#people need to treat animation better

[chex-nix]

Hi besties about the ask that apparently so many people missed the point on; i know there are ways to watch the show for free, i have links and i even have every episode downloaded on one of my computers.

I still bought the episodes regardless of already having them, and im as poor as they come (I’m unemployed and can barely afford food for myself every week with commission money)

Why would i “waste money” if i already had the episodes for free? Sitting in my computer available for watching? Because its not a waste of money. Buying the episodes directly supports the show and tells CN there are people who care about it. We dont have season 2 because they believe theres no demand for it. If you purchase the episodes (or even just one episode at a time) it will tell them there are people out there who want more.

Pirating the show HURTS the show. Yes i have it downloaded and i have links but even before it was taken off streaming i would still watch it on hulu. Just liking the show isn’t enough, you have to show them you want more. Harassing Parker on twitter and pirating the show that he and his crew worked so hard on with love isn’t going to get us season 2.

I said it in the tags but ill add it here: its okay to watch an episode or a few for free to decide if u like it or not before buying it. I ask u to purchase episodes though if u Do like it and want more

[egophiliac]

(looks at upcoming card releases)

I'm in danger :)

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

I hate how now every time a discourse is being had about classic Disney movies, the godawful remakes (or retellings) have to be included in the conversation. It's no longer just the animated movie that is adressed. You can't discuss Aladdin without its 2019 remake, Sleeping Beauty without its 2014 remake, The Little Mermaid without its 2023 remake, Beauty and the Beast without its 2017 remake, The Lion King without its 2019 remake, Mulan without its 2020 remake, etc, etc, etc. I hate how they will be forever attached to these classic movies. It actually pisses me off to no avail.

[mantisgodsdomain]

On the rare occasions when we talk about the spectre of veganism you can probably physically tell the amount of psychic damage that we take from seeing people throw out any part of a carcass.

[steakout-05]

staffy expectations vs staffy reality (by someone who has an absolute sweetheart of an american staffy <3)

[tariah23]

Well, I’m still glad that Gojo was always a character who was growing and learning at least. He’s literally one of my favorite characters of all time now. Like, he’s never been as perfect as how the fans would make him out to be despite canonically being viewed as an absolute nuisance to everyone around him (I don’t think his peers necessarily hate him but a lot of them probably hate to see him coming and the ones who’ve dealt with him long enough to consider him a friend, tolerate him and groan whenever he opens his mouth, too 😭… out of love. He’s extremely childish so there is only sm the other adults around him can take and to an extent, his students. I think the only characters in canon who adore him and their eye’s sparkle whenever he’s around, and being a silly teacher was Yuuji and Miwa (she asked him for his autograph (he’s the most famous sorcerer in the jjk world) and when she was alone, she did a little dance in the empty hallway 🥺…) from what we’ve seen even though the others still care about him, too. They just find him rather annoying, which he most definitely is. And he does it on purpose. He plays too much.)

[creative-hanyou-girl]

Sometimes when I'm reminded of the Yashahime manga's continued existence, I need to bury myself in as much Inukagmor family fics (where they're not separated 'cause fuck that shit) as I can so I can purge the anger and urge to rip someone's throat out from existence.

That being said, any inukagmor family fic recs?

[swamp-spirit]

I know it's become the fic standard method to talk somebody down from a panic attack, but if I was mid attack and somebody started trying to get me to list five things I could hear, I would go for the jugular.

[agallimaufryofoddments]

Checking the Fate/strange fake TV special again, and that PV from 2019 again, and wow, yep, two hours later and it’s still surreal that these are characters written by Narita who are speaking audible words against mainstream J-Pop music for a megafranchise with more fans and money that any original Narita IP could ever conceive of.

Narita characters...who are speaking and will in two months be speaking dialogue Narita has written for light novels he has published. Narita’s name in huge typeface for a TV special which may or may not be a prelude for a summer anime that mainstream audiences are going to care about.

The TV special teaser is frankly underwhelming only because the first two thirds of it is just a build-up list of Fate anime until now (2004...F/sn! 2010...title! 2012...title etc.!), except of course it’s building up to, this, “the next Fate,” Fate/strange fake, and that, I concede, is hyping F/sf up. It is treating F/sf like a big deal, or at least worthy enough to be included in the line-up of all those other notable Fate entries. 

