#look theyre in my head so much that consuming media is difficult

[feisaru]

Do you have any other IE ships besides FeiSaru? And do you have any sexuality/Neurodivergence Headcanons for anyone in IE?

I do. But tbf, tbf I've drifted away from the other ships ever since I played CS and these two entered my life. You could say they're the only ones I have really hard feelings on. Other than that, I pretty much just vibe with what the people I follow throw on my dash (there are a few ships that trigger me, but luckily nobody here has subjected me to them yet and I've filtered their tags)

Nevertheless, here's some other stuff I enjoy:

Enhiro!!! My babies. I love them. A lot. I wrote crap analysis on them at 3 am after I watched S3. I've heard the Japanese side of the fandom does them pretty dirty though. Glad I didn't have to witness any of that yet lmao

Arugan (Alpha and Gamma from CS) (@amalg4me's fault. These two are so friggin cute)

Rococo and Fideo

Garsha and Vanfeny (recently decided to call them Garvan)

Meia and Giris

Hakushuu

Kyouten

Somefubu

Midori and Nishiki

Anything within the Break Trio (yes, as polycule also)

Very fine with Kdfd and Kisaku

Haruna and Kogure

Tourika

Ennatsu

Most of the typical Galaxy pairings, I think? Like Minamana, Mataten, Munetaku, Konoha and Kusaka... I kinda forgot what I shipped there because in the end I found Ozrock as an antagonist really enthralling and thus focused on him mostly. Gotta touch up on that someday.

(There's also a special ship my friend made up that I'm not listing here...) (and Aoi is a firm sapphic imo, make of that what you will)

It all comes down to I don't seek out ships, if they come to me they do, if they don't, they don't. There are various things I like seeing people get worked up over but can't say I actively ship (e.g. Takuran, Ranmasa, Nosaichi (bc I have not seen Areori)). Suma sumarum you could say I'm pretty chill over almost everything mainly bc I'm so insane over Fei and Saru that there's no room for much of anything else *fingerguns*

Now to the sexuality hcs: I have a lot of those. If you want my thoughts on any specifically, u can send 'em my way bc I wouldn't even know where to start. They come flying to me like the word of God to an ancient monarch.

And neurodivergence! Honestly, there are quite some characters in the entirety of IE that exhibit signs of being nd. Lots of them hyperfixate on soccer, use it as a coping mechanism, or both. But once again, my brain doesn't mull over the entirety of this franchise. So, (who would have thougt?) I definitely have pretty firm thoughts concerning Saru's mental problems (Fei's too but Saru's are overall easier to figure out for me)

(Bonus little thing which I think is a pretty popular fan interpretation: Endou has ADHD and Kidou's definitely autistic)

[aprito]

hello <3 since i got these asks at the same time i decided to combine my thoughts on them in this post. yet another annoying sjw essay from yours truly on this blog 

before i get into these i think i need to preface why im like. i guess overly hyperfocused on a certain unproblematic base (same age au / platonic canon) for them and avoid the ped0philic content like the plague lol

tw for pedophilia ment, rape ment if that makes you squicky. ALSO THIS IS LONG AND RAMBLY

as i’ve mentioned a couple times already, ive been into the ship since i was 12, back when it was very very common to not only post untagged (nsfw) canonverse content of the two in writing and in drawing but also non con and the like, so you can imagine how bad my first impression online was. thinking back on it ...as a child i found it disturbing but didnt really register how problematic it really was?? (i know, but i also lived in the middle of nowhere and had no one explain this to me) 

skip to 2014 aka me coming back to naruto at 17ish and i had kinda become hyper aware of the fact that there was an increasing amount of people online who had come forward with explaining how fictional problematic content, mostly pedophilia, had been used to groom them into starting relationships with adullts. it was also a time where a lot of people didnt believe these victims, not registering how common it was for minors to be online friends with adults who had no boundaries and no qualms exposing them such content. not gonna get into my personal life here but i was lucky to not having gone through this myself. like... it kinda was my first time truly realising how fiction can EASILY be used to manipulate others irl (and yes i will not argue this, if you dont think fictional media can form and manipulate people’s opinions on attitudes, countries, cultures and virtues, pick up a book about the effects of propaganda media at least once please) 

