#is this pandering to too niche of an audience? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

morgana-ren · 1 year ago

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Alrighty, everyone mute me here cause I'm about to go on a tirade.

Look, I've been playing video games since I was young. Very young. Probably too young, if we're being completely honest. We had an old Nintendo 64 from my step-dad's youth that I used to play religiously. I played my ps2 for hours and hours a day as a way to cope with a.. shall we say unstable household. I had Gameboy Advanced, Gameboy color, all the way up to Nintendo DS to the switch. This is something I've been doing since I was barely old enough to speak. I used to get games at Blockbuster, okay? I played the OG Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights on a clunky old computer. Even when we were flat-busted ass broke with absolutely no money to spare, I would play at friend's houses. I would play old AV consoles on those fat ass TVs. It's my oldest hobby besides reading, is the point here.

My point is I'm old enough to remember when gaming was a niche hobby that you could actually get bullied for. It was back when studios made games mostly out of passion, and not to sell to a broader audience. There wasn't really even such a thing as microtransactions. You bought a full and complete game. Blizzard released good products, actually (unbelievable, I know.) Games knew their audience, and there wasn't necessarily an assload of money in it, so it was mostly made out of love for the games and their community.

Gaming has grown in popularity over the last 10-20 years, and that can be an excellent thing! Really! It can be! But Baldur's Gate 3 winning game of the year brought something to my attention that has been driving me mad for a few days now. It's a concept I've found myself repeating for a long time, but barely just sort of sat down to analyze it:

Not everything is for you.

The last few winners of GOTY have had some... sour people be very upset. Not that this is uncommon, but especially the last few years. People saying Elden Ring is 'too hard,' people saying that Baldur's Gate 3 is nothing but pedantic dice rolls, etc. People who, in general, were very unhappy that these games did not appeal to them in particular, and they were very vocal about how these games should be changed to appeal to them personally.

What I'm saying is that these people, along with most others, were not there during the days of niche gaming, where when you didn't like a game, you didn't necessarily throw a tantrum and stamp your feet and demand that these games aren't good and that they need to change, but rather, you just... didn't play them. They weren't made for you.

We live in an age where absolutely everything is being scraped for every last dollar. Games that used to be made out of passion for their communities are now being made to sell, sell, sell as many copies as physically possible to everyone. If it won't pander to every last person, it's not going to be made. Things are being 'streamlined' to make the games appeal to anyone and everyone who might play them.

'Streamlined' in this case, means 'dumbed down.' As Bethesda famously says, KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Games that used to be a little bit more 'niche' and 'complex' like Morrowind, are now games like Skyrim, that are dumbed down to sell to everyone. They remove a lot of the aspects that made them beloved in the name of 'garnering a new and broader audience.' Older folks, adults, children, everyone. But this attitude of inclusivity isn't as great as it might seem initially. It isn't done out of community. It is done to get absolutely every last person possible to empty their wallet at the altar. To get every last fucking dollar out of everyone.

Games are passionless money pits. They sell you a half-baked, simple product that insults your intelligence. It's impossible to fail quests, because God forbid one person doesn't like that and asks for their money back. They won't touch on complex topics, because they don't want to cause a controversy that might drain their prospective bank account. They can't make things so intricate that God forbid a toddler might not understand them. They are milquettoast, miserable little games that appeal not even to people who enjoy games, but rather, people who don't.

Yes, they are making games to try and get money from people who don't even like them. They can't make anything nuanced or put a learning curve or put any actual work or fun into the game, because people who don't actually like playing games might realize "Hey, actually, I'm not enjoying this at all." and not give anymore money.

I'll get to the point.

Games being disliked by certain people is a good thing. It means those companies were unwavering on their vision and their loyalty to their fans. It means it was a game made from passion, and not just to be marketed and sold to literally every living person. They were made with their communities in mind, and no offense, but if you aren't one of the people that likes the things those communities stand for, maybe you should seek it elsewhere rather than trying to change something someone loves to suit you instead. You are not the demographic here.

You hear people that hate turnbased saying that Baldur's Gate 3 should not have been turnbased. Guess what? That's literally DnD. It's a DnD game. Don't like the lack of day cycles? Again, that's long resting in DnD. Pedantic dice rolls? That's fucking DnD, baby. Maybe you don't like it, but just because the game got popular does not mean it was made for you. Too much gay? Go away. Baldur's Gate was not made to sell copies to everyone. In fact, it was a relatively niche prospect that gained massive popularity near the end because of a scandal. I've been with them since Patch 2 of Early Access, and it very much was a passion project by people who loved DnD and TT games. They did not think it was going to hit this level of popularity, and they stuck to their guns even when it did. I cannot tell you how rare and remarkable that is.

Dark Souls is too hard? Maybe it's not the game for you. If you don't like certain design aspects, that's fine and okay! But Miyazaki and Fromsoft should not be forced to change their vision of their passion project because you personally do not like it. It was around before you, and they have a loyal community that does love the game just how it is. If you want a game with a difficulty slider, maybe you should play a game that has one. I'm sorry if you don't like the fundamentals of the game, but they exist for a reason, the community likes it, and no, it's not just for elitist reasons like I see all too often. You just do not understand because you don't like the game and do not like being told no for once by a company that has integrity.

I'm not trying to insult you. I'm being honest when I say that it's an attitude that is expected in the current climate where everything is changed when people complain the loudest because changing it means more money, and more money is the goal. These people are not your friends. Do not forget that. They are not changing it because they care about you. They are changing it because they think they can con you out of another dime.

People have a masochistic relationship with these companies. They have gotten used to being pandered to. They have gotten used to being sold a shitty game that everyone from their grandmother to their toddler niece and nephew can beat. And no, there's nothing wrong with games for everyone. But it's not because they wanted to make a game for everyone. It was because they wanted everyone's money.

People make hour long youtube videos about how Baldur's Gate would have been better if it was real time, and if it was more like this game and that game (namely games that pander to everyone) and then, in the same week, release a video bewailing that all games are so bad now and they don't understand why. They grasp that greed has a part in it, but they don't understand that they are directly contributing to the problem.

Games are bad because when everything is for everyone, nothing is truly for you. You won't have a chance to be passionate about anything, because on the off chance you find something you love, you will inevitably watch it die the same way that those of us who have been here forever did, because someone outside of the community doesn't like it, so it has to go because Christ forbid they don't sell two more copies.

And no, I am not talking about 'woke' or 'political correctness' so you alt-right weirdos can keep the fuck off of this post. I am talking about things like a lack of quest markers. Complex puzzles that you can fail. Political nuance. Things that take brainpower and are fun but not everyone likes.

Maybe not everything is for you. Maybe a game is allowed to exist even if you don't like it. Maybe communities are allowed to have their thing while you have yours. Maybe you have gotten so used to being pandered and catered to with every game being this blase, half-baked experience that is sorta liked by most, but... beloved by none. It's a forgettable, boring experience that garners no real loyalty, but at most a "Ha, that was alright." And then you put it on the shelf never to touch it again.

It means these companies aren't thinking of money; they are thinking of their communities. They are thinking of their fans and the people who love their games. Every time Miyazaki says 'no' to changing the formula that we love about his games, he is thinking of his loyalty to his community and his passion to the game. When Sven refuses to change aspects of the game to suit people who don't like DnD, he is staying loyal to the DnD community.

More companies should be doing this. Not less.

But consumers need to remember that one little creedo: Not everything is for me.

It can exist and I can exist. I do not have to play it and I do not have to enjoy it. It doesn't mean that it's bad. It means it's not for me. And that's fine.

#morgana and friends #im going nuts here I just had to say it #so many people whining about bg3 and dark souls and like #these are games I LOVE #and if you don't like them DON'T PLAY THEM #not everything has to be for you #this is a good thing #it means these studios CARE about the people in their community!#it means they aren't thinking with their wallets!#they are making games out of PASSION #something larian is actually famous for #and ill be damned if I have to sit and listen to another whiny toad whinge about how 'they don't like it so it should be changed'#im not tagging this cause I'm not railing for popularity points #I just had to get it out #back to your regularly scheduled filth

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foxcassius · 2 months ago

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i read lots of books this year so i'm gonna post opinions about some

gita desai is not here to shut up

sonia patel

this book is like a 2.5/5 stars for me. did i cry yes but its very hard to not cry when a book is talking about something traumatic that you happen to have experience with. i find that the metaphor was shoved pretty hard, i read the words chup-re at least 400 times over the course of the book i think, and while its a good metaphor you dont need to dumb something down and shove it front and center just bc its a ya book. the book also reeked of like bioessentialism? there were no good men in the book except gay men and the mc's brother. dads are bad uncles are bad boyfriends are bad guys you meet at school are bad guys you meet at work are bad. the author couldn't find it in her to write a man who wasnt a violent rapist who wasnt gay. it felt very pandering and vaguely radfem. the main character's thoughts were so tangental and rambling i had trouble reconciling that people she interacted with had normal interactions with her. kind of weird overall with the takes and the writing choices.

