#i really love this manga its so hokey

[blenselche]

chap 133 異世界美少女受肉おじさんと; ファ美肉/Fabiniku panel redraw for fun and also cuz BIG zim makes me laugh. original under cut.

@alt-zadr-b1tch3z day 1

fabiniku is a “man wishes to be a woman when he's drunk and it actually happens” adventure/romance/isekai manga jsyk

[they-lived]

The FMA 03 Post

Welcome to the FMA 03 Review no one asked for lol it’s 6 pages of rambling and barely making a point y’all can definitely keep scrolling

TLDR - there’s a lot to like about this series and while this story delves more into tropes and storytelling themes that I am personally not a fan of, I’m glad I watched it! It’s a little convoluted and even though I wish they’d focused on some parts more than others, I overall enjoyed this chaotic binge session.

I’m breaking down my review into four sections: Things I Really Dig, Things I Wish They’d Explored More, Things I Didn’t Vibe With, and Final Thoughts

Keep in mind that I did not grow up with this series, I watched Brotherhood for the first time last year as an adult and had no exposure to the manga or any FMA content beforehand. I went into this bitch basically blind and did so very deliberately. Having said that, in this review I will try to talk about the series in a way that is divorced from Brotherhood as much as possible because they’re stand alone series as far as I’m concerned - I will probably fail at this but I’m going to try.

Also quick disclaimer: if the more negative parts of this post end up longer than the positive it’s because I feel the need to over explain myself. I’m not trying to be a negative bitch I just feel like if I’m going to be critical I need to come correct and thoroughly explain why I feel that way lol.

Things I Really Dig:

I enjoyed how much backstory everyone got. I feel like Trisha especially got much more fleshed out as a person and I liked getting to see more instances of her being such a present figure in the Elric’s childhood. I also loved getting more side adventures before we dove dick first into the thick of the main story, all the side quests were entertaining and were generally really fun little romps with the boys. The first half of the series is entertaining and introduces really fun side plots that build up the world and the characters in interesting ways.

I loved getting more time with a few background characters! More Maria Ross and Sheska was a huge win for me personally and having more episodes with Hughes and Nina before the horrors was a treat. I also enjoyed Winry getting involved in investigating Hughes’ murder with Sheska which I was very skeptical of at first - that turned out much more fun than I was anticipating.

Jumping off of the above point - I really love what they did with Shou Tucker. What a concept to make him in to a recurring villain who was so unsettling and so fucked up! I think they could have used him more but that’s a minor gripe because anytime he showed back up I was really invested. Very impressed by where they took his character.

While I can’t think of any specific lines that really got me, I enjoyed the dialogue in this show a lot. I had some laugh out loud moments and some moments where I actually audibly said ‘damn that’s a sick line’. Yes, I did watch this show alone with my cat and still talked to myself about it, I like having fun lol. Some sequences were hokey but in a way that leaned in hard to its cheese that I personally really like. I’m a simple girl with simple needs, give me over the top banter and lean into it and I will probably like it lol.

Things I Wish They’d Explored More:

While I think the idea of the homunculus being a result of human transmutation is an interesting concept, I feel like they didn’t delve into this idea as much as I would have liked. Lust’s backstory and integration was by far the most well done in this regard but most of the other homunculi did not get the same level of investment as her. Envy’s backstory is fascinating but they didn’t do much with it and I would have loved to see more of it. I also like the concept of Sloth being the boy’s mother but wish she had been utilized more and honestly weaponized against them. Bradley was the most disappointing in this way but we’ll get more into my thoughts on him later. Also RIP Gluttony, you’ll never get a backstory buddy and that’s rough lol.

They mentioned a few times that the homunculus are a result of ‘failed’ human transmutation which implies that it can be successfully done. It would have been super interesting if we found out there was a way to do it successfully and what that would look like. I think it’s implied that’s what Dante and Hohenheim were doing but I was honestly unclear about that… I think it’s also implied that Nina at the end is successfully transmuted but once again I was unclear about that so my question still stands lol. Would it still make a homunculus? Would that person know they’d died? Would the alchemist still see the gate? Then that could lead into one of the alchemists we know (probably Ed lol) goes mad scientist for an arc which could be super cool. It’s something I would have been interested to see.

I felt a distinct lack of political machinations going on in the background in this series. I assumed that there were some things going on behind closed doors because of my familiarity with the world but I wish we had gotten to see more of it. When Mustang and co were doing their thing I really enjoyed it but it was too few and far between for me. What we got was great. I just wanted more of it.

Jumping off of the above I missed team Mustang shenanigans. I love that team of losers and I wanted more of them because they were written in really fun and interesting ways.

