#the aesthetics of oppression they liked those but then never owned up to the actual story they were telling and retconned everything

[ithacanradio]

so sad that the arcane lesbians are a cop and a class traitor like they're very cool characters but everytime i see them i get the same feeling as when i have to be fake polite to the local police at my job

[the-grand-gemini]

More Gortash Analysis

I've seen lots of posts going over Enver Gortash's appearance and what story telling elements that gives us and I have more thoughts that won't leave me alone.

Gauntlet and Rings

Asthetic:

Aesthetically speaking they're obviously pretty (or gaudy depending on how you feel about an all gold arm piece), but also I can't not think that his whole look is to hide himself and make himself look more dangerous/compensate any of his perceived shortcomings (especially those he experienced in the hells).

His rings mimic claws like Raphael and other devilkin he may have dealt with in the hells. A basic weapon available to most deziens of the hells

Aids:

I imagin that the gauntlet, plus the rings on his other hand, hide and correct crooked fingers while also possibly help with pain. Acting like wrist and finger bracers.

As far as finger braces go even if he wasn't injured reparative writing and working with them (building machines etc) can lead to pain.

But personally I feel like the repeated breaking of fingers is something Raphael and/or Nubalidn may have done to punish him. This could have left lasting pain and possible disfigurement.

Disguise:

A disfigurement he wouldn't want the upper class to see or bother him about constantly. Again even if it wasn't from injury the hands of a builder or fighter (arms dealer/crime lord) will have changes that someone from a softer occupation or a life of leisure won't have. Duke Ravengard as a swordsman probably has hands that show past injury/work, but he's known for and revered for it. While Enver is trying to distance himself from anyone looking into his dodgy past.

ALSO... If anyone wants to write a fic where Tav (or Durge) massages his hands tag me please 👀👀👀 (I'm totally not projecting my own wrist/hand pain here what are you talking about).

The two mainly free fingers... We all know why 👀💦 but also it's probably so he can pick up a pen and write easily/do Archduke paperwork.

The Flame Shirt:

I've seen other posts talking about the flames and how he's laced his shirt and I don't have anything else to add other than ~ Guy Fieri vibes that I can't unsee 🔥🔥🔥

Coat Collar:

Again the coat has been discussed by lots of others in great detail and I love every analysis! However, I do want to talk about his collar specifically.

It's meant to be intimidating, but it also covers all of his neck and a good portion of his head. A very vulnerable location both physically and mentally. It screams I am hiding/anxious to me. He can't wear an all out hood without looking (even more) shady, but the high collar probably still acts as some kind of security. I don't think anyone else in game has a hood like this? There's the odd ruffled collar, but nothing like this outside of armour.

Also! Even though most coats are meant to (in fashion) elongate the figure) I feel that his collar makes him appear shorter. Does it darken his figure and make him stand out? Yes, but I feel like it falls short on making him look larger and more intimidating then it could if it cut off at the neck like a normal collar or continued into a full hood.

IF his coat was gifted to him by Bane (see man who prays to a god of tyranny and fear but his coat prevents him from experiencing the fear spell) I think it actually visually demonstrates how he isn't in charge at all.

Visually it makes him shorter and swallows his head a bit. It seems almost like there is a shadow behind him. Is the coat Bane visually oppressing Gortash? I think it's two fold, Gortash will never escape Raphael's shadow and he is within Bane's controll.

Idk this is probably too meta but the ideas wouldn't leave me alone until I screamed them into the void.

I want to talk about Orin's outfit next ahhhh

[spottheantisemitism]

Lizards and Goblins are not neccesarily antisemitic

Jewitches overview

Jewitches already provides examples of goblins and in Tolkien as being these villanious creatures with no Jewish coding and in Shakespeare Goblins are seen more like fairies and are shown positively so off to a good start for team “Goblins aren’t always antisemitic”

Goblins in Final Fantasy

Goblins are hit or miss in Final Fantasy at least according to this summary by a mutual

they have their own culture and focus on invention and hard work which aren’t negative (if arguably positive Jew coding) but they have a faction called the Illuminati (hello new world order conspiracy) which want to take over the world and worships a machine messiah named Alexander that when awakened tries to destroy the goblins that helped wake him to create a better world. Horrified the other goblins then helps the players fight this Alexander

“The Illuminati could be seen as Christians, with Quickthinx being Jesus. Shanoa could be seen as being akin to an angel, as could possibly Alexander Prime. You could be seen as having wrestled God/a God. Or I could be completely full of shit overthinking things.