the emily wilde series

heather fawcett

first i want to state my confusion about these books being ya……the protagonist is 30 years old. is it just due to the lack of sex? does lack of sex a ya book make? i think these books are good, a solid 4/5 stars. i cant say much for them other than that they are entertaining, especially to me. the fae love interest isnt controlling or dark or brooding he’s just kinda goofy and particular and faeries are referenced/the worldbuilding is done so as to build a very cozy and pleasant view of the fae and their world without it being too cozy. in complement, the dangers of interacting with faeries are highlighted without it being overly grim and melodramatic. there is a lot of reference to real folklore but like more niche real folklore and a wider variety of it instead of just the same six superstitions over and over again. They’re not 5/5 because i have a certain bar for that but there’s nothing like wrong with the books theyre enjoyable.

hench

natalie zina walschots

this book is like a 4 or 4.5/5 for me. i think i lean more towards a 4 because it was longer than it needed to be and the ending was pretty blah in my opinion. the book carries the pov character’s voice very well and addresses the made-up issue of its world (that parallels our real world in ways) very head-on. the way the plot and the characters build is natural and realistic. it can be slow to start but once you get into it you’re pretty into it. it drags its feet as it waddles towards the ending but you stick around because you do want to see what’s going to happen. if you’re really into romance though and want the romance a lot you will be disappointed

this is how you lose the time war

amal el-mohtar and max gladstone

i feel like i’m not smart enough to fully appreciate this book or something. not into poetry enough to Get It i suppose. i did like it. it’s like a 3.5 or 4/5. it’s the only pov-change book i’ve read recently that warranted it. but its a difficult book to recommend to people because it is sci fi, right, but its also got a really weird writing style. i really dont Know what to say about it? it was good and i liked it but if i was the target audience it would have been Gooder and i would have liked it More, maybe.

other birds

sarah addison allen

this book is a prime example of changing pov where no change of pov is necessitated. it’s like a 2/5 for me. i did finish it. i dont know why the author insists on using changing pov when every character’s pov has the exact same voice as every other character. its also just kind of a boring book its not that interesting. and the only black characters are elderly parental figures even though there is a pretty full cast of young white people running around being heartfelt. like you didnt think for one moment to make one of them a slim shade less white? not worth reading in my personal opinion.

the bog wife

kay chronister

another pov change book that had no business being changing pov. if this book had picked a main character, it maybe would have been a 3/5. as it is, its 2/5. it's a long book with very little character development or payoff to speak of. i guess you solve the mystery? a little? not even, really? i dont know maybe im just not smart enough to get it but this book was a huge miss.

the unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry

rachel joyce

this is like a 4.5 or 5/5 book to me. it is one of those books that is quintessentially about humanity and realizing that everyone around you is a human with a life and a story and a sorrow of their own. i understand how people could find a book like that kind of boring or condescending, but i like books like that, and i liked this one even though it felt pretty direct and low on metaphor. i teared up and cried my fair share towards the end but there are about 30 children’s picture books that make me do the same that i can name off the top of my head so not really a MASSIVE feat i suppose. i would recommend it.

till the last beat of my heart

louangie bou-montes

this was like a 3.5/5. an extremely low-stakes ya sort of urban fantasy romance. i dont even know if im using urban fantasy correctly here. the writing style is just sort of okay in my opinion and when you step back, they spend a lot of time waffling around not doing much. i felt like it could have used one more draft, and i mean draft like start over from the beginning with a blank page and write only what you remember of the most important parts of your old draft. it was good though and other than just feeling like the writing could have been tightened up there is nothing wrong with it.

a good girl's guide to murder

holly jackson

not normally the kind of book i would read but kids keep asking for readalikes to one of us is lying so i had to read a few and have more on hold. this was the best one of the bunch, 3.5 or 4/5. realistic? no. pretty good though? yeah. i appreciate that the book acknowledged racism without trying to center it in the narrative. maybe some readers would prefer the story to have tackled it more head-on, but i think with a white author this is a better approach. i think there were plenty of leads to keep the mystery interesting but the solution didnt come out of left field or anything, and having so many loose suspicious people does set it up well for sequels, which i know it has but i wont be reading them.

all your twisted secrets

diana urban

this is like. a 2.5/5 or 3/5 for me personally because i am not a teenager who is into this genre. when it got to the end and *SPOILER* it turned out the main character set everything up, i was just like lmao. no she didnt though. like i know you wrote that she did but like. no she didnt. would suffice as a readalike for one of us is lying though which fulfills my purpose w it.

a danger to herself and others

alyssa sheinmel

follows a girl with psychosis who doesnt realize she has psychosis through her court-mandated stay at an institution for evaluation/diagnosis if possible after her summer program roommate falls from their second-story dorm window during a game. its like a 3.5/5. i cant speak to whether or not its an accurate portrayal of the illness, but it shows how she changes and her view on her doctor and the insitution changes as she comes to terms with things and gets medicated. also portrays how she struggles with missing people from her hallucinations and how missing them can tempt her into not taking her medication and similar struggles.

jubilee

patricia reilly giff

this is one of my favorite books of the past decade full stop. 5/5. its a children’s book. a young girl with selective mutism who was left to live with her aunt as a very small child is moved from the special ed class to the general classroom at the start of 5th grade and is adjusting to it. she makes friends with a dog a random man throws at her in the ocean and also with a dirty, rough boy who is always being chased and beaten by either his brothers or his parents. her aunt’s not-boyfriend tells her he wants to marry her aunt but wants her permission/approval, and then also she finds out her mother who she hasnt seen in like ten years is living on the mainland a mere ferry ride away. all of these are things she struggles to answer/make decisions on/be heard about. its a book about adjusting and growing and moving past your traumas and i cried a lot its a really good book. i recommend.

the puppets of spelhorst

kate dicamillo

another 5/5. childrens book. beautiful, sad, hopeful, poetic, just an extremely good read. i truly have nothing else i can say about it.

the land of neverendings

kate saunders

a book that tackles grief. a real 4.5/5. its a childrens book. it is explicitly sad and does not shy away from talking about death and grief and every little thing associated with losing someone. a young girl loses her older sister, who was disabled her whole life. she feels strange because she finds her grief over her sister manifesting as missing her sister’s bear, bluey, who was cremated with her. when she starts catching glimpses of the world of toys she had always made up stories about to keep her sister entertained, she jumps the hurdles of hope and disappointment over and over again as her desperation to see bluey and, in turn, her sister staggers between the extremes. it is so well written, it depicts both raw, recent loss and long-lived loss clearly and realistically, and i really recommend it.

the grace of wild things

heather fawcett

i wanted to read this book when i worked at my last library, then i came to my new library and forgot about it, and then while reading the emily wilde series i was like hey. that author's name looks familiar. which is kind of funny to me! she must be busy, because this book and an emily wilde book both came out this year i think? anyway a good 3.5 or 4/5. sort of an anne of green gables retelling but with a heavy magical twist. the main character, grace, is a witch, and runs away from her orphanage to seek out an old witch the kids have told her about who cooks and eats children because grace wants to be her apprentice. this book does not shy away from scariness, often depicting the witch as terrifying and confirming she does cook and eat children, going so far as to have the bones of them left in her oven and etc. i think its very good and original as far as anne of green gables retellings go and it has really wonderful voice, something heather fawcett just seems to do well.

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7grandmel · 1 year ago

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Todays rip: 14/01/2024

Jesus of the Underground

Season 6 Featured on: siivagunner's highest quality rips: volume

Ripped by eg_9371

youtube

Alright, look, at this point I do try to avoid posting too many Undertale/Deltarune rips on this blog. With this post I think we're getting close to...20 or so rips of the game, or rips featuring its music prominently, covered on this blog. Yet Jesus of the Underground is the kind of rip that truly cannot be ignored - one of the most extensive rips ever made for the game, uploaded on its seventh birthday, after eight years straight of being featured on SiIvaGunner. Jesus of the Underground is the most perfect tribute to a game like Undertale that one could ever ask for.

It's easy to say that Undertale's popularity in being ripped on SiIvaGunner was purely a timing thing - SiIvaGunner started in January 2016, just a few months after Undertale's release in late 2015, still riding high on the sheer hype of tracks like Megalovania and Hopes and Dreams. And yeah, it may have started out that way, but I don't think launch hype would carry the game past six hundred rips made for it. In truth, I feel like Undertale's music spawned a sort of community of its own, for just how unique yet immediately appealing it is - its easily identifiable as video game music, yet with just enough parts in its percussion and backing played with real instruments, to remind those not wholly invested in the world of VGM that its music is more than just a series of bleeps and bloops. Pair that sound with Toby Fox's love for leitmotifs, distinct samples, and excellent sound design on the whole, and you've got a soundscape that almost defines the game's legacy more than the game itself. A lot of this is just me speculating, but its undeniable that the game's music has remained just as relevant to Undertale discussion as the game itself - it's not an aspect that ever feels like its taking a back seat, even despite just how globally popular the game itself has become.