I can see why people think it’s portending a summer TV anime. Sawano as composer, teaser as self-important for a self-important franchise...what I’m getting at is... The teaser is treating F/sf like such a big deal in a way that Baccano! never quite got (and, hell, Durarara!! was popular enough, but just...not this popular), so it leaves me with slight bittersweet wistfulness over what could have been with Baccano!

“Wow...  Imagine a 2023 twentieth anniversary Baccano! anime treating the source material with this much magnitude. wheeze”

(No, hype and magnitude never guarantee the actual product will be well-executed, but c’mon, it’s not worth being spitefully pessimistic when what the hell, that’s Narita being treated like a big deal right there.)

[medicasino]

where's that post that's like "if you fawn over fictional characters with scars but treat irl people with visible disabilities and/or facial differences like shit or think theyre creepy you suck" because i want to reblog that a MILLION times.

[primsycoldbottles]

i remember hating godot when i first played aa and then later after a year or two being like Hmm maybe hes not as bad as i remember... but now that im replaying it i can confirm he is Bad

[woundedheartwithin]

I’m probably fundamentally a Not Good Horse Person simply because I forget that other folks’ horses are fucking nuts because mine are so solid. Like my mare is the shyer of the two, but her idea of spooking is flinching and backing up a couple of steps. My gelding just raises his head and like that’s it. So like I’m so used to mine not giving a single shit about anything that if I had to handle somebody else’s horse I’d probably die because I’d be treating it like one of mine lmao

[weareuniqueandimportant]

EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU'RE CLOSER TO YOURSELF... THAT IS THOSE IN POWER THE VILLAINS THAT PRETEND TO CARE THAT DISLIKE YOU ONLY FURTHER... THEY COULDN'T CONTROL YOU LIKE THE OTHERS... THIS IS WHAT YOU'RE PUNISHED FOR... PUNISHMENT MOST EVIL BEING STORED FOR THE MOST TRAUMATIZED... HELP ONLY A GASSLIGHT TO JUSTIFY WITH THE ABUSE ALL THOSE PEOPLE FACED... NOBODY DEEP IN THE ABYSS EVER NEEDED TO BE SAVED OR CHANGED. THE UNBIGOT THEY ONLY NEEDED TO BE ACCEPTED... EVERYTHING THEY HAVE DONE SEEN FROM THEIR VIEW AND ACCEPTED AS ABSOLUTE... NO PERSON IS JUSTIFIED TO BE TAKEN AWAY... THERE... THOSE OF POWER WHEN THEIR FAVORITE MACHINES THE POLICE THEY'RE ALL THE SAME... THEIR ABSOLUTE POWER TOO MUCH TO BE TAKEN AWAY... AS THEY GUIDE JUDGEMENT ON THOSE DEEMED DANGEROUS TO THEIR CAPITALISM... THEIR MACHINES BLIND JUSTIFYING AND REPEATING THEIR LAW... MACHINES BLIND THAT WILL NEVER BREAK FREE... ABANDONED POOR PEOPLE... THAT WILL NEVER HAVE SUPPORT OF ANY KIND. SUPPORT ONLY A WAY TO GASSLIGHT ALL ABUSE ON THEM IS WAS AND ALWAYS WILL BE JUSTIFIED...

[demilypyro]

So I've seen a few too many people on twitter talking about The Kiss Scene from the new Scott Pilgrim anime. People saying it's fetishistic and indulgent, people calling it male gazey, etc. And while the kiss itself is certainly a bit exaggerated, I felt like writing a bit about why I disagree, and why context is important, like it always is. But it basically turned into an extended analysis on the metatextual treatment of Roxie Richter. So bear with me. It's a long post.

What really matters about this scene is not the kiss itself, but what precedes it. Not even just the fight scene just before it, but what precedes the whole anime series, really. And that's the Scott Pilgrim comic book, and the live action movie. Because in both, Roxie is a punchline.

