#roller derby is niche

[wormbraind]

was thinking maybe i should put off my transition so i can still play in wftda leagues and then i was like no what the fuck are you talking about man

[lunchataunthildas]

when she’d be willing to NSO for you 💞💓💗💞💕💝💖💘💕💞💓💞💘💝💖

[oaky-dokey]

robots will see a scoring ball and/or cube in their hands and be like "is anyone going to throw this away from the goal" and not wait for an answer

[bcyhoods]

why did i completely forget. about the eddie one. lolz! tonight maybe😁

i was going through my old google drafts and i found a couple old blurbs from my old blog that were actually………kinda really cute to me.

so poll time!!! pls answer i’ll give you a tongue kiss

[canmom]

Ping-Pong The Animation: eps 1-3

So Masaaki Yuasa [AN12, AN28, AN150] can do no wrong, right? OK, well, I'll admit Ride Your Wave was kinda mid, and Devilman Crybaby goes hard as hell at the beginning and end but sorta treads water in the middle, but... generally speaking! No-one does it like Yuasa.

For reasons I don't really remember, I didn't get very far watching Ping-Pong The Animation some years ago. It should be entirely my shit: Yuasa pulling in a gang of wildly creative animators to put their unique spin on something. However, the first episode didn't entirely hook me, and I never got round to trying the second before something else punted 'watching Ping Pong' out of my brain. ADHD, y'know.

This is a shame because even the very next episode seriously goes, as does the one after that. But also this anime isn't entirely what I was expecting (crazy sakugafest full of Yuasa weirdness). Not to say it doesn't do a lot of really unique stuff with its cinematography and animation, but these first episodes at least are more about like... dissociation! ennui!

But more on that in a mo. First I wanna continue the thread of 'how do you animate sports'.

So, ping-pong, or table tennis. Not a sport I know much about, I'll be honest. (To be fair I don't know a lot about sports in general outside of some very specific niches. The sports I've pursued so far are rather eclectic: swimming, fencing, tai chi chuan, and roller derby; I never got particularly far in any and it's been years since I've done them.)

I'll inevitably be drawing a lot of comparisons to The First Slam Dunk, the other sports anime I've watched recently. I do think it's a productive comparison though! Both of them bring something of the visual language of manga into their presentation in unique ways. I have not yet read the Ping Pong manga, but it's by Taiyō Matsumoto, otherwise known for scifi manga like Tekkonkinkreet (god tier movie, still need to read the manga) and Number Five. So that's a pretty impressive track record!

If you go take a look at some scans of Ping Pong, what will immediately jump out is the shaky, rough line style and unusual camera angles and compositions.

The stylisation is also very different from a lot of manga. Noses are fully drawn, eyes are realistically small, and in contrast, lips and mouths tend to get the emphasis - as well as hands.

Knowing this makes a lot of the creative choices in the anime make sense! It also adopts a shaky lineart style, and makes use of heavy line weights and spotting blacks to add definition. It also has a lot of crazy closeups and layouts, and it loves a visual metaphor. But most of all, the most striking element of this anime is how often it loves to split the picture up into little panels...

...which [eli]'s subs do a really good job of typesetting, incidentally, moving the dialogue to fit naturally into the split composition. And while this shot with 7 smaller shots is perhaps on the extreme end, splits of three or more are pretty frequent. It's a really interesting way to evoke the effect of seeing a whole page of manga

So, as you proooobably know, ping-pong is a game of bouncing balls off a little table and directing them into places the opponent will find it hard to hit them back. From watching this anime I picked up that there are a number of styles of holding the racket (e.g. 'penhold grip' and 'shakehand') and approaches to hitting the ball (e.g. 'chopping'). A lot of this pretty much went over my head, but honestly it didn't matter, since the narrative significance was pretty much always evident.

Compared to basketball, though, ping-pong is a pretty tricky sport to make visually interesting! Sure, you have the players running to and fro, and that can lead to some interesting poses, but how do you get the drama and tension into this?