I do think there's something to be said on how data gained from Alexander and later Omega, would be combined to send G'raha to the First from the Doomed Timeline, saving you and the future”

@arandomshotinthedark remarks in last paragraphs of the above link

while that’s a fascinating analysis, I find the focus on the development of Goblin Christianity out of Goblin Judaism a bit uncomfortable and supersessionist but fascinating plot point nonetheless

Goblins in Harry Potter

Harry Potter’s goblins are greedy bankers who care only for their in-group and their goods. No matter how charitably you slice it that Griphook is just reclaiming a sacred artifact and helps the heroes he still betrays them for the artifact and his hatred of wizards and muggles is treated as his problem and not trauma or paranoia. Rowling truly believes you should shrug off oppression as her essays on house elves show

The video game Hogwarts: Legacy that was written by a literal neo nazi goes further elaborates on this by having the plot center on quelling a goblin revolt. Regardless of your actions and the revelations that the goblins were merely pawns of an evil wizard, you cannot change the way people view goblins even in the more compassionate ending and it implies the only good goblins are two who don’t fight for their rights as those movements with inevitably be corrupted by bad actors. More subtly, goblins artifacts look like judaica, notably you can recover a ceremonial ram’s horn that’s oddly like a shofar. Why a race of beings that live underground and have never kept livestock use a ram’s horn and not the silver or gold they are famed for is never explained. The only explanation is the writer wanted to mock jews

I will disagree with a common criticism of the game being blood libel as there is no child kidnapping. The ‘child’ being kidnapped is the teenage player character and you very much foil the goblins attempt to kidnap you. The fact that the goblins are willing to kidnap a child to keep you from unraveling their plot is bad enough but it’s not blood libel

Goblincore

Goblincore is not antisemitic at all. It’s basically combining being a collector of shiny trinkets and not caring about appearance. Behind the fantasy name is a straight forward aesthetic that opens up “the hoodie and jeans, messy hair don’t care, I collect pop vinyls and old nintendos” aesthetic to people who aren’t cishet men.

I judge movements by their actions and not by what they claim to be hence gamergate is a hate movement, cottagecore is tradwifery for leftist women and goblincore is a -core for queer nerds who want to a less bigoted version of nerd culture or cottagecore without the misogyny. They’re linking goblins to jews they’re enbodying and empathizing with the goblins. If you movement is using the fantasy creature to promote empathy instead of xenophobia then more power to you

Lizards for David Icke

David Icke decided to use science fiction to stoke his antisemitism. Icke believes all major institutions are run by shapeshifting Lizards (aka reptilians) from the moon here to colonize humanity and enslave us. Icke also believed the all popes , all presidents and prime minister and every Zionist was actually a reptilian shapeshifter. Since the overlap between Zionist and jew is significant, Icke all but admitted he sees most jews as subhuman shapeshiftering lizards. Even the staunchest antizionists laugh this nonsense off (Alice Walker not included) and his theories are more popular with Nazis. Considering original Nazis stole from Blavatsky’s mysticism of the aryan descendants of the hypeborean race from antarctica that’s just tradition at this point

Lizards in Dracula

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula is compared to lizard when he crawls up a wall that a human like the narrator Jonathan Harker cannot (until Jonathan manages to do just that rendering the point moot). This a non issue since it was written before the reptilian was a concept. It is however used to dehumanize the count as other not code him as specifically Jewish. It’s xenophobia, not antisemitism. So maybe the people in making lizard jokes and the people smugly accusing them of antisemitism should both cut that shit out

Lizards in she-ra

I was told Double Trouble was an antisemitic stereotype because they only care about money and being good at infiltration and lack morals (same could be said of Marc Spector and yet no one calls him an antisemitic stereotype). Oh and they’re a Lizard creature like the Reptilians in Icke’s screed.

this is so patently ludicrous to the point where I believe this was a psyop to push Jews out of the She-Ra fandom, because oh my G-D this could not be made in good faith.

TL;DR

Goblins often antisemitic but not necessarily, Lizards almost never antisemitic unless Reptilian is used

[delta-queerdrant]

the best allies we could have (Alliances, s2 e14)

If Voyager’s Kazon arc has a peak, it’s “Alliances.” Here it is, the dramatic turning point in our understanding of Delta Quadrant politics! This episode has a kernel of something almost compelling, but like much of season two, it’s sadly undercut by storytelling failures.

We cold-open on a firefight with the Kazon. Star Trek battle scenes are so silly; why do the consoles explode? I guess the claustrophobic mayhem is a holdover from the nuclear submarine aesthetics of TOS. I will never not be amused by how Janeway’s hair explodes every time they’re in a fight. Are there no bobby pins in space?

A crewman dies in the battle, and we learn that two more have died in previous Kazon encounters, our first casualties since Durst got de-faced (lol) by the Vidiians. The tension is real - redshirt deaths hit differently when a small crew has trauma-bonded in space.

A faction of the crew wants to buy off the pursuing Kazon with Federation technology, but Janeway won’t turn her back on the Prime Directive. The Starfleet/Maquis divide, usually an afterthought, feels momentarily real. We’re treated to a three-way debate between Janeway’s lawful good authoritarianism, Chakotay’s collaborative ethos, and Tuvok’s detached realpolitik. “This isn’t a democracy, Chakotay, I can’t run this ship by consensus,” Janeway says, briefly inviting a utopian, communitarian vision of a Voyager actually run by consensus. But even she’s swayed by Tuvok’s (frankly, bullshit) suggestion that a temporary alliance with the Kazon has the potential to make the Delta Quadrant more stable as long as Voyager doesn’t actually hand over technology.

This is arguably a weak leadership moment for Janeway, who can’t adapt to the demands of her environment or crew, but maybe it’s okay to be a rules-y Taurus if you surround yourself with people who correct your worst impulses.