And that feeling of, music remaining wholly appreciated despite its explosion in quality, was always the impression I got from the band that Jesus of the Underground is also paying tribute to - Green Day. I am, to reiterate a talking point I've made many times before, not in any way in touch with the music world, yet I've always admired Green Day in particular from a distance, in how their album American Idiot managed to become an absolute smash hit despite never feeling like they surrendered to pandering. On top of that, the album wasn't just "popular", but critically acclaimed, and even as time passed its popularity never felt like it drew the band any real negative or spiteful ire. Jesus of Suburbia, in particular, does not feel like it was made to tally up as many plays on a radio station as possible - it's akin to a whole storyline playing out over nine minutes of rock music, with peaks and valleys althroughout, yet it remains loved by music enthusiasts and everyday listeners alike. Much like Toby Fox with Undertale, Green Day filled American Idiot with their raw, almost-unfiltered feelings, and were able to strike a cord with so many people the world over despite evidently being made for a particularly niche audience: because the soul of their craft simply shone through.

Jesus of the Underground, in all its nine-minute glory, almost feels like as much of a labor of love as the two sources its pulling from - an expression of passion toward the art of ripping Undertale itself. Despite being such a long rip, it shows no signs of cut corners, no signs that eg_9371 was ever *not* making this out of love for the game. Or at the very least, no signs that he wasn't making it out of a love of ripping - it's clearly inspired by prior made and equally excellent Jesus Of Tazmily, a rip arranging Jesus of Suburbia within the soundscape of MOTHER 3 instead. Undertale itself wears its influences from the MOTHER series proudly on its sleeve, which makes it all the more fitting to think that it was an ambitious MOTHER 3 rip that inspired eg_9371 to roll his sleeves up and attempt doing the same for Undertale.

It remains hauntingly authentic in arrangement style to the original Hopes and Dreams and its instruments throughout, althewhile seamlessly changing in BPM and time signature just the same as Jesus of Suburbia does, without ever missing a beat. Meanwhile, small touches of quality ripping remain present throughout - Flowey's theme echoing throughout parts of the track's second act is such a great touch that I never would've thought would add so much to the arrangement alone. And setting aside all of the meta analysis and speculation on Undertale's popularity, American Idiot's merits, and just how much effort eg_9371 keeps putting into his rips, the instrumentation simply fits Green Day like a glove - Hopes and Dreams' guitar samples and the bright, hopeful sparkle of the main melody synth simply wraps everything together more seamlessly than one could've ever imagined.

That, or it's simply eg_9371 being magic again - which, given his title as SiIvaGunner's busiest ripper, is not a possibility I'm going to rule out. Jesus of the Underground is a fitting celebration in so, so many ways, honoring the legacy of Undertale, the appeal of its music, the success and influence Green Day has had on music, and just how much Jesus of Suburbia was able to connect with people despite its seemingly narrow appeal. Undertale, Green Day, and indeed the SiIvaGunner channel itself, and so many more projects out there, show that love and heart can push through any perceived boundaries of market appeal with enough of a push.

#todays siivagunner #season 6 #siivagunner #siiva #eg_9371 #Youtube #Bandcamp #green day #american idiot #rock #emo rock #punk rock #undertale #deltarune #utdr #hopes and dreams #asriel dreemurr

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ineffable-opinions · 1 year ago

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Why so many shonen-ai live-action?

A lot of Japanese BL live-actions are manga adaptations. However, most of source IP are of a particular kind. Most of them seems to be shonen-ai.

A trend in Japanese live-action adaptations that I have noticed:

Most of them are soft/lite – little to no explicit content (sex, language, violence), never too intense and goes easy on well-established BL manga/novel tropes.

Such a setup has obvious benefits. This is probably meant to make it palatable to a larger audience, censors, etc. It is also for homonationalism soft-power, you see.

To educate and evoke empathy among a heterogenous audience towards the queer characters, it is more apt to make it more palatable, simple and understandable.

Manga and live-action are different mediums – they have different audience demographic, with a lot of overlap. Main target of BL mangas and novels continues to be (腐)fu-people [fandom: fujoshi, fudanshi and fujin irrespective of nationality]. BL live-action have audience outside this niche. This wider audience is not familiar with the quirks of BL. Example: one can watch a dozen BL live-action (that is not self-referential) without ever encountering concepts like seme and uke. This is not for a lack of seme uke dynamic. On the other hand, it is unlikely that one can go about reading BL manga and novels without learning those terms. Moreover, all that will be accepted/appreciated by a large-number of fu-people might not be accepted/appreciated by rest of the audience.

Transnational audience continue to be dominated by audience from the Global North owing to their greater purchasing power which also manifests in their ability to affect what BL is made. Western tastes dictating queerness in BL is no surprise part through censorship and part through ideas of right kind of queerness. Purchasing power has to be pandered to in the neo-liberal world. പിന്നെ അല്ല!

BL live-action is not always seen as the end product. The value of the IP only grows with it.

BL continues to be a niche area and there is only so much money going into BL production. Wider audience is probably a safer bet – lower risk and better returns.

In the end we get live-actions of BL manga and novels that are not necessarily the most popular, critically acclaimed or both.

There are probably a bunch of copyright/publisher related restrictions on adaptations with IP changing hands and publishers going out of business. Most live-actions are sourced from contemporary works.

Take for example Harada sensei’s works. So many of her works are intense and explicit. Out of all her works – popular and critically acclaimed – the one that was chosen for live-action adaptation was One Room Angel. It probably benefitted from canonical romantic ambiguity between the main characters.

Yoneda Kou got a live-action adaptation for her work in 2014. Since then, nothing.

Many BL (yaoi) manga artists such as Hinohara Meguru, Chise Ogawa, Ayano Yamane, Ike Reibun, Zariya Ranmaru and Rihito Takarai who are famous internationally are yet to get any live-action adaptation. I don’t think this trend will change anytime soon.

I mean, look at BLs that got live-action adaptations and Chil Chil BL award winners. Look at how manga popularity is playing out with live-actions.

Compare this with the short-lived 耽改 (dangai) phenomenon. Between early Chinese BL live actions and ban on live-action BL including censored adaptations (dangai) following the success of Word of Honor, a lot of very famous writers such as Priest, Chai Ji Dan, Shui Quan Cheng and Lan Lin, among others, got live-action adaptations, some censored and others not.

Right before dangai ban, a lot more contemporary and time-honored works attracted interest and investments for live-action adaptation. A bunch of them even landed in development hell.

It is also interesting to note what are stripped off from the source materials when adapted onto screen.

I probably got a bunch of things wrong since this analysis is not based on data. Instead, I’m relying on my fickle memory to guide me. I should probably do a proper analysis someday.

I am craving for more variety in BL live-action adaptations. I want more yaoi adaptations after this year’s deluge of live-action shonen-ai. I want a pinku eiga based on BL manga. I want another Sei no Gekiyaku (2020) level ero-manga adaptation. I want some gei-comi (bara) adaptation. Someone, please make the live-action adaptations of Gengoroh Tagame’s Fisherman’s Lodge and Ichikawa Kazuhide’s Fire Code. Some fire and ice, please.

#japanese bl #bl history #bl trivia #boys love #yaoi

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fortressofserenity · 2 years ago

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Who really is an everyman?

I remember somewhere in a Spider-Man board where somebody said that Spider-Man isn’t so much of an everyman but rather a stand-in for the superhero comics reader, when I think about this while there are certainly portrayals of Spider-Man that hew closer to his purported everyman reputation (the newspaper cartoons where Mary Jane worked as a computer saleswoman) there are aspects of him in the ‘616′ stories that don’t feel everymannish.

It’s not that normal men don’t cheat on their partners either, but that Spider-Man finds himself in situations where he gets the attention of femmes fatales like Black Cat and White Rabbit. The 616 version of Mary Jane works as a model, most men may have a crush on a female model but don’t date and marry these kinds of characters. I could also say that Kate Pryde herself isn’t much of an everywoman when one considers these.

Not only is she a skilled martial artist and hacker, she also has a pet dragon. You might say that it’s fiction, so she should have her pet dragon. But if you take a look at most other cartoon characters, they often have dogs. Obelix has a dog (or is it Asterix), both Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse have pet dogs (Bolivar and Pluto), Charlie Brown has a pet dog named Snoopy and Garfield’s Jon also owns a dog named Odie.

Both Batman and Superman have pet dogs, well so did Impulse at one point. Nightwing has a dog, so does Hawkeye. If you want a villainous example, we have Dick Dastardly and his pet Muttley. If you want a stretch, we have Pegleg Pete and his pet dog Chainsaw but he still qualifies and fits the shoe pretty well.

Most people in the real world have cats and dogs as pets, it’s very rare to encounter somebody who has a pet reptile. If dragons are reptiles, while reptile owners aren’t nonexistent they’re not that common either. There are even some people who point out that Kate Pryde panders a lot to those who really are deep into X-Men, if this is true then she resonates with just a few people.

