#i love how uniformly colorful all the characters are

[qloof]

any cota coga fans...i love him with my whole heart

[badpanini]

absolutely NOBODY asked for this, but i happened across this clip of jackson publick as the monarch doing pentecost’s monologue from pacific rim and i blacked out and wrote down my ramblings about a crossover. this series is so good for a pacific rim au because there are SO many iconic duos and variety in character relationships:

okay so obviously hank and dean drift compatible, from the beginning to the very end. would be especially compelling for a hank + dean copilot situation with their season 6 onwards selves.

dermott and hank could also pilot a jaeger together but they wouldn’t be as good as if hank and dean did i think, because hank and dean balance each other out more while dermott and hank are sort of enablers of each others behavior and therefore not as aligned.

rusty and jj would be drift compatible in theory but they would fight and bicker and be HORRIBLE at piloting a jaeger because rusty would want to take control and fuck everything up but jj would like actually know what he was doing. and they would fight. so they have the neural link but they just suck at copiloting. also they could make their own jaeger, with jj taking over most of the project because he actually gets shit done while entrusting rusty to do some things for it (perhaps the shielding systems like palaemon) but he sucks at it and then it fails mid battle and they bicker more. they would probably name it some stupid shit like V.A.L.O.R. (venture aegis lethal offense robot) (yes i came up with that on the spot).

pete and billy drift compatible ooobbbbviously. could be some interesting “getting into each others brains/memories” shit there if you consider a link before billy remembered how he lost his hand.

THE MONARCH AND DR MRS OF COOOURSE. they would be so good at piloting a jaeger they would kick ass. the monarch would like have his own jaeger made specifically for himself and he would have a bunch of stupid shit built into it (e.g. ACID MAGNET!). dr mrs would be the level logical ‘chessplayer’ type pilot while the monarch has the energy and impulsivity for the actual combat.

21 and 24 would tooootally be drift compatible but 24 would NOT want to be a jaeger pilot he would be like “duuude im not doing this we’re gonna die” and 21 would be like “dude are you kidding?!! we are SO doing this!! this is fucking awesome i’ve DREAMED of doing something like this!!” and he would be over enthusiastic and clumsy with piloting, partially because 24 isnt feeling it at first but after going for a test run he would totally start loving it. they wouldn’t be great but they’d end up successful in combat in an unintentional way.

to coincide with the events of the season 3 finale, they could have a “raleigh and yancy” moment that makes 21 averse from piloting for a while. he would blame himself for what happened and vow to train hardcore before ever stepping foot in a jaeger again.

the monarch, dr mrs, and 21 would 100% triple pilot (like crimson typhoon) and KICK CRAZY ASSSSS!!!!!! 21 would make them name it some shit like vice royal and it would have deployable wings that slice and stun projectiles and arm daggers like 21’s (and like striker eureka!). it would be that mustard yellow with the visor area of the head resembling bug eyes and the accents would be black and that horrifically bright magenta color.

during the blue morpho arc, the monarch and 21 could pilot a rogue unknown jaeger (like obsidian fury) and “vigilante” around while trying to keep their identity intact.

watch and ward would copilot a guild standard enforcer type jaeger, all black and uniformly made, with red accents and hella tech shit.

brock would be the only person to pilot a jaeger by himself without any repercussions on his health. unfortunately, it does take a lot out of him to do so in terms of exhaustion so he can only pilot in small bursts- but he beats the fuck DOWN for those short deployments. all of the OSI’s top agents are ‘trained’ to be drift compatible with each other but for the most part they just sit in the chair and make sure brock stays stable because he’s usually all they need to secure a situation.

let us not forget THE TRIAD!!!! they would definitely have a triple pilot thing as well, and orpheus would INSIST that they could pilot a “mech” - (i’m thinking, a golem-like husk made of rock/earth?) - all though MAGIC only, and it would take a lot of focus. orpheus would take the helm in terms of magic and actually powering the “jaeger” and making it move, al would be in control of magic projectiles and jefferson would do all the melee combat.

the concept of red mantle and dragoon copiloting is very funny to me so they can be a part of this too.

PLEASE feel free to add, to disagree, to suggest, ANYTHING!!! i may or may not doodle some of these ..

and if you read this far.. i love you, thank you.. we are kindred spirits

[dangermousie]

Ok, 13 eps in and it’s official - Lost You Forever is this year’s Love Between Fairy and Devil for me, and not just because I am unreasonably obsessed or because I love the design or because it features a protagonist horribly hurt by life and a love interest who gets to them by pure sunshine goodness.

No, it’s because they both are summer dramas that I mocked before they aired and whose cast gave me hives and then I had to eat crow dinner with crow coffee and crow dessert.

I thought the concept of LBFAD (demon king and fairy girl occasionally swap bodies) was risible. I thought anyone who cast Dylan Wang in anything, let alone as a terrifying demon lord, needed to have their head checked. I’ve seen that man in a number of dramas and he can’t act, thought I. Oh, and that trailer was simply awful. This is going to be a great terrible flop and I am gonna enjoy hate watching and mocking it, also thought I. I checked it out solely out of sheer morbid curiosity and I was a gone five minutes in. It ended up my favorite drama of 2022, made it into my top 10 cdramas of all time in fact, and if anyone said Dylan did anything but an amazing job in LBFAD, I’d fight them in the parking lot. Man tore my heart out.

Now comes 2023 and here is another anticipated summer drama, Lost You Forever. If you assume I learned anything from the LBFAD scenario, you would be wrong. (In my defense, in the overwhelming bulk of cases when I hate the concept, trailer and cast, I do not end up adoring the final product.) Nobody could explain the plot to me coherently (not their fault in retrospect, I can’t even explain it myself as it’s more character study than anything.) The concept screams reverse harem, something I am primed to enjoy about as much as I was primed to enjoy LBFAD body swap between female fairy and demon king or perhaps a toothache. The cast - yikes think I. The last Yang Zi drama and performance I enjoyed was the Battle of Changsha. A drama that is a bona fide masterpiece and in which she performed amazingly but was released in 2013, a whole decade ago. Ever since then she’s proceeded to play a range of cheery dimwits who only a mother could love, and only a mother in possession of earplugs and perhaps a gag at that. And to me she started sleepwalking through those roles to boot. Watching her and her dramas became the definition of elevator music. And her leading men here? Ooof! The guy who plays the cousin I’ve never seen in anything. Tan Jianci is good in the right role but I did not think that was going to be a good role and then we get Court Lady Tan Jianci which - shudder. And Deng Wei? Yikes! I’ve seen him in a bunch of dramas and he was the walking incarnation of color beige. And that trailer was a giant huh.

And now here we are. The story is exquisite and I feel so deeply for everyone in it (now, in case of cousin the feeling is the desire to barbecue him but still.) The acting is uniformly good and so is the story. And Yang Zi does not play a cheerful dimwit but a haunted old soul and she does it so well my heart breaks for her and I am so invested in her it becomes ridiculous as I feel her slightest joy or disappointment so intensely. And oh Deng Wei is my other revelation. If someone told me I’d be swooning over a character played by him I would have told them to sleep off all the booze they must have just consumed. But guuh, his 17 just might end up being my favorite male character in 2023 cdramas and I feel for him so deeply and remain amazed how he makes goodness layered and not boring or cloying at all.

That crow feast is sooo delicious!

Am I gonna learn? Hell no! Provided we are not all murdered by a giant asteroid, come back to this space in 2024 to see what other drama that I was prepared to hate I am now obsessing about.

[bearmemesreviews]

Skylanders Review: Trigger Happy

Oh yes, my first fave. Let's talk about one of the many "subspecies" of Skylanders: The Gremlins. You see, since a major part of the Skylanders are the collectible figures, they would obviously need a way to make manufacturing them easier. So, while each figure is obviously unique in how it's detailed, they will often use a specific body type as templates for multiple figures. Similarly to how Neopets and their alternate forms work. Spyro shares the "Dragon Template" with several other characters, which we'll see soon, but for now we have the "Gremlin Template".

[Image: Trigger Happy is a short Gremlin with a Firey orange and sandy tan color scheme. His body is covered in uniformly orange fur, with the inside of his ears and the entire front of his body/the area acting as his face being tan. He has small stumpy feet and muppety three fingered hands with forearms thicker than the rest of his limbs. He has yellow eyes with black irises, almost always crooked, alongside fur around & in-between his eyes that's orange - making a pattern resembling a domino mask. He is almost always smiling with his comically large tongue hanging out, with teeth that are almost human-like with sharp canines. He wields two large pistols designed to fire gold coins, and in this specific image, he's straddling a golden cartoon missile Dr. Strangelove style.]

With Trigger Happy you'll be able to get what the body type is all about. A neckless and round being, more like the head itself is its entire body, supported by four limbs. There's not many of them, but each one is so unique it really does highlight how you can stretch one body type in so many ways.

Trigger Happy is a mysterious little guy, being the token "crazy loose cannon" as his name would suggest. He simply showed up one day, explicitly role playing as a western hero type, and protected frontier towns from bandits with custom-made guns that used coins as ammo. He's a Tech Skylander, as being an engineering savant is basically second nature to all fictional Gremlins, and he can even bring out a Coin Gatling gun as a special move.

He has a high pitch, kinda grating, voice; but in early Skylanders trailers he has an accent that sounded like an incomprehensible mix of Spaniard and Frenchman - almost like he's a Team Fortress 2 character.

In fact, doesn't that game have its own...

Anyway, I love these reviews because it really does highlight why I love my favorites. Trigger has a simple design, but making one of your playable characters marketed towards children a gremlin packing heat is just instantly hilarious. And it's only today, as I'm writing this, that I realize that the pattern of fur on his face is meant to resemble a domino mask. That really ties together his "Goldslinger aesthetic," though I still think he needed a ten-gallon hat.

Alternates: I don't know if I'll talk about all the recolors and occasional redesigns some Skylanders get, but I feel like I should tell you guys that Tigger Appy gets to wear an Evel Knievel Daredevil's costume for Superchargers, the game where the Skylanders get to Mario Kart with Bowser and Donkey Kong. Both he and the other two I reviewed by now have another-other form, but they're so weird we'll have to review those things by themselves down the road.

We'll get to Gimmicks once we get to Giants.

Trigger Happy is a fun exploration of his trope, and it's nice to know that the Skylanders team had bangers right out the gate considering he's one of the first few original Skylanders designed after the beta five.

Motto: "No Gold, No Glory." - Great Catchphrase, even if it's very obvious that it doesn't apply to him specifically. His lore outright states that the townsfolk that he saves get rich from the amount of gold coins his battles leave behind. I think that concept applies to the NPCs of Mario and Sonic games too, considering those two mascots become ATM machines whenever they walk into anything with a sharp corner.

The same thing happens to babies by the way. 4/5.

Trigger Happy gets 5 Chompies. The first of my personal roster.

Those cowards couldn't even be bothered to arm this child.

