#most are from magazines

[theinternetisaweboflies]

Ghibli Museum | Mitaka, Tokyo

[muzaktomyears]

she gets it

[theknightlywolfe]

[show-us-kaidenshenandoah]

every time i watch anything with him in it (admittingly, predominantly from the Dropout app), i am reminded that Lou Wilson is the most handsome man to have ever lived. like, objectively. he just is. i will hear no arguments for any other person to be ranked higher. Lou Wilson: whose face single-handedly shows humanity can go no higher in beauty. he is THE most attractive man in the world. argue with the wall lmao

[gimmeshelter]

"who would have thought about joan of arc doing amateur film?"

ingrid bergman behind the scenes of joan of arc (1948)

[anotherpapercut]

my friends and I had a collage night where we all worked together to make masterpieces

[yridenergyridenergy]

Vicious August 1998

[hotwaterandmilk]

I'm seeing "Wedding Peach was unsuccessful" trotted out on Twitter again and it's honestly kind of funny to me. You can dislike the series, but you're rewriting history if you suggest it was a massive commercial flop/astronomical failure — it simply wasn't.

The Wedding Peach TV series maintained viewership throughout its run which is why it aired an entire year's worth of episodes (the full length it was intended to run) and didn't get cancelled like Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, for example.

I'm not going to pretend it did Sailor Moon numbers, dear god, it absolutely didn't get close hence why it wrapped as it did. I would suggest looking back now, that it was the definition of a mid-performing title for the time period. It sold toys decently but not outrageously, it got viewers but not an outstanding number, and it garnered a small but dedicated fanbase of male otaku. All of which is par for the course when it comes to a mid title in 1995.

Wedding Peach DX was produced because the TV series LD sales were decent enough to warrant it. Children were not buying LD box sets at this time, adult fans were and it was this interest that justified the creation of the four DX episodes as direct-to-video releases. If a series doesn't sell well they don't make more episodes, let alone higher quality deluxe episodes specifically for the home video market (and thus for older audiences with spending power).

It is very important to point out that Wedding Peach DX had NO INVOLVEMENT from the original creative team. Tomita Sukehiro and Yazawa Nao did not contribute to its creation, Tadano Kazuko didn't provide designs. Yuyama Kunihiko was the driving force behind the production of the DX episodes and he served as both director and writer for all four episodes (bringing on Wedding Peach animator and soon-to-be frequent Pokémon collaborator, Ichiishi Sayuri to serve as character designer).

What inspired these to be fanservice dreck to the level they ended up being is honestly beyond me. I mean the otaku market definitely wanted more episodes featuring the characters (and more songs featuring the seiyuu, if you want to see how keen otaku were for FURIL please see this post) but part of what they liked about the characters at the time was their (barfbarfbarf) perceived purity and innocence. The DX including panty shots and swimsuits kind of threw them for a loop. Even now, if you look at discussions about the DX among otaku there's a bit of a divide in opinion.

The DX episode sales were (as far as I can tell based on magazines from the time) also mid, but enough to cover four episodes. Three and four don't seem to have sold as well as one and two, but again the stats from the time aren't comprehensive. I think the fact that there weren't any after episode four says it all, honestly. OVA episodes are expensive to produce and it was extremely common for them to stop immediately if the sales weren't there. DX didn't justify its existence beyond those four episodes and Yuyama moved onto a far more successful project in Pokémon.

On that topic, I think it's important to note that Wedding Peach was OLM's first television series (albeit a coproduction with KSS). If it and the studio's adaptation of Mojacko hadn't made some level of profit it would have been quite difficult for them to adapt Pokémon. Neither Mojacko nor Wedding Peach set records with their viewership or sales numbers, but they both did "OK". It was in Pokémon however, that that OLM truly found a successful property with the series still running today. Sometimes you've got to have a few runs at producing things before you find success. Wedding Peach was one of these early runs, a project where a lot of people cut their teeth but one that didn't justify its own continuation beyond a certain point. Just a very standard media mix from the mid-90s, in other words.

Wedding Peach is a problematic title with indifference through to outright objection to representing love outside of heterosexual romance. Looking back now it feels like an absolute dinosaur on so many levels. Between the anime's fatphobic episode and Momoko dropping some gender essentialism, I'm not surprised people want to relegate it to the dustbin of history.

However, I think it is very telling that Tomita Sukehiro, when presented with the opportunity to tell a similar story in the modern day, chose to represent not just queer love, but platonic and familial love in Wedding Apple. While he can't undo the regressive and cringy elements of the original series, as a creator he has progressed and I'd like to think we can all continue to improve our outlooks and output as we grow.

Disliking Wedding Peach in the modern day is completely understandable. I'm not going to pretend anyone should watch it in 2024 without knowing that it is a camp, cheaply made relic of a time when heterosexuality was considered magic. However, just because it pandered to all the worst things trending at the time doesn't mean it didn't sell enough products or hold enough viewers to justify its production. It did, it just wasn't a strong enough property to go beyond that and that's representative of mediocrity rather than mind blowing commercial failure imho.

[kingkatsuki]

The thought of Bakugou listening to those terrible Cosmopolitan articles about dating to try and court you.