Things I Didn’t Vibe With:

I feel like generally the characterizations of most of the core cast were weaker than I was expecting. I really didn’t like how they used Bradley, I never found his presence very threatening or interesting, we didn’t get to see him engage with the plot much, and I generally felt like he wasn’t involved in anything going on until his fight with Mustang at the end; Wrath had an interesting set up but I felt like his character never really went anywhere nor did I feel like he was presented in a way that intrigued me, I was mostly left feeling ambivalent towards him at best and annoyed by him at worst; Scar wasn’t particularly engaging and I felt like I got lost in the sauce with his character more than anyone else, I felt like a lot of his arc went unspoken or was meant to be internal but as a result I didn’t feel connected to him - also I’m straight up begging for us to stop having character be secretly in love with their sibling’s partner I have never been able to get behind this and it did Scar no favors here; something about Izumi in this iteration rubbed me the wrong way, I think it’s because she had a lot of big plot pieces in her back pocket that she didn’t tell the brothers and her lack of empathy upon learning that the boys did the taboo rubbed me the wrong way; I’m sorry to say it but I really didn’t like Al in this version, I felt like he would swing wildly between being active and passive (biggest offender of this was ‘we need to do something to stop the homunculi!’ and then we start trying to address the homunculi and he’s mad that we’re killing them… when we have no reason to believe there’s any other way of dealing with them because at that point we know the philosopher’s stone takes human lives to create and even if we did have one we don’t know how to use it to help the homunculi become human… which what does that even mean are we going to be sapping souls out of the ether? I digress) and beyond that he often got relegated to hanging out with side characters I already didn’t particularly care for (Martel is the main one who comes to mind). I think this issue is a consequence of the more sprawling story because everyone has so much to do in a given episode, let alone the whole story, their development is either quietly lurking in the background or never fully addressed. I found more of the characters to be less intriguing and their arcs to be harder to follow. I’m still not sure why Scar decided to run off to make a philosopher’s stone or why Hoenheim didn’t do anything during his confrontation with Dante. Ultimately, this cast has more stuff to do but as a result I felt like they weren’t as well defined or explored.

I really didn’t vibe with Dante as a villain, while I understand her motivations and I think she was serviceable for the story being told - I didn’t find her threatening or enjoyable to watch (which in my humble opinion you need at least one of those things for a villain to work). It might have been because she really isn’t around much but even when she is I felt like she didn’t add a lot to the scenes she was a part of. I’m thinking of the arc in Liore specifically, because yes she’s there and grooming Rose to join her but it’s never a major focus. By the time we reach the end and she is revealed to be the mastermind she is extremely powerful, yes, but I weirdly never questioned how we were going to defeat her. I just kind of vaguely assumed she would be the source of her own demise and that’s exactly what happened. Even her confrontation with Hoenheim left a lot to be desired, especially considering their shared history; which we find out about in the same episode that she sends him to the other side, so any emotional weight we could have had with her is thrown very quickly out the window.

This show suffers from the overuse of a trope I personally can’t stand, which is the ‘I’ll tell you about this plot point at another time’ - and yes most anime, books, and movies do use this trope including Brotherhood - trust me it bothered me there too - but it came up a lot in 03. Izumi gets saddled with this the most consistently (which probably contributed to me not enjoying her) but much more egregiously the Elrics themselves do this a whole lot to each other. There are so many times between the brothers where they should be having a conversation to propel the story forward, but instead, we stall for time with an attack or a completely different plot point that makes the show take a sharp detour for an entire episode or more before we get back to that conversation. This is a personal pet peeve of mine in general, but especially in this story where there is so much going on that every diversion muddied the waters more than it needed to. There were many times I felt like I was missing something or that I hadn’t kept up with the story only to find out at the end of the episode that a conversation which should have been at the start of the episode hadn’t actually finished and we were finally getting back to it.