One would wonder why Wolverine became X-Men’s breakout character and not her, well the problem is that she may not be much of an everyperson to appeal to everybody else in some regards. Especially if she appeals too much to a certain demographic, then it goes a long way why her appeal in comics never translated well to media with a more mainstream audience like film.

Not everybody’s experience is going to be the same, so defining what makes an everyperson character’s going to be tricky. If there’s ever going to be a concrete consensus for what counts as one, they wouldn’t be part of a niche subculture of any sort. They’d have normie experiences and interests, mainstream and basic even. There’s a big difference between Charlie Brown and Tim Drake.

This is what separates the everymen from the fanboy favourites, they’re characters everybody can relate to. Whoever they are, they’re not part of some elite or niche. They’re going to be very plebian in a way Tim Drake never was.

#tim drake #peanuts #kate pryde #x-men #robin #batman #disney comics #carl barks #mickey mouse #donald duck

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bernaticneon · 21 days ago

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"Chappell Roan's thing is like; you're gay, you like this, and I hate that, because I do!" — Chanse on Smosh Bit City City Pop Girl episode.

(or something like that) I've been thinking about that line

because it’s not just funny—it’s painfully real to some of my friends in the queer community. Chappell Roan’s entire aesthetic does kind of feel like queer culture in neon pink: unapologetically fun, a little over the top, and very aware of its audience. She knows who she’s singing for, and honestly? That’s part of the appeal.

But here’s the thing: the line also taps into this weird tension in queer media and music right now. On one hand, we’re living in an incredible era of representation where artists like Chappell Roan can make music that explicitly celebrates queerness, instead of hiding it behind metaphors or subtext. But on the other hand, there’s this nagging question of whether it’s authentic or if it’s leaning into "queer baiting"—but for the aesthetic instead of the narrative.

When artists or brands say, “You’re gay, you like this,” it can sometimes feel like being pandered to instead of seen. It’s like when a company slaps a rainbow on their logo for Pride Month and calls it a day. Sure, it’s visibility, but is it coming from a place of genuine understanding, or is it just marketing?

With Chappell Roan, it feels more complicated. Her music does actually resonate with queer people because it’s playful and campy in a way that queer culture has always celebrated. But when an artist’s whole vibe becomes the aesthetic of queerness, does it risk flattening the complexity of queer identities into something that’s just marketable?

And then there’s the broader music industry. The line between authentic representation and capitalizing on niche markets is thinner than ever. Streaming algorithms reward hyper-specific branding (“if you’re gay, you’ll LOVE this”), and artists have to figure out how to play into that while still staying true to themselves. Originality becomes a balancing act between creating music that’s honest and building an image that sells.

At the same time, it’s worth celebrating the fact that queer representation is now profitable enough to even be a question. We’ve gone from coded references and subtext to explicit queer joy, and that’s a win in itself. But representation doesn’t fix everything—it doesn’t automatically make an artist’s work more original, more meaningful, or more immune to criticism.

Ultimately, the real challenge isn’t whether queer media is “too marketable” or “too pandering”—it’s making sure that queer stories, voices, and experiences don’t get reduced to a checklist or an aesthetic. Queer art doesn’t have to cater to every queer person, and we’re allowed to feel conflicted about it. The beauty of the queer community is that it’s diverse, chaotic, and full of contradictions.

So yeah, Chanse is right. Sometimes you hate how much you love something because it’s so on the nose. But maybe that’s okay too—because at the end of the day, queer art isn’t just about liking or disliking it. It’s about existing in all its messy, complex, neon-pink glory.

#chappell #chappell i love you #chappell roan #smosh #music industry #queer community #queer media #queer artist #essay #reflection #essay writing

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m-s-justice · 5 months ago

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hi sorry op I'm going to hijack your post for a little bit. I am a professional yapper.

To answer the question: Yes, it is weird.

To elaborate on it:

It really fucking sucks. It is deliberate erasure of his queer coding. A huge facet of his character in his two previous iterations was his queerness. From a bit of a pretentious, thematical perspective, it was another way to make him "different" from the other three and more "alien". (Queer people are always the other and has an long, well documented history of being villainized.) It was shorthand that he was weird and crazy and "gross" considering how crass he is about it. (though, it's fine when Dempsey and Nikolai talk about women in that way. eugh.) But that's subjective interpretation and you can ignore all that.

His queerness was never really addressed with any seriousness and was always portrayed as a joke. Seeing the franchise he (unfortunately) belongs to, you can understand that. For all the bells and whistles of "inclusivity" in the modern games and all the shouts of "woke agenda" from audiences, the moment zombies tries to pander to the general player base (which it DEFINTELY is doing by adopting warzone mechanics and the hud, which is another discussion entirely) he is washed of anything that could be off-putting those general audiences. A queer lead was fine when it was in a niche, campy sidemode and was the joke, but now that Richtofen is a serious character in a serious mode he cannot be that.

(of course, there could be symbolism in that. Read into it as much or as little as you want.)

Now, there are counters. Bisexuality is a thing and erasure is a huge problem for those who identify as it. If Richtofen is bisexual then like good for him, good for him. But also, it's kinda gross to take the ONE ONLY character that references how he likes men and has sex with men and never talks about women and then. give him a wife.

Alternatively, compulsory heterosexuality. He could have felt the pressure to live as a "successful man", which includes having a wife and children, alongside money, prestige, and a respectable job. He could feel shame over his preferences and the need to cover them up with a traditional life. Which is very relatable to many queer people and could be a good jumping off point for a sub-plot where he comes to terms with his queerness.

Now, for my purely subjective opinion. I am dropping all pretenses of "literary analysis" and giving my unadulterated view on it. If you have read this far, thank you :] ! I know this is getting long.

It is so fucking boring.

They fridged his wife and kid. I've seen this narrative played out so many goddamn times its ridiculous. Hell, we've seen it played out before in zombies. (Close enough, welcome back Nikolai Belinski.) If it were up to me, I would have fridged Edward and make his wife "Dr. Richtofen" and the reveal is that she is the main antagonist. It would piss off the fanboys but it would at least be interesting. Instead, we get this bland nothing burger. I'm going to be entirely blunt here: I don't give a single shit about his wife or his child. That's because they aren't people. They are motivations. "Oh no, this character I know nothing about is dead! How sad! Look at how sad that makes our favorite boy!! You should feel bad, too!" Maybe it's my low empathy speaking, but it feels so goddamn contrived that I rolled my eyes at the Liberty Falls trailer. It's so pedestrian. I know that makes me sound ridiculously pretentious and tone deaf considering that this is the megacorporation funny gun game where you shoot the glombies. I'm not expecting anything groundbreaking here, but for a game mode known for being off-the-wall, this is so head bangingly unimaginative that it puts me off from the story entirely. I was so hype in the beginning and then the story drops and. It's just the most bland bullshit ever.

The zombies mode has never had any particularly groundbreaking narratives, but at least it was so... extreme that it was compelling. I hate to say it, but this is just indicative of a larger problem. I don't enjoy digging into Modern vs Old zombies discourse, but a problem I've notices is how extremely easy modern is. Easy to get to high rounds, easy to unravel the lore, they practically are spoonfeeding us. But that's, once again, a different discussion. I have talked for long enough. Thank you for reading.

Sorry guys but Richtofen just suddenly having a wife feels weird

Like- are we just gonna ignore all the utterly diabolical and weird things he has said and done over the years ❓️

#cod zombies #edward richtofen #call of duty zombies #black ops 6 #another goddamn essay #once again I apologize op #turns out I had a lot to say about this #once I sat down I couldn't stop #Still have more to say but this is getting ridiculous #There has to be a cut-off somewhere #hopefully you got something out of this

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mushroomwillow · 1 year ago

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Ngl it’s a sad post about missing art and having the most amazing moment between me and someone I love.

There isn’t a pain like the pain of knowing you can’t just create art and still survive in a capitalist world. I want to make jewelry, blow glass, work in a forge, crochet, draw digitally and on paper. But instead I have to work a job to make money just to survive, any art I get to make is a treat, most often something I have to budget for and most of the time sacrifice so I can pay the bills. It’s deep and goes past an ache in my bones.

It’s a sad post at 1am. My fiance saving up to make our anniversary special sparked that fire and gods do I wish I could just spend my days creating whatever I want. No niche, no direct audience to pander too. Just make art for the love of it and the immense joy it brings me.

When we were making our ornaments, all my thoughts cleared and I was more in the moment than I have been in years. My heart filled with that flutter of creating something beautiful and learning a brand new skill and sharing that beautiful moment with someone I love and adore. Watching him also create something beautiful when he insists he doesn’t have a creative bone in his body. Seeing that same cup inside him that will never be filled.

Sad post over. It was a beautiful moment, a tradition we’ve decided to never let go of. We want to do it every year. Always have the memories of years that go by that we can hold and look at for forever.

#mushroomwillow rambles #sad post #art #capitalism is hell

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felassanis · 3 years ago

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Seriously. So much for being hyped about Saints Row.

Like yeah, gameplay wise it'll be grand. The setting looks great. I'm glad the aliens have fucked off. Yay for layered clothing...