[demolitiondecay]

a small mcr zine that i made over the last few months :) one page for each album, everything is made from scraps of magazines i had lying around

[francesderwent]

I’ve been on a real Fearless kick lately and it always makes me feel some kinda way about Olivia Rodrigo’s body of work. and not even primarily about her and her talent and her songwriting, just about how different an experience it seems to be growing up as a young millennial woman versus growing up as a young gen z woman. take the total absence of any jealousy/self-image song on Taylor’s debut album or Fearless—because social media wasn’t this omnipresent perfect image factory and so the insecurity of growing up looked more like “Place In This World” or “The Outside”, fundamental experiences of questioning and longing that are deeply connected to our humanity, as opposed to “jealousy jealousy”, “pretty isn’t pretty”, or “lacy” which are founded on an obsession spiral that is literally only possible on that level because of the invention of the smartphone.

look at “Tell Me Why” or “Other Side of the Door” as opposed to “vampire” or “logical”—Taylor’s approach was a very straightforward “you acted this way and this is how it made me feel." it wasn’t until later that she started to make statements about patterns of behavior, because she simply couldn’t see them except in hindsight! she couldn’t say “this is what kind of man you are” or “this is what sort of relationship we had” until she had fully processed what happened—which is when we get songs like “Fifteen” and “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” and “The Manuscript”. but because the younger generation breathes the air of pop psychology buzzwords, Olivia is diagnosing her exes and labeling her relationships right away. and you might say this is a good thing, that young women are armed with terms like “gaslighting” and taught to be suspicious of age gaps because of the power differential. but having the knowledge doesn’t seem to have protected Olivia at all. she still makes all the same mistakes, there’s literally a whole song all about knowing something is a bad idea and doing it anyway. she still dates the older guy, but then she has so many labels readymade to explain why it didn’t feel good that she doesn’t ever actually get down to saying how it felt—because I don’t think she knows. the younger generation acts like processing an experience means figuring out what tiktokified sound bite applies to it and then slapping the label on and moving forward. “my parents were emotionally abusive” “my ex was a narcissist” “my ex best friend gaslit me” etc. but it seems to me that’s skipping some necessary stages of actually processing your shit. “vampire” is Olivia trying to write “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” before she’s ever written (or felt) “Tell Me Why”. it’s the difference between “here’s to you and your temper, yes I remember what you said last night / and I know that you see what you’re doing to me, tell me why” on the one hand and “went for me and not her ‘cause girls your age know better” or “master manipulator, you’re so good at what you do” or “you convinced me it was all in my mind” on the other hand.

and another side effect of this, the big names in this younger generation of artists aren’t really writing love songs, and I don’t think that’s accidental. they literally do not have the vocabulary to do so. the psychology buzzwords that go around are all about toxic relationships and red flags. and so, deprived of a way of thinking about being in love, the love songs either fall flat (“I’ll go anywhere he goes and he says I’m so American”) or they simply don’t exist. the open-hearted sincerity of a “Hey Stephen” or “Jump Then Fall” is nowhere to be found.

[theclockworkkidart]

Forgot to post here.

Joined a cosplay collab (Jojo slumber party) on Insta hosted by @ahappymetalhead (on Insta)! The first pic was what’s featured on the collab post, the others are some extras. Wore an oversized Metallica tshirt for the Melone cosplay here because I don’t think Melone would wear much for sleeping so he stole something for the party- Also managed to find my snake plush. Shoutout to my mum for helping take the pics.

[veryintricaterituals]

I think your post is totally spot on, but I WOULD say that I’m not sure some of the articles count as marketing as they’re not written by people with an actual hand in the show! But it does show at least how much people thought it was heading that direction. I just think marketing is technically just the official efforts like the instagram post — a lot of articles like that are fully opinion from people that didn’t know any more than the fans did. I wouldn’t be surprised if the actors actually did support the ship (especially as Harvey is actually queer) but kind of felt they had to pivot in what they were saying when it became clear the showrunners weren’t actually willing to go there. Ugh. Thanks for compiling all that. I absolutely agree it was queerbaiting

Those articles are an integral part of the marketing. Shows, much like movies, go on a promotion route before, during and after a season to try to bring viewership. The shows and networks pay the media sites to write articles about them, I'm pretty sure they also supply topics to be covered in the articles, plus almost every single one of those was an interview with either the cast or the writers.

I'm not going to comment on whether the actors support or don't support the ship, I think it has been pretty obvious from both sides that they did up to a point. But the stuff they're saying right now in those post finale interviews is just distasteful and adding logs to the fire of the very clear textbook queer baiting we just witnessed.

[colleybri]

Tony Gilroy speaking in 2022 about the structure of Andor season 2.

Playing with “the negative space” is something I’m really intrigued (and slightly worried) about. So much story is going to be happening in those gaps.

But season 1 already did this so well, providing a huge amount of backstory simply by showing the present situation and a few key flashbacks. It’s just that in season 2 this filling in of the gaps will be happening every three episodes. I’m really hoping that because it’s already been done so well, season 2 won’t feel rushed. These a-few-days-in-a-year arcs have been described also as “needle-drops” in the old sense. We’ll start each in media res and will really have to pay attention. Because this is a series that repays you in spades for doing exactly that.

Those hints about the stories? What the passage of time does the characters? Hmm. “People get crazy”… yeah, like me – waiting for April 22nd.

[prettydykeboy]

me: I'm not obsessed with him-

my literal phone wallpaper:

(original version and blue version!)

[solradguy]

Always a little jumpscared going through old (<2005) USA gaming mags for Guilty Gear reviews and seeing decent scores and nice things said about them lol