[fourseasonsfigs]

天理昭昭 - A-Han and Da Shixiong

Back into the JZEUniverse for this pair! These were one of the first figs made of this very popular pairing known as mobage - but they will definitely not be the last.

Mobage is a Japanese word for mobile gaming. In the Junzhe extended universe, it stands for the mobile game characters played by Zhehan and Gong Jun.

The koi spirit A-Han is one of two characters that Zhehan played in the mobile game Fantasy New Jade Dynasty. He also played the lotus spirit Xiao-Zhe, which I posted about previously. You'll be seeing lots and lots of figs of these characters in the future. How soon? Come back tomorrow!

The inspiration for the A-Han in this fig set is our favorite koi spirit handing out a treasure trove of gifts!

Gong Jun plays the oldest senior martial brother (da shixiong) of the Tian Zhao sect. Yes, it's a title more than a name, but Da Shixiong stuck and here we are. I generally just run the name together as Dashixiong (I have a bad habit of doing this with a lot of the JZEU characters, particular Xu Jin and Ji Fa) but I'm trying to do a better job of it! A lot of people just call him DSX, which works too.

I originally posted an A-Han video, but since Tumblr restricts me to just one per post, I decided to use that valuable space for Da Shixiong this time. That way you can see his whole costume. Tomorrow I promise it will be all A-Han!

I will note Da Shixiong as a video game character actually has wings, but that's a story for another day.

This pair is gorgeous. The detailing on the costumes is superb. A-Han is decked out in his finest golden jewelry, as he should be! Da Shixiong is standing in the same crossed-arm pose with his sword as you see in the picture and the video.

As you can see from the video, Da Shixiong's costume is very ornate, so I'm impressed with the level of detail put into this fig. I always love a good ombre effect. You can also see the great 3-D effect on A-Han's tassel there, and of course his golden anklet, which the fandom lost their collective minds over (for good reason, just wait until tomorrow!)

The height difference is pretty significant here, but let's remember A-Han is barefoot while Da Shixiong is rocking some serious white boots.

Here's a good shot of Da Shixiong's blue ribbons and A-Han's golden hair crowns. In the pictures/videos, A-Han's hair is actually more of a grey-white than a pure white (there's a backstory in the game about his hair turning color), and as near as I can tell Da Shixiong's hair has a slight undertone of pink to it. Here in the figs, they're rendered a little more uniformly white, although A-Han's hair IS a bit greyer. I think it was an excellent choice, keeps the focus on the outfits.

The full back view so you can see Da Shixiong's golden scarf and detailing on his costume. I would buy a replica of that scarf no problem.

And a little more detail of A-Han's little feet and the back of Da Sshixiong. Love the layers of his costume here.

An extreme close up of our beautiful koi fish! His golden jewelry shines beautifully, as well as his lucky chest and the gold crowns in his hair. This is such a delightful fig.

LOVE his little smirky smile here - that sideways grin is my number one favorite expression on any fig's face! Even better than the cute uwu face, because you know they're up to something rascally and fun.

This is a good view of his impressive boots, and and all the rest of the fine details like his different colored vambraces. The sword always makes me laugh, it makes me think of little tiny beady dragon eyes.

As you can see from the box cards, the name of the set is 天理昭昭, tiānlǐ zhāozhāo, which Google translate reports is either Sky Carp Zhao Zhao or Heaven's Justice Manifested, so I'm guessing (always dangerous when I'm embarrassingly ignorant to the language) the name is a clever play on Da Shixiong's sect name (Tian Zhao), A-Han being a fish spirit, and the chengyu (a Chinese idiom) for Heaven's justice prevailing over the wicked. Yet another thing to figure out when I'm much, much further along in my Chinese lessons.

I've now posted about all these three sets now that you can see on the box. I'm feeling a little accomplished. The firefighter set is here, and the winky Bazaar photo shoot is here if you want to check those out!

Material: PVC

Fig Count: 182

Scene Count: 13

Rating: Celestial indeed!

[link back to Master Fig Index for more posts]

[cobragardens]

Aziraphale is so fucking hot in this picture I didn't even notice the background right away. Those hips, that arm, that hand, that heartpricking da Vinci-sketch face.

But this background!! Y'ALL. We MUST talk about how cool what @elizabethrangerart is doing here.

So! The mandorla is a symbol of divinity in Christian iconography, often used for the Virgin Mary and Christ instead of (or in addition to) a halo.

It is not an accident that the mandorla looks like a pussy: that’s exactly what it is. Like most Christian symbols, the mandorla far predates Christianity, and it has been used for millenia as a symbol of both literal and metaphorical fertility. (In English heraldry women’s arms are traditionally depicted on a lozenge that is similar in shape to the mandorla rather than on a shield, and for similar reasons.)

In Christianity the mandorla symbolizes divine femininity. Behind Mary, it’s Mary giving birth to Jesus. Behind Jesus, it symbolizes the wound made in his side during the Crucifixion from which blood and water poured (John 19:34). In Catholic Christianity, the innocent Christ is said to give birth to the salvation of humankind through this wound just as Mary gives birth to the salvation of humankind through her ‘innocent’ (i.e., unrailed) pussy.

I shall leave it to the reader to contemplate the depth of misogyny required to compare the vulva to a wound and penetration to marring, to set the feminine ideal as a virgin mother, and then to reassign credit for birth itself to a male deity. The point is, the mandorla represents metaphysical femaleness. And the way @elizabethrangerart is using the mandorla here is really fucking cool, because it’s telling a story about Crowley and Aziraphale.

Rather than assigning a mandorla each to these religious figures, as would be traditional, @elizabethrangerart has turned the shape into a background pattern—into a painting or wallpaper on a wall, in fact. This tells the viewer that the religious figures depicted are associated with that metaphysical femaleness, but unlike Mary or Christ, they’re not bounded or defined by it. Both the metaphysical and the female are definitely a thing—this is an angel and a demon presenting as human women—but they’re incidental aspects of these characters.

How do we know that’s the message? A couple ways. One, because the mandorla pattern is painted as old, fading, literally in the background. New streaks of color, new shapes—human names and love hearts and an arc connecting the wives' heads--have started to cover that background. Two, the background pattern is flat and uniformly lit, plain and stark and regular, but Crowley and Aziraphale aren’t: they’re painted with deep dimension and detail. Even Crowley’s black-on-black uses multiple hues, highlights, shadows, and texture. The wives are posed characteristically, i.e., in a way that reflects their respective individual characters, but not at all formally.

That’s why it’s important that Crowley is striking a dorkily heroic pose that an actual cool person would know better than to adopt. It’s important that Aziraphale isn’t just holding books, but holding almost more books than she can carry. It’s important (and brilliant imo) that their colors clash with the background. We’re being shown that these are individuals, not icons, and that their individuality, their personhood, has overtaken and grown more real than their original assigned natures.

Even the tiniest details support this. Blackened fingers and cherubically blushed cheeks are by now well-established iconographic features for Crowley and Aziraphale respectively, but look at the way @elizabethrangerart has painted them here: they’re right on the edge of plausibly natural. Are Crowley’s fingers blackened, or is that just shadowing? Are Azirapahle’s flushed cheeks here iconographic, or are they realistic, matching her earlobe and the tips of her fingers?

And! And! Using the mandorla as a background pattern lets @elizabethrangerart do more than one thing at a time with it as well! Because these aren’t just mandorlas, are they: they’re huge, hostile, staring eyes. They represent not only the roles Heaven and Hell have assigned the wives, but the constant and inescapable background of metaphysical surveillance in which Crowley and Aziraphale exist. That’s why the pattern is black and white and red even though it clashes with Crowley and Aziraphale, the painting’s subjects: because those are the respective symbolic colors of Hell, Heaven, and danger.

So, in conclusion, this Aziraphale would get it and this fanart fucking rules.

60s Ineffables. I did the thing.

[demonslayedher]

What was dating/courtship/(arranged) marriage/whatever like back in the Taisho period?

Aww yeah, Taisho Roman, Anon! A period in which GIRL CULTURE was going into full swing! There were new fashions, magazines, cafes, short haircuts, manicures, girls were being recognized as consumers and had major cultural impact in this period, and they were starting to get more and more opinionated about love and romance and having a dreamy match!

But, a lot of those classic Taisho (1912-1926) fashions didn’t start to develop until a bit later in the brief (and generally nostalgically looked at in rose colored glasses) period sandwiched between the more forceful social upheavals of the Meiji (1868-1912) and Showa eras (1926-1989). Kimetsu no Yaiba takes place at the beginning of the Taisho Period, when Japan is already a full generation or two into Westernization, so a lot of the 'newness' has worn off in the cities. Meiji mindsets still would have a lot of influence on marriage, and what it meant to be a girl in the first place (we must talk about girls especially, because they had a lot more riding on marriage).

However, the Taisho period was also interesting as an in-between period, when the arm of the law did not reach all that deep into the mountains. Despite all the Meiji reforms on to everything from religion to marriage registration to compulsory education to how to count your own age, many of these were not uniformly enforced until later in Showa. The deep countryside of Taisho, far from the rapidly developing cities and social farming villages, was still a place where demons and secret societies of swordsmen could thrive. Meanwhile, clinging to old ways by using loose definitions under modernized laws left old demon hideouts like Yoshiwara much like they were in Edo times. Which is to say, having a mix of both old and somewhat ungoverned Japan, and new, fashionable Japan, as well as the classic divide between rich and poor, gives us a couple of very different worlds of marriage. This going to be a history lesson, and then we’ll use that to interpret what this might mean for the Kimetsu no Yaiba characters, at least as much as my heart feels so inclined.

The reason I focus on girls in this answer is because their marriage determined the fate of their life, especially due to laws like the Meiji Civil Code of 1898 and the associated family system, which almost always had a male figurehead. Despite, and perhaps because of the rapid embrace of modernity, there was a return to Confucian values which placed women at a very low status in society and made them almost entirely reliant on men (I also touched on this in a post about Uzui having three wives in this period, but concluded that their ninja society was counter-cultural in the first place). These reforms were considered a step back from the relative freedoms and independence Edo women could have, for example, it wasn’t until these reforms that women were required to take their husband’s name (except in cases of a son-in-law marrying into her family as an adopted heir, in which cases it typically never would had been an oldest son). While Taisho is remembered for the new freedoms and free thinking it encouraged in young women, it also had a strong “good wife, wise mother�� push for what women should strive for. The Meiji government was also concerned about population decline and labor shortage, which is why they encouraged larger families.

Speaking of the labor shortage, that brings us first to a discussion of poor girls. It was very common for girls from poorer families to go work far from home as soon as they graduated elementary school (technically required, but graduation rates could be pretty low anyway). It was not a matter of selling them to decrease the burden on the family, as in Kanao’s case, nor a matter of selling them into prostitution. They were still a member of their own families with parents anxious about their welfare, and the girls usually did domestic labor or factory work or childcare, things like that. Kiyo, Sumi, and Naho seem a bit young for this, but girls only a bit older would had been working just as hard.

