game.

Playtesting, how important is it?

Very, but it’s also very misunderstood. I see people post all the time on forums about how they have been testing their game rules for 5 years. That sounds very impressive, but if you are only getting together 3 or 4 times a year in that time frame, you are basically starting over each time. Additionally, just playing the game with your own group is fine to iron out the basic problems of a game, but it will lose its value very quickly. 

To get actual feedback, give the game to people who cannot ask you questions and let them figure it out. Now your text must stand on its own feet and must work without you being there to explain the intentions. That is the real test. I would say three games played by strangers is worth more than ten games with your usual Saturday group. 

Of course, tracking down people who can understand the rules, will play the game, [and] report back to you, AND aren’t crazy is a challenge. If you post online, 50 people will say they would love to, and of those, two will read the book. Once you find reliable people who can give you good feedback, cling to them for dear life. 

 What are the benefits and pitfalls of self-publishing your own wargaming rules?

The biggest advantage is, of course, that you are in charge. What you want in the book goes, if you want a supplement, it will happen, and so forth. Additionally, your game will reflect what you wanted it to be. I think in [self-publishing], you get a lot clearer creative visions and indie gamers tend to gravitate towards that: A game that has something to say on the topic is extremely attractive, even if you disagree with a particular conclusion.

I try to do as much myself as I can, though, of course, I do rely on outside sources for things like artwork, feedback, etc. Part of that is that this way, I know I can support the product down the road: If I want to fix a rule where we came up with a better way of doing it, or I want to add a new section, I can do that. 

The downside, of course, is that you are on your own: Your art is as good as your own wallet can make it, your book looks as good as you can make it (unless you pay for it), and so forth. You also must promote it yourself. If you are writing for something like Osprey, they have marketing power and money to put behind the project. 

Anything else you would like to say to our readers?

Before you write a game, ban yourself from reading any game on the same topic for a few months. If you are writing a WW2 tank game, put all your WW2 games in a box and do not open it. You should be spending that time immersing yourself in the topic in the form of books, music, documentaries, or anything else. Never ever another game.

Also, it cannot hurt to blast some metal albums, at least in my experience. 

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At Epoch Xperience, we specialize in creating compelling narratives and provide research to give your game the kind of details that engage your players and create a resonant world they want to spend time in. If you are interested in learning more about our gaming research services, you can browse Epoch Xperience’s service on our parent site, SJR Research.

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(This article is credited to Jason Weiser. Jason is a long-time wargamer with published works in the Journal of the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers; Miniature Wargames Magazine; and Wargames, Strategy, and Soldier.)