I don’t like how the Ishbal War was handled in this version. It’s very referential to a lot of characters' backstories and it comes up in conversation often but something in the way that it is presented isn’t as engaging or emotionally impactful as it should have been. I think this comes from less of our core cast being involved in the war (only Mustang, Kimblee, Armstrong, and Bradley were there as opposed to Hawkeye, Hughes, Mustang, Armstrong, Kimblee, Envy, and Bradley) and thus we have fewer perspectives on what went down. Yes the chimera being the ones to start the war and recontextualizing it was an interesting concept but I feel like it weirdly made the whole thing less engaging. I think this is a case study of my biggest qualm with the series as a whole. There were so many moving parts that I found it difficult to keep up with and as a result was less engaged with it and started more passively consuming whatever they threw at me next. The story of the war starts with us being fed the ‘a child was shot and as a result uprisings started’ narrative but the chimera are actually the ones who started it pre-chimera transformation, but then how did that story about the child being shot get started? Who’s the real Juliet Douglas and why did the homunculus re-use her identity? That seems like a weird slip up for these otherwise very smart competent beings to make in their master plan. Are we expected to believe they didn’t think anyone would notice because they simply think they’re better than humans? Because otherwise they waste a lot of effort covering their tracks in other ways if they think it’s pointless. Also it seems like only the state alchemists were sent in to deal with the Ishbal war but I might have just gotten that confused because we don’t know of any non-alchemists who were there. Then we have the Dr. Marcoh of it all and the war kind of seems like violence for violence’s sake? Like Dr. Marcoh did make the stone presumably from the casualties from the war but I don’t think we ever get confirmation of that. And he does have a philosopher’s stone and the military does seem to have them but Marcoh’s is the only real one - I assume - which begs the question how did he get away/why wasn’t searching for him priority number 1 for Dante and co? Why did they just start trying to make a new one instead? Also Scar's brother made a stone and we never get an exact number on how many souls need to be used to make a stone so presumably Dr. Marcoh could have made dozens of them but only he had a single real one? Or did he have multiple and he stole all of them and this is the only one left? Since Marcoh is eaten by Gluttony like two episodes after we meet him his story never gets fully explored or explained beyond Mustang helped him escape, but that leaves open a lot of unanswered questions. We see from Al’s disintegrating body that even the real philosopher’s stones take something from their host so have the other stones disappeared? Does Dante know this? Then to muddy the waters further we never get a proper ending for the Ishbalans because all of the attention goes back to Liore and unless I really missed something none of these threads link up by the end. It’s just kind of hand waved off as we move into all the other things going on. It just felt messy and weirdly impersonal even with meeting those two kids who were actually there and it honestly feels tangential to Scar’s character as well, which is pretty unfortunate as the war arc is so impactful to me as a viewer. I can’t exactly pinpoint why this version of the war was less engaging for me but something about it felt oddly impersonal, like no one was trying to right those wrongs or pay homage to the past, it was just… background noise.

The overall theme and messages - now as a disclaimer I prefer happy endings and hopeful stories so if I had been forewarned about 03’s ending (which I actively avoided as previously mentioned I went in blind and I did so on purpose) I probably wouldn’t have had a problem with it… however, this series didn’t end in a way that satisfied me, even excluding the real world/parallel universe stuff which I will not be touching in this review. The end debate boiling down to whether or not equivalent exchange is a fundamental rule of this world translating into ‘does hard work pay off’ isn’t inherently bad or poorly executed - they do spend a lot of time building into the concept and I think Dante’s monologue was well done - but they also just don’t answer their own question. The cycle kind of perpetuates itself with Al and Ed separately trying to figure out how to reunite. It’s unsatisfying not because it’s morally ambiguous or not traditionally ‘happy’, but because it presents a story without a conclusion. I’ve heard that Shamballa is the true ending of 03 and maybe that’s true but the series concludes in such a way that I felt like pieces of the puzzle were still missing. Dante gets killed off screen by her own creation, two of the homunculi are still at large, and our main characters are in the same situation they started their story in. Yes, the world is better off because of everything the Elrics did but my emotional investment as a viewer is in the brothers and their journey, which feels incomplete. The show asks us directly ‘does hard work pay off’ and then kinda shrugs its shoulders and I did have to google the ending just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’m not saying the show needed to hand its thesis to me on a silver platter and I’m not saying I couldn’t draw my own conclusions based on what they gave me, it’s just that the conclusion I come to is unclear based on this ending. Al having no memory of the last four years and being in his ten year old body only to pursue alchemy all over again to find Ed feels like an incomplete story to me. Ed going to research rocket science to get back to Amestris made sense but still feels odd. I’m left feeling unsatisfied because the brother’s story isn’t over yet and that’s the story I felt like the series was trying to tell.

In addition, this story was clearly more open ended and just generally didn’t answer many of the big moral questions it presents. And ambiguity is fine to have in a story and I am once again not saying I need everything spoonfed to me. However, I feel this show didn’t really take a stance on any of its big questions and I think this also contributed to my feelings of being dissatisfied with the conclusion. This story has a whole host of moral questions that it explores but those questions are mostly left unanswered. Lust’s ponderings on what happens when she dies and what would actually make her human; Does equivalent exchange (and therefore hard work) fundamentally drive this world; Are the sacrifices we make for the betterment of others worthwhile. These questions are interesting and 03 does a really good job of exploring multiple angles with each of these ponderings, but by never taking a stance on even one of the above it leaves multiple arcs hanging. I think this also contributes to a lack of satisfaction at the end of the series because it ultimately feels like the show’s not done talking when it’s over and that’s disappointing. Does the movie answer these questions and take a firmer stance? Maybe but I haven’t seen it yet sooooooo guess we’ll find out.