i, being young, still liking the dynamic but not really the romance, would point this out here and there in the fandom and get into fights with grown adults in their mid 20s who assumed i automatically hated the ship(s) and tried to restrict their freedom of speech or whatever, heard everything from the “age of consent doesnt exist in naruto” to the “sasori looks like a child what does it matter” despite people clearly playing on him being older and experienced. it made me so upset that people were just consuming all this content uncritically and exposing children to it tbh?? not really just sos but a lot of minor/adult ships in naruto in general. and thats where i sat down and thought, i do not want to be a grown adult talking down to children that point out how unsafe the fandom is. theyre absolutely right in drawing these boundaries and calling out adults who defend the uncritical consumption and creation of this content. i do not want to consume or create content that predators could use to groom minors, and i absolutely do want to let younger people in fandom know that i am respecting their comfort zones and want them to have a safe and fun experience. after all, naruto is not an adult show and i think a lot of people forget that!!!! i am not perfect in that regard but its something that i, at the age of 23, am very passionate about and strive towards to.

and i guess thats where same age au was born for me and i have been sticking to it ever since. 

so finally we can move to the first question 

aside from the fact that we both dont like canon sos, i dont think it would work out even if i wasnt prejudiced to it anyways. in all honesty, 35 year old canon sasori is not a redeemable character to me, given the fact that he’s easily amongst the cruelest villains in naruto (torturing and killing and taxiderming people for his own fun personal gain, never for a goal that served anyone but himself. how do you redeem having over 300 corpses in your backpack that you felt absolutely no remorse for killing). sasori was legit one of the only cruel villains that didnt had someone else pull the strings, which sends a clear message on kishi’s part, who absolutely loves to redeem villains LOL.

being that old, he obviously had already been very manifested in what he believed in, even if it was shakey, to the point where the first crack in that world view (sakura and chiyo protecting each other) immediately had him give up on his life all together. that, in my opinion, is not a man who’s going to know what healthy relationships would look like, regardless of it being romantic or not. 35 year old sasori to me has the same appeal as an expired can of tuna and he’s probably very happy 6 feet under. he’s supposed to be a failed gaara in that sense that he had no one to look out for him and therefore was never going to experience anything but a bad ending in life. its fine that hes dead honestly, it wraps up his short character development the best IMO.

adding to that, seriously, sakura was obviously interested in knowing why he was that way, and called him out for being seriously fucked in the head, but it’s weird to me that people assume she had any interest in actively rehabilitating him, let alone starting a serious romantic relationship with him. sakura who’s not only very, uhm, immature and straight forward when it comes to her romantic viewpoints also, as a big bootlicker, wouldnt soil her standing in the village by starting anything with a disgraced and far too gone criminal like sasori. shipping that version of sasori with sakura intimately is still going to set her up for a huge power imbalance that would be difficult to handle imo, even if she was the one in the fight ultimately exerting her power over him. i would still look at it and think damn she deserves better than having to play therapist for man like that lol.

additionally, even if you ignored all of this, you cant really ignore that sasori had already known her as a child, and that had been his first and most impactful impression of her. i dont think that sasori would look at 35 year old sakura and see her as a grown woman and not the little green girl she was in the fight. plus, you easily fall into predatory comparison territory between the “childish” and “womanly” and i have seen way too often in fic just being boiled down to her now being fuckable. a lot of of ships do this and i would just like to remind yall thats it not normal for adults to want to start relationships with children they have seen grown up or known as a child when they themselves were fully grown adults. therefore, maybe if sakura hadnt met sasori before it would be less of a problem? but that also obviously defeats the point of the dynamic and the reason he died in the first place. so yeah, it sounds kind of doomed especially if you were to make it romantic. 