The girls who labored for economic reasons very often delayed marriage until they were better off. For them, getting married at 25 would had felt relatively early; being over 30 at the age of first marriage wasn’t at all unusual. In very poor peoples’ cases, marriage registration was not very strictly enforced either, so sometimes that can mess with historical research, but we do know it could vary a lot. Furthermore, some regions had very, very different standards of what ages were normal for a girl to get married, but put very simply, the national averages in the Taisho period at the age of first marriage were 27 for men, and 23 for women (yes, we’ll get to those rich girls later in this post). As marriage would determine a lot of her future stability, she’d of course had been getting as stable a catch as she could, and since the times of samurai-era fussy class rules were over, she could marry up if she was attractive enough. Since these were often girls who worked for the sake of caring for their own parents and siblings, it was likely they’d have family agreements involved before settling down with someone, and it would be felicitous for everyone. At least according to Meiji laws, the head of her family would be the one granting permission for the union anyway, so if you didn’t have grandpa’s approval you were kind of screwed if you wanted to do things neatly. Since marriage was not really her decision, cases of being called home because the family had arranged someone for her wouldn’t be surprising.

In the context of Kimetsu no Yaiba, perhaps Nezuko, who already helped a lot with the family finances both with her sewing labor and her abacus skills, would had left the family to go work in town if their father was stronger and her presence wasn’t so needed around the house. I also find it likely that Aoi might had been laboring away from home when her family was killed, meaning she had never seen a demon until facing them at the Final Selection.

Alright, now for the people who might had actually had some fun with courtship… the rich girls. The prim and proper young ladies, the “reijou,” as they were called. Kanae and Shinobu were total reijou, Mitsuri was a total reijou, Satoko (Swamp Demon victim) and Tokie (almost Swamp Demon victim) were all total reijou. The latter two, being 16-year-olds with offers of marriage, were well on their way to securing their futures, sort of like landing the perfect corporate career right out of college. They would, after all, be financially dependent on their husbands. And men of that class were indeed looking for happy domestic lives, as we see in how three men wanted Tokie’s hand because she was so renown for her cooking, but more so in the fact that Kazumi and Satoko actually had the chance to court each other and grow affection for one another.

This was a big Taisho step forward in the culture of “omiai,” arranged marriages between families. Nowadays people may still turn to omiai if they’re awkward about dating or somehow or another haven’t managed to make a love match on their own, or they’re done fooling around and want to settle down with someone who will be family to them instead of an exciting romance. In Taisho, since pretty much every marriage was an arrangement between families with the head of the family’s approval, “arranged marriage” was less a matter of “long-since promised to one another by our families” and more just… “marriage.” However, what makes this a step forward is that there was now a culture of actually meeting each other in advance and having some say in if they actually liked each other.

Maybe a couple would meet on their own (we’ll get to that) and had chemistry and therefore got permission from their families to court each other; or, if they were introduced by outside parties who assumed they’d make a good match, or matched via a matchmaker with photos and formal meetings (we’re getting to poor Mitsuri-chan!), then they might get that one chance to make an impression and decision. In those cases it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to turn someone down given all the pressure to make it work out, but unlike in Edo times when perfect strangers (especially of high society) would be married off to each other with no say, Taisho youth had the chance to put their foot down and stop it.

So, where would a single man in possession of a good fortune and in want of a wife go looking for someone to court instead of seeing who he winds up with at an omiai? Why, to the bride store—I mean, the secondary school for girls, of course!

It’s not leery at all, all those girls were there for the sake of scoping out a match anyway. Only about 15% of 12~17-year-old girls went on to secondary school after elementary school in the first place, and if you hadn’t quit to get married part way through (legal marriage age for girls in Meiji was 15, then 16 in Taisho, but for reijou 17~19 was pretty normal) or didn’t have a marriage lined up for right after you were out, the general idea was that you were doing something wrong. In fact, simply graduating for the sake of having finished an education, and even more shocking, going off to—gasp!!—university to continue one’s studies for the sake of, goodness gracious, knowledge which would be totally useless to a good wife, wise mother??—was so, so outside the norm that 18-year-old women who might had chosen this (*coughShinobucough*) were judged very, very harshly. Women who had the means and could and did go on through graduate school, but by and large, no one wanted that for their daughter. Quitting school to get married was the better sign of success. It was also a common insult to refer to girls who weren’t as attractive as having “a face for graduation.” Ouch!

Now, before we go on, it’s worth mentioning that no one really had a problem with reijou graduating and delaying marriage so they could go off to polishing school to learn arts like flower arranging and music (and Kanae could totally do these things before the Kocho parents were killed. And I just now got totally sidetracked rereading the part of the light novels when little Shinobu brags to Himejima how Kanae could do anything from flower arranging to playing the koto to making tea and how all the boys in their neighborhood had crushes on her). Buuuut, if the reason a reijou wasn’t married by the time she graduated secondary school was because of her looks, there was no guarantee she’d find a husband even if she did pour effort into bridal skills.

Which brings us to Mitsuri-chan. Poor, poor Mitsuri-chan.

Our girl grew up in a happening shopping district of Tokyo with all the latest fashions and entertainments, lots of date spots* where courting couples were finding love and happiness and the emerging girly consumer culture feeding her similar idealized content that magazines and social media do today. Not only did she really, really want someone to feel a special connection with, to have a place in which she feels she belongs, but she would had grown up feeling that her self-worth was tied to her worth as a bride. Being a good bride was a way of being a good daughter, and she loved her parents too much to want to be the young lady who failed to find a fitting husband. They went the omiai course, a way to try to ensure a good match and her forever happiness and security, and instead she got that rejection. It wasn’t just that Mitsuri was chasing a doki-doki shoujo manga feel, but she was an outright failure of her station in life.

(*I admit I had no idea what these dates would look like, maybe I should check out “Haikara-san ga Tooru” one of these days.)

Since Mitsuri’s parents seemed most concerned about her happiness, even recognizing the emotional needs she had met in her dangerous, not officially recognized society of people who carried very illegal swords. Therefore, if Iguro did ask them for permission to court and marry her, they’d probably be very willing to grant it. Besides, this guy is a Pillar, he can totally financially support her (and the fact that Mitsuri could financially support herself and her own appetite probably made her feel better about herself too, for it took some of the dire marriage pressure off). If Mitsuri wasn’t bothered by his facial scars, they probably wouldn’t be either (at least in the context of already having wrapped their brains around the fact that their daughter is likely to die a violent death). At least, I interpret them this way, as she never expresses any guilt about having run away without permission to join the Corp. She’s very much a Good Daughter™ and would probably want them to approve of her marriage, too.

As for orphans in the Corp, they probably would marry whoever they want, should the right match come around. I’ve wondered before if Wisteria House daughters make popular girlfriends, for the families there can appreciate the situations the swordsmen are in. If they are orphans with conservative tastes who still feel they need the formality of seeking permission for marriage, they’d probably look to their own cultivator to approve in place of a deceased head of a decimated family. Even Tecchikawahara felt the need, as an adoptive parent, to see Haganezuka securely married off, and in the light novels set up an omiai so that he might enjoy some domestic bliss (which didn’t work out because she was a stupid choice of a match for a Nichirin swordsmith). Speaking of the light novels, there’s also a side story of the Kamaboko boys getting invited to attend a local wedding while recovering at the first Wisteria House introduced, and Tanjiro thinking about Nezuko’s future bridal prospects and just wanting her to be happy. (Dang, the light novels actually touch on marriage a lot.)

But hey, Tanjiro… you’re an Eldest Son™. Even if your little brothers hadn’t been killed off, you’d be the one with the pressure to carry on the family. Taisho Common Knowledge says you gotta get a wife, dude. Knowing that, Tanjiro probably always assumed he’d meet the right dog-like-lily-of-the-valley someday, and finding a way to make her happy despite their poverty was always a given in some way or another. She’d probably have been a poor girl in the first place.

But, Tanjiro in a post-canon world, deciding he wants to take Kanao as a wife? Well, he’s his own head of the Kamado family, but he’d probably seek Urokodaki’s blessing, for he’s the closest thing to a parental figure in Tanjiro’s life. He probably formally stated his intentions at Shinobu’s altar and asked her blessings too. But Kanao, being a working woman and co-master of the Butterfly Mansion, and having grown up outside of traditional family structures, probably is fine deciding this matter on her own (especially since working her way up to making her own decisions is significant).

In the InoAoi case, Inosuke probably never bothered asking anybody anything. Aoi, having no parents around, probably just went with it and they were informal, or she forced formality upon him in some way, I could see either course happening.

In the case of ZenNezu, they ain’t going anywhere without Tanjiro’s formal approval. Not that this will be hard, of course. Uzui might jump in and say no just to mess with Zenitsu.

Pillars might had at least formally informed Oyakata-sama of their intentions to wed. Who knows what Ruka’s family background is, probably people who were familiar with the demon slaying gig and who recognized what a responsibility it was to marry into the Rengoku family. As for Pillars marrying each other in potentially child-producing unions, Oyakata-sama’s permission was probably an absolute must. There may be pressure either not to get married at all because their work is too important, or to retire to prioritize their health. Whether they continue working as colleagues or not, their position as Pillars outweighs any social Taisho norm about good wives and wise mothers and providing husbands and heads of families.

As for marriage registration, the Corp manages to exist without the meddling of the law (woot woot Taisho in-between period), so it’s pretty likely Corp members would not bother with this formality.

Speaking of norms in late Meiji, Hashibira Kotoha and Shinazugawa Shizu would not only have had little say in their marriages, but also little recourse for leaving them. They would have had no way to return to their families and expect to be supported, and under the late Meiji era family system, the children belonged to their fathers. Even if they did secure a divorce (not terribly uncommon in late Edo/early Meiji, actually), they’d have had no way to make sure their children were safe...

So anyway! Back to happy canon marriages! Kamado Tanjuro and Kie likely would not have had formal wedding portraits, but I can see Tanjiro and Nezuko making sure to get them. Maybe Tanjiro would not have considered it a necessity if he were just a normal humble charcoal farmer, but after all they’ve been through and since they have the means, I feel it would mean a lot to them, especially with all the new people who would probably be present at their weddings and would probably want those keepsakes too.

[franky-enjoyer]

Rating the clowns in One Piece

Let me preface this with these are all characters that people have talked about in this post and I did not ever specify a clown.

The clowns will be rated in 3 categories on scales of 1-10. The categories are as follows:

Is this a clown?

How attractive are they?

Are they likeable?

I will then average those scores out per clown individual for a overall score. No these will not be in any particular order

Also don't start shit on this post like "how could you not wanna fuck that man???" I am 16 and asexual. It's gross. Don't.

This is gonna be long as fuck so here we go

Donquixote Doflamingo

Is this man a clown?: 1/10. This man is not a clown. The nickname Joker does not make it so. Who suggested him and why did you think I did so??

