#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

[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.

[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 😭✋️

[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."

[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.

[starry-bi-sky]

jason and danny childhood friends au memes (mild spoilers)

[watmalik]

Poolverine out of context…either they have a pain kink or they just like getting tied up…or both? Let’s do both.

[ironinkpen]

hands down one of the best pieces of subtle world building this season is the name High Five Heroes and the way it doesn't mean anything. the Bad Kids and the Maidens' names actually say something about their respective groups and what they've done/been through. meanwhile High Five Heroes is clearly a name that was handpicked by Kipperlilly long before she stepped foot in aguefort on the first day or actually met any of her party members. it's a pre-approved inside joke specifically designed in a lab to be as bland and palatable and inoffensive as possible—a middle manager's attempt at manufacturing camaraderie. the most generic, perfectly marketable name she could come up with for her Perfect, Optimal Adventuring Party.

[ohno-the-sun]

Sol

[chiisana-lion]

my ugly ass cat it has every disease

[stiffyck]

I WISH ARO HEADCANONS WERE MORE POPULAR IN FANDOMS