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE SECOND QUESTION

let me preface this that im not fundamentally against age gaps, even if im not super interested in it. after all, colorblind had a 5 yr age gap (with sakura being 21), even if, say, i wrote similar fics today i probably would make it smaller lol. i think it can be handled well if both parties have enough life experience to deal with it, and the author is cautious of where the age gap starts, i think a 10+ year age gap would be fine in a scenario where the younger party (i guess sakura) was at least 25-27ish, meaning she has completed most of her most formative life stages and probably had been in relationships before, meaning she would be able to handle it without having to fear a huge power imbalance. the older the younger party is the less the age gap is going to matter tbh .TsukiHoshino and AngelOfDeath10 both handle age gaps in their fics really well imo, so i do not mind reading about them.

unfortunately, a lot of people in this fandom think making sakura barely "”””legal””””” (18, not even 20 which is hilarious to me because the source material is obviously japanese) because they both cannot stand her being past her “prime years” of being young fertile and fuckable to much older men as well as thinking a 20 year old is automatically old enough to handle that type of relationship. ive seen a lot of unironic takes that believe it will absolve them of callout posts if they throw around age of consent and “shes 18 now suckers!!!” enough lmfao. absolutely hilarious. aging a minor up without aging the adult down seriously reeks of predatory “cant wait until youre 18″ narratives and thats why i find it similarly disturbing as straight up pedo shipping.

ultimately, sasosaku is and will always be a inherently problematic ship in canon, which is why i think it should always be handled a little more responsibly in fandom spaces, ignoring or outright excusing the main problem factor, which is sasori, isnt going to convince anyone that the dynamic in itself is well written and interesting enough to explore in aus, like giving sasori the redemption most of us wanted him to have by aging him down to a point in time where he was still realistically going to allow being positively influenced, similar to gaara. 

so really, what i think is well handled age gap and how most people handle age gap in the naruto fandom are two different worlds at times lol 

tl;dr

canon shippers have never been anything but gross when i was younger and i didnt wanna be like that, even if youre “smart”enough to differenate, actual creeps dont really care and might use your content to blur the lines, sasori isnt rly redeemable so romantic canonverse realistically wouldnt make much sense and is still iffy, age gaps are fine if they are handled well, but given that the dynamic doesnt really need the age gap to still work im not that invested on making that an essential part of my shipping experience.  

thank you for reading and hope this makes sense!

[detectivehole]

besides all the glitches and bugs, are the games any fun? are the stories any good if they are non canon stories? are the voices and designs good?

this should be a basic question, but its actually weirdly not when considering frogwares games (i should state i havent played all of them ftr so take this all with a grain of salt)

first off, you really cant forget the bugs and glitches- they can make the games either so frustrating that it doesnt matter if the rest of it is good, or they can make them legitimately unplayable. however, there is apparently a patch (released YEARS late! but whatever!) on the way to make the older games fully compatible with modern pcs! so, lets pretend you can actually ignore the errors;

the stories are... good. just good, i think- maybe pretty good sometimes- and certainly entertaining, which is all they need to be for a video game. they range from original to highly canon-influenced, depending on the game. (ive been avoiding one of them for its story but thats just because ive got Opinions on part of it)

cosmetically, like character, set, and voice design, it really depends what youre playing. the older games have very generic character and set design, and the voice work is completely understandable, but charmingly bad; like its kinda shit, but in a tolerable and funny way, and after a while you just get used to it and hardly notice. newer games have va work that's just completely unremarkable, if not a little awkward- you really wont take note of it, likely, which isn't a bad thing. newer game’s set design is actually very nice, i think, all things considered. not super remarkable but not at all bad to look at- they can even be beautiful, from time to time. character design in crime and punishment was good actually- it felt like hd versions of the older games, and that was just fine- however, it seems that after that things have/are going down hill, eh? not sure what the hell is up with devils daughter and... “sherry” and “jon,” but... technically thats all superficial. theyre not bad to look at after all, just... well.