Is this man attractive?: 1/10. Absolutely NOT. This man looks like the physical embodiment of what I thought rich old ladies looked like when I was 5 and does not pull it off. His color palette while uniformly warm, doesn't make sense to me with the random orange and teal on his belt while those colors don't appear anywhere else, along with the yellow hair. For some reason I wish his hair was orange too idk.

Is he likable?: 1/10. Well written villain, shitty guy. What can I say, not getting what you wanted when you were 10 isn't a good excuse to manipulate mansplain malewife your way into dictatorship

Overall Score: 1/10. This is a Doflamingo hate page

Donquixote "Corazon" Rosinante

Is this man a clown?: 5/10. He consistently wears clown-esque makeup, but overall doesn't have any other clown-like features. He is however comical in his clumsiness which could be seen as "clown-ish", so I'll give him that

Is this man attractive?: 10/10. Yes. I don't need to explain, but I will anyways. I absolutely adore his character design and have been obsessed with it since I saw it. The red hearts and red hood match each other well and bring that color throughout the design and the dark purple is a good touch. He is what I though rich old ladies looked like when I was 5 in a good way, he pulls it off.

Is this man likeable?: 10/10. HE IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. I WOULD HAVE TO MAKE A SEPARATE POST PURELY ABOUT HIM TO GET IT OUT.

Overall Score?: 8.3/10. Great man, decent half clown

Gecko Moria

Is this man a clown?: 1/10. No. This is a spirit halloween decoration, and he isn't in the clown aisle

Is this man attractive?: 3/10. This is a goth onion. Why do his pants have windows? That being said, I enjoy his color pallette and while I don't think it's an attractive design to me, I think it is a good design in general

Is this man likeable?: 5/10. I know nothing about this man so this is purely based off of skimming through his wiki. I really am not a fan of his general laziness as a fighting style but eh it works for him with his devil fruit. Not a fan of him siding with the Marines during Marineford either. But he was described as caring towards his crew and a good father, so I guess I can give him benefit of the doubt?

Overall Score: 3/10. Eh. Just don't know enough about him and he just. Isn't a clown

Caesar Clown

Is this man a clown?: 6/10. He has clown-like makeup as well as clown in the name, so I guess?

Is this man attractive: 8/10. Yea. I can definitely say that he is. Idk what it is about him but yes. He is. I love his design

Is this man likeable?: 1/10. No. He drugged children. I know nothing else about him but I know that's enough to not have me like him

Overall Score?: 5/10. This man has a higher score than I'd like him to have

Buggy the Clown

Is this man a clown?: 10/10. His crew is circus themed. His name is Buggy the Clown. He has the makeup, the nose, and yes. Just yes

Is this man attractive?: 9/10. Taking 1 point off for Bedsheet Buggy. Aside from that, absofuckinglutely. I genuinely would probably think he doesn't look right without the red ball nose. He has the scruff, he has the smile, and I know he has a busy color pallette but it works for him

Is this man likeable?: 5/10. Eh. He's pretty egotistical and values monetary gain above a lotttt of else, and also has used his crew as human shields. But he's pretty damn funny so I'll give him points for that

Overall Score?: 8/10. He's a solid clown what can I say

[testudoaubrei-blog]

So I just posted an except from this interview in a reblog but I wanted to post the whole link and another excerpt in its own post. So some background, this is 2015. Noelle is 24, has just come out to himself and the world as a lesbian, and is also fresh off of being the youngest ever national book award finalist. She is also writing Lumberjanes and importantly, was developing She-Ra.

"Honestly, I want to find a way where we can still have these conversations about gender and diversity, because they’re SO important, but also kind of…give the stories in question a little room to breathe, and expand. It’s great we have role models, and I know it’s making a difference. But I think that’s just the beginning. I want female characters and characters of color to be able to exist in a mundane way too, or in an outright unpleasant or villainous way, and not have them have to carry the weight of portraying every single marginalized person positively, and not have their negative traits be seen as a poor reflection on the group they represent. Can you have a black Walter White or a female Lex Luthor without making an uncomfortable political statement? Can you have a epic, doomed gay love story like Titanic where you’re not just playing into the tired “tragic gays” trope? Can the character lose a fight dramatically and it not be seen as them being inherently less competent or valuable? I want the same nuanced characters, the same diversity of personalities, heck, I just want…MORE characters, and more kinds of characters. We deserve all kinds of stories. But first we have to break those stereotypes down before we can start to rebuild. So we do need role models! But the more positive representation we have, the more freedom we have for characters who aren’t role models, too. I hope that we can explore both at the same time. That’s what I’m trying to do."

So I mostly joke when I describe Catra as Walter White as a Catgirl. But it's right there. This is Noelle's artistic statement of intent. This is him throwing down the gauntlet to himself and the world to tell queer stories and women's and non-binary stories that are complex and challenging and go beyond the demands to provide uniformly positive 'representation'. One thing that always blows my mind about this show is how intentional everything is. We're not imagining everything. All this complexity and richness is very much intentional. I am still in awe of it.

[heylinfanclub]

Okay but outside the anatomy there’s stuff like (studying art styles I already like): a thick dark outer lineart with thinner, often colored inner lineart is NICE.

I like bright, saturated colors and also Cool colors. I like using weird colors for unexpected things. Love seeing pops of purple and orange on water, blueish trees, pink grass and green skies. But it’s all still clearly representative of what they’re meant to be.

Rim lighting is DOPE.

**back at that anatomy tho**

I like limbs that taper at the joints, though I’m not sure how taper to get before it looks weird (more of that ‘u gotta study real anatomy to stylize that anatomy’)

Big heads often important for big expressions but once I got the ‘1/3 between the shoulders’ in my head, my brain like ‘okay head has to fit between the shoulders’. Most animations meanwhile got heads as wide as the shoulders or wider it’s fYNE,,, making the neck thicker is more my style than pencil necks however, so that’s,,, still hard.

Alphonse Mucha and the SYMBOLIC DETAILS. Love a dash of organic and then symmetric details. I love the Borders. And ofc King of the ‘thicker border, more fluid thin and colorful inner lines’.

JTHM was very detailed for black n white and that’s somethin that also intrigue me. I don’t always like to color things. So that my work could still look POLISHED in black n white would be nice. The way the lines are drawn, thick and jagged, thin yet cuffed with chunky details (say very skinny long boots, but they have THICK buckles). Plusss… jhonen a master of ‘simple headshape’. I would love a simple headshape I can draw from many angles. But it’s a big ask. Especially for multiple dif headshapes. But the Big Bug Eyes, Small Chin, easily diversified but often simplified to a triangle nose, all very nice.

She-Ra probably too realism for what I really want (more fun). But it’s very much an idealized ‘semi-realism but cute’. Love the lil blush mark everyone gets across their face. Diverse body types. Angela and Glimmer main color scheme queens I love. Perhaps I’m more interested in the shows sci-fantasy aesthetic. The backgrounds? Oh god chef kiss. Inspo for hair perhaps. I really wanna draw hair but it’s HARD. show simplifies a lot of beautiful hairstyles across many many characters. It’s got room for study.

**grabs The Aristocats for cat anatomy study only** I would give them bigger eyes.

Tbh. Aggretsuko may just be a good study. Dark thick outer lines. Big expressive heads n faces. Still pretty detailed and cute!

C-could you believe—- The Boondocks. Study how they draw afros and the like. Diverse body types. I really like how they draw clothes and shade in stuff in general (the sort of sharp shading I feel from stuff like jthm too). It’s crisp. Loved Riley’s outfit when he was sellin chocolate (his hood looked like a cloud it was so fluffy). Also EYEBROWS SO GOOD?? How do they do it. (Makes me think of a tumblr artist but I’ll just say Sad Catholic Dog and y’all who know, know). It’s the definition of the forehead muscles ALONG with sharp, defined brows.

OFC. XIAOLIN SHOWDOWN. MY BELOVED. so smooth. So unique in shape language. The swirls everywhere. Hidden yin Yang symbols. Everything given a traditional Chinese aesthetic even if it’s not in China (how often they fly to like, America, but it’s still red tile roofs and that unique palanquin shape, everywhere). Thick lines, I love how they draw hands and how POINTY the shoulders are. Heads just Round as Hell, EASY PEASY.

Scavengers reign biology my beloved. Lines are uniformly thin, colors seem flat at times, but it’s still deep and intriguing. Someone said they draw beards weird but boi I wish I could draw beards at all so BEARD REF.

There’s a ton of shows I haven’t watched that I know would be good for study but I always take my time watching shows. (kipo how long will my brain neglect you, THE COLORS AND VIBE ARE SO UP MY ALLEY, but perhaps it’s the fear of distracting hyperfixation that keep me on a leash).

Lookin to expand style and watched video on it like. ‘Pick features u find important and highlight/focus on em then. Shrink stuff that’s less important’. BIG EYES. BIG MOUTH. LONG LIMBS. FUN HAIR. At least a moderately noteworthy nose zone cause I don’t want em Gone. I WANT. Anime but not it seems. (Always on that semi realism-cartoony-realism triangle somewhere close to semi-real and cartoony. Which is where anime is!!)

But I’m also curious how this idea would correlate to. Drawing animals. Longer limb kitties. Cheshire-like faces. Maybe. Maybe.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2021 (In No Real Order)

Hello again, website. Been a bit. I’m not gonna get into it too much but this year was straight up the worst year of my life. Will it remain that way with so many years left to come? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure it will at least always be in the running. Sorry to start this off on a bummer but it’s just been a bummer of a year. I have good, tangible reason to believe 2022 will at least be an improvement though. Hopeful for the future and all that. Anyway! One way that this year did not suck was in regard to those lovable Visual Games we all enjoy playing. Good year for those, which means it’s time for yet another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2021.

Shin Megami Tensei V (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Shin Megami Tensei V is a cool video game. It is not as cool as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. I know this applies to most video games created before and since, but it feels relevant to note here, this game being in the same direct series and all.

SMTV's combat and demon management is absolutely on point. There were some changes I initially didn't know if I agreed with, like lowering the amount of times buffs/debuffs stack and the introduction of the Essence system, but in the end the gameplay was basically as engaging and challenging as it ever was so all that stuff won me over. What didn't win me over as much is the move to open areas. In SMTV, the world is made up of a handful of large open areas that you're meant to platform around in and explore to find treasure, sidequests, all that JRPG stuff. It's functional and the platforming is surprisingly decent for being inserted into a turn based RPG, but looking through every nook and cranny for all the treasures and Mimans you're missing gets tiring after a while, and the map being incredibly unhelpful at describing differences in elevation exacerbates that. It also doesn't help that most of the areas just feel like the same desert wasteland with different colored lighting. There's not a ton of visual variety which, combined with the kinda underwhelming characters and plot, do a lot to make the game Not As Cool As Nocturne(tm).