But I never played Saints row for gameplay and setting lmao. I played it for gang warfare and playing a morally bankrupt piece of shit. About forging bonds through living a dangerous and deranged lifestyle. Where those people can even betray you or die for your cause. Not...whatever the fuck those guys are...

I just find it unfair that when some people say they hate the new route the reboot is going its chalked up to racism or sexism. Because the ones complaining were fans of the old games, and those games were diverse. There's like, one white guy in saints row 1 aside from your character who race is dependent. Lin literally punches a sexist douche in her intro and Saints Row 2 let's you play as the only female gang leader who takes down three other gangs led by men.

Are there idiots who are whining about these things? Yeah, but they're clearly not actual fans.

Fans have been vocal for years about the ways they wanted the games to change. YEARS. instead, the game company disregards any and all criticism over a product that is clearly a pandering to a wider, and more censored audience.

I'm not gonna complain about anyone liking this new game. You do you. But the game company clearly doesn't care about their IP. They don't care about their fans. They just wanna pander to a wider audience to garner more sales. Why do you think Agents of Mayhem was Saints row in no way whatsoever save for it clearly being a *add on* to the universe? To sell to an already established fan base craving for Saints Row content. And it was a forgettable game.

And this is probably gonna be the same. I want to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.

#saints row #a lot of people are dick riding volition and deep silver #just to spite others #ive no problem with people who will like this game #none #but to the fans who were disappointed #i feel ya #gonna miss the old gang #gonna mourn for the Dex plotline Deep Silver were too cowardly to pick up #gonna mourn for the wasted potential of Troy #and just sad that one of my favourite game series is #reduced to this...#like #whats so bad about pandering to a niche audience?#Volition is so scared about being a GTA clone #that they wont try to be a fucking contender to it instead #what a waste #saints row 2 #saints row reboot

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deanismysavior · 3 years ago

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I kept seeing people comparing byler to other ships that were pure queerbait, like d*stiel, st*rek, johnl*ck and probably others, and I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. As far as I know, none of those ships were planned, they happened because fans felt the chemistry between the actors and they started shipping them, so they became really popular, but the writers never meant to make them canon. sure, they were assholes because they shamelessly queerbaited their audiences for years, but those relationships were never going to be canon, that was never the plan. With byler though, Will was always meant to be in love with Mike, this ship has been half canon since the very beginning, so previous shipping disappointments lol don't mean that byler will not happen either. they're different situations.

Yeah, as I've said before on here being a HUGE destiel shipper myself is that we really can't compare the two. Supernatural was supposed to end with season 5, and Kripke never wrote with any intention of making Dean a queer character, and I'm pretty sure Kripke didn't even like the idea of adding angels to the plot at first, so he sure as hell wasn't planning destiel. It was only after Misha came onto the show to play Cas and saw how much chemistry Misha and Jensen had together on screen that the direction of their story got muddled. There was a constant tug-of-war happening in the writers room because there were many writers who wanted to explore the depth and nuance of that relationship, while others wanted to just focus on the show about brothers and guns, even though Misha's presence on the show literally saved it from going under and bought them an additional 10 years on air. As much as we all saw the potential in destiel, there was never actually an expectation that the writers were going to go there up until maybe the last few seasons because there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen and the CW execs didn't want their launch of Walker Texas Ranger to flop, so they had to hang onto their conservative audiences. It was messy and disastrous because destiel was being pulled in 15 different directions at once.

Stranger Things has always had queerness written into the story. It was in the initial pitch of the show and in Will's character description. The Duffer Brothers have far more creative control in working with Netflix because they don't have to pander to an entire network, and the branding of each Netflix show is completely different, whereas channels like the CW and MTV have a niche market that they generally target for. The Duffers also have a tight writers room and directors that they trust to convey the story. The storytelling and the arcs have been outlined from the beginning, and at least somewhat fleshed out much further in advance than serialized shows like Supernatural or Teen Wolf that only really plot arcs for one season at a time. The truth is, Byler has been intentionally built up in a way that none of those other ships have, and I think that's important to recognize. You literally can't compare them, because while one is an opportunistic choice, the other has been laid into the very fabric of the show from the beginning.

#byler #byler endgame #byler nation #ask #will byers #mike wheeler #will x mike #mike x will #stranger things #st #will byers is gay #mike wheeler i know what you are

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shihalyfie · 3 years ago

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About the Adventure: reboot, the likely reason why it exists, the question of target demographic, and whether I would recommend it or not

I think this reboot has been kind of a strange outlier in terms of Digimon anime in general, in terms of...well, just about everything. I also feel like everything surrounding it has kind of been giving us mixed signals as to what the intent and purpose behind the anime is -- well, besides “cashing in on the Adventure brand”, but looking at it more closely, that might be a bit of an oversimplification.

I’m writing this post because, having seen the entire series to the end for myself and thinking very hard about it and what it was trying to do, I decided to put down my thoughts. This is not meant to be a review of what I think was good and bad, but rather, something that I hope will be helpful to those who might be on the fence about whether they want to watch it or not, or those who don’t want to watch/finish it but are curious about what happened, or those who are curious as to why this reboot even exists in the first place, or even maybe just those who did watch it but are interested in others’ thoughts about it. I'm personally convinced that -- especially in an ever-changing franchise like Digimon -- how much you like a given work is dependent on what your personal tastes are to the very end, and thus it’s helpful to understand what kind of expectations you should go in with if you want to watch something.

With all of this said and done, if you want to go in and best enjoy this series, I think it is best to consider this anime as a distinct Digimon series of its own. The relationship to Adventure is only surface-level, and by that I mean it’s very obvious it’s doing things its own thing deliberately without worrying too much about what prior series did. Of course, I think everyone will have varying feelings about using the Adventure branding for something that really isn't Adventure at all, but we are really talking about an in-name-only affair, and something that’s unabashedly doing whatever it wants. So in other words, if you’re going in expecting Adventure, or anything that really resembles Adventure, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you’re able to approach it like yet another distinct Digimon series, and the other aspects of it fit your fancy, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it much better. And, conversely, I think it’s also important to remember that this series seems to have a writing philosophy with a fundamentally different goal from most Digimon series, and since it’s understandable for most long-time Digimon fans to have their tastes built on those prior series, it’s fine and completely understandable that this reboot may not be your cup of tea, for reasons that probably don’t actually have much to do with whether it’s an Adventure reboot or not.

There are no spoilers in the following post. (Although I use some emphatic language for the duration for it, these are mostly just my personal thoughts and how I see the series and the overall situation.)

On what exact relationship to Adventure this series has, and why it’s an “Adventure reboot”

If you ask why they did an Adventure reboot, the easiest answer to come up with is “Adventure milking, because it’s profitable”, but that’s kind of an oversimplification of what the issue is. This is especially when you take into account a key fact that official has been very well aware of since as early as 2006: most kids are too young to have seen Adventure, and therefore have no reason to care about it.

That’s the thing: Adventure milking only works so well on today’s children, and Toei and Bandai know this. This is also the reason that the franchise started going through a bit of a “split” starting in around 2012 (after Xros Wars finished airing), when the video game branch started making more active attempts to appeal to the adults’ fanbase with Re:Digitize and Adventure PSP. (Although they were technically still “kids’ games”, they were very obviously aimed at the adults’ audience as a primary “target”.) The generation that grew up with Adventure and other classic Digimon anime was getting older and older, and targeting that audience would require tailoring products more specifically to them -- ultimately culminating in 2015 and the solidification of “very obviously primarily for adults” media in the form of both games (Cyber Sleuth and Next Order) and anime (tri.). Note that Appmon ended up getting its own 3DS game, but since it was targeted at kids, it seems to have been developed by a completely different pipeline/branch from the aforementioned adults’ games, so even that had a split.

So if we want to talk about full-on nostalgia pandering, that’s already being done in the adults’ branch. In fact, Appmon development specifically said that they felt free to not really care about the adults’ audience because that was tri.’s job. Of course, the hardcore Digimon adults’ fanbase is still keeping an eye on the kids’ shows, and it’s good to not upset them -- and, besides, even if we’re all suffering under the hell of capitalism, people who work in kids’ shows still tend to be very passionate about the content and messages they’re showing the kids, so they still put an effort into making good content that adults can enjoy too. But, nevertheless, adults are still the “periphery demographic”, and a kids’ show is not a success if the kids (who have not seen and do not care about Adventure) are not watching it or buying the toys. Appmon ended up being extremely well-received by the adults’ fanbase, but that all meant nothing since the kids didn’t get into it.

Most kids are not super incredibly discerning about so-called writing quality (it’s not like they don’t at least unconsciously know when something is good, but they’re much less likely to be bothered by little things adults are often bothered by), so there’s a certain degree you have to get their attention if you want things to catch on with them. Critical reception does matter a lot more when we talk about the adults’ audience, but for the kids, the more important part is how much you’ve managed to engage them and how much fun they’re having (especially in regards to the toyline). Moreover, there’s the problem of “momentum”; Digimon’s sister shows of PreCure, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai have sometimes had really poorly performing shows (critically or financially), but have managed to recover it in successive years to avoid getting cancelled. Digimon never managed to get to that point, with sales nearly dropping to half with Tamers and again with Frontier. So in essence, Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon were all attempts at figuring out what was needed to just get that “kickstart” again -- but things just never lined up for it to work.