Final Thoughts:

I think that 03 was extremely ambitious and I applaud the writers for really going for a complex story with a lot of ambiguity. However, I think that there were too many threads and the story gets caught up in itself a lot. I think that if a few stories were cut or at the very least simplified it would have greatly improved my overall enjoyment of the series. I’m sure they had no say in the amount of episodes we got but I think that if they were going to go this big with the story they needed more episodes to really get the full impact of their storylines. I understand why 03 is iconic for a lot of people but it’s ultimately just not the type of story that I personally enjoy.

All of this having been said, as a new FMA fan I’m glad I’ve seen it and definitely don’t feel like I wasted my time or anything like that, it’s just not something I’m likely to revisit.

[paulisweeabootrash]

Pokémon 2.B.A. Master

I stumbled across a piece of weeb trash media I had heard of, but neither attempted nor expected to find.  And it’s a bit different.  Today, my friends, we are not doing an anime or manga, or even another novel.  We’re doing a tie-in music album, a American blatant cash-grab based on a Japanese franchise.  Oh no.  Oh yes.

Pokémon 2.B.A. Master (1999)

As a young weeblet, I was a regular watcher of the first two arcs of Pokémon (Kanto and Johto).  It was in both weekday and weekend timeslots, and never seemed to be broadcast in any sensible order, but I nonetheless watched it frequently and enjoyed it no matter how many times WB decided to rerun episodes I’d already seen.  At some point, this CD came out, and I remember seeing ads for it when it was new.  There were even televised music videos for a few of the songs, broadcast as a segment called “Pikachu’s Jukebox���. I never saw a copy of the album in person, and never expected to. Maybe it was one of those that you had to order by calling some number?  I don't remember (or, frankly, care enough to look it up).  Anyway, I recently encountered this in the small music section of a used book store, and I figured "why not?"  And the obvious answer is "most of the contents".

The cover, in addition to using proud and unironic Comic Sans for the subtitle "2.B.A. Master", boasts that the album contains both "Music From The Hit TV Series" and "10 Brand New Songs!"  The former refers obviously to the main theme of the show and every child's favorite mnemonic device, the PokéRap (or “PokéRAP” as it’s spelled for some reason?), but I'm not sure what the third song from the show is.  And again, I don’t care enough to look it up.  The important thing is, John Loeffler wrote all of them, and apparently an absurd number of other Pokémon-related songs.  The "Brand New Songs!" here are mostly new to me, and they’re... a doozy.  Except for the songs from the show, plus “Double Trouble” and maybe “Misty’s Song” if I want to be very generous, I am tempted to suggest you could get a similar musical experience in a shorter time by putting on an episode of Pokémon, playing a mix of Milli Vanilli and Boyz II Men songs over it, and banging your head against a wall.

1. Pokémon Theme

We begin with the extended version of the classic theme, this is a sure dose of nostalgia for anyone who watched the show.  It sounds, considering the release date, a little outdated — I get kind of a "Beat It" vibe, not from the melody, but from the instrumentation, combining 80s-gated drums and searing electric guitar.  But the theme, already one of the few TV themes out there I find enjoyable and not instantly forgettable, extends to a full length surprisingly well, avoiding getting boring or devolving into complete idiocy with lyrics.  I actually like this song as a song, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

2. 2B A Master

The instrumentation in this track is absurdly 90s, and again kind of Michael Jackson-y, but is interesting and varied, especially in the sudden attention-grabbing rhythmic change accompanying the line "the greatest master of Pokémon".  It shows better restraint in its use of things like record scratch noises and basslines running parallel to vocal lines that I find get really old really quickly.  I actually, on the whole, enjoy this song and think the music could have been the basis for something great.  “Could have” being the keyword.  Lest you think I'm going to give a rosy, loving review of this album, no, it quickly gets bad.  Some of the lyrics feel like such forced attempts to get Pokémon references in that I am embarrassed on behalf of the people stuck singing and rapping them, 20 years later.  It’s a waste of what could’ve been a fun funky song.  (Incidentally, why is the title of the song punctuated differently from the title of the album?)

3. Viridian City

The slide downhill continues.  What the hell is this song?  The lyrics are only marginally less stupid than the previous track, the music sounds like a keyboard "dance" preset, and it has a weird rapped/spoken "echoing" of sung lines it’s incredibly hard to imagine anyone ever liked.  Ugh.

4. What Kind of Pokémon Are You?

Third time's the charm, I guess?  After the previous two tracks tried and failed to force Pokémon-related lyrics that just don't work, this one at least manages to fire off a series of type-related puns.  The music, however, turns back towards gratingly boring (and for some reason, the bridge comes thisclose to ripping off "Eye of the Tiger"?).  Actually, no, hahaha, the lyrics remain very stupid, I think I'm just getting "ground down by a Marowak" by how bad the preceding tracks were.