All in all though SMT5 is a good time, and probably the only entry in the series so far where I'll go for 100% completion (mostly because beating the game in New Game+ takes like five hours if you just run towards the main objective markers). I'd love to see what they could do if they expand on this framework with a Maniax/Apocalypse style release in the future.

Metroid Dread (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Metroid Dread is like, shockingly good. MercurySteam not only finally made a good game, they made a fucking great game. I replayed (at least one version of) the mainline Metroid then-quadrilogy this year in the leadup to Dread releasing and picked Samus Returns as my Metroid 2 experience since I hadn't played it, and I thought that game fuuuuuucking sucked. Slow, clunky, repetitive, annoying, I just did not have fun with that game outside of thinking the post-Queen Metroid stuff was kind of neat. Like I'd genuinely rather replay original Metroid 2 before I touch Samus Returns again, and it majorly tempered my expectations for Dread.

So how fuckin’ surprised was I when Dread comes out and it's the most fluid feeling and fun to play Metroid game yet? Samus controls like a dream in Dread, the combat is snappy and satisfying, just moving around in and interacting with the world feels great. Basically every lame idea they had in Samus Returns is either massively improved or outright gone, and there's a bunch of cool new powerups that are fun to use and feel like smart additions to the series rather than the devs going "I don't know, Samus get machine gun?". The combat is also way more engaging. The basic enemies aren't a slog to deal with like they were in Samus Returns, and the bosses are uniformly great, with the final boss being probably the most fun fight in the series.

I did have one big complaint on my first playthrough (and keep in mind this is a complaint that disappeared in subsequent playthroughs), and that was that progression felt super railroaded to me. Not as in your face "You Will Go Here And Only Here, The Objective Marker On Your Map" as Fusion and Other M were, but it still felt like there was really only one obvious, correct way to go from whatever room the powerup you just acquired was in to the next room a powerup is in, and if you tried any other way you got hit with a door you couldn't open. It felt very hard to get lost or miss anything important (but boy howdy did some people still manage to pull off both of those spectacularly, the discourse around this game for the months after it came out was fucking insufferable), very hard to go anywhere the devs didn't intend for you to go, very limited.

Then I replayed it with the express purpose of looking for sequence breaks and holy shit sequence breaking this game is so fucking fun. Maybe BECAUSE that first playthrough felt so restrictive, finding ways to skip around and avoid shit, both in ways intended by the devs and ways unintended by them, really made me appreciate the world design way more. It's not like Zero Mission levels of masterfully designed to allow you to do whatever if you're smart enough to know how, but they let you get away with some duuuuumb shit if you're trying to. Like, I beat the game without any sort of extra jump ability just to see if I could. I got myself in so many dumb situations that I had to improvise my way out of, got myself locked into boss fights that I was just barely equipped to handle, and it all felt great! You can get so dumb with this game! I beat it like 5 times within the month it came out. It fucking rules. Play Metroid Dread, it's a good game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Nintendo Switch & eventually PlayStation 4, 2019)

And on the other end of the search action spectrum, I finally got around to playing Bloodstained and man if this isn't the best search action Castlevania game without "castle" or "vania" in the title. Right up there with Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow.

It's not too much of a looker, but it makes up for it basically everywhere else. There's soooooo much weird shit to discover and so many weird systems on top of systems on top of systems. It's just a weird game in the best way possible. The power curve is great too, by the end of the game you're zipping around at 100 miles per hour, warping through walls, stopping time, near-instantly decimating everyone with chain lightning and 8-bit fireballs, all sorts of wild shit. If you like the exploration-focused Castlevania games you owe it to yourself to play this.

Just don't play the Switch version. It's indefensibly bad, like it should be illegal to sell that version. Buggy, crashy, framey, hard to look at, just a total fucking mess. Really wish the full scope of how terrible this version of the game would be was more readily apparent before I ended up choosing the physical Switch version on my backer survey!!

Lost Judgment (PlayStation 5, 2021)

Lost Judgment was another big surprise for me. I enjoyed the first Judgment's story, but kind of hated almost everything about actually playing it, and only hated playing it even more when I picked it up again this year to refresh myself before the sequel came out. Lost Judgment, on the other hand, is the most fun a Yakuza game has been to play since Yakuza 0 with a story that's just the dictionary definition of acceptable.

But yeah holy shit they did it, they finally paid off the Dragon Engine debt and made a Yakuza game that's got fun action combat and a ton of weird optional side activities. Like, really fun combat. Best in the series combat. The new Snake style is super fun, having three styles makes a lot more sense than having two, they all flow into each other way more naturally, you can do funny air juggles, it's genuinely the best it's ever been. The breadth of side stuff reminds me of Noted Best Game In The Series Yakuza 5, there's wayyyy more than you think there would and reasonably should be. Like even more than Yakuza 7, and that already felt like it was mostly back on the right track in that regard. And sure it's all pretty hit or miss, but that's the way things should be with these games, dammit. They should get wild with it and they super did and I'm so happy it finally happened again.

It's a shame the story just isn't super engaging! Not awful, just not that compelling. I really hope the weird business with Kimura's agency not knowing what a computer is doesn't stop a third Judgment game from happening, because an iteration on the gameplay from this one with a story that's more in the caliber of the best this series is capable of could be fucking killer.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

This is kind of a weird game to talk about. There's a lot of weird aspects to unpack about how it was released.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a collection of two games, "The Great Ace Attorney Adventures" and "The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve", neither of which were released outside of Japan until this year. The first game originally came out in 2015 and was met with, from my outsider view, a pretty negative reception. So much so that I really didn't hear anything about the sequel when it released two years later in 2017. It seemed like a flop that was destined to sit in the no localization corner with Ace Attorney Investigations 2 (Capcom! You dumbasses!! Give AAI2 an official release!!! It's one of the best games in the franchise!!!) until suddenly in 2021 it didn't. Capcom was just bringing them both over here in a compilation, suddenly as that.

After playing through this collection I can say two things: I 10000% percent understand the initial reception in Japan, and I think The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is pretty damn good. Releasing it like this was absolutely the only correct call on Capcom USA's part. If US fans got it piecemeal like Japan did there would've been riots. The fact that it was initially split into two games with a two year gap between each is insane. This is just one bigger than usual Ace Attorney game.

GAA1 is, when taken on its own, SO fucking weirdly paced. The first case is genuinely bad in my opinion. It's your average Ace Attorney tutorial case except expanded out to three and a half hours. Then you get to case two expecting things to pick up and, while not bad, it's entirely an investigation segment. The third case is trial-only (but again, not bad!). The fourth case finally has you do both one investigation segment and one trial segment, and then the fifth and final case is the first and only one that dares to take place over more than one day. And then it's over! And it's over with an almost Halo 2 level "see ya next game suckers" ending! I wouldn't go so far as to say GAA1 is bad, but it is a game that's mostly setup and, when taken as a standalone product, has bizarre pacing that's only acceptable in the context of it being the first half of a larger thing you can immediately continue.

With all that out of the way though, when taken as the one large product it was released worldwide as, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is the best game the series has had since Ace Attorney Investigations 2. The first half being basically nothing but setup is, coincidentally enough, good at setting up overarching mysteries and characters for the second half to very successfully make good on. Especially the characters. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has the most eminently likeable core cast of characters since the original Ace Attorney trilogy. It was extremely bittersweet leaving them at the end of it all. Herlock Sholmes is the best character of 2021. He is a huge dip shit and he is my huge dip shit. The ultimate lovable dumbass. And then it has all the charming writing, music and animations you'd expect from a good Ace Attorney on top of that. If you're in the mood for an XL AA and you go in knowing that it's gonna be big and take its time, I can't recommend it enough.

Bravely Default II (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Ok look, I know every single year I have one game where I go "this was objectively good but still disappointed me" and in recent years I've even made a disclaimer similar to this one right here. Bravely Default II is this year's game. But before I get into it I feel the need to stress, emphatically stress even, that this game is objectively good. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It would not be on this list if I didn't. Please please please do your best to keep this in mind as you read the following rambly wall of text.

Bravely Default II might be one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I love the first Bravely Default. It's one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. Final Fantasy V is my favorite Final Fantasy and they made a shiny new FFV just for me with an insanely good soundtrack. Just that would have been enough for me, but they also went and did one other thing: they made it weird. Bravely Default gets fucking WEIRD.

What starts out as a purposefully traditional "warriors of light please you must save the crystals" story suddenly turns into what appears to be a time travel story after you "save" the last crystal, which then turns out to actually be a multiple dimensions story when you find out your cutesy fairy companion Airy is secretly a major villain, which is signified by the game's subtitle on the title screen changing from "WHERE THE FAIRY FLIES" to a big goofy red "AIRY LIES". You run through multiple dimensions, each one becoming more and more warped and distorted from the original one you knew, until you eventually face the final boss on the edge of all realities, banding together with every alternate universe version of your heroes as represented by your actual friends on your 3DS online friends list. And that's just an extremely surface level synopsis of how the back half of that game just fuckin’, goes for it. Just does a bunch of extremely weird, over the top, unexpected things that make it stick in your mind forever.

I don't like the direct sequel, Bravely Second, as much as the first game but it also Just Fuckin’ Goes For It. Maybe even harder in some respects! Like, the game opens immediately on a scripted unwinnable fight with the final boss and halfway through the game you fail in stopping his plan, and the solution is to use the newly unlocked New Game+ button on the main menu to go back to that unwinnable fight and break the scripting so you can win. The true final boss attempts to defeat you by sending you back to the main menu and literally forcing your cursor to pick the delete save option. The Bravely Series Fucking Goes For It! It rules!! I love it!!!

Anyway, the scene is late 2019. I'm on the last leg of my commute home from work, walking to my apartment from the bus stop, begrudgingly watching The Game Awards on my phone. Suddenly, the announcement I never expected to see on Geoff's dreadful obligation of a show magically appears: fucking Bravely Default II. I honest to god started jumping up and down and yelling on the sidewalk. I cannot remember the last time a game announcement surprised and delighted me that much, let alone one at the fucking Game Awards. It was all I could think about for the next couple of weeks. My mind raced with all the wild directions they could possibly go from the end of Bravely Second. Hell, they were already calling the third game in the series Bravely Default II, what title screen nuttiness would they get up to this time? I was so fucking pumped. They were doing it! They even got the original composer back after scheduling conflicts stopped him from working on Bravely Second! This was gonna rule!

Bravely Default II is a good game. It still has the rock solid core job system gameplay the rest of the series has. Bravely Default II is also the worst game in the series. Bravely Default II Does Not Fuckin’ Go For It, in any respect aside from the music. Revo did his job there. Nobody else did.

For starters, Bravely Default II wasn't developed by the studio that developed Bravely Default and Bravely Second, Silicon Studio. It was instead handled by Claytechworks, the developers of the mobile game Bravely Default: Fairy's Effect. I'm assuming this is the reason a lot of Bravely Default II's gameplay and mechanics feel like varying degrees of a regression from Bravely Second. Bravely Second (and technically Bravely Default: For The Sequel, which is the upgraded version of the original that was the only version released internationally) introduced a lot of interesting new job mechanics, skill interactions, and overall gameplay systems that are either severely pared down or completely absent in Bravely Default II.