Ping-pong additionally is all 2D, it doesn't have the sort of resources that Toei could throw at making the best looking 3DCG basketball game ever. It is limited to a TV-feasible drawing count. So it has to make use of clever limited-animation tricks to get the most impact out of fewest drawings.

Let's take an example sequence from episode 3. A minor character is about to get his ass kicked by Tsukimoto. Tsukimoto is something of a pingpong prodigy, and yet he is very emotionally closed-off and even standoffish; he doesn't particularly seem to like the game very much, and doesn't particularly feel inclined to flex on other players and get into the status games. But other players, like Wenge, have heard about him and want to see what he's got.

First we have the setup. Other characters are observing and discussing the game. Since ping-pong tends to involve very rapid exchanges, it can follow the classic shōnen model where there's a lot of talking, flashy fight sequence, more talking...

The cut happens in two steps, maintaining the vertical dividing line. This approach to cutting is used a lot in Ping-Pong, and it's quite a creative way to keep visual interest when it's using a lot of largely static shots. The panel on the right is more animated than the panel on the left, a naturalistic depiction of bouncing the ball off the table.

Things start moving faster here. A rapid pan on the image on the left disguises the fact that this anticipation pose is actually not moving at all. This then goes into a rapid, explosive moment as this guy serves.

The final pose is held for a couple of seconds while the voiceover line discussing his intended move finishes. This sort of elasticity of time is a very Osamu Dezaki type of move - it's something that Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata actually really disliked.

A sound effect hits as Tsukimoto appears on the right in silhouette, anticipating his reaction, and setting up the next shot which leaves the split picture and hides the background for just a moment, as if to put us in Tsukimoto's shoes: he only sees the ball.

Tsukimoto follows through and holds this pose - the ball is the only thing moving here. The ball moves mainly on 2s while Tsukimoto moves on 3s and 2s, and he and the ball move on alternating frames. He holds the pose as the ball zips off to the right (bouncing off the corner of the table), with a speed lines-like effect. At the end of the shot, the ball freezes in the air for the moment while the sound echoes.

The actual table-tennis round lasts just seconds, and the drawing count involved is pretty minimal, but it does a lot with those drawings.

We go back to voiceovers and reactions in the next few shots, returning to the split video as Tsukimoto's opponent thinks about how he'd really rather be at the beach...

Often, these comic-like compositions will change one panel at a time, and while one panel is animated another panel will be still, naturally moving your eyes across the screen. It is an approach similar to some experiments I've seen in 'animated comics' viewed in a web browser, where the panels do not appear all at once, but enter with some animation.

So this is the sort of animation technique that Ping Pong uses. It's effective! Elsewhere the cuts are used in a less direct, continuity-editing way and more in a juxtaposition/montage way. For example, Wenge's desire to return to China is symbolised by match cutting/fading to shots of an aeroplane.

And there is a recurring image, which I'm sure will be expanded on, of Tsukimoto hiding in a cupboard and wishing for a tokusatsu hero to come save him from his isolation. As Tsukimoto's feelings about himself change, the toku hero is replaced by a robot. At this points it starts to feel like an outright Ikuhara anime.

There is occasionally a little bit of CG, mainly when Tsukimoto uses a different type of racket surface, and the way the ball and racket make contact is the crucial thing that the shot is trying to convey...

It gets the job done, but I'm glad they stuck with 2D for most of it.

So I went in the first time expecting like, crazy elaborate sakuga - and to be fair, the OP, animated by none other than Shinya Ohira, delivers on that front - but if anything what I've seen so far in Ping-Pong is actually a triumph of storyboarding and limited animation techniques. I think back then I didn't have the eyes to appreciate it in the same way.

OK, that's the film nerd stuff, but what about the story? Ping Pong follows two school friends, Makoto Tsukimoto aka "Smile" (right), and Yutaka Hoshino aka "Peco" (left). Smile is defined by a flat affect and a standoffish persona. He's just going through the motions. He's very good at ping-pong, but to him it's just a way to pass time, and he's scornful about the idea of caring all that much about it. Much like Shinji with his casette player, Tsukimoto is pretty much always staring at a handheld games console rather than make eye contact with anyone.