Janeway reaches out to Seska to try to broker a deal, which is fun because it’s genuinely unexpected and makes Chakotay so squirmy. Meanwhile Neelix makes contact with a Kazon acquaintance. They meet up in what I believe is the first “hive of scum and villainy” of the series. You know these people are up to no good because there are alien bikini girls!

Here Neelix encounters the Trabe, another local alien species who have their own story to tell. The episode both becomes interesting and loses the plot completely.

The Trabe tell Voyager that “over thirty years ago,” they enslaved the Kazon in an apartheid society. When the Kazon rose up, the Trabe lost everything. Now the Trabe are a landless people still persecuted by those they oppressed, even though decades have passed and many of the Trabe were children when the Kazon overthrew them.

Janeway is delighted - instead of allying with the Kazon, they can ally with the friendly Trabe! Chakotay agrees - the Trabe, after all, have openly acknowledged the harm their people caused.

Meanwhile, me: OMG NOOOO THEY FOUND WHITE PEOPLE IN SPACE

Previously I wrote about the Kazon as a parable for midcentury US race relations. Before I rewatched “Alliances,” I genuinely thought they were just clearance-rack racialized space baddies, but here the parallels to white Boomer experiences of the 1960s uprisings are unmistakable. It’s a resonant scene, but watching our command team fall over each other to befriend their new pals is… stressful.

The Trabe build on Janeway's proposal: together they’ll bring the Kazon together and negotiate for peace. But when the meeting begins, the viewer can’t help but notice that the Kazon seem like the most reasonable people in the room. They don’t trust the Trabe or Janeway, and they have a much better read on the power dynamics at play than Janeway does. Because the meeting is a fucking trap.

This episode is such a bummer. Maybe I'm being too charitable, but it feels like a genuine attempt at anti-white supremacist storytelling that missed the mark. Janeway, our audience surrogate, is presented with a complex political situation and immediately latches onto the group she identifies with: white-presenting people who have claimed the moral high ground after centuries as oppressors. Then the rug is pulled out from under her. White liberalism as a facade for violence is a very mid-nineties dynamic.

The full impact of this plot twist relies on the viewer sharing Janeway’s white myopia. If you don’t implicitly trust the Trabe (or the writers), you spend the whole episode screaming at the television. Why are our protagonists so clueless?

“I hope there's a lesson for all of us in this,” Janeway says in the final scene. “Although some of the species we've encountered here have been peaceful, others seem governed only by their own self-interests.” It’s not a good look when our hero has traveled 70,000 light years to learn that… politics are a thing? And why didn’t her command team didn’t save her from herself? Are you telling me that Chakotay, the Indigenous anti-authoritarian militant, is this politically naive?

If “Alliances” is at times a smart portrait of how an oppressor mindset operates, it’s undermined by an offensive caricature of resistance. Violent resistance absolutely can be fueled by an ideology of separatism and racial hatred, but the Kazon aren’t a resistance movement; they’ve won. Yet the Kazon resemble white peoples' worst fears of postcolonial "failed states." It feels like the writers genuinely believe that the political and social problems of formerly dispossessed people are of their own making, not recognizing the ways that white supremacy and economic imperialism still actively shape the lives of formerly colonized peoples. The Kazon only make sense in a universe where the Trabe are still economically and politically exploiting them, and that's not the universe we're shown.

We needed an episode with this shape, one that sets up the hard political choices of later seasons, and I can accept that requires our characters to exercise truly poor judgment. But this attempt at gritty politics doesn’t feel grounded in anything real, and the result feels disappointingly thin.

2/5 triangular tables.

[acquired-stardust]

Game Spotlight #13: Nioh 2: Complete Edition (2020)

Acquired Stardust's first game spotlight of the new year is here! Come along with Ash on a long look into one of the greatest games of the past generation and a little bit of a look into where its influences, and even its overall genre, lie.

As previously discussed, I think Nioh is a title that lives and dies by its comparisons to Dark Souls. Director Fumihiko Yasuda has been transparent in his admission that Nioh was inspired by Dark Souls, and the influence is clear. As a matter of fact I don't think it's a stretch to say that after a decade in development hell it's likely due to the success of Dark Souls that Nioh was able to see the light of day in the first place. Team Ninja cleverly designed the opening hours of Nioh 1 to appeal to fans of the smash hit Souls series with eerie, tense enemy introductions and a slow combat system that eventually gives way to a deep and fast action game by the time the opening hours of the game are up, at which point players coming to Nioh simply for more Dark Souls are lead to one of two conclusions: either 'this isn't Dark Souls and that sucks' or 'this isn't Dark Souls and that's awesome'.

The slow burn of Nioh revealing its identity to the player as not just a mere Soulslike, instead an unmistakable fusion of Blizzard's Diablo and Team Ninja's own previous success Ninja Gaiden, is a satisfying one. Seeing a game go from standing in the shadow of another massive success to one with its own impressive vision and execution all in a single game, within the space of just a few hours, was one of the coolest experiences I've had with a game. It's my pleasure to report that Nioh 2 doubles down on everything that made the first game special, and represents an official divergence from the label of Soulslike into a little-discussed larger genre known as 'masocore'.