It's also just kinda fucking ugly? The first two games were pretty damn good looking for the 3DS, with well-stylized characters and very pretty painted backgrounds. The backgrounds here in Bravely Default II are still nice, but the models look rough and on a technical level everything just looks grainy and blurry and there's a lot of framerate hitching.

The whole thing very much feels like a separate studio that wasn't several iterations deep in a series had to scramble to hammer a game into a shape mostly resembling the shape of those old games while missing a lot of the details. I don't know why this change of studios was made. I hope either Claytechworks gets it together or Silicon Studio comes back for a hypothetical sequel.

But beyond the gameplay shortcomings, my biggest misgiving with Bravely Default II is that it does not have that Bravely series juice, and I was DESPERATELY craving the juice. It makes some meager attempts to provide the juice, but it's just water with food coloring. The story and presentation just does not have it together, and the "wild stuff" they do try to pull mostly falls flat. The final boss genuinely snuck up on me. They do a few fakeouts with the final boss near the end of the game and I honest to God thought the actual last fight was another fakeout until it was over, with only the degree to which how hard the music was going (extremely hard, hard enough for me to look back on the fight as being cooler than it actually was) giving me any sort of suspicion that this was truly supposed to be the climactic final battle.

Even worse than the stuff they fumble is the stuff they just don't do, which is most of it. One of those later game fakeout bosses starts to play a key theme from the original Bravely Default, hinting at some sort of deeper meaning/connection/plot, but there isn't any. Nothing comes of it. That character just disappears after that fight, leaving you to maybe potentially go out of your way to find a hidden lore page to get any info on what her deal was, just like so much of the rest of the game's plot details. I also didn't think the final dungeon was the final dungeon! It's just kind of a lightly altered version of the world map!! Hell, they don't even do anything weird with the title screen!!! They named the third Bravely game Bravely Default II and they don't even do anything weird with the title like the first two games did!!!! Fuck!!!!!

Bravely Default II is a good game. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It's a shiny new Final Fantasy V just for me with a good soundtrack and, as previously stated, that's enough for me.

Psychonauts 2 (Xbox Series X, 2021)

In a list already full of big shocks, this was the biggest shock. I genuinely kinda can't believe how well they pulled Psychonauts 2 off.

If you asked me what my favorite games were in 2005, as one of the handful of people who played Psychonauts, I would have put Psychonauts pretty damn high up on my list. I spent at least a decade after it came out lamenting the lack of a sequel and cursing the world for ignoring such an incredible game, so much so that eventually all the energy I had behind those feelings was just depleted. When Double Fine finally did announce Psychonauts 2 as a crowdfunding campaign, my reaction was along the lines of "sure, fine, I'll believe it when it's out". The release of Psychonauts 2 ended up sneaking up on me.

I only ended up realizing it was imminent like a week or so before its release date, and in an "oh fuck wait shit I actually am excited about this" frenzy I decided to replay the original to refresh myself, and I'm glad I did because it just made it that much more clear how much they fucking NAILED Psychonauts 2 when I ended up playing it right after. It's like the original game came out 16 days ago, not 16 years ago. They didn't skip a beat, didn't age a day. It's uncanny, like everyone involved with the first game immediately time traveled to 2021 after production finished. The entire voice cast is back and firing on all cylinders (except maybe Cruller, whose voice got much more southern and much less grandpa in the interim), the writing and environments are as wild and inventive and charming as ever, and the gameplay is monstrously refined from the first game. Just wildly better, it's full of smart improvements and plays great (Jeff if you're reading this you're insanely, impossibly wrong (also hi)). I could go on and on about what they got right but I'd have to list nearly everything.

I genuinely think the only criticism I have is that by focusing the story so hard on having a big central mystery, it feels more like you learn how characters relate to that mystery rather than learning about the characters themselves, and I liked naturally learning what made each character who they were over the course of a level in the first game. For instance, I had zero idea why Compton's level was game show themed until I looked at his room in photo mode at some point and saw that he was watching game shows on TV and kind of inferred from there that he's just cooped up watching them 24/7, whereas I feel a detail like this would have more effortlessly revealed itself over the course of the level in the first game.

But I'm nitpicking. Psychonauts 2 is an incredible, almost impossible seeming follow-up to one of my favorite games ever. Just stunning considering the gap between releases and what Double Fine has done/been through in that gap. I'm so happy it happened, and I'm so happy I got to play it. Psychonauts 2 is game of the 2021, just edging out Metroid Dread. Thank you.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania (Nintendo Switch, 2021): This is a good game, but mostly on the merits of being built off two great games. They made a lot of weird decisions with it, and it's an aesthetic downgrade on every level, but for the most part it's still those Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 levels, and those are still good. 100% the best Monkey Ball product released in the last decade and a half. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Nintendo DS, 2008): And in search action Castlevania games that DO have "castle" and "vania" in the title, this is probably the most fascinating of them all. Absolutely the best one mechanically. The glyphs are a cool mix of standard weapons and Soma's soul system, and turning the MP bar into a Souls series-style stamina meter is a cool shakeup. If they managed to make a sequel to this before Konami decided to be Konami, it probably would have been the best in the series. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PlayStation 5, 2021): This is a better version of a fantastic game and the added Yuffie side mode is very good. Yuffie might just straight up be my favorite character to play as? Super versatile and fast with a real fun ability set. Really looking forward to using her more in the sequel. The story for her campaign is decent too, I just wish they left the Deepground dipshits in the basement where they belong. New Pokémon Snap (Nintendo Switch, 2021): New Pokémon Snap is exactly that. It is a New Pokémon Snap, but bigger and fancier. I was never one of the ones clamoring that there's GOTTA be another Pokémon Snap RIGHT NOW like a lot of people were, but I would have gladly accepted one at any time, and here I am now to accept it. It's extremely similar to the first game, but that 20-something year gap does a lot to mitigate that being a negative. Looking forward to Newer Pokémon Snap in 2041! Monster Hunter Rise (Nintendo Switch, 2021): Monster Hunter Rise whips. Literally, you have a grappling hook you can whip around with. But yeah, it's solid as hell Monster Hunter with very little of what got in the way in MH World. They completely revamped the Hunting Horn, and while I think it's still fun I do miss the old one. Also a little light on content, but nothing a G rank expansion won't fix. Good stuff! Hitman 2 & Hitman 3 (PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 5, 2018 & 2021): Grouping this in as one game since it essentially is and I played it all at once. A bucket load of great new levels and mechanical additions to the formula established in the previous game. Not much more to say than that, it all just kinda rules. Hitman just kinda rules. Except Sniper Assassin mode, that sucks. Mario Party Superstars (Nintendo Switch, 2021): I feel a lot of the same ways about this as I feel about Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. A good game carried on the backs of great games with a lot of weird decisions around the edges, but still the best product released in the franchise since the mid 2000s. Some of the items are just too busted, and a lot of the rules changes drain the typical Mario Party tension and stakes out of the whole thing. Great online play though, hope it eventually gets more boards as DLC. Resident Evil Village (PlayStation 5, 2021): I had fun with Resident Evil Village. It's good. When I was done with it I never wanted to play it again. It's going for something more action-y than Resident Evil 7, and what it ends up being is weirdly reverent towards Resident Evil 4 but with none of the mechanical chops to back it up (masterfully demonstrated by its absolutely terrible take on The Mercenaries mode). Entertaining in the moment but instantly forgettable. A popcorn video game, and there's nothing wrong with that. Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown (PlayStation 4, 2021): Virtua Fighter 5 rules and it's nice that they ported it to something other than 360 and PS3. I would have rather had a Virtua Fighter 6. They also should have given it rollback netcode. And put it on the PC. The apparent success of this release has given me high hopes that I will eventually get all of those.

And that’s a wrap on 2021, gamers. What does the new year hold for this neglected website? I dunno man. I’d like to at least get that article about the ToeJam & Earl 3 racism final boss up so that story is somewhere other than a Twitter thread, but beyond that you’ll just have to wait and see. As always, thank you so much for reading to the end of this. See ya next year.

[fandom-space-princess]

The Game of Us

Rating: T (gen, no warnings)

Chapter 5: Michael

“Well, First of Heaven?” Death raises his eyebrows, mouth twisting into a subtle smile. “Still your Father’s creature?”

Read below the cut, or on AO3

************************************

Death awaits him at the surface.

“It seems my confidence in your powers of persuasion was justified.” From his perch on the wall beyond the entrance to the temple, the Horseman appraises Michael as he ascends the stairs and regains level ground. “The lightbearer has a long path ahead of him still, if he’s to find what he seeks. But that’s his business.”

He stands, leaning his weight atop a cane tipped with tarnished silver. Michael can see him clearly, now, the form he has taken solid and familiar as a well-worn glove. Tall and gaunt, attired chin to heel in the sable vestments of an undertaker. He beckons, and Michael falls into step at his side.

“And, perhaps, yours as well,” he amends. “What will you do, viceroy, with no title and no sovereign to serve? I suspect you will find the capacity in which Heaven requires you quite unlike what you have come to expect.” Michael is silent, but his companion doesn’t appear to expect an answer in any case.

As suddenly as it had begun, their path ends. They find themselves in the center of a garden.

The flora here is the same rich black as every other feature of this landscape, and yet as Michael studies it, it seems to hold more. Colors that creep into the ultraviolet, hues without names in any human tongue. The surroundings no longer reflect light back to him, he realizes. His form has shifted again; he no longer wears his brother’s face.

He wonders what he looks like now.

As if sensing his thoughts (and perhaps he can, Michael muses), Death inclines his head and smiles. “It is time. You have a decision to make. And I believe you’ll find that you know how to make it.”

In the center of the garden two springs of water await. A dais has been built up around them, and Michael steps up onto the platform to peer down into the depths.

To his left, murky water swirls ponderous and thick. The surface swallows greedily such light as there is, and beyond a muddy outline he casts no reflection in it. Were I to touch it, he thinks, would it pull me in too?

“Ameles potamos,” the quiet voice from behind him supplies. A steady hand rests on his shoulder. “Lethe. The wellspring of unmindfulness, river of forgetting. That is an option, lad, should you truly wish it. You may leave the sting of betrayal behind you, the bloodshed you’ve seen. Go on as you always have. However...” His posture shifts minutely, frame adjusting to face the pool’s twin. “... there’s always the alternative.”

Michael twists to face the other pool.

Oh. I remember.

Lucifer’s form, his first form, had been the embodiment of dawn, diamond-bright and burning. Plants bloomed as he passed, when the Earth was new; his brother had shone as brilliantly as the sun. But that was Lucifer’s identity. Examining his reflection now, relief and a kind of unfamiliar contentment take root and blossom in Michael’s grace.