So if kids don’t really care about Adventure, why would they do Adventure nostalgia pandering? The answer is one that official has actually openly stated multiple times: they want to have parents watch it together with their children. Both Seki and Kinoshita said this in regards to watching the reaction to Kizuna, and it was also stated outright as a goal for the reboot, but, believe it or not, there’s reports of this having been stated back as early as Savers (followed by an admission that maybe 2006 was a little too early for people who grew up with Adventure to be old enough to have their own kids). So the little nostalgia references in Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon aren't really meant to magically turn the series into Adventure as much as they’re supposed to be flags waved at the parents to get them to pay attention, so that they can introduce their kids to Digimon and watch it together with them, until the kids eventually take an interest on their own and they don’t need to rely on that kind of standby as much. (I say “as much” because of course PreCure, Rider, and Sentai all are still very indulgent in their anniversary references, but they’re not nearly as reliant on it to the point of life-and-death.)

This is also why Kizuna’s existence and release date two months prior to the reboot is a huge factor in this. The reason tri. wouldn’t have done it is that it never actually reached a properly “mainstream” audience. It’s a huge reason I keep emphasizing the fact that tri. and Kizuna are two separate things with completely different production and release formats, because tri. being a limited OVA screening released in six parts over three years means that, although it was a moderate financial success that did better than the franchise’s other niche products, in the end, it didn’t actually reach the “extremely casual” audience very well. We, as the “hardcore Internet fanbase”, all know people who watched all six parts, and the difference between tri. and Kizuna’s release formats doesn’t hit us as hard because of international distribution circumstances, but even on our end, if you talk to your casual friends who barely remember anything about Digimon except what they saw on TV twenty years ago, you will almost never find anyone who got past Part 1, maybe 2 at most. (That’s before we even get into the part where a good chunk of them got turned off at the character design stage for being too different.) Sticking with a full six-part series over three years is a commitment, and if you’re not someone with a certain level of loyalty to the franchise, you aren’t as likely to put aside the time for it!

Kizuna, on the other hand, was a full-on theatrical movie with full marketing campaign that was aimed at that extremely casual mainstream audience, including a lot of people who hadn’t even heard of tri. (due to it being too niche) or hadn’t bothered to commit to watching something so long, and thus managed to “hype up” a lot of adults and get them in a Digimon mood. (Critical reception issues aside, this is also presumably a huge reason Kizuna isn’t all that reliant on tri.’s plot; Adventure and 02 both averaged at around 11% of the country watching it when it first aired, but the number of people who even saw tri. much less know what happened in it is significantly lower, so while you can appeal to a lot of people if you’re just targeting the 11%, you'll lock them out if you’re overly reliant on stuff a lot of them will have never seen in the first place.) We’re talking the kind of super-casual who sees a poster for Kizuna, goes “oh I remember Digimon!”, casually buys a ticket for the movie, likes it because it has characters they remember and the story is feelsy, and then two months later an anime that looks like the Digimon they recognize is on Fuji TV, resulting in them convincing their kid to watch it together with them because they’re in a Digimon mood now, even though the actual contents of the anime are substantially different from the original.

So, looking back at the reboot:

There’s a huge, huge, huge implication that the choice to use Adventure branding was at least partially to get Fuji TV to let them have their old timeslot back. Neither Xros Wars nor Appmon were able to be on that old timeslot, presumably because Fuji TV had serious doubts about their profitability (perhaps after seeing Savers not do very well). This isn’t something that hits as hard for us outside Japan who don’t have to feel the impact of this anyway, but it’s kind of a problem if kids don’t even get the opportunity to watch the show in the first place. While there’s been a general trend of moving to video-on-demand to the point TV ratings don’t really have as much impact as they used to, I mean...it sure beats 6:30 in the morning, goodness. (Note that a big reason PreCure, Rider, and Sentai are able to enjoy the comfortable positions they’re in is that they have a very luxurious 8:30-10 AM Sunday block on TV Asahi dedicated to them.)

Since we’re talking about “the casual mainstream”, this means that this kind of ploy only works with something where a casual person passing by can see names and faces and take an interest. This is why it has to be Adventure, not 02 or Tamers or whatnot; 02 may have had roughly similar TV ratings to Adventure and fairly close sales figures back in 2000, but the actual pop culture notability disparity in this day and age is humongous (think about the difference in pop culture awareness between Butter-Fly and Target). 02, Tamers, and all can do enough to carry “adults’ fandom” products and merch sales at DigiFes, and the adults’ branch of the franchise in general, but appealing to the average adult buying toys for the kids is a huge difference, and a big reason that, even if they’re clearly starting to acknowledge more of the non-Adventure series these days, it’s still hard to believe they’re going to go as far as rebooting anything past Adventure -- or, more accurately, hard to believe they’ll be able to get the same impact using names and faces alone.

This advertising with the Adventure brand goes beyond just the anime -- we’re talking about the toyline that has the involved character faces plastered on them, plus all of the ventures surrounding them that Bandai pretty obviously carefully timed to coincide with this. One particularly big factor is the card game, which is doing really, really well right now, to the point it’s even started gaining an audience among people who weren’t originally Digimon fans. Part of it is because the game’s design is actually very good and newcomer-friendly, but also...nearly every set since the beginning came with reboot-themed Tamer Cards, which means that, yes, those cards with the Adventure names and faces were helping lure people into taking an interest in the game. Right now, the game is doing so well and has gained such a good reputation that it probably doesn’t need that crutch anymore to keep going as long as the game remains well-maintained, but I have no doubt the initial “Adventure” branding was what helped it take off, and its success is most likely a huge pillar sustaining the franchise at the current moment.

Speaking of merch and toys, if you look closely, you might notice that Bandai decided to go much, much more aggressively into the toy market with this venture than they ever did with Savers, Xros Wars, or Appmon (Appmon was probably the most aggressive attempt out of said three). They put out a lot more merch and did a lot more collaborative events to engage the parents and children, and, presumably, the reason they were able to do this was because they were able to push into those outlets with the confidence the Adventure brand would let them be accepted (much like with Fuji TV). Like with the card game, the important part was getting their “foot in the door” so that even if it stopped being Adventure after a fashion, they’d still have all of those merchandising outlets -- after all, one of the first hints we ever got of Ghost Game’s existence was a July product listing for its products replacing the reboot’s in a gachapon set, so we actually have evidence of certain product pipelines being opened by the reboot’s precedent. (The word 後番組 literally means “the TV program that comes after”, so it’s pretty obvious this was intended for Ghost Game; in other words, the reboot’s existence helped ensure there be a “reservation” for this kind of product to be made.)

I think one important thing to keep in mind is that Toei and Bandai have as much of a stake in avoiding rehashing for their kids’ franchises as we do. Even if you look at this from a purely capitalistic perspective, because of how fast the “turnover” is for the kids’ audience, sustaining a franchise for a long time off rehashing the same thing over and over is hard, and even moreso when it involves a twenty-year-old anime that said kids don’t even know or remember. Ask around about popular long-running Japanese kids’ franchises and you’ll notice they practically rely on being able to comfortably change things up every so often, like PreCure/Rider/Sentai shuffling every year, or Yu-Gi-Oh! having a rotation of different series and concepts, or the struggles that franchises that don’t do this have to deal with. And, after all, for all people are cynical about Toei continuing to milk Adventure or any of the other older series at every opportunity, as far as the kids’ branch of the franchise goes, this is only capable of lasting to a certain extent; if they tried keeping this up too long, even the adults and kids would get bored, and there is some point it’ll be easier to try and make products directly targeted at the kids’ audience instead of having to rely on the parents to ease them into it.

So it’s completely understandable that the moment they secured a proper audience with the reboot and finished up their first series with this, they decided to take the risk with Ghost Game right after. And considering all that’s happened, this is still a risk -- they’re changing up a lot (even if not as much as Appmon), and there’s a chance that the audience they’ve gathered is going to shoot down again because they’ve changed so much and they no longer have the Adventure branding as a “crutch” to use -- but they’re taking it anyway instead of going for something at least slightly more conventional.

Which means that, yes, there’s a possibility this will all explode in their face, because the Adventure branding is that huge of a card they’re about to lose. But at the very, very least, Ghost Game is coming in with the “momentum” and advantage that Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon all didn’t have: a brand currently in the stage of recovery, all of the merchandising and collaborative pipelines the reboot and Kizuna opened up, a fairly good timeslot, and a premise somewhat more conventional than Xros Wars and Appmon (I’m saying this as someone who likes both: their marketing definitely did not do them many favors). There are still a lot of risks it’s playing here, and it’s possible it won’t be the end of more Adventure or reboot brand usage to try to keep that momentum up even as we go into Ghost Game, but it’s the first time in a long while we’ve had something to stand on.