"Masocore" is a large umbrella, a broad style of game and design philosophy, with titles that span a variety of genres from precision platformers to action games and everything in between. And while you may not have heard the term before it's not a new phenomenon per se as you're likely more familiar with the saying 'Nintendo hard' that hearkens back to the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System when games were often cryptic and overly punishing in their designs. It is the goal of masocore games to deliver those sorts of punishing and oppressive experiences to players so that the eventual triumph feels all the sweeter. Not every developer has the vision and expertise to deliver on the promise of the genre - not so with Nioh which saw an incredible utilization of the nature of masocore titles to effectively communicate not just its brutal setting but provide a deep sense of immersion to its gameplay. While many developers simply wear the masocore aesthetic as a gimmick, Team Ninja utilized it expertly in the original Nioh title and continues to do so in its sequel.

It's also important to note that while you may not have heard of the masocore term, Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda most certainly has and while he has freely admitted the influence Dark Souls had on his project he's never actually called the games Soulslikes - he instead refers to them himself as masocore titles. The label of 'Soulslikes' was inevitably but perhaps unfairly attached to Nioh from the start, but is certainly unwarranted for Nioh 2 which represents a bold step forward in both vision and execution for a series that already shined bright in these areas and a complete divergence from any attempt to bridge the gap between fans of Dark Souls and Nioh, proudly wearing its vision on its sleeve from the start.

Featuring every single mechanic from Nioh 1, an already staggering number of ways to interact with a game of surprising and impressive length, Nioh 2 does indeed double down on all of them. On top of every weapon type from the previous title returning with new and reworked abilities as well as three stances (each with their own movesets attached to them), Nioh 2 adds a whopping four additional melee weapon types along with new ninjutsu and onmyo magic techniques as well as making both of those categories much more viable for use. The Living Weapon and Guardian Spirit mechanics make a return and has seen a significant expansion, replacing its upgraded moveset per weapon with three unique forms with movesets tied to them based on the classification of the currently equipped spirit (that's Brute, Feral and Phantom classes) each with their own Burst Counter unique to each class of guardian spirit. Burst Counters are a new mechanic that allows the player to interrupt big telegraphed enemy attacks (always associated with a red glow) and create an opening for offense, with the counter using a small portion of the new Anima gauge.

The Anima gauge is also used for the game's most impressive and obvious addition to the gameplay formula with Yokai Abilities, which sees enemies have a chance to drop a Soul Core which can be equipped to your Guardian Spirit (for a total of up to three different cores) and allow you to perform an attack based on the particular enemy you obtained the Soul Core from. There is an impressive number of these Soul Cores in the game, with the majority of enemies being able to drop them, and each comes with an array of passive effects (some of which baked in and inherent to the particular enemy type, some of which are randomized) tied to the Soul Core which adds an astounding number of additional opportunities for customization. Just as well there are the new Demon Scrolls, items obtained starting only on the game's first run of New Game Plus (of which there are 5 total difficulties, each with their own escalating recommended levels as well as featuring remixed and new encounters).

Demon Scrolls drop randomly from enemies, similar to Soul Cores, and give the player a repeatable arena-style fight with predetermined enemies that ultimately turns the Scroll into an equippable item with an increasing number of passive bonuses depending on the tier of rarity of the Scroll. These encounters, repeatable, can be utilized to farm Soul Cores and items from specific enemies but also allow the player to reroll one effect from the Scroll upon subsequent completions of the battle.

It isn't only the gameplay systems that have seen an impressive expansion and upgrade that doubles down on the original's vision. Opening in the middle of the Sengoku as opposed to the tail end of it like in Nioh 1, we are treated to a surprising and impressive character creation suite with lots of room to create your own character or even attempt to recreate one from various media before being launched into its significantly more complex story.

Opening with our protagonist having a chance meeting with a young Kinoshita Tokichiro, one of history's least likely success stories and most fascinating people, the base game storyline of Nioh 2 chronicles his meteoric rise through the rigid social strata of the turbulent Sengoku era Japan in a roughly 60 year period before his eventual fall. The story features a higher number of active characters and even deeper ties to real-world history, as well as many instances of toying with history and verging into alt-history in fun ways and culminates in a surprisingly touching way before picking back up in an awesome epilogue and its three DLC episodes.

It is unafraid to throw gamers headfirst into the complex web of events and does not hold the player's hand through the twists and turns of territorial gains and political allegiance swaps, in part because it offers a surprisingly robust encyclopedia that features entries on each and every character in the game that unlocks subsequent lore entries as you advance through the game for those who would like to really study the events of the game which largely mirror actual history. As an aside the game sees my favorite integration of face scanned actors in all of gaming, which often feels like hollow and distracting celebrity cameos to me. The casting of Naoto Takenaka as Tokichiro is a particular stroke of genius in this regard, as the actor has played the historical figure several times previously in live action and his unique voice, sounding less like an overly polished voice actor and more like a person you could actually talk to in the real world, lends a remarkably genuine human element to an otherwise larger than life character.

Nioh 2's encyclopedia also extends to the game's large variety of enemies, again split between human and the demonic Yokai, with the majority of Yokai based on actual Japanese mythology. These Yokai have their own language that is heard and seen through undecipherable subtitles upon picking up a Soul Core, with enough Soul Cores having the benefit of translating the aforementioned subtitles and providing a little more insight into the particular Yokai.

