#i'm incredibly bad with shoujo it stresses me out like . really bad

[miserye]

i'm not gonan do it i'm not gonna do it i'm not gonna fo it i'm not gonna do it

[joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

Watched this with the oomf @yurisorcerer, I came across it multiple years ago and cannot remember where (my best guess is it qualifying as a magical girl anime for the mahou shoujo achievement on MAL graph?) and just yesterday as I was clearing my plan to watch for funsies I decided to torrent this so I could have it watched and thus remove another ptw entry.

It was fucking incredible! What the fuck! Like I didn't go into this expecting it to be bad I had no preconceived notions of what it was even about it's just the score was kinda low and I was like "if it's good it'll be like 6 or 7 good" but nah this shit was awesome, awesome to such a degree that I'm almost mad I hadn't already seen it before, and now I'm mad that it released so long ago that the fucking blu-ray is long out of print and sold for way more money than I'm willing to part with. Joy to be found at least in having shared this experience with a friend whom, spoilers for her presumed post (unless she posts before I do anyway) also really enjoyed it.

Elaborating a bit more specifically, I'd really say this movie is split into three acts. The intro gives us an overview of lead pair Dual and Dorothy, how their setting works, and how it's about to be changed with the introduction of Remo. The start's cool if a little slow, but there's magical girl adjacent action in a visually appealing cyber-world with fucky gravity and shit. I was already having fun here. Midsection of the movie sees Dual and Dorothy having become genuine friends with Remo, and there's a ton of genuinely adorable slice of life and character building antics here. The two music montages in a row are both particularly peak. There's a weird bit in the middle of said montages that shows the destruction of humanity and overwhelming dread of war - it works with what the movie is actually about thematically although I get the sense it was meant to be a little longer. We're still very good though. At this point 6 isn't even on the table for score anymore, and I'm genuinely having a lot of fun. And then we get our final act, which I can't even begin to succinctly describe and can really only say that the stakes go crazy, the plot goes crazier, and it was one of the best endings I've seen in what feels like forever. Absolutely incredible. Shot the movie up to an 8. I cannot stress enough that the movie is already pretty solid by this point and then just becomes peak beyond reason. Phenomenal.

Will say more broadly that the literary idea of computers continuing after human extinction is a common idea, but I gotta say this movie executed on said idea in a much more optimistic manner than I usually see, and I think the plot itself and how we get to all this comes together in a really nice way. Like the ending isn't just epic and emotional it's also naratively satisfying and thematically well justified. This movie being such a uniquely particular vibe would be enough for me to find it passively interesting already but being as generally well written as it is does a lot as well. Fuckin, really liked this thing.

Only drawback is count how many times it fades to black though lol.

[maneaterwithtail]

Why I do not think I will ever be a friend to pearl-stans

Crossposted from spacebattles

Think of this as a companion or follow up to my reaction to the Lea C video

I suppose if there is a main character that I dislike in Steven Universe it's Pearl. In no small part there's her fans because chances are there were 'pressed or budding lesbians who view any attack on her as an attack on the entire concept of their identity. The fact that she's painstakingly tied into said Rebel lesbian identity while often referencing revolutionary girl utena which in my opinion did a much better job handling that as an identity / phenomena

But I don't have any real rational reasons. There's this one moment in this one episode that permanently pissed me off about ttheshow, months later it was still pissing me off. Okay this isn't the first time this had happened with the sshow. at one point you would receive extra canonical material or the charafters be characterized one way and then when it was necessary for the plot characterized another way. A popular one is when Pearl said she can't stand eating so that that way she doesn't become present at a parent get together which causes some really annoying hijinks. But that's just one episode. no, what really collapsed my suspension of disbelief for her as a character and required me to desperately not think she was a real character but just a series of events that did whatever the episode wanted her to?

"What is a sch-ool?"