5. My Best Friends

The parts move in unison too closely for my tastes, the lyrics are bland, the vocal arrangement makes it sound downright inappropriately dramatic, and what’s up with the bridge that veers off into doo-wop?  The main thing this song has going for it is the vaguely pleasant piano part in the verses, which really appeals to me (it sounds familiar, although I can’t place what specifically it reminds me of).  The melody of the chorus sounds even more familiar — so familiar in fact I'm starting to wonder if it's a copyright-violation-skirting ripoff of something famous. But otherwise, this is a solid “meh”, sounding like a boy band song that would only briefly have made the charts.

6. Everything Changes

And now we're back to impressions of Michael Jackson.  This one's instrumentation and mood and even bits of the melody are so him that I could almost believe you if you told me this was an outtake that didn't make it onto Bad. (Although the singer sounds less like Jackson the longer the song goes on.) The lyrics, although vaguely applicable to everything, are a welcome change from the previous few tracks by not feeling like Pokémon has been painfully shoehorned in... up until the part where a clip from the show plays during a break between choruses.  Ugh.  Could you really not come up with a better way to make this into a distinctly Pokémon song?

7. The Time Has Come (Pikachu's Goodbye)

Yuck.  The sentimental ballad (I want to call it a “power ballad”, but I’m unsure what exactly counts as one), as a general rule, is a fire hose full of melodrama best used for comedy.  I don't understand how songs like this have ever been taken seriously.  I would expect to hear this as the ending theme to a movie that tries to be a tragedy but can’t quite pull it off.

8. Pokémon (Dance Mix)

I assumed from the title that this was a remix of the theme song, but instead, it's just sort of a filler track...  It makes almost no impression on me at all, although I do enjoy the intro’s use of "backward-sounding" and morphing synths.  Otherwise, this is another track that sounds like it uses keyboard preset backgrounds.

9. Double Trouble (Team Rocket)

Okay, look, I can’t rate this one fairly.  The longest-running fandom-related internal conflict of my life has been whether I'd rather be James or have James as mai hasubando, and I love Team Rocket in general as comedy relief villains.  I used to enthusiastically perform their ridiculous introductory speech with a friend from band camp (I am even more of a geek than you thought).  This song actually bothers to be more specific in terms of its Pokémon subject matter, meaning this is finally a song about Pokémon rather than just a generic pop song with Pokémon flavor, and it uniquely is performed by voice actors from the show, namely those who played Jesse, James, Meowth, and Giovanni.  It really grates on me when the VAs talk over the singers, but unlike some of the other songs, it feels like it builds up and goes somewhere.  We have at least broken free from the boringness of the last few tracks, with almost industrial percussion and chromatic and sometimes dissonant bass and synth lines that really make it a solid villain song, even though it has a hokey “rap written by people who haven’t actually listened to any rap” feel.  And James’s absolutely ludicrous laugh will absolutely alienate who isn’t already a fan of the character, and most people who are, too.

10. Together Forever

The “disappointing imitation of Michael Jackson” theme returns, this time mostly in the voice.  It especially pops out at me with the pronunciation of "friend" as "fraynnnndah!".  Unfortunately, rather than trying to imitate Jackson’s songwriting again, this song seems to want to rip off Stock Aitken Waterman.  And it succeeds at that, too well, as it somehow manages to outcompete a song those writers wrote for Rick Astley to be the worst song with this title.  Also returning here: the use of clips from the show to clumsily force an otherwise generic song to be Pokémon-related.  Hooray.

11. Misty's Song

Huh.  Now this one is interesting.  Buried deep in the album, we get something from a character POV that doesn’t just set trivia or quotes from the show to music.  Yvette Laboy does a believable job filling in as the singing counterpart for Rachel Lillis's speaking voice for Misty, and I just don't find it nearly as ridiculous as the other ballads on the album, for some reason. It even portrays a tsundere as insecure rather than just an obnoxious walking trope!  Sure, it's not great, but it's not bad either, especially after the other attempted ballads on here.  Until you remember that it's a 14-year-old singing a love song to a 10-year-old, which... ick.  It could've been sweet if put in the mouth of another character with a more age-appropriate relationship. Anyone want to rerecord this as “Kaname's Song” or something?