Speaking of the different enemy types and changes to the game, Nioh 2 features a drastically higher ratio of Yokai enemies than the original game and marks another real divergence point in how it feels to play. Yokai, who's ki must be depleted before there are real guaranteed openings to attack them (with said ki only being able to be reduced through risky attacks you shouldn't fully commit to lest you tempt a swift death), are prone to otherwise unpredictable amounts of hyper armor that ignore the hitstun of your attacks. They most certainly require a different mindset and skillset to battle, and the huge increase in Yokai enemies may deter some players but it does offer a lot more opportunity for various elements of the game to shine. Tonfa in particular, which eventually allow for the player to animation cancel significantly more often than other weapons, provide a really engaging sense of interaction against these lethal enemies.

With the increase in Yokai enemies comes an unavoidable fact: Nioh 2 is considerably harder than the first entry on a base level. Enemies are harder to interact with in favorable manners and are faster, often with wider ranging attacks radiuses and trickier animations. Burst Counters and Yokai Abilities added into the mix also highlight the issue of input bloat from the first title that has only gotten worse with the increase in difficulty and overall game speed. While certainly absolutely more challenging and even challenging in meta ways like input bloat I do not consider this a flaw per se - it is merely a mild growing pain in the long journey towards mastery of the game mechanics that is, of course, part and parcel with the masocore genre. You are meant to be challenged and feel like survival, nevermind comfortability, are impossibilities and that feeling of danger helps sell the story, world and their stakes incredibly well. Mastery over the game's overwhelming number of mechanics and potential interactions is a long road but more satisfying than almost any other game I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

Of course, this being The Complete Edition, Nioh 2 does feature three DLC episodes bringing more story content and side missions that explore other fondly regarded periods of Japanese history and further utilize the characteristics of the masocore genre to make a very salient point about history: there is no utopian past from which we have strayed. Frantic soldiers in the Genpei War lament their helplessness, villages burn and their inhabitants are massacred, and discrimination sets people down the path of bloody revenge. While there may indeed be heroes and heroism, life has and always will be a brutal struggle against the harsh realities of nature as well as against our own worst instincts. These expansions to the base game are each as fascinating and satisfying as the base game, and can feel just as meaty with the content included, which is a real testament to the overall vision and its execution.

While much has been made of Nioh's connections to and divergence from the Soulslike label, its connections to Diablo and Team Ninja's previous outing in the 3D Ninja Gaiden games run far deeper. In fact while many of the references made in the first Nioh have been retained (such as cameos from series regular Muramasa with the same design as in those games as well as Nioh's small treasure chests' designs being directly lifted from the Ninja Gaiden games) there are even more that have been included in Nioh 2. The Tsuchigumo ninja, rival clan to Ninja Gaiden's protagonist clan, see a glorious return to gaming complete with their eponymous Yokai making an appearance. Ninja Gaiden 2 (2008) opens with an enemy throwing hatchets at protagonist Ryu Hayabusa and Nioh 2 manages to include the same hatchets as a new usable weapontype complete with a weapon throwing mechanic for them. The masocore genre existed long before Dark Souls became synonymous with it and there was a time Team Ninja was thought of as being the kings of it in the days of a waning scene for Japanese games, perceived as being well into a decline in the aughts.

The rise of the blockbuster shooter in the mid to late 2000s completely changed the discourse around video games for one simple reason: it introduced so many people to gaming that many of the people talking about games now simply weren't around then, and many who were around then were likely too young to be playing much beyond what completely gripped the entire mainstream gaming scene at the time. A million games came and went while the likes of Gears of War, Halo and Call of Duty monopolized our collective playtime and this time in gaming is poorly remembered because of it. One such example of this is the way in which Dark Souls has become quite so synonymous with 'hard games', to the point that even Crash Bandicoot, returning to prominence thanks to a wonderful remaster of the original trilogy, has often been called "the Dark Souls of platformers" despite its entire existence playing out well before Dark Souls was born.

Nioh's bucking of the monopoly From Software's Dark Souls (along with Sekiro and Elden Ring - perhaps spotlights for another time) have on our perception of and conversation around hard games is significant, and its place among the upper echelon of masocore titles is simply undeniable. Bigger and better in almost every conceivable way than its already fantastic and extremely dense predecessor, Nioh 2 is easily able to keep you busy for several hundred hours provided you're willing to give it that much time. It's also developed with multiplayer in mind in a significantly deeper way from enemy attack animations to the push and pull of the Assist Gauge as well as a reliable scaling down of player stats if there are large discrepancies to keep things relatively on the rails, making for a wonderful experience with up to two other players across the vast majority of its missions.

Nioh 2 is unquestionably worth every minute you're willing to put into it, and likely even more no matter how much you've spent on it. The sheer breadth of the experience is almost too much to describe and encapsulate in this spotlight - it needs to be experienced first hand to be truly understood.

A gem hidden among the stones, Nioh 2 is undoubtedly stardust.