To be clear this is an alien being who comes from another planet where they have temples. They understand the purpose of Arenas in which to fight for displaying to martial prowess. And she has a 14 year old human son. She's been on Earth for thousands of years. Also she doesn't just know how to operate a motor vehicle and repair one she talks explicitly about traffic laws these cannot be any older than 200 plus years. Despite all of this she does not know what a school is a human practice that has been practiced for thousands of years

That moment, right there, completely destroyed all credibility as a character. She'll have emotional moments that she evokes very well. Because they give her some pretty solid writing and her actress does a damn fine job. But that does not matter because they've basically toled me in certain terms that she is made of stupid. Whenever they want to make her alien they will make her inexplicably alien and Incredibly dumb to make a plot go forward. Whenever they want to make her too traumatized they will make her too traumatized to justify some bullshit. It's everything I Hate About Mary Sue writing ( even though she is most certainly not a Mary Sue.) Arbitrary in order to evoke audience sympathy rather than earn it and ignore consistency with either setting or character. I don't even hate her that much it's just when they say care about her that I can't do it. I'm always at an enormous divide whenever they try to center on the character.

again this would be okay if she weren't front-and-center on several plots. And hating her basically didn't come with an immediate Repulsor field of saying anything bad or evil or mean about her basically brings out every lesbian, girl who's not like other girls, animation aspirant, or Shoujo Manga fan who's had to deal with any harassment at any point in their lives and assumes that you're part of another chain of evil man figures. Cuz seriously Pearl is really really bothersome. And it gets more so when it feels like her bother some parts get put aside to make her more sympathetic or to make sympathetic allusions. 

The big one for me was when they implied she was going to date a human woman. Despite the fact almost every other word out of her mouth about humans is utter contempt and disgust along with the aapprehensive fact she knows so little about their culture she can't pick up on 2000 year plus old practices. This would imply a level of bigotry that I honestly appreciate the entire fandom accepting in dis course

But much like a popular web novel series apparently her victimhood due to status and how she's crafted in terms of appealing identity matters more than the actual actions and character she displays. This is made even worse due to recent Revelations where I'm supposed to care even more

What's weird about it is that Pearl is in my opinion an incredibly well-written bigoted character. But she's not appreciated as such she's appreciated as basically a Justified bitch. And if any male character dares to show a similar level of fault unless yyou are stanning or shipping them they will be hated the fuck out oof or just dismissed. As far as I'm concerned Uncle Andy is Pearl with Aviation as opposed to space flight and spear use. He's effectively the straight older guy version of pearl. But no one will see that because all they can see is 

oh she's autistic just like me 

she's post-traumatic stress disorder just like me 

oh she's a lesbian or atypical about feminism in some sort of way just like me. 

And this got very explicit with one Tumblr poster who out and out said this then privately contacted me when I reblogged that moment to have me delete it and then close down her entire blog. This gets particularly bad due to the greater critical Steven Universe sentiment. Which honestly I want to enjoy but I can't help but feel that they're more pissed off that the lesbian Revolution was not what was being televised and not frustration with various storytelling beats because almost all the common storytelling criticism get apologized for by every fan and blamed on Cartoon Network

There is a fractal wrongness with the "what is a school" line coming from Pearl. To be fair it actually comes from Steven but she's basically repeats it a scene later and reveals her ignorance. Ignoring the fact that it's unrealistic for her to be ignorant or to not have looked it up in a fucking dictionary. There's the fact that that's "what is this thing you humans called love and or kissing?" level writing.

. Pearl is very deliberately kind of the anti girl written for guys sort of character. She's very much a girl written for girls sort of character. And I don't mean aimed at a female audience. I mean she's like the anti Starfire. this extends to hur character design which is all sharp edges along with the very deliberate I'm a lesbian fuck off codifiers that I keep mentioning. And the way they often and continuously show her as complicated is to do stupid shit like this. Make her have a breakdown and or make her ignorant about a human subject but only in a convenient way for a narrative. And when the consequences come they will be softened considerably because we need to be recognizing that she is a mentally ill lesbian who was oppressed and abused