Peco on the other hand is the more childish one - playful, kinda arrogant, very much an 'emotions on his sleeve' kinda guy. He sulks when he loses and gloats when he wins, and is constantly seen with bubblegum or other kinds of candy. He provides a lot of our commentary when he chats with the other players.

日本語上手 readers probably noticed the tsuki (moon) vs hoshi (star) symbolism thing they've got going on here!

High-school table tennis in this story seems to be a rather 'tough love' kinda world. Most of these players tend to look down on those who can't meet their level. Going easy on someone is seen as weakness, or cultivating bad habits, by almost everyone. Tsukimoto doesn't play at his full potential because he isn't as invested in winning as all these weirdos, but it seems that might be starting to change...

The coach is interesting. He's an old man and fairly disdainful of the club at large, and prone to speaking English randomly with a heavy accent. But he gets excited at the prospect of getting Tsukimoto to unleash his full potential, in terms that are repeatedly metaphorically compared to romance/marriage.

And when Tsukimoto gets sick of it, he challenges him to a game, with the stakes as...

Cue Makima/Beatrice images here I guess.

Tsukimoto de facto wins when the coach collapses, but this episode marks a change of heart. He starts to think of himself as a robot - the affect of a robot replacing the affect of the toku hero in his fantasy. And in this way he does what people seem to want and plays ping pong with mechanical precision, expressed once again in visual metaphor (shot here from a cool transformation sequence)...

What if I just dissociate harder? This is gonna end well.

So it really is one of those kind of like 'ennui of being a teenager' kind of stories - c.f. say FLCL. 'Boy with complicated emotional landscape' is Yuasa bread and butter, but the particular variant here seems a little unusual for him - they tend to be a little more earnest. I'm curious to see how Tsukimoto develops.

I am definitely enjoying the arrogant Chinese player Kong Wenge. Dude's got a lot of screen presence, and while I'm sure he'll get shown up sooner or later, he makes for a very fun antagonist of sorts.

In comparison to Slam Dunk... one thing that's significantly different about table tennis is that it's an individual rather than a team sport, which means it's harder to have an ensemble cast all contributing to the protagonists' eventual victory - instead it's about a lot of individual arcs interweaving with each other, individual duels. Besides that, it does seem like it will be following a similar arc of a character in an emotional hole (grief for Ryota, depression for Tsukimoto) finding new meaning and purpose through sports - though I can't be sure how things are gonna go for Tsukimoto here!

The tone however is quite different. Even when it's silly, I feel like Slam Dunk is a very sincere story. There's little detachment or irony, or false consciousness - with perhaps the major exception of Ryota's mother, who lets her own grief and trauma get in the way of understanding her son. But ultimately 'why would you care this much about basketball' is not a question that anyone would ask in Slam Dunk. Even the judo guy in the manga who's trying to recruit Sakuragi is just as hot-blooded about his own sport of choice.

There's a difference in like, general affect about the players as well, which has something to do with the sport itself. Yeah, Sakuragi's superpower is his 'genius' ability to predict rebounds, and there is plenty of strategising in Slam Dunk - but basketball is still a sport that very much emphasises physical power, and as much as Slam Dunk will work hard to sell you on a clever trick pass, the visuals are also emphasising the speed that players are dashing, the height they're jumping, their physique. Table tennis by contrast seems to be a sport that's more about prediction and mind games.

That said it is equally just like Matsumoto's style being different from Inoue's. Now I know it's by the guy who wrote Tekkonkinkreet, a lot about this series falls into place! There's a sense of tension here, of being fundamentally at odds with the world. The autismfeels. This is reflected also in the drawings - the characters don't entirely seem comfortable in their embodiment.