--Ash

[coffeecatcraze]

"Pieck still wearing her stolen Scout Regiment coat in the final battle is just a meta aesthetic choice and a way to have the wings that symbolize freedom and have been such an iconic part of the series visible during that fight, it has no character relevance" well maybe not to YOU, but as a serial over-analyzer of my faves, I have my own thoughts on the subject.

Honestly, Pieck shouldn't have hesitated before throwing that coat away as soon as she didn't need it for her undercover mission anymore. It's the crest of the people who attacked her home; it's the crest of the asshole who's about to destroy the world. She took off the medallion, but kept the coat, even with all the downtime they ended up having. Why? Practical reasons? Forget it; even if the weather's cold, she's wearing long sleeves under the coat, and as the Cart Titan, she knows she's gonna be in a warm Titan body for a good amount of time. So why keep it?

(Besides the fact that she looks better in it than most of the actual Paradis soldiers, of course.)

I'd bet Reiner told the other Warriors what those wings mean: the desire for freedom from being preyed on, freedom to explore the world, freedom to have choices and stay safe and be yourself. So why wear the enemy's symbol when she doesn't have to anymore? Because those are all things she, as an Eldian who's lived under the oppression of Marley and had to forfeit her life to the military just so her father could see a doctor, understands and desires for herself. None of the Warriors have ever been free; they never even had the illusion of it. They've been constantly reminded that their race exists to be hated and oppressed for their whole lives.

She's also accepted that after Eren's bullshit, Eldians might be even worse off than before; that means what little freedom she managed to glimpse will likely be gone forever, if she even survives. Besides, the Scouts were formed to give their hearts for humanity's future, and isn't that what they're all doing? Charging into almost certain death for the hope of giving humanity a future of freedom?

When Jean tells Reiner they're Scouts, that doesn't just extend to the people who signed up for the Scout Regiment at some point. It's also everyone else who's fighting Eren not just for themselves, but for the people around them and for the comrades they've lost. They're fighting selflessly, not for vengeance or for their own sakes. They can try and find a safe place to wait out the apocalypse, but they choose not to.

The people who signed up for the Scouts charge towards the most dangerous bastard in the world for humanity's sake without hesitation; Pieck and Onyankopon are right there with them; and when Falco realizes he can get to them, Gabi and Annie go with him, putting their lives on the line for the sake of protecting others when they could just as easily have stayed behind with Kiyomi. The fact that Keith Shadis, who hasn't worn the Wings of Freedom in years, decided to put on a Scout's jacket when he came to the port to help only reinforces the point: it's a symbol that represents going against everything Eren wants to do. It's the symbol of those who want to create a future for humanity, and it's something worn by those who fight against the extermination of humanity outside of the island.

Floch and the other Jaegerists weren't Scouts by the end. They'd turned into the nobles from the old regime, the ones from before Historia became queen: obsessed with defending the people they consider elites, even if it means sacrificing thousands of "lesser" lives. The only difference is they were willing to be active participants in those crimes against humanity.

So, in my character-oriented overthinking brain, that's why Pieck kept the coat. She understands what those wings are supposed to mean, and she has the spirit of the a true Scout in her: refusing to give up, fighting for humanity's future, and hoping to find freedom even while being willing to give everything she has.

And the Scouts do win this time; they are given their freedom; and they accomplish their goal of creating a future for what's left of humanity. They dedicate their hearts, and they win.

Also we don't know how many times her Titan form was killed offscreen, but we do know she estimated she's capable of over a hundred transformations before her energy runs out. She was willing to fling herself out of a badly injured Titan body and transform again, over and over. Please keep in mind that we've seen Titan users experience the pain of their Titan bodies. Now imagine having a body that gets killing and crippling blows over and over, and jumping right back into the fight with a new body that can get just as damaged as the last one. The exhaustion and trauma from that, holy shit; and there's no time for a break between the adrenaline of the fight, the adrenaline of seeing her father who she thought was dead, and the adrenaline of having to jump into another fight after the father she just reunited with got turned into a Titan.

Please let this woman have a good 12-hour nap. She deserves it.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Liz Lamere on Alan Vega and Her Solo Career: Whatever Happens, Happens

Liz Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Liz Lamere's got a story to tell, and one that won't end any time soon. The former Wall Street lawyer and boxer and current singer-songwriter is also the widow and former creative partner of the late, great Alan Vega, the visual artist and vocalist of landmark proto-punk duo Suicide. Since Vega's death in 2016, Lamere has, in conjunction with Jared Artaud of post-punk act The Vacant Lots, worked to bring to light a wealth of unreleased material from Vega's vault.