Okay, so that’s out of the way. But the end result is that we now have 67 episodes of an Adventure “reboot” that actually doesn’t even resemble Adventure that much at all, which seems to have achieved its goal of flagging down attention so it can finally going back to trying new things. This series exists, we can’t do anything about the fact it exists, the period where its own financial performance actually mattered is coming to an end anyway, and we, as a fanbase of adults hanging out on the Internet keeping up with the franchise as a whole, have to figure out how each of us feels about this. So what of it?

About the contents of the reboot itself

One thing I feel hasn’t been brought up as a potential topic very much (or, at least, not as much as I feel like it probably should be) is that the reboot seems to be actively aimed at a younger target audience than the original Adventure. It hasn’t been stated outright, but we actually have quite a bit of evidence pointing towards this.

Let’s take a moment and discuss what it even means to have a different target audience. When you’re a kid, even one or two years’ difference is a big deal, and while things vary from kid to kid, generally speaking, it helps to have an idea of what your “overall goal” is when targeting a certain age group, since at some point you have to approximate the interests of some thousands of children. Traditionally, Digimon has been aimed at preteens (10-11 year olds); of course, many will testify to having seen the series at a younger age than that, but the "main” intended target demographic was in this arena. (Also, keep in mind that this is an average; a show aimed at 10-11 year olds could be said to be more broadly aimed at 7-13 year olds, whereas one aimed at 7-8 year olds would be more broadly aimed at something like 5-10 year olds.) Let’s talk a bit about what distinguishes children’s shows (especially Japanese kids’ shows) between this “preteen demographic” and things aimed at a much younger audience (which I’ll call “young child demographic”, something like the 7-8 year old arena):

With children who are sufficiently young, it’s much, much more difficult to ensure that a child of that age will be able to consistently watch TV at the same hour every week instead of being subject to more variable schedules, often set by their parents, meaning that it becomes much more difficult to have a series that relies on you having seen almost every episode to know what’s going on. For somewhat older kids, they’re more likely to be able to pick and pursue their own preferences (the usual “got up early every week for this show”). This means that shows targeted at a young child demographic will be more likely to be episodic, or at least not have a complex dramatic narrative that requires following the full story, whereas shows targeted at a preteen audience are more willing to have a dramatic narrative with higher complexity. This does not mean by any shake of the imagination that a narrative is incapable of having any kind of depth or nuance -- the reboot’s timeslot predecessor GeGeGe no Kitaro got glowing reviews all over the board for being an episodic story with tons of depth -- nor that characters can’t slowly develop over the course of the show. But it does raise the bar significantly, especially because it prevents you from making episodes that require you to know what happened in previous ones.

The thing is, the original Adventure and the older Digimon series in general didn’t have to worry about this, and, beyond the fact that their narratives very obviously were not episodic, we actually have concrete evidence of the disparity: Digimon has often been said to be a franchise for “the kids who graduated from (outgrew) a certain other monster series”. Obviously, they’re referring to Pokémon -- which does have the much younger target demographic. That’s why its anime is significantly more episodic and less overall plot-oriented, and Digimon wasn’t entirely meant to be a direct competitor to it; rather, it was hoping to pick up the preteens who’d enjoyed Pokémon at a younger age but were now looking for something more catered to them. This is also why, when Yo-kai Watch came into the game in 2014, that was considered such a huge direct competitor to Pokémon, because it was aiming for that exact same demographic, complete with episodic anime. When Yo-kai Watch moved to its Shadowside branch in 2017, it was specifically because they had concerns about losing audience and wanted to appeal to the kids who had been watching the original series, but since they were preteens now, they adopted a more dramatic and emotionally complex narrative that would appeal to that audience instead. So you can actually see the shift in attempted target demographic in real time.

Adventure through Frontier were aimed at 10-11 year olds, and here’s the interesting part: those series had the protagonists hover around the age of said target audience. We actually have it on record that Frontier had a direct attempt to keep most of the kids as fifth-graders for the sake of appealing to the audience, and so that it would be relatable to them. You can also see this policy of “matching the target audience’s age” in other series at the time; Digimon’s sister series Ojamajo Doremi (also produced by Seki) centered around eight-year-olds. Nor was Seki the only one to do this; stepping outside Toei for a bit, Medabots/Medarot had its protagonist Ikki be ten years old, much like Digimon protagonists, and the narrative was similarly dramatic. The thing is, that’s not how it usually works, and that’s especially not really been how it’s worked for the majority of kids’ series since the mid-2000s. In general, and especially now, it’s usually common to have the protagonists of children’s media be slightly older than the target age group. This has a lot of reasons behind it -- partially because kids are looking to have slightly older characters as a model for what to follow in their immediate future, and partially because “the things you want to teach the kids” are often more realistically reflected if the kids on screen have the right level of independence and capacity for emotional contemplation. Case in point: while everyone agrees the Adventure through Frontier characters are quite relatable, it’s a common criticism that the level of emotional insight sometimes pushes the boundary of what’s actually believable for 10-11 year olds...

...which is presumably why, with the exception of this reboot, every Digimon TV series since, as of this writing, started shifting to middle school students. That doesn’t mean they’re aiming the series at middle school kids now, especially because real-life 13-15 year olds are usually at the stage where they pretend they’ve outgrown kids’ shows (after all, that’s why there’s a whole term for “middle school second year syndrome”), but more that the narrative that they want to tell is best reflected by kids of that age, especially when we’re talking characters meant to represent children from the real world and not near-immortal youkai like Kitaro. In fact, the Appmon staff outright said that Haru was placed in middle school because the story needed that level of independence and emotional sensitivity, which is interesting to consider in light of the fact that Appmon’s emotional drama is basically on par with that of Adventure through Frontier’s. So in other words, the kind of high-level drama endemic to Adventure through Frontier is would actually normally be more on par with what you’d expect for kids of Haru’s age.

But at this point, the franchise is at a point of desperation, and you can see that, as I said earlier, Appmon was blatantly trying to be one of those “have its cake and eat it too” series by having possibly one of the franchise’s most dramatic storylines while also having some of the most unsubtle catchphrases and bright colors it has to offer. Moreover, one thing you might notice if you look closely at Appmon: most of its episodes are self-contained. Only a very small handful of episodes are actively dependent on understanding what happened in prior episodes to understand the conflict going on in the current one -- it’s just very cleverly structured in a way you don’t really notice this as easily. So as you can see, the more desperate the franchise has gotten to get its kids’ audience back, the more it has to be able to grab the younger demographic and not lock them out as much as possible -- which means that it has to do things that the original series didn’t have to worry about at all.

Having seen the reboot myself, I can say that it checks off a lot of what you might expect if you tried to repurpose something based on Adventure (and only vaguely based on it, really) into a more episodic story that doesn’t require you to follow the whole thing, and that it has to break down its story into easy-to-follow bits. In fact, there were times where I actually felt like it gave me the vibes of an educational show that would usually be expected for this demographic, such as repeated use of slogans or fun catchphrases for young kids to join in on. That alone means that even if the “base premise” is similar to the original Adventure, this already necessitates a lot of things that have to be very different, because Adventure really cannot be called episodic no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, even though the target audience consideration has yet to be outright stated, we also have interviews on hand that made it very clear, from the very beginning, what their goals with the reboot were: they wanted the kids to be able to enjoy a story of otherworldly exploration during the pandemic, they wanted cool action sequences, and they wanted to get the adults curious about what might be different from the original. Note that last part: they actively wanted this series to be different from the original, because the differences would engage parents in spotting the differences, and the third episode practically even goes out of its way to lay that message down by taking the kids to a familiar summer camp, only to have it pass without incident and go “ha, you thought, but nope!” Moreover -- this is the key part -- “surprising” people who were coming from the original series was a deliberate goal they had from the very beginning. They’ve stated this outright -- they knew older fans were watching this! They were not remotely shy about stating that they wanted to surprise returning viewers with unexpected things! They even implied that they wanted it to be a fun experience for older watchers to see what was different and what wasn’t -- basically, it’s a new show for their kids who never saw the original Adventure, while the parents are entertained by a very different take on something that seems ostensibly familiar.