So if that's what I'm getting from just three eps, I'm very excited to see what the remaining 8 have to offer. This series is probably too long to cram into Animation Night format, but we'll see...

[aburningconstellation]

things that i think thrawn + the ascendancy gang would love (part 2)

thrawn: earning as many doctorate & masters degrees as possible (he loves being able to say that he’s a master at everything from art history to underwater basket weaving - & he has the diplomas to prove it)

eli: the dying crafts list + being the one person preventing so many crafts from not being practiced anymore (he tries to teach them to the sky-walker girls with varying degrees of success)

ar’alani: women’s sports in general, but also really niche sports (you know she was playing pickleball way before everyone else, but now that it’s kind of popular she’s moving on to like roller derby or something)

wutroow: the duolingo owl - not the app, the owl specifically (even though she speaks like 5 languages already & will 10000% learn another just so she can gossip without other people being able to eavesdrop). also chappell roan.

che’ri: spontaneously chopping off all your hair in the bathroom at 2am (&& probably giving yourself bangs too for good measure)

samakro: renaissance festivals (you know he’s got a giant turkey leg in one hand, a mug of ale in the other + is booking it to axe throwing)

thalias: modern adaptations of jane austen novels (no one appreciates yearning like she does)

faro: driving late at night with your windows down & a killer playlist blaring (bonus points if it like just rained & you can smell it in the air)

ba’kif: sam reich on game changer (he wants his cedf officers to experience just a fraction of the stress they put him under so badly)

thrass: the headspace meditation app (also under so much stress, but handling it in a very different way)

thurfian + zistalmu: the reesa teesa ‘who tf did i marry’ tiktok series (this much hot goss? for free?! they’re sat)

[constelationprize]

ROBIN/ELODIE ??????

if this about to be like my eva josten/adèle moreau scenario i will cry then ask u to please marry me.

i need this more than i need air. u don’t understand. i love u. ur the freaking best. tell me more.

Yeah that one came to me in a vision.

The thing is that like most of my other niche rarepairings I just cannot resist the allure of Narrative Parallels™. Mostly I just realized how similar Elodie and Robin's stories are (in concept) and that they could actually be around the same age (considering Elodie would be around 15-16yo in 2007 and Robin joins the Foxes in 2009 after Kevin graduates, and assuming Robin didn't get held back due to the Horrors, that would put them at around a 1-2 year age difference).

So the basic concept for the AU is that Elodie survives and is rescued by Stuart during TSC and then brought over to the USA to live with Jean and the Trojans. This goes about as well as you would expect, which is to say not at all – she's heavily traumatized, barely speaks English for the first couple years, and is resistant to any kind of help that would result in her having to leave Jean's side. She also at first does not want anything to do with the other Trojans at all because she sees most of them as adults she can't trust and also resents them for monopolizing Jean's time, and none of these college sports players is anywhere near qualified for unpacking All of That.

Elodie and Jean effectively make each other's recovery worse for a long while because they immediately try and fall back to their childhood dynamic, which can no longer work for multiple reasons. But through Betsy Dobson all things are possible and eventually they get to a point where they aren't actively standing in each other's way anymore, though things are still Not Good.

It gets tough again when Jean graduates and they move out of LA, which just uproots what little stability Elodie had again, and he has developed a need to constantly check on her that cannot be good for his now even busier pro player schedule. Also, Elodie is almost 18, and at a point where she should be graduating high school and thinking about her future, which she very much is not doing because until a couple years ago she didn't even HAVE a future so she doesn't really know what to do with it.

They start floating the possibility of getting her into a community college or something in the state Jean's in, but eventually the possibility of having some strings pulled to get her into PSU is brought up, and Elodie latches onto it immediately, mostly because she both feels stifled by Jean's helicopter parenting AND kind of wants to punish him for not actually spending time with her by moving away. Jean doesn't want to let her, but he also doesn't really have a choice, and PSU might be far but at least he knows Elodie will have people there to reach out to if she needs it.