After the release of 2017's It, the final album Vega recorded before he died, Lamere and Artaud discovered the material that would constitute the 2021 release Mutator. In 2022, they unearthed the songs that would be released this past May as Insurrection (In The Red). It hasn't been until now, however, where there's been a simultaneous awakening of all things Vega. In addition to Insurrection, Artaud co-curated "Cesspool Saints", an exhibition of Vega's fine art works, which opened two months ago at Laurent Godin's Gallery in Paris. Lamere, meanwhile, co-wrote Vega's biography with Laura Davis-Chanin, entitled Infamous Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat Books). (The foreword? By none other than Bruce Springsteen.) With a rich collection of songs waiting for ears--material that Lamere and Vega recorded and Vega meticulously documented between actually released Vega solo albums throughout the 90s and 2000s--it's become clear that Vega's backlog rivals of those like Prince and Arthur Russell, full of albums that are contextualized by what was recorded before and after them but that stand alone as cohesive statements.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

At the same time as everything Vega-related, Lamere has finally found not just the time but the will to release her own solo records, an artistic career that Vega always encouraged but never was able to witness. Her songs are certainly different than Vega's in terms of subject matter and aesthetic, but Lamere credits Vega's approach to music-making--be spontaneous and fearless and realize that nothing is a mistake--for informing her artistic process. She started working on her debut, Keep It Alive, during COVID lockdown, and finished the album in mere weeks. Her follow-up, One Never Knows (In The Red), released last month, took a little bit longer to make, understandably when Lamere was working on Vega's biography and Insurrection all at the same time. Thankfully, Lamere was able to separate the entities, another thing she took from Vega. "It wasn't too difficult to compartmentalize because I wore so many different hats and did so many different things, like Alan," Lamere said over the phone last month. "Alan could be hyper-focused on visual art, and then hyper-focused on music and sound. They might be different sides of the same coin, but whatever he was focused on, he was so in the moment and heavily focused on that creation."

To really understand Vega's perspective on art and life, you have to go far back into the oft-ignored details that inspired Lamere to start writing his biography. Vega was, infamously, 10 years older than everyone thought; various articles incorrectly referred to 1948 as his birth year rather than 1938, confirmed when the 70th birthday release of his recordings was announced in 2008. The parents of the man born Alan Bermowitz were Jewish immigrants. His first wife, Mariette Bermowitz (née Birencwajg), is a Holocaust survivor from Belgium; they met attending Brooklyn College. Lamere credits such a close familial proximity to persecution as a reason for the trauma Vega felt, and also why he chose to not use his birth name as his stage name. But such closeness was also why Vega chose to sing about difficult topics in his music. "Alan was always hypersensitive to any type of oppression or challenging situations," Lamere said. "He had tremendous empathy. He wasn't doom and gloom but more readily shining a light." Out of college, Vega worked for the Welfare Department, eventually quitting because he felt the menial work he was tasked with doing didn't allow him to make a true difference in the lives of the poor. But the experience helped him understand how to secure funding when working with the Art Workers' Coalition, and from the New York State Council on the Arts to help found 24-hour artist-run multimedia gallery MUSEUM: A Project of Living Artists.

Alan Vega; photo by Walter Robinson

Vega possessed the ability to apply what he learned from one effort to another, and his mind was well-rounded. He actually enrolled in Brooklyn College not for art, but for astrophysics, having received a scholarship as a result of his building his own telescope(!) But one day, the head of the Art Department witnessed Vega sketching portrait drawings in the cafeteria and immediately recognized Vega's artistic brilliance and convinced him to study art. (Vega's portrait drawings appear in the video for Lamere's "King City Ghost".) Vega ended up studying with legendary artists like Kurt Seligmann and Ad Reinhardt. When substitute teaching a class for Reinhardt during his senior year, Vega assigned students a self-portrait to be turned in the next class, but instead of collecting them, he told the students to rip them up. "When he was telling me the story," said Lamere, "He said, 'You should have seen the look on these kids' faces!'" But Vega viewed art as, in the words of Lamere, "coming from a pure place of expression," not of preciousness, and one worthy of consuming your life. Vega met Martin Rev and formed Suicide in 1970, garnering notice for their wild live shows throughout the New York punk scene. After they released their self-titled debut in 1977, they toured with The Clash, an infamous time during which the crowd, unable to understand the Suicide's artistic vision, would throw switchblades at the band. "Alan was willing to be...out there front and center and put his life on the line, literally," Lamere said. "He believed so strongly that what [Suicide was] doing was breaking new ground and important in its own right."

Vega had been releasing solo albums for a decade before Lamere came in the picture; he met her while making 1990's Deuce Avenue, the record that returned to the beloved electronic minimalism of Suicide. Though the actual release of solo albums was sporadic, he and Lamere never stopped making music. "When we were in the studio together all those years, I was very much the type of person thinking about releasing albums, whereas Alan wasn't structured in that way," Lamere said. "His thought was, 'We're going into the studio to create sound, and whatever happens, happens...' Part of his process was he would just keep moving forward. Unless I said, 'Hit stop,' so we could put out an album of what we'd been working on right at [that] moment in time, he would keep evolving and moving forward on new material." Vega constantly wrote poetry in his notebooks, often using what he wrote for ad-libbed song lyrics; Lamere was actively involved in mixing their recordings. At the same time, Vega was a staunch documenter. He would burn a CD of what he and Lamere had worked on in the studio and note down changes he thought they needed to make to each song. Even the titles of the songs from Mutator and Insurrection came from his notebooks.