Here at the end of the path, he no longer needs to define himself by Lucifer, or by Chuck, or even by Adam.

Michael’s reflection stares back at him out of the only face that has ever been his, and his alone. Eyes the deep honey-gold of sunlight in amber. Forehead high, cheekbones broad and fine. A face made for both the solemnity of duty, and the easy laughter of quiet joy. His own first shape: the form he had taken to walk with Lucifer among the first humans, dusk to his brother’s dawn. Adam and Eve reaching out to him, curious, taking his own strong brown hands in theirs, so much closer to them in likeness—if not in spirit—than his shining twin.

A gleam of grey catches his eye, and he sighs in recognition. There you are.

Nestled into his hair is a circlet of steel, polished and flashing like a beacon in the pool. He reaches up to touch it, running the tips of his fingers over it delicately.

“Your other choice,” Death interjects, shaking him loose from his ruminations. “The river of memory, sacred Mnemosyne. Keep your pain, and what it has taught you. Remember, hurt, learn. And become someone new.”

Michael glances back, once, at the hypnotic roil of Lethe. He closes his eyes. Reaches into that clawing, bleeding place inside himself that he knows will never truly be unbroken. His Father, his family, the Cage; abandonment, absolution, fear and destitution and reclamation and loss. All of this tangles inside his grace, a shard-edged ache. He reaches for it, and he grasps it as tightly as he can. Hefts the weight of it. Allows himself to feel it all.

Then he exhales. Opens his eyes.

“Well, First of Heaven?” Death raises his eyebrows, mouth twisting into a subtle smile. “Still your Father’s creature?”

The archangel Michael smiles back. Raises his hands to his head, pulls the crown he wears free of twining umber curls. Sets it at his feet. It glimmers for a moment, steely against the blackness, then dissolves away into nothing.

“No,” he says softly, kneeling at the edge of the sparkling clear waters of memory. “I don’t think I am.”

“What, then?”

He dips one hand into the water, and brings it to his face.

“I don’t know. But I intend to find out.”

************************************

Epilogue:

Saturday marks the fourth day in a row of wind and frigid rain. Sodden earth clings to Adam’s feet, trails in muddy footprints past the entryway to his apartment. He shakes off his boots beside the front door. Flicks away the crinkling orange leaves that stick to the hem of his pants. The trees had turned early this year, a riot of red and ochre like a sunrise outside the exterior door to his apartment complex each morning for weeks now. But the last of the leaves are rapidly coming down under the weight of the constant drizzle, and he brushes them away with fingers numb at the tips.

He hasn’t been properly warm in days. Or—if he’s being honest with himself—since last November.

Shrugging off his jacket over the back of a chair, he heads for the bathroom.

He’s in the midst of rinsing his hair, idling in the steam in an attempt to will warmth and feeling back into his hands, when the building shudders around him.

An earthquake? In Minnesota?

He lurches forward, flails at the handle to turn the water off. The shaking builds rapidly, and he drops to the ground and braces himself against the wall. Then there is a resounding crack like breaking glass, loud enough that he slaps his hands over his ears, wincing. Whatever it is seems to have been the apex of the disturbance. The shaking abruptly ceases, and in the quiet that follows he can hear dogs barking and car alarms blaring up and down the length of the block.

He winds a towel around his waist, and opens the door to the bathroom. Strides out into his living room, intending to investigate the source of the disturbance, and pulls up short. Sprawled out across his floor is a man Adam has never seen before.

The stranger raises his head, and meets his eyes.

“Adam,” he rasps. His eyelids flutter. Adam takes one halting step toward him, two—

—then Michael slumps back, unconscious, and Adam is alone with his questions.

************************************

(Chapter notes:

If you're still here, I love you. Thank you for reading. <3

This fic was created and published as part of tumblr's SPN Archangel Week 2021 event. You have no idea how happy it makes me that, even now, there are so many people who care as much about these characters and their stories as I do. Special thanks to the people in the Archangels discord server, who are uniformly lovely, and inspire me every day.

As the epilogue indicates, there is at least one sequel to this story (Michael and Adam, my beloveds). I was hoping to have that ready for this week as well, but life happened. I'm hoping to get to it next week, so check back in a bit for that.)

[dangermousie]

I got to the bit in chapter 183 where they are in the village and Ling’er is checking Mo Ran out as he’s handing out the food and by that I mean she’s ogling him like no tomorrow going “I know he doesn’t want me and I can’t have him and that’s fine but looking is no crime” and I (a) love her and (b) love Meatbun for the fact that her female characters even if minor aren’t uniformly evil harpies out to wreck our protags somehow like in some danmei I’ve come across where I end up wondering if this person writes danmei because they just dislike women.

(Also, this made me think how well Meatbun gets that everyone is the hero of their own narrative and their world doesn’t revolve around the protagonists. Even as minor a character as Ling’er is has her own life and her own goals and you get the sense of it from her few scenes that the presence of Mo Ran and Chu Wanning are all entertaining and exotic but very short interludes in her very long life, minor episodes with some fun color but no more.)

[foreverlogical]

Donald Trump is running for the presidency of an America that no longer exists.

Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly reprised two of Richard Nixon’s most memorable rallying cries, promising to deliver “law and order” for the “silent majority.” But in almost every meaningful way, America today is a radically different country than it was when Nixon rode those arguments to win the presidency in 1968 amid widespread anti-war protests, massive civil unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., white flight from major cities, and rising crime rates. Trump’s attempt to emulate that strategy may only prove how much the country has changed since it succeeded.

Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.

Almost all of these changes complicate Trump’s task in trying to rally a winning electoral coalition behind his alarms against marauding “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats.” The Americans he is targeting with his messages of racial resentment and cultural backlash are uniformly a smaller share of American society now than they were then.

Not all the country’s changes present headwinds for Trump. The population is older now, and older white voters in particular remain a receptive audience for Trump’s messages of cultural and racial division (even if his mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has notably softened his support among him). Fifty years ago, Southern evangelicals still mostly leaned toward the Democratic Party; now they have become a pillar of the Republican coalition. And while many Northern white Catholics back then might have recoiled from Trump-style attacks on immigrants as a smear on their own heritage, now “when Trump talks about making America great again,” more of them “see themselves as part of that country that is getting protected,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a new book on Christian churches and white supremacy.

[David Frum: This is Trump’s plague now]

Together, those shifts have solidified for Republicans a much more reliable advantage among white voters without a college education than they enjoyed in Nixon’s era. Like Trump, who once declared “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon recognized that he was shifting the GOP’s traditional class basis. On “tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us,” Nixon told his White House advisers, according to David Paul Kuhn’s vivid new book about blue-collar backlash in that era, The Hardhat Riot. “The educated people and the leader class,” Nixon continued, “no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.”

Trump might echo both of those assessments. But he is offering them to a very different audience. The demographic shifts that have most reshaped politics since Nixon’s day sit at the crossroads of race, education, and religion.

From the 2016 GOP primaries forward, white voters without a college education have provided Trump’s largest group of loyalists. In the 1968 presidential election, that group comprised nearly 80 percent of all voters, according to post-election surveys by both the Census Bureau and the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies. White Americans holding at least a four-year college degree represented about 15 percent of voters, with non-whites, almost all of them Black, comprising the remainder, at just under 10 percent. (Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz analyzed the ANES data for me.)

That electorate is unrecognizable now. The nonpartisan States of Change project has forecast that non-college-educated white Americans will likely constitute 42 percent of voters in November, not much more than half their share in 1968. States of Change anticipates that both college-educated whites and voters of color will represent about 30 percent of voters in 2020. For the former group, that’s about twice their share in 1968; for the latter, that’s somewhere between a three- and four-fold increase.

The change is just as dramatic when looking at the nation’s religious composition. White Christians comprised fully 85 percent of all American adults in 1968, according to figures from Gallup, provided to me by senior editor Jeffrey M. Jones. They now represent only half as much of the population, 42 percent, according to PRRI’s latest national figures.

The groups that have grown since then reflect the nation’s increasing racial and religious diversity. In 1968, non-white Christians represented only 8 percent of Americans; now that’s tripled to just over 24 percent in the PRRI study. Most explosive has been the growth of those who identify as secular or unaffiliated with any religious tradition. They represented just 3 percent of Americans in 1968; now it’s 24 percent.

Other shifts in society’s structure since that era are equally profound. Census Bureau reports show that a much smaller share of adults are married now than they were then. Only about half as many Americans live in small-town or rural communities outside of major metropolitan areas. The share with at least some college experience is about triple its level then.

Across all these dimensions, the consistent pattern is this: The groups Trump hopes to mobilize—non-college-educated, non-urban, married, and Christian white voters—have significantly shrunk as a share of the overall society in the last 50 years. The groups most alienated from him include many of the ones that have grown over those decades: college- educated white people, people of color, seculars, singles, and residents of the large metro areas.

Trump faces two other big challenges in channeling Nixon. One is that the crime rate, especially the rate of violent crime, doesn’t provide as compelling a backdrop for a law-and-order message as it did during the 1960s. The overall violent-crime rate increased by more than 50 percent just from 1964 to 1968, en route to doubling by the early 1970s. Robberies per person more than doubled between 1960 and 1968. The murder rate soared by 40 percent just between 1964 and 1968; by 1972 it was nearly 85 percent higher than in 1964. In Gallup surveys from September 1968, 13 percent of college-educated white voters, 11 percent of non-college-educated white voters, and 9 percent of non-white voters identified crime as the biggest problem facing the nation.

Today, overall crime rates are much lower, a change that’s made possible the revival of central cities around the country. After violent crime peaked in 1991, it declined fairly steadily for about 15 years. It’s proved more volatile over the past decade: The violent-crime rate fell from 2008 to 2014, then rose through 2016 and has dipped again since. As Trump did in 2016, with his dark warnings about “American carnage” following the uptick in crime late in Barack Obama’s second term, he is again using recent findings of elevated murder rates in some cities to raise the specter of Democrats unleashing a new crime surge. “Despite the left-wing sowing chaos in communities all across the country … and the heart breaking murders in Democrat controlled cities like Chicago, New York City, and Atlanta, Joe Biden has turned his back on any semblance of law and order,” the Republican National Committee warned in a press release yesterday morning.

But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that any crime spikes this year amount to “short-term fluctuation [in] a long-term trend” toward greater safety. “We’ve enjoyed, really since the early 1990s, a decline in crime,” he told me. “From year to year, some cities see decreases, some see increases, [but] there’s no crime wave … although Trump may want to construct one—a trumped-up one.”

Though polls generally show concern about crime hasn’t fallen as fast as crime itself, Americans haven’t entirely missed this long-term trajectory: In June Gallup polling, just 3 percent of adults cited crime as the nation’s top problem, far less than in 1968.