She's a joke. Her character starts and ends with "one of the exes is actually a girl, I bet you didn't expect that." Jokes are made about Ramona's latent bisexuality, the movie especially treating it as funny and absurd, and her validity as a romantic interest is entirely written off by Ramona as being "just a phase." There's a fight scene, she's defeated by a man giving her an orgasm which implicitly calls her sexuality into question (come on), and the movie just moves on. It sucks. It really, really sucks.

The comic fares a little better. It never veers into outright homophobia like the movie does, and while the line about Ramona having gone through a phase remains, Roxie actually gets one over on Scott when Ramona briefly gets back with Roxie. But Roxie is still only barely a character. Like all the other evil exes, she's just a stepping stone towards the male protagonist's development. She barely even gets any screentime before she's defeated by Scott's "power of love." But Roxie stands out, since she's the only villain who is queer, or at least had been confirmed queer at that point (hi Todd). In a series that champions multiple gay men in the supporting cast, the single undeniable lesbian in the story is a villain. She's labeled as evil, made fun of, pushed aside in favor of the men, and then discarded. Her screentime was never about her, or her feelings for Ramona. It was about the straight, male protagonist needing to overcome her. And that was Roxie Richter. An unfortunate victim of the 2010s.

Fast forward to current year, and the new anime series is announced. Everybody sits down to watch the new series expecting another retelling of the same story, and.... hang on, that straight male protagonist I mentioned just died in the first episode. And now it's humanizing the villains from the original story. And there's Roxie, introduced alongside the other evil exes in the second episode, and she's being played entirely straight, without a punchline in sight. No jokes are made about her gender, no questions are made of her validity as one of Ramona's romantic interests. The narrative considers her important. In one episode, she already gets more respect than she did in either of the previous iterations of Scott Pilgrim. And this isn't even her focus episode yet... which happens to be the very next one.

The anime series goes to great lengths to flesh out the original story's villains and to have Ramona reconcile with them. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Roxie gets to go first. While Matthew Patel gets his development in episode 2, Roxie is the first to directly confront Ramona, now our main protagonist. This is notable too because it's the only time the exes are encountered out of order. Roxie is supposed to be number 4, but she's first in line, and later on you realize that she's the only one who's out of sequence. She's the one who sets the precedent for the villains being redeemed. She's the most important character for Ramona to reconcile with.

What follows is probably the most extensive, elaborate 1 on 1 fight scene in the whole show. Roxie fights like a wounded animal, her motions are desperate and pained. Ramona can only barely fight back against her onslaught. Different set-pieces fly by at breakneck speed as Roxie relentlessly lays her feelings at Ramona's feet through her attacks and her distraught shouts. And unlike the comic or the movie, Ramona acknowledges them, and sincerely apologizes. And the two end up just laying there, exhausted, reminiscing about when they were together.

Only after this, after all of this, does the kiss scene happen. Roxie has been vindicated, she has reconciled with the person who hurt her, the narrative has deemed that her anger is justified and has redeemed her character. And she gets her victory lap by making the nearest other hot girl question her heterosexuality, sharing a sloppy kiss with her as the music triumphantly crescendos.

It's... a little self-congratulatory, honestly. But it's good. It's redemption for a character who had been mistreated for over a decade. And she punctuates the moment by being very, very gay where everyone can see it, no men anywhere in sight. Because this is her moment. And then she leaves the plot, on her own accord this time, while humming the hampster dance. What a legend. How could anything be wrong with this.

[oatmealaddiction]

Okay but the weirdest thing about the whole "Brotherhood is better you should skip 03" discourse that's become commonplace now, it sort of forgets the world Brotherhood came out in and why you should watch the original Fullmetal Alchemist. When Brotherhood came out, the original Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most beloved and most watched animes of all time. Brotherhood assumes you the audience have already seen it because of course you have, everyone has seen it, so it skips important information and speeds the story up because it doesn't want to bore you with things you already know. Have you ever wondered "hey why does the first episode of Brotherhood kind of suck, and why am I being introduced to like 50 new characters, and why are they acting like I know what the hell an alchemist is?" It's because Brotherhood thinks you've seen 03.

