#rant about something i like

[qballqueue]

I haven't watched anime (or any show, really) for a while, but fuck man, Undead Girl Murder Farce really got me hooked, and I think it's mostly down to its two lead characters.

Like, yeah, the premise of the show itself is good. It's fucking excellent; a pair of Japanese yokai travel to Europe to solve Monster Crime™ is an instant grab for fans of horror, paranormal, and mystery (of which I am all three), but from episode to episode I keep finding myself drawn specifically to the main duo and their antics.

First you have Tsugaru, a man who, thanks to being half-oni, will have his life cut prematurely. But rather than him being mopey, he's decided to just have a good time while it lasts. If the candle is burning twice as fast anyways, he's going to make sure it burns twice as bright no matter the circumstance.

And on the other hand you have Aya. Unlike Tsugaru, she's immortal, but has decided--now that she's a severed head--that life isn't worth living without a body. It's a cold and logical decision that she only changes her mind about once Tsugaru convinces her that there's a chance to get her body back.

And despite their very, very different circumstances and methods of thought, what makes them the most entertaining to me is how similar they are.

Both of their perspectives give them a sort of detachment to the world, because for both of them (for different reasons) anything that happens, no matter how shocking or tragic, is only temporary. Which leaves them free to react to almost any situation however they want. This is best demonstrated through their shared interest in gallows humour.

That last one in particular is of note, because that bit they're doing happens in the middle of them questioning a man about his dead wife.

And it's not just that they make jokes in dire circumstances; they laugh at each other's jokes too, showing appreciation for the other's sense of humour.

We're only seven episodes in at the time of writing, but it also seems so far like they're both good examples of static character arcs. In other words, they're characters that don't necessarily develop a lot over the course of the story, but do develop the world around them through their actions. Another good example of a character like that is Sherlock Holmes, which is a hell of a coincidence because he's also a character in this show. But it makes sense for Tsugaru and Aya because of their detachment. They can't really be shaped by the world if they're rarely affected by anything in it.

The issue that typically arises from characters like that (at least I find) is that, without becoming interesting over the course of the story, static characters need to start their stories by being interesting, which Tsugaru and Aya both do extremely effectively. We haven't gotten a ton of their backstories yet, but it's pretty clear from everything they do and everything they say what kind of people they are and how they think, and that is fantastic character writing.

TL;DR: watch Undead Girl Murder Farce (or Undead Murder Farce? The anime seems to have dropped 'girl' from the title) because it's really fucking good.

[magnusbae]

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

"You and me, Ethan. Together we go save Rose, and then we can grind Miranda into paste!"

[k-is-for-potassium]

i feel like many people use "straight"...wrong

it's used a lot to mean cis, het, allo, perisex, etc.

basically just not lgbtq+ at all

but that's not true

trans people can be straight and lgbtq+

intersex people can be straight and lgbtq+

neopronoun users can be straight and lgbtq+

arospec people can be straight and lgbtq+

acespec people can be straight and lgbtq+

polyamorous people can be straight and lgbtq+

genderfluid, bigender, and other gender non-conforming people can be straight and lgbtq+

people who are biromantic, panromantic, etc. and heterosexual or vice versa are still lgbtq+

and there are so many more identities that can absolutely be both

straight does not mean not lgbtq+

[aunmenosheteroenespanol]

2.12 Chimney Begins - 2.09 Hen Begins - 2.16 Bobby Begins Again - 7.04 Buck, Bothered and Bewildered

Tommy's family arc

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[aka-indulgence]

Why do they do this

[moonhze]

anadius has made it so so easy and safe for people to obtain ts4 and all of its packs without paying for them and i really wish more people knew about this bc the only way to get EA to pay attention to the terrible state of the game is to literally stop giving them money, 🏴‍☠️ the packs to keep playing the game u enjoy but know they only care about appeasing their shareholders/investors/whatever they are and they're all driven by money and have very little interest in the playable state of the game in terms of bugs and features unless the game is so broken that people are actively demanding refunds in mass or just not buying the packs at all.

[eveningdawn222]

something about how "wholesome" batfam aus where jason and bruce have a good relationship inherently require jason to be portrayed as overreacting and hysterical when he returns. something about how the lazarus pit madness trope gives people an excuse to make this palatable. of course he wasn't in his right mind when he did those things, but he's all better now :) it's so silly how angry he was :)

something about how jason has to grovel for forgiveness at tims feet "oh im sooo sorry for trying to kill you (lmao) i was sooo crazy" and tim can then be magnanimous and forgive him because he wasn't in the right state of mind. tim is such a vulnerable little kid (at most 2 years younger than jason) and jason is a grown ass man (was in a comatose state for a couple of those years but who cares) so obviously tim is gonna be soooo traumatized and he's gonna flinch when the big bad man comes near him :( he's a badass vigilante who is smarter and better than everyone but he's also a traumatized little baby who everyone needs to be super nice to :(

something about how tim gets to be a kid, how tim gets to be a victim, how tim gets an apology and groveling and guilt and jason gets -

what? bruce telling him he loved him? a hug and a moment of vulnerability and jason having to split himself open to be dissected by the whole family. jason having to laugh at jokes about his death, jason having to be the one to reach out and admit he was wrong and crazy and totally out of his mind, while bruce can just grunt and give him a hug.