Trump’s other big obstacle is that racial attitudes have shifted since then. That’s partly because people of color represent such a larger share of American society. But it’s also because college-educated and secular white Americans, who tend to hold more inclusive views on racial issues than non-college-educated and Christian whites, are also a bigger portion of the white population. Gallup polling in 1968 consistently documented a high level of white anxiety about the pace of racial change: Almost half of white Americans said the federal government was moving too fast to promote integration; two-thirds said Black people did not face discrimination in hiring; and, most strikingly, a bristling three-fifths majority supported a policy of shooting looters on sight during riots. On each front, college-educated white people were less likely to express conservative views than those without degrees, but even they split about evenly on these questions.

[Read: The rage unifying boomers and Gen Z]

A half-century later, racism remains ever-present in America. But many more white people appear willing to acknowledge its persistence, especially in the national debate that has followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A recent Monmouth poll found that most white people now agree police are more likely to use deadly force against African Americans, while CNN found that most whites agree the criminal-justice system is biased. And while Trump has called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate,” three-fifths of white people expressed support for the movement in a June Pew Research Center poll. White people with a college degree were consistently more likely than those without one to express such liberal views on race, but these perspectives claimed significant support among non-college white Americans as well.

Those attitudes point toward a final key difference from 1968. Back then, many anxious white voters genuinely believed Nixon could deliver law and order; but today, many white Americans, especially those with degrees, have concluded that Trump himself is increasing the risk of lawlessness and disorder. In one particularly striking result, Quinnipiac University last month found that college-educated white people were twice as likely to say that having Trump as president made them feel less safe rather than more safe. That’s a very different equation than Nixon faced: Though he may have considered “the uneducated” the most receptive audience for his hardline messages, he overwhelmingly won college-educated white voters too, carrying about two-thirds of them in both of his victories, according to the ANES. Some recent polls have shown Trump carrying only one-third of them now.

Trump still has an audience for his neo-Nixonian warnings about an approaching wave of disorder: In that same Quinnipiac survey, a solid plurality of white voters without a degree said they feel more safe with Trump as president (even though many blue-collar whites have also expressed unease about his response to the protests). In a PRRI poll last year, majorities of white Protestants, Catholics, and especially evangelicals said discrimination against white people was as big a problem as bias against minorities. Yet both these groups—working-class and Christian white voters—will each likely comprise only about half as many of the voters in November as they did when Nixon prevailed five decades ago.

Those numbers won’t become any more favorable for Republicans in the years ahead: While white Americans accounted for four-fifths of the nation’s total population growth from 1960 through 1968, Frey noted in a recent report that all of the nation’s population growth since 2010 has been among people of color; the final 2020 Census, he concludes, will likely find that this has been the first decade ever when the absolute number of white people in the country declines. The shift in the nation’s religious composition is as unrelenting: Jones says that the share of adults in their twenties who identify as secular grew from 10 percent in 1986 to 20 percent in 1996 to nearly 40 percent in PRRI’s latest study. Only one-fourth of adults younger than 30 now identify as white Christians.

Trump hopes that reprising Nixon-style messages about disorder will allow him to mobilize massive margins and turnout among the white voters who feel threatened by these changes. But the country’s underlying evolution shows how narrow a path Trump has chosen. He is betting the Republican future on resurrecting a past that is dissolving before his eyes.

VISIT WEBSITE

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2019 Anime Overview: Carole and Tuesday (final episodes)

I ended up having a lot more to say about Carole and Tuesday’s second season than I thought I did! It delved into some pretty varied and complex issues, after all. I did an EXTREMELY brief review/reaction( to the first half/season of the show you can see here. This review continues from that but is much more involved.

Carole and Tuesday (second half/ episodes 13-24)

Carole and Tuesday’s second half really expands its scope and goes all-out into the zone of social commentary in a way that I didn’t expect. Dang. I’m definitely impressed. There were hints of this in the first part, with Carole being a refugee from Earth who had very limited means and opportunities, while Tuesday came from a privileged background but ran away to escape a mother who cared more about her political career and public approval than her children’s well-being.

The second half delves into this much more, and condemns the policies of deportation and general public attitudes towards refugees and undocumented immigrants. Since the part of Mars our protagonists live inhabit pretty clearly meant to be analogous to New York, the plotline definitely meant to be a criticism of what’s going on in American politics right now. Of course Japan also notoriously has a lot of problems accepting immigrants and I think Watanabe and the rest of the staff probably wanted to say something about that too. 

Tuesday’s mom is able to climb the political ranks by calling for deportation of refugees on Mars- and in a chillingly accurate bit of commentary, she does this  solely to gain popularity with the public, and an even richer white man who has a corporate monopoly easily flouts laws and ethics to push her campaign. Black people are shown to be the first ones targeted for deportation and the black men who speak out are “made an example of”. The show doesn’t go so far to have anyone be killed (which is for the best, it’s unnecessary to go that far to make the point), police brutality is depicted and condemned, one man is targeted and beaten a bit despite not physically resisting, and a pair of men simply walking on the street are manhandled and arrested for “obstructing officers” despite doing absolutely nothing illegal. These marginalized folks continue to bravely fight back, even releasing protest raps from jail. And it’s pointed out to Tuesday that her mom is targeting people who are like her best friend and maybe she should step up and do something about it.

All of that is really good, and the show is firmly on the side of the minorities fighting back, and is all about how art should be used to challenge and reject oppression. It encourages diversity, unity, and takes a stand against persecution of immigrants, forced deportation and censorship. And how the show does this witha multi-cultural cast and a lot of developed characters from different backgrounds is great- there’s a love for all different kinds of music and acknowledgement that music owes everything to people of color. I especially appreciated the show going out of it’s way to depict how rap is often a tool for resistance.

That said, while the show’s message is positive and I appreciate its optimism and good intentions, the ending felt a little too neat and overly simplistic.It might be reductive to say the show goes so far to say racism can be solved if you sing a song, it’s more like “yeah use music to resist!” but the way the police are SO EASILY talked out of violence when they come to shut things down, the neat and simple way the political situation is resolved, and ALL the prison guards being willing to help out minorities in jail with no argument- yeah, I think it’s fair to say it wouldn’t go that smoothly in real life. However, the show seems to sincerely trying to send a message of hope, even if the execution is a little simplistic and lacking. 

The show is just sort of messy when it comes to its plot, themes and issues in general- I’d say it tries to do a little too much, so every arc is left feeling kind of underdeveloped and a lot of things are just...dropped. There are several examples of this.

Two mothers are both major characters in the show, and the show tries to make a connection there and say something about motherhood at the last second, but it’s muddled and contradictory. It’s stated that mothers can either chain you down or give you guidance and freedom, which is true, but we’re ONLY shown awful moms throughout the show, who have a large negative impact on their childrens’ life and hardly any positive impact, so celebrating motherhood at all feels bizarre. 

And the idea that this one mom isn’t all bad and maybe can be reasoned with is jarring since there aren’t any examples in the show of her postively affecting her child or being a good mom in the past. It’s so muddled I don’t know if I can say the show crosses over into abuse apologism (it’s at least made clear that if that mom doesn’t take her one chance to start to make amends, the kids will step aside and let her be taken down) but it really edges on it, and this is definitely something the show should have developed more and executed better

Another really muddled plot element with a lot of weird implications was the whole “martian androgyny syndrome” thing. It didn’t tun out as badly as I feared it might, but it was really hard to say why it was even there or what the show was trying to do with it. 

Basically, being on Mars can lead to some sort of vague condition where your sex changes I guess? And maybe it’s eventually fatal for some reason? And maybe the medication that treats it (by trying to stop the change? by addressing side effects? it’s not clear what it even does) causes uncontrollable anger??? That last part is especially uncertain because it’s only stated once by a person who might be trying to justify their abusive behavior BUT it’s also true that out of the three groups introduced in the show who have the syndrome, the people who (probably) take the meds have explosive tempers while the person who explicitly doesn’t is calm so????

 Anyway, the syndrome isn’t presented as uniformly negative, the calm person who doesn’t take the meds is a good person who is okay with their condition and they identify as non-binary and make a nice speech about it. But they’re also, y’know, dying, so. Again, it’s really unclear why this is even a plot element since it goes nowhere and gets explored so little and what is actually even going on with the syndrome and the medication is SO VAGUE. It doesn’t help that 2/3 of the people afflicted look like stereotypical anime caricatures of trans women. The idea that being intersex/getting a sex change/whatever is supposed to be happening is a death sentence isn’t great either.

And that kind of extends to the character arcs, relationships and plot in general a bit- there were a lot of things that were underdeveloped and muddled, which made the characters a little hard to connect to. Even the sci-fi aesthetic felt a little half-baked- I guess it’s a alternate history because we’re in Mars but Instagram is still a thing and modern singers are being referenced, but exactly how this world works went pretty underexplored. At least the text at the encourages viewers to use their creativity and continue the story themselves, so even the show itself is telling ficcers to get on it and make sense of this mess, okay. (Seriously though, I always enjoy seeing pro writers inviting the viewers to continue their story. Let those fic flags fly!)

Carole and Tuesday is definitely not perfect, but it’s entertaining, warm, visually beautiful and bursting with a love and respect for music. It’s features awesome tunes and varied and intriguing characters. The pro-diversity message that extends support for the marginalized and especially immigrants and refugees is very needed in these troubled times, and it’s theme of unity is very sweet

It’s an thought-provoking show clearly made with a lot love and largely positive intentions, so if you can handle the mixed and concerning implications of some of the more muddled bits, I encourage checking it out. 

[blueoatmeal]

alright listen I don’t know any--okay no that’s not accurate I do know an entomologist actually--but he’s not available to chat atm

ANYWAY my point is that I have to talk about this awful thing I learned recently that’s been seriously bugging me (haha), so this is as good a platform as any from which to scream into the void

so, pillbugs. roly-polies. aka potato bugs, doodlebugs, armadillo bugs, and probably five other names I don’t care to list rn. cute little bugs. always liked em. pretty sure one of my petnames as a kid was doodlebug

they’ve got a decent color variation, nothing like butterflies but not uniformly one color always either. most common are darker greys and browns, personally I see a lot of slate greys. slate grey is kinda bluish btw

I got into hollow knight recently and long story short a character i like is most likely a roly-poly, based on his design. cool!

but that led me to googling the species, genus, etc., aaaand I came across a neat picture. A bright blue doodlebug!! lovely! i refined my search and found quite a few like that, some even sliding into more of a cyan color. pretty wild. I don’t think I’d ever seen any that bright myself

interesting, right? I dig deeper, and suddenly it’s not pretty. because that color is a sure sign of a viral infection (iridovirus) that makes crystallized chunks of itself under the bug’s shell, causing the bright blue color and ultimately killing it

fun.

why does this matter? It doesn’t. Quirrel--the HK character I mentioned--is a perfectly reasonable and healthy slate grey. I checked. Because that’s how my mind works I guess

oh also humans can’t get it. that’s good

unfortunately I still can’t dismiss this bug virus from my mind, despite it having exactly zero relevance to me now

so I’m sharing it with you all

you’re welcome