12. PokéRAP

Oh, educational rap.  Why?  It’s just unbearably cheesy and doesn’t seem to have had much thought put into it, as a general rule.  And this song is no exception.  Sure, I guess it has value as a mnemonic exercise (and it does a decent job of that, as anyone who still has large chunks of it memorized can tell you), but no value as music.  It often doesn’t even come close to rhyming where you’d expect it to, and it's obvious that Loeffler et al weren't sure what to do with a few of the names at all — Grimer and Chansey have egregious pauses after them, for example, and Omastar is stretched across space enough for two or three names for no good reason.  It is broken into convenient-sized stanzas that are only somewhat awkwardly forced into the established meter, but that meter has a too-regular feel, bouncing like a musical Superball, that even I, someone with no particular knowledge of nor interest in rap, recognize as being cheesier than Vanilla Ice.  It also hasn’t aged well.  The sung parts have absolutely no dynamic range and stay at MAXIMUM DRAMA LEVEL at all times.  Over the past 20 years, the lyrics have also become obsolete due to the many additional generations of Pokémon media and consequently much longer list of Pokémon to memorize.  Those topics have been covered in excruciating detail by Brian David Gilbert, who is much cleverer than I am, and yes, I do highly recommend sitting through that entire half-hour video.  All I can really add to that is, it's considerably less annoying than certain other mnemonic songs I was exposed to growing up. A bad song, unless you’re viewing it through sheer unfiltered silliness?  Yes.  A surprisingly catchy song that was a good marketing move?  Also yes.  And 20+ years later, I still can't avoid laughing at the way he says "Wartortle".

13. You Can Do It (If You Really Try)

The album could've gone out on that upbeat note, but no, they had to go for another overblown ballad, this time trying far too hard to be inspirational.  The plus side is, it's not yet another generic 80s/90s pop song.  The minus side is, it sounds like something that would be playing on the PA in a church thrift store.  Or a fake ad on an episode of SNL.  I do not feel empowered by this level of unironic encouragement.  I just feel like my eyes are rolling so hard they'll fall out.  Its only saving grace is that it’s somehow not the most irritating inspirational ballad from the late 90s that was used in connection with a geek-magnet TV show.

Overall... Although I want to describe the music as being "generic" — and it is full of the tiredest parts of 80s and 90s music, wandering from orchestra hits to record scratch noises to cutesy synthesizer "dings" to what seem to be several different singers' bad Michael Jackson impressions — some of it is actually interesting!  See, no matter what impression you got from what I said above, I don’t categorically hate this style of music.  I made multiple comparisons to songs from Thriller and Bad because I think most of the songs on those albums are examples of how to do this genre very well.  But 2.B.A. Master doesn’t just lag because I’m comparing it to widely-beloved albums.  Writing this review actually sent me introspecting for quite a while about what music I enjoy and why.  And I realized, many of the cheesiest and most flawed aspects of this album are also present on less-acclaimed albums I enjoy very much, like the niche The Golden Age of Wireless by Thomas Dolby and the virtually-unknown Playgrounds ‘n’ Glass by Urban Blight.  But, while Dolby’s music often has the same cheesy synthesizer voices and lack of dynamics or has weirdly melodramatic moments, it’s also often clearly experimenting with particular effects and techniques, and his lyrics have evocative images or stories that make the songs really engaging.  And, while Urban Blight’s lyrics are often cliche-ridden or downright idiotic, the 80s/90s pop music instrumentation and style elements are varied and used with... for lack of a better term, more discretion, I guess?, which makes me feel like their songs are building to something musically.  Well, except the song “Favorite Flavor”, which is just garbage.

The point is, while neither of those examples is a great album (at least not to my taste, which I freely admit colors this), they are both still good.  Unfortunately, while some songs on 2.B.A. Master approach goodness, they are the exception, not the rule.  Most of the music is simple and predictable and seem to use the more grating tropes of the time like orchestra hits and record-scratch noises just because they can, and most of the lyrics are less "song about Pokémon" and more "attempts at being vaguely inspirational with Pokémon references forced in uncomfortably".  Some of the songs are enjoyable in a "this was an earnest attempt” and/or guilty pleasure sort of way (and I unironically like the B-52s, so believe me, I know "this was an earnest attempt” and/or guilty pleasure music), but there’s very little on here I’d actually call good.  The best track here musically, “2B A Master”, is wasted on blah lyrics, and the one that most accomplishes the goal of being a song about Pokémon, “Double Trouble”, suffers greatly from its speaking-over-the-singers vocal performance.  All I can say is, I’m glad I got this album used.

-----

W/A/S Scores: 3/0/7

Weeb: The lyrics require some prior specific knowledge of the Pokémon anime to not be completely baffling, but Pokémon is probably the most well-known and well-entrenched Japanese franchise on this side of the Pacific, and other than that, it’s decidedly American, or at least decidedly within the musical cultures of Western Europe and the Anglosphere.

Ass: No.

Shit: AAAAAAAAH.  Okay, okay, no, seriously, there are a few good points, but it’s at best average-quality 90s pop with a veneer of Pokémon over the top.