Joke's on Elodie though because going to college to annoy your brother does mean she just conned herself into taking classes and figuring out what to do with her life now and she has to do it while dodging 20 phone calls per hour. Anyway now that she's on PSU she has to learn how to do human person things like making friends. She ends up joining a roller derby team as a combo meeting people-getting exercise-venting anger deal.

Robin, on the other hand, is going through a similar situation where Andrew just graduated, and Neil is in his last year, so she's about to lose her anchors at PSU. Once Neil graduates, she won't have anyone to night practice with anymore, so she also joins the roller derby team to fill in her nights, in a way of trial-running how to maintain some sense of routine and normalcy and maybe make some friends as well.

And that is how the world's saddest most traumatized girls meet. They have no idea who the other really is at first because Elodie doesn't follow exy out of spite and they also don't tell each other their full names because they are very googlable and the team is for both of them a way to finding who they are outside of what happened to them, so they don't want to invite the past in there.

Neil figures it out pretty fast though, since he's been keeping an eye on Elodie, but he tells no one because he thinks it's going to be funny when Andrew and Jean (who absolutely hate each other) discover they're dating (He's right). The basic idea I have is that everyone kind of finds out at the same time when Andrew and Jean play against each other in a nearby city and both Elodie and Robin come to watch and it's a very spiderman pointing meme moment all around.

Getting to truly know each other then is a blessing and a curse because the similarities between their stories are as important as the differences. Elodie would have given everything to have parents that would want her back home and want to protect her and Robin would kill to have her family understand and relate to her trauma the way Jean does. Elodie genuinely cannot understand Robin's guilt over escaping by dooming another girl because she would have actively killed without remorse to break out. Robin doesn't get why Elodie is bitter over having to be rescued when she used to dream about someone finding and saving her. It's a very "grass is always greener on the other side" situation, and they clash a lot, but eventually they work it out.

I'm also thinking of having Robin being conflicted over whether she wants or even is capable of going pro (since as per the EC she technically wasn't good enough to be recruited if not for Andrew's constant endorsement). I'm not sure what Elodie would be majoring in, but that's fine because neither is Elodie. So that's something else they're both dealing with.

That's mostly what I have so far, I'm hoping some day this fic will grow a plot that can hold my attention so I can actually write it.

[drawinbutter]

GeniRiot (posted 9 years ago... has 4 Likes; my reblog of this will bring this post from last week pretty close to tying that :.(

artist?

[ladyriot]

Angela Montenegro for the character ask! -mix

• How I feel about this character

I really like Angela! I think she edges into my top 3 Bones characters. They did personify the free-spirited bisexual artist stereotype, but it works. At least they rounded it out with tech knowledge and just as much loyal dog, will bite you if you even try to hurt my friends energy as emotionality, so that she does feel like a genuine and well-rounded character.

• All the people I ship romantically with this character

Hodgins is fine. He's there. I think their swingset date was very cute and they work well together. I'm also a very loud brengela girl. Especially in the first 3-5 seasons, but even later, they just had so much chemistry and some of the most compatible lifestyles and worldviews. They don't need to shed their unconventionality for marriage and babies if you just put them together... it would be so easy. Also Angela needs to teach Brennan how polyamoury works. It's basically canon. And this might be niche, but she should've hooked up with that one delivery girl who Hodgins and Zach were fighting over. I ship that.

• My non-romantic OTP for this character

This is hard! Canonically, her friendships with Bones, Zach, and Sweets are all very dear to me. And she just should be best friends with Hannah. Like, come on. Kindred spirits to the absolute maximum.

• My unpopular opinion about this character

Have you ever seen the non-Tumblr opinion of Angela and the other Bones women? People seem to hate them, so it's basically unpopular to like them at all 😂

But a less cheating answer is that I honestly don't care if she's "overpowered" in technology. That Pelant story got so annoying by its end that I was glad for it.

• One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

I love her in roller derby. More roller derby!