Insurrection artwork design by Michael Handis

The extent to which, upon being done with a song or an album, Vega moved on, proved to be extreme, and would have ripple effects on Lamere's solo career. The two, along with French director Marc Hurtado, would tour Europe after recording a solo album and perform the unreleased songs they'd recorded. ("The Europeans have heard a lot of this stuff before," joked Lamere about Mutator and Insurrection.) For the songs that had been released, Vega would rely on Lamere to feed him lines so that he could give the audience at least something recognizable. "I would be chanting little phrases, he would hear that, and he would riff on it, and the audience would be happy even though the lyrics [were] mostly completely different," Lamere said. "I learned to 'sing' because Alan never wanted to rehearse anything...I kind of learned a little bit how to project my voice." Meanwhile, upon hearing it for the first time, Vega didn't even remember "Nike Soldier", a track long-time engineer Perkin Barnes had digitized and Lamere chose for a split single with The Vacant Lots in 2014. Lamere's the opposite. "When we first started mixing [Insurrection], I could literally remember and envision the days in the studio I was laying down [those riffs]." But the ultimate story comes from when Springsteen, touring Devils & Dust, invited Vega to one of his shows, as he had been covering Suicide classic "Dream Baby Dream" during the encore. "[Vega] literally was sitting with Jesse [Malin], they're waiting for the show to start, and on the PA comes the song 'Dujang Prang' that he and I had done in 1995," Lamere said. "Alan turns to Jesse and says, 'This is really good, do you know who this is?' Jesse said, 'Alan, that's your song.' That's classic Alan: been there, done that, don't wanna hear it."

It was during the release of The Vacant Lots split single where Vega gave Artaud and Lamere his blessing to unearth songs from the vault. The single happened when Artaud reached out to Vega, sharing The Vacant Lots' cover of Vega's "No More Christmas Blues". The two men became fast friends, as Artaud, living in Brooklyn Heights a subway stop away from Vega and Lamere in Lower Manhattan, often visited. "Jared would come over here and sit and talk to Alan for hours about everything," Lamere said. "He had listened to every piece of music that Alan had pretty much ever done. He understood Alan's philosophy of creation and the minimalism and the existential philosophers that Alan had studied." As for Lamere, Vega knew that her approach to producing his music was intuitive. "After Alan heard 'Nike Soldier', I said, 'Alan, you have no idea how much material is in the computer in the studio of what we've done over the years,'" Lamere said. "He said, 'I know. Once I'm gone, you should feel free to put it out because I trust your judgement. You've worked with me for so long, you're my co-producer.' I could go in and make these tracks sound completely different. But I make what Alan would want. He's still so present with us because he had such a strong influence on us. It's part of our DNA. That's the reality."

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Insurrection was recorded in the late 90s, and you can hear its influence on the material that would make up 1999's 2007. The album is a snapshot of an era for Vega, New York City, and the world at large. Dante, Vega and Lamere's child, was about to be born, so Vega's mind was occupied with the post-Gulf War, pre-9/11 state of a city and country rife with racism and capitalistic rot. (The mention of 9/11 is not teleological; Vega literally had premonitions of a terror attack in New York City.) Songs like "Sewer" and "Invasion" sport thumping, propulsive beats and clattering, machine-like percussion, the most messed-up club songs you've ever heard, Vega chanting like a street urchin. The presciently titled "Murder One" and "Genocide" are circular, droning, and forward-lurching. The instrumentation is perfect for Vega's mantras and pleas to "Make a new reality!' Lamere's One Never Knows, though a personal album whose singles' videos feature Lamere sort of half-boxing, half-dancing, a callback to her earlier career, echoes Vega's idealistic spirit. "Don't destroy the dream tonight," she sings on the dystopian "If Only", an almost 50-year-later spiritual sibling to Suicide's best known song.

One Never Knows, like Keep It Alive, was engineered by Dante at their Dujang Prang home studio, where Alan held his sculptures. Before the pandemic, Dante had been working with hip-hop artists, but as they weren't coming in during lockdown, Lamere asked him to help her with her solo debut. Dante sang in The Choir of Trinity Wall Street for 10 years and purportedly has perfect pitch, whereas Lamere is not formally trained. "He wants to help other people with their vision," Lamere said of her son. "I do say to him once in a while, because I run a lot of sounds through the keyboard, 'What key is this?'...He knows I like dissonance, so he says, 'If you like it, it works.'" Lamere's taking a key from Vega and not wanting to get technical any time soon. "I'm sure Miles Davis had his pick of brilliant musicians to work with, but Alan used to say, 'Miles Davis liked working with people who weren't necessarily formally trained.' They didn't say, 'You're not supposed to do that,' or, 'This is what you're supposed to do here, this chord progression.' No! It's none of that. There are no rules," Lamere said.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Lamere's planning on taking the same approach to her recording as playing live, but with a little bit of her boxing knowledge thrown in. "When I was performing with Alan, I was always playing effects machines in the background. It's a whole different animal carrying the show front and center," she said. "For me, it's like getting in the ring sparring. You have to be hyper-focused. The adrenaline kicks in. It's a great feeling...It scares the shit out of me ahead of time. In the moment, I absolutely love it. Alan was the same way. He wouldn't even be thinking about getting on stage, but as soon as he did, he kind of embraced it."

As always, her musical endeavors will constitute at least some work with the Vega vault. For one, according to Lamere, there are about 4 or 5 albums worth of material from the 8 years between the release of 2007 and Station alone, from when they were first raising Dante, as well as even more from after Station, despite Vega suffering a stroke in 2012. "I love the