in terms of game design quality (mechanics, options. blah blah), i really cant describe it. i think from the most general view, usually its fine, if not plain good; game’s puzzles and mysteries are not too hard imo, but also not uninteresting or downright simple (well, some are, but “some” is not a crime). exploration is functional and mostly interesting, and for the most part you are given clear direction when playing, so time wasting is minimal. certain mechanics (which are not present in all games, but showed up slowly as the studio seemed to be figuring out what exactly they could do) like deductions can and conclusions can be a lot of fun. i think if youre looking for something stellar you should curb your enthusiasm, but if you just want simple fun some of these game will actually really suck you in- i played crime and punishment for... some hours straight. specifics not necessary, just know it held my attention.

other aspects are just lazy; many of the games lack many otherwise standard game and setting manipulation options, like any video manipulation for some, difficult settings, etc. all do let you manipulate volume, though, and captions are always on (you also have a dialogue log to reference), so at least there's that. additionally, for some puzzles, for some of the games, they dont offer any instructions of any kind- i assume this is to pad difficulty curves, and to an extent you could argue that “well, real life wouldn't have instructions,” but its not real life. its a game. they should have added at least a toggleable blurb. theres other issues with the game’s construction at times, but honestly i cant think of them off the top of my head with any coherence. i dont leave much weight to steam reviews, but i think if you want a better understanding of whats wrong with some of these games id read the reviews or the discussion pages. overall, the default settings and the construction of the game should be playable for most people and on most machines- they're not particularly demanding or visually/auditorily complex games, and the puzzles are not too hard to figure out, even without instructions. (WARNING: there IS a glitch in crime and punishment that can effect some people that makes lighting fuck up on many objects, and it may not be friendly to more photosensitive people, though it also doesn't seem like something that would be downright dangerous, and as someone without any photosensitive issues i was not bothered by it.)

lastly, some of the games are dated, or jokes are in poor taste, or they present something or some attitude historically accurate, and their content shows this. it is not common or consuming, and you should be able to move past it with just a bitter taste in your mouth and nothing more, but its worth it to mention. its nothing someone used to consuming retro or janky media would be unfamiliar with, but i certainly didn't enjoy it- i cant imagine anyone sane would.

i am full of complaints. i have written goddamn dissertations to my long suffering friends. BUT..... i have had a lot of fun, honestly. ive got the patience to deal with the glitches, and the disposition to reap simple fun out of broken and awkward content, simple puzzles, and the story lines presented to me, however silly they may or may not be. i would recommend it, personally.

[pagesofkenna]

nikevi replied to your post: anyway for some reason actors freak me out (it’s...

I think the default media age being teenager doesn’t help us w/our self perception. It always helps me to think back on (or look at ) things I said as I was a teen to remind myself of how much I’ve changed, and I’m sure you’ve changed a lot too. Also, fully same about being weirded out by actors, when I’m watching a show im invested in im always thinking about how what’s going on in the actors head is nothing like what would be going on in the characters head

yeah part of me is..... thinking if i should limit the amount of media i consume that features teenage characters...

i was talking to a friend a few months ago about how part of why i hate teenagers being acted by adults on tv and in movies is because then i rarely actually see teenagers, and now when i do i have a hard time remembering how much younger than me they are. i like your advice about looking back at my own teenage stuff - i still have a ton of notes from when i was a teenager so maybe i should read through those (i had an open journal all throughout highschool and maybe there was a Reason for that)

also THANK YOU the actor/character dissonance is the one thing that makes watching stage performances difficult you’re a person???? theres a person right there in front of me??? that person is NOT that character and they just kissed that other person??? theyre not actually in love and we just saw that actual dude in some actual underwear none of you are the characters you’re pretending to be??? with filmed stuff it’s usually slightly easier but then i always imagine just right after the cut, when the actors drop their characters and have to go about their day with the knowledge that they just had some intense fake sexual tension with their coworker

[wallkickswillwork]

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.