[familiarscarsxelectrichearts]

Top 5 niche interests you have

1 - Roller Derby

2 - I'm aware this is the unhinged fic website, but writing and reading fic lol

3 - Plants

4 - Knitting

5 - Random scene/emo bands from the 2000s

thanks for the ask! 💕

[thatswhatsushesaid]

TGCF: the Roller Derby AU 😎

i love it when my niche interests (or interests-in-law; my husband is the one who sold his soul to roller derby back when he was like 19) intersect like this.

(for the unenlightened, here's a quick breakdown of roller derby rules and positions.)

OKAY:

team heavenly court:

captain: jun wu (there's some Drama around his and mei nianqing's departure from their last league, but no one asks questions about it because he's just So Good)

jammers: xie lian and jun wu, naturally

pivots: mu qing (used to be a blocker with feng xin, could not stop fighting while on the track), shi qingxuan, and mei nianqing

blockers: feng xin, shi wudu (when he's not sitting on the bench for incurring penalties any time sqx is jamming), pei ming, lang qianqiu, and quan yizhen

NSOs: ling wen, of course, and pei xiu

team ghost:

captain: hua cheng

jammers: ...hua cheng

pivots: yin yu and jian lan

blockers: qi rong (edited to add that he ALSO spends a lot of time on the bench because he just can't be normal about his cousin xie lian, and everyone is mad at him about it), rong guang and he xuan (rong guang and he xuan end up benched for penalties any time they're on the track at the same time as pei ming and shi wudu)

NSOs: banyue, xuan ji (or she was an NSO until she kept fucking up the points in pei ming's favour any time he's on the track); cuocuo gets honorary NSO status because he just likes feeling included and will pitch the biggest of toddler shitfits if he doesn't get his way

[altcrations]

It had been odd to her , the idea of the show . Her roller derby team was no stranger to events ever since they'd done a couple of CHEERLEADER style routines && their niche made them popular . What she hadn't understood was why they wanted them anywhere near a Marine-corps event .

No matter . At least she got to hang out with all those hunky military personal .

She still has her skates on , slipping angelically across the waxed floor to the edge of the rink that had been set up - eyes FIXED on what she wanted . That one Marine with the eyes , those sparkling eyes . The cheeky smirk . She's got one of those too . She pastes it on now , flipping the collar of the skimpy BASTARDISED version of fatigues that the whole group was wearing . Tongue against her teeth , adjusting her breasts in the push up .

She slides to a SLAMMING stop against the half wall , an OOOPH leaving her , eyes fixing on the older man's lips .

" 'iya darlin ' " she grins , " ya look like you'd REALLY piss me ma off if i took ya home - so how about ya just give me a quick buck in the jacks 'n we call it a day ? "

@never-surrender

[jackies-ear]

Therapist: what’s everyone niche thing?

Me, practically vibrating: pls get to me I want to talk abt roller derby

They did not make it to me :(

[tinybro]

fundraiser for my roller derby team is up! make a donation to vote for the best new player name, maybe help me win some team merch! a vote for hermes is a vote for niche mythology nerd bullshit ✨

[tmntphantom]

🏒 Does Casey play hockey?

🦸 Is Casey a vigilante?

🎤 Is April a reporter?

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Is April considered a sibling?

extra question: how did they meet eachother + the turtles?

tmnt ask game

🏒 no. at least i'm pretty sure she doesn't. i'm planning on having her play roller derby or something else with skates instead but this might change.

🦸 of sorts. she isn't as aggressive about it as she was in other iterations (as in she doesn't go out looking for crime) but yes she does like to beat up creeps and the likes

🎤 no, she isn't a reporter. she does run a niche ghost-hunting/cryptid blog though, and she does all the research herself.

👬(couldnt find the exact emoji) yes! april is like an older sister to the turtles.

edit: AH i didn't even see the extra ask! i'm not going to answer it here but i'll see if i can make a comic for it soon

[i-am-so-normal-about-wildlife]

Even better, its for very niche sports that you just have to deal with.

Like imagine being sent an official letter to play in the Olympic roller Derby