-----

Oh Weird: While writing this and hunting down appropriate links, I was surprised to see how many uploads of, and even covers of, songs from this album there are on Youtube.  I assumed this album was a more or less forgotten piece of bad 90s media, but apparently it’s one with a significant fanbase.

Oh Cool: Maddie Blaustein, the original English-language voice actress for Meowth was also a comic editor and writer for both Marvel and DC and the Creative Director for the Weekly World News. Oh, and she was intersex and, according to one of the sources cited by the Wikipedia article, bi.

Oh No: Educational rap is still a thing, and there are resources to make your own.

[demyrie]

I'm curious but why did you delete JAM? It was one of my favorite JxD fics and I never got to finish reading it.

ahhhh oh dear, yeah, that happened.

So, for everyone arriving, I wrote a fic called Just Another Mission for the Jak and Daxter game series, and Jak/Daxter pairing. Yes, the green haired elf protag with the fuzzy orange thing, which btw used to be a human and was a human in fic. I think I started it when I was maybe 14 (yikes omg) and a few years ago, I deleted it, and I don’t delete fics.

Rant and personal history ahead, but tldr; i deleted this particular fic because:

1) I became more and more uncomfortable with the way I’d treated certain characters without giving them respect or resolution (throwing around things like domestic abuse while being too young to properly understand What I Was Doing or How to Answer Very Triggered Friends Who Had the Misfortune of Reading This I’m So Goddamn Sorry, as well as falling into that Not Like Other Girls slash fan ditch of treating female characters like shit/obstacles to the main pairing WHICH IS JUST ******) as well as personally uncomfortable portrayals of obsession and taking advantage of people that turn my stomach to this day (see reason 4)

2) i got way in over my head with my own writing/style which was so obtuse and self-indulgent that I felt a great amount of shame over it, including the attention it had gotten, and the way it went to my head and turned me into an egotistic little shit. I was an asshole peacock and I regret it. There was a break where I got waylaid before the final confrontation in the fic (see reason 4, also a very bad time to get held up in any narrative) and when I returned to the story, i nearly cried because it was such a mess and I didn’t know what I was saying anymore. Finishing it was a struggle and I even remember one JnD fan friend being like “hey this chapter seemed really curt??? short?? not like you” and I was like YEAH THATS NOT ME ANYMORE god i hope

3) there was a sort of ... anti-JxD surge in my little pool from people I really respected and it made me think i was doing something wrong even just remembering it, so I cut off that memory.

4) it coincided with two ugly relationships in my life that marred it, and I just wanted it gone for my own mental health.

So anon, I’m very sorry that you never got to finish it. I had good intentions in mind and gave them a happy ending where they realized they loved each other, even if the journey there was difficult. 

It both touched me and broke a piece of my heart when someone came to me years ago and asked me why I had deleted it, saying the story had given them the courage to come out as gay to their family. In that moment, overwhelmed with how ProblematicTM the whole story was, I was really struck with just ... how subjective our world experience is, and how so many things can mean so many different things to every single soul and how terrifyingly VALID peoples experiences are, no matter how they come by them. We’re all so unique and convoluted, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure -- and one man’s trigger is another man’s key to Becoming. But no matter how inspiring, I couldn’t bring myself to repost it. 

Hopefully this will be the only fic i ever delete with relish. Jak and Daxter will always be a good memory for me, regardless. Thanks for the ask, anon.

(even more) personal stuff below the cut. tw for stalking, harassment, manipulation and emotional abuse.

So.

Im a firm believer in stories living beyond their authors (something that JK rowling doesnt seem to understand iykwim). I don’t normally delete past works, because while I wrote them, I also know that they’ve outgrown me as most narratives do: people are absolutely allowed to enjoy what they want to or need to, not just because I think said thing is reflective of my current work or jives with my current stage of life. 

However, JAM was a particular Thing that Had to Go.

The timeline is hella fuzzy to me because I’ve blocked a lot of it out, but I was coming out of middle school and struggling with my mental health. On the real life side, I was stuck in a situation with a close friend of mine who was very fixated on us being in a relationship and the pining was loud enough to hear from the other side of the country. Wounded people pleaser that I was, I flipped (exhaustingly) back and forth between “i dont like you like that” and “but I want you to be happy so what if I tried liking you like that?” and there was massive amounts of hidden hurt and resentment and tension and abandonment complex activation and just ... a strangling of anything that made our friendship good for either of us. 

Also she was a she. So. Yannoe, gay is difficult.

This definitely burnt me out on the “best friends pining” trope and is probably legit the ONLY reason I’m not equally in the erasermic and erasermight camp haha. That trope feels claustrophobic and draining to me, so I leave it for others to enjoy.