people want bruce to be a good dad because it doesn't feel good for him to be abusive. but by shoving him into these roles, jason's own story becomes unmoored. what would jason have to be angry about? bruce is trying his best! jason is being unreasonable, he's destroying this family, he just needs to realize that while bruce isn't always perfect, he's in the right and jason just needs to -

isn't it funny? how it's never your fathers fault? how it's always on the child when the relationship sours? isn't it funny, how you can slit your child's throat, and it'll be okay after you apologize?

something about how jason todd is a woman and a child and a victim and a son and a brother and a monster.

something about how the only thing jason todd ever did right was die. and how much it must fucking hurt to sit at a dinner table and laugh when someone makes a joke about it.

[qballqueue]

Bloomburrow's story is good

Having just binged the audio version of the Bloomburrow story, I can say with genuine surprise that I actually enjoyed it a lot??? I'm stunned, legitimately, that it actually delivered.

For context, I'm not an avid reader of the Magic story. It had been so reinforced from community consensus--as well as my own experience--that the story for each set was largely lacklustre, existing mostly so people could see what their favourite blorbos were up to instead of actual entertainment, that I hardly bothered reading them and stuck to story recaps on Youtube. It had always seemed to be a better use of my time.

This was echoed by my reading of the Thunder Junction story. I loved the idea of Magic Cowboys, so I actually dove in to read this one as it was being released, and it was meh at best. It was a story where most of the characters were reappearing ones instead of new, almost none of whom felt they had any reason or motivation for wanting to be there. And the climax largely centred on a cliffhanger, which left a lot of narrative tension feeling unresolved.

(For the record, absolutely no shade thrown towards author of the OTJ story articles, Akemi Dawn Bowman. I found the actually writing to be enjoyable, and I'm 80% sure most of my issues with the narrative were mandated to be there)

I went into Bloomburrow expecting more of the same, honestly. I only really started it because I needed something to listen to, but, like, holy shit. We have a mostly original cast that's simple but fun. We have a plot that's almost entirely self-contained, with no larger narrative implications so it's just allowed to be itself. We actually only have one reappearing character who joins in on the current story instead of taking it over. It's just a short, pleasant ride you can finish in an afternoon.

I do have some issues. For starters, the prophecy that happens at the end felt like a shoe-horned in way to remind people that there's supposed to be an over-arching plot. I do prefer it to the 'something interesting is going to happen soon, we promise' form of storytelling longer narratives often fall prey to, which MtG's story often does, but I would just as soon do without an over-arching story at all if I'm being honest.

The pacing also felt a bit rushed. By the time we get to chapter five, it feels like we're only at the middle of the story, but then the antagonist's introduction, their explanation, a couple climatic battles, and the ending happen all at once. It felt like I had skipped something, but this feels more like an issue with WotC only allowing five chapters per set and one set per plane.

Speaking of which, if the quality of the Bloomburrow story is doing anything, it's highlighting how shitty it is that each plane only gets one set worth of story before we have to leave again. I liked the story, so it's a shame that as soon as the set arrives it'll be gone for a while; WotC almost assuredly has the next year-or-so's worth of sets planned out already, so if there ever is more Bloomburrow story it'll be way in the future, and not because someone decided to put faith in it--it'll be because it proved profitable enough for a revisit.

So, yeah. You know the drill: artistic integrity good, capitalism bad, etc., etc.. But I will say that I think these story articles are worth a look. Kudos to the author, Valerie Valdes, and the entire story team.

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

I'm sorry but the irony of Nico calling Max unprofessional is sending me so bad like sir there's an entire garage full of people, who were literally in the trenches trying to survive the Brocedes fallout while just doing their jobs, who might have a few things to say about your (& Lewis') level of professionalism at that time 😭✋️

[stiffyck]

I WISH ARO HEADCANONS WERE MORE POPULAR IN FANDOMS

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[wickjump]

i hope everyone who preaches about how the only way to enjoy fandom spaces (especially in this fandom) is by strictly abiding by canon interpretations and thinks everyone else is ruining fandom spaces remembers that uwu baby cutesy dream is not in fact fanon but very much so how dream is canonically portrayed so if you want to stick strictly to canon and villainize fanon you’re gonna have to make that guy fucking insufferable and infantilized to hell and back sorry. it’s canon and if you do anything else you don’t actually deserve to be in the fandom that’s just how it works i guess

[xxplastic-cubexx]

🧙‍♀️🐈‍⬛

[starry-bi-sky]

jason and danny childhood friends au memes (mild spoilers)