On top of that, the head writer directly cited V-Tamer as an influence -- and if you know anything about V-Tamer, it’s really not that much of a character narrative compared to what we usually know of Digimon anime, and is mostly known for its battle tactics and action sequences (but in manga form). In other words, we have a Digimon anime series that, from day one, was deliberately made to have a writing philosophy and goal that was absolutely not intended to be like Adventure -- or any Digimon TV anime up to this point -- in any way. And that’s a huge shock for us as veterans, who have developed our tastes and expectations based on up to seven series of Digimon that were absolutely not like this at all. But for all it's worth, the circumstances surrounding its production and intent don't seem to quite line up with what the most common accusations against it are:

That it’s a rehash of Adventure: It really isn’t. It’s also blatantly apparent it has no intention of being so. The points that are in common: the character names and rough character designs, some very minimal profile details for said characters, Devimon having any particular foil position to Angemon, the use of Crests to represent personal growth, the premise of being in the Digital World and...that’s it! Once those points are aside, it’s really hard to say that the series resembles Adventure any more than Frontier or Xros Wars resembles Adventure (which are also “trapped in another world” narratives) -- actually, there are times the series resembles those two more than the original Adventure, which many have been quick to point out. The majority of things you can make any kind of comparison to basically drop off by the end of the first quarter or so, and trying to force a correlation is basically just that: you’d have to try forcing the comparison. The plot, writing style, and even the lineup of enemies shown just go in a completely different direction after that. So in the end, the base similarities can be said to be a marketing thing; if I want to criticize this series, I don’t think “lack of creativity” would actually be something I would criticize it for. (Of course, you’re still welcome to not be a huge fan of how they’re still guilty of using Adventure’s name value to market something that is not actually Adventure. We’re all gonna have mixed feelings on that one.)

That they don’t understand or remember Adventure’s appeal: Unlikely. All of the main staff has worked on character-based narratives before, which have been very well-praised while we’re at it. The producer, Sakurada Hiroyuki, was an assistant producer on the original series, and I would like to believe he probably remembers at least a thing or two about what they were doing with the original series...but, also, he’s the producer of Xros Wars, which definitely had its own individuality and style, and, moreover, was more of a character narrative that people generally tend to expect from Digimon anime. (Still a bit unconventional, and it has its own questions of personal taste, but a lot of people have also pointed out that this reboot has a lot in common with Xros Wars in terms of its writing tone and its emphasis on developing Digital World resident Digimon moreso than the human characters.) All signs point to the idea they could make a character narrative like Adventure if they really wanted to. It’s just, they don’t want to do that with this reboot, so they didn’t.

That they misinterpreted or misremembered the Adventure characters: There’s been accusations of said characters being written in a way that implies misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the original characters, but the thing is, while I definitely agree they have nowhere near the depth of the original ones, there are points that seem to be deliberate changes. (At some points, they’re actually opposites of the original, and certain things that operate as some very obscure references -- for instance, Sora complaining about having to sit in seiza -- seem to also be deliberate statements of going in a different direction.) The lack of human character depth or backstory doesn’t seem to be out of negligence, but rather that this story doesn’t want to be a character narrative to begin with -- after all, we’re used to seven series of Digimon that are, but there are many, many kids’ anime, or even stories in general, where the story is more about plot or action than it is completely unpacking all of its characters’ heads. In this case, this reboot does seem to have characters that are taking cues from or are “inspired by” the original, but, after all, it’s an alternate universe and has no obligation to adhere to the original characters’ backgrounds, so it stands to reason that it’d take liberties whenever it wanted. (Again, the head writer outright stated that he based the reboot’s Taichi more on V-Tamer Taichi than the original Adventure anime Taichi. He knows there’s a difference!) Even more intriguingly, the series actually avoids certain things that are common misconceptions or pigeonholes that would normally be done by the mainstream -- for instance, the Crest of Light (infamously one of the more abstract ones in the narrative) is fully consistent with Adventure’s definition of it as “the power of life”, and, if I dare say so myself, Koushirou’s characterization (emphasizing his relationship with “knowledge” and his natural shyness) arguably resembles the original far more than most common fan reductions of his character that overemphasize his computer skills over his personal aptitude. In other words, I think the staff does know what happened in the original Adventure -- they just actively don’t want to do what Adventure did, even if it’s ostensibly a reboot.

That it’s soulless or that there’s no passion in its creation: Well, this is subjective, and in the end I’m not a member of the staff to tell you anything for sure, but there are definitely a lot of things in this anime that don’t seem like they’d be the byproduct of uninspired creation or lack of passion. It’s just that those things are all not the kinds of things that we, as Digimon veterans, have come to develop a taste for and appreciate in Digimon anime. That is to say, there is an incredible amount of thought and detail put into representing Digimon null canon (i.e. representing special attacks and mechanics), the action sequences are shockingly well-animated in ways that put most prior Digimon anime to shame, and the series has practically been making an obvious attempt to show off as many Digimon (creatures) that haven’t traditionally gotten good franchise representation as they can. Or sometimes really obscure “meta fanservice” references that only make sense to the really, really, really, really hardcore longtime Digimon fan (for instance, having an episode centered around Takeru and Opossummon, because Takeru’s voice actress Han Megumi voiced Airu in Xros Wars). If you follow any of the animators on Twitter, they seem to be really actively proud of their work on it, and franchise creators Volcano Ota and Watanabe Kenji seem to be enjoying themselves every week...so basically, we definitely have creators passionate about having fun with this, it’s just that all of it is being channeled here, not the character writing.

So in the end, you can basically see that this series is basically the epitome of desperately pulling out all of the stops to make sure this series lands with the actual target demographic of children, dammit, and gets them into appreciating how cool these fighting monsters are and how cool it would be if they stuck with them even into a series that’s not Adventure. The Adventure branding and names to lure in the parents, the straightforward and easy-to-understand action-oriented narrative so that kids will think everything is awesome and that they’ll like it even when the story changes, and the merchandise and collab events booked everywhere so that they can all be reused for the next series too...because, remember, they failed with that during Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon (I mean, goodness, you kind of have to admire their persistence, because a ton of other kids’ franchises failing this many times would have given up by now), so it’s a bit unsurprising that they went all the way to get the kids’ attention at the expense of a lot of things that would attract veterans, especially since the veterans already have a well-developed adults’ pipeline to cater to them. This does also mean that this series is more likely to come off as a 67-episode toy commercial than any previous Digimon series, but it’s not even really the toys as much as they’re trying to sell the entire franchise and the actual monsters in the hopes that they’ll stick with it even when the narrative changes.

Nevertheless, here we are. The series is over. Ghost Game -- which, as of this writing, is looking to be much more of a conventional Digimon narrative, complete with older cast, obviously more dramatic atmosphere, and pretty much everything surrounding its PR -- is on its way, presumably thanks to the success of this endeavor. It’s hard to gauge it; we have it on record that they also intend it to be episodic, but remember that this doesn’t necessarily prevent it from having an overall dramatic plot or nuanced drama (especially since the abovementioned Appmon and Kitaro were perfectly capable of pulling off this balance). Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more of the conventional kind of Digimon narrative we usually expect, so, as for us, adult long-time fans of the Digimon franchise (many of whom don’t have kids anyway), what exactly should we make of this? Well, as far as “supporting the franchise” goes, you’ll get much more progress supporting Ghost Game than the reboot; I highly doubt view counts and merch sales relative to an already-finished series will do nearly as much for the franchise’s health as much as the currently airing series, and, besides, it’d probably do us all a favor to support the endeavor that’s actually new and fresh. So when it comes to a “past” series like this, it’s all just going to come down to a question of personal preference and taste: is this a series you, personally, want to watch, and would you find it entertaining?

For some of you, it’s possible that it just won’t be your cup of tea at all -- and since, like I said, the majority of us here have based our expectations and preferences on up to seven series of Digimon that were not like this, that’s also perfectly fine, and in that case I don’t actually recommend you watch this. Of course, I’ve never thought that it was ever fair to expect a Digimon fan to have seen all of the series released to date; the more series we get, the more inhumane of a demand that’ll become, and I think this franchise becoming successful enough to have so many series that most people won’t have seen it all is a good thing. (It’s actually kind of alarming that the percentage of people who have seen it all is so high, because it means the franchise has failed to get much of an audience beyond comparatively hardcore people who committed to it all the way.) But I think, especially in this case, with a series for which adult fans like us were probably lowest on the priority list due to the sheer amount of desperation going on here, it’s fine to skip it, and if you’re someone who lives by a need for character depth or emotionally riveting narrative, the fact this series is (very unabashedly and unashamedly) mostly comprised of episodic stories and action sequences means you won’t have missed much and probably won’t feel too left out of any conversations going forward. That’s before we even get into the part where it’s still completely understandable to potentially have mixed feelings or resentment about the overuse of the Adventure brand for something like this, especially if Adventure is a particularly important series to you.

But for some of you out there, it might still be something you can enjoy on its own merits. I’ve seen people who were disappointed by the limited degree of Digimon action sequences in the past or the fact that the series has gotten overly fixated on humans, and had an absolute ball with the reboot because it finally got to represent parts of the franchise they felt hadn’t been shown off as well. “Fun” is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy something. It’s also perfectly possible to be someone who can enjoy character narratives like the prior Digimon series but also enjoy something that’s more for being outlandish and fun and has cool Digital World concepts and visuals -- and, like I said, it does not let up on that latter aspect at all, so there’s actually potential for a huge feast in that regard. I think as long as you don’t expect it to be a character narrative like Adventure -- which will only set you up for disappointment, because it’s not (and made very clear since even the earliest episodes and interviews that it had no intention of being one) -- it’s very possible to enjoy it for what it is, and for what it does uniquely.

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