It also coincided with a married 45yo adult man luring me into a “platonic, ecstatic, boundary-breaking, you-are-my-beautiful-young-muse, words cannot express how much I love you” creative type relationship that inevitably turned possessive, domineering and manipulative. Within the bounds of the Renaissance Faire community, I thought he was a safe person and he was not, and his constant reassurance that I wasn’t like other women my age was absolutely hypnotizing to a undeveloped soul who really, really wanted to be special.

We traded poetry and tarot card readings over email. He bought me manga and shared stories about his time overseas and in the service. He made me props to go with my renaissance faire character and showed me where to find cheap leather so I could piece things together myself.

He also stalked me and owned me for the better part of a year and I only realized it once he started harassing a dear friend of mine overseas, whom I was visiting, about a package that he’d sent, which apparently he’d covered in original poetry to let me know how much he loved me But Not In a Hetero or Sexual Way Bro, so of course he didn’t want it to get lost in the postal system. So what is he going to do? Note my friend twice a day asking if its arrived until she inevitably, tearfully spills that this guy is stressing her out and who is he anyway?

My horrible secret was out, which only sounded horrible when I explained it to someone else. I realized this man was trying to follow me wherever i went and I got so fucking angry that he was messing with my friend that I had to stop it.

(He called me a cunt when I broke it off with him on the phone in the dark on the floor of my bedroom in the middle of the night so my parents wouldn’t hear, then sobbed and said he was sorry. I was so dissociated from the rush of anger and helplessness that it took for me to actually MAKE the call that all I could do was wiggle my foot and watch it in the reflection of the mirror on the back of my door, and think maybe I was a cunt but I wasn’t his cunt anymore. So there. 

Afterward I slammed my forehead into the mirror a few times to make sure I’d actually done it and it wasn’t a dream.)

During all of this, I was writing this stupid fic. I think. Honestly, I don’t fucking know, but I can’t think of it without thinking of him and how i was devoured.

The stress of hiding this “totally wonderful but NORMAL PEOPLE DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT WE HAVE!!!!” grooming shit from my parents was gutting me alive, and I was so far gone RE: worthiness/autonomy that I didn’t even consider why I BOTHERED diffusing his petulant accusations over notes on deviantArt again and again as he baited me into shit just to explode over how I didn’t love him and I figured out another way to soothe his engorged and tarry ego without explicitly lying that I loved him too. 

He made me regret my silver tongue and way with words as I used it to defend myself again and again, and crushed my love of writing. I would pace the neighborhood for almost an hour several times a week, claiming I was ‘exercising’ but really trying to understand why i felt so trapped, or where the lines between love and hate lay, or why I wanted to cry all the time, as i low key tried to get hit by a car just to force something to change in my life and jolt me out of his smothering, needy nightmare of constant texting and emails and notes. I couldn’t fucking flinch without him knowing about it, and asking me if I was okay. For this reason, I react very poorly to people fretting over me at length, and loudly. I get angry and feel violated, or just pinned to the floor by someone Performing their love on me with no real regard for my health.

This whole time, I was escaping into fandom. It probably saved my life, in one way or another, because I found friends who supported me and made me laugh in the JnD sphere. Especially the friend whose distress caused me to snap and realize This Couldn’t Continue.

This terrible man was the first one outside of my friend group that I showed my writing to, the first adult as well. It was on the dark side even then, but he said it was wonderful and amazing. He teased me for being stuck up in my authors notes on JAM (one of the reasons I’m just getting over ... talking ...) but said it inspired him to start writing as well. He used that writing to imagine hokey sprawling stories of him being a hot rod racer and me being his sexy girlfriend, Very Totally in Love. Why Couldn’t We have Just Met in a Different Lifetime??? not that its a relevant question for my young 16yo friend lol just something dreamers wonder lol lol here why don’t you take this traditional irish engagement ring aka claddagh i bought for you, lie to your parents and say I bought one for everyone in our renfaire group, and turn it toward your heart, to imply that you’re in love, so that I can keep your heart safe for you until you find a boyfriend?

FUCKER YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKER ok I’m done. Fuck.

JAM was a project of mine that spanned a year or two and is intrinsically tangled in those very bad relationships and very bad lessons. I deleted it because I needed to, for purely personal reasons beyond the fact that it was generally bombastic, over-long, tone-deaf and dealt with very serious issues poorly. Due to these experiences, you won’t catch me in a hot minute writing either best-friends-pining or heavy jealousy/possessiveness fic, but everyone else? Go crazy just tag your shit.

so. anyway. isn’t subjectivity actually terrifying? You never know what something can mean to someone else. So just ask, maybe.

Damn, son. Some fics you just can’t repost.