The first 7 or so episodes of Brotherhood constitute dozens of chapters in the manga, and the first 25 or so episodes of the original Fullmetal Alchemist. The Nina Tucker episode in Brotherhood, in FMA 03 takes up nearly three episodes. Yoki gets a backstory in 03 and it's genuinely one of the best episodes and taken directly from the manga and Brotherhood glosses over it because: duh, you've already seen it. And so if you skip the original you miss out on dozens of really great character building episodes like Ed and Al meeting Hughes for the first time and getting to spend a whole episode helping him free a train from terrorists, or Ed and Roy having a duel that expands on the relationship they have, or episodes where the brothers just help out random people in towns before the major story gets going.

The original also paces itself quite a bit better than Brotherhood and is more in line with the mangas storytelling. In the manga we don't find out about The Gate until nearly two dozen chapters in, and the same goes for the original anime. Like, that's a twist reveal in those stories, and it's weird that the most watched series is the one where they tell you all about The Gate in the first two episodes because they assume you've already seen the original show.

What's more, people don't know that Hiromu Arakawa helped write for the anime while she was still in the middle of writing the manga, and as a result was inspired to write scenes in Brotherhood that the anime did first. That scene of Edward getting impaled by a falling beam? Directly inspired by a similar scene in the original anime. There's a lot of little instances of that and they're great when you can recognize parallels and things in Brotherhood that are direct references to the original anime, but people don't notice any of that anymore. Because the original anime is just an automatic skip these days, and it's a bummer because people don't realize what a giant it was back before Brotherhood was released. They treat it as *bad,* not realizing it was one of the most beloved anime of its time and the problems people take issue with have a lot more to do with personal taste than any kind of actual flaw in the writing. Brotherhood was never meant to dethrone it, and the original anime was always supposed to be part of the viewing experience which is why those first few episodes of Brotherhood are so fast paced. So like, please stop telling people Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is a skip, or it's bad, or you don't need it because Brotherhood is better. Regardless if you think Brotherhood is better or not, the original wrote Brotherhood's check. It was huge, it was beloved, and Brotherhood is *banking* on the knowledge you've seen all of it and loved it. And trust me when I say there is so much to love about the original series. It's still my favorite branch of the FMA franchise, and it's worth your time, I promise you.

[dduane]

"University of Houston researchers make nasal vaccine that prevents COVID from spreading"

For reasons I don't understand, I'm having trouble linking directly to this Houston Chronicle post. But here's most of the text. (The URL's at the bottom if you want to try it.)

A team of researchers from the University of Houston have developed a new vaccine to treat and prevent the spread of flu and multiple coronavirus strains. Through two nasal sprays — an immune activating therapeutic treatment and a new vaccine — the team of UH researchers have not only broken ground on vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2 and the flu virus, but also on creating a universal coronavirus vaccine. Dr. Navin Varadarajan, who leads the lab behind the nasal sprays, said the new vaccine will be a game-changer to the “major obstacle” of current vaccines, which can prevent people from serious illness, but not stop them from spreading the disease to others.  “They can (current vaccines) keep you out of the hospital, but it doesn’t stop you from spreading it to vulnerable people,” Varadarajan said. On top of providing a way to stop the spread of COVID to those most at risk — the elderly and immunocompromised — the new nasal vaccine is a crucial step forward in the goal of fighting viral evolution.  It’s natural for viruses to change and evolve — and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is no exception. As viruses spread farther and faster, they can better adapt to their environment. Successful variants beat out weaker ones, which can lead to easier transmission or worsened disease.  While many viral variants have minimal impact, over time viruses become stronger against existing vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 resides in the nose, and since existing vaccines are intramuscular, meaning they are administered through a shot in the arm, the virus is not actually eliminated from the body. NanoSTING-SN, on the other hand, hits “the last mile” of the nose, which prevents the disease from spreading, Varadarajan said.  It’s also a pan-coronavirus nasal vaccine, meaning it works against the infection and disease of all viruses in the coronavirus family.  In animals, the nasal vaccine was 100% effective in stopping transmission of the Omnicron variants of concern to unvaccinated hosts. Despite the wide-use of Pfizer and Moderna, viral evolution of the disease forces scientists to keep updating existing vaccines. To Varadarajan, the nasal vaccine can also stop the cyclical need to create more COVID boosters — a method he not only says doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, but also anticipates the general public will be less willing to sign on board for. 

The article URL:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/health/article/university-of-houston-covid-nasal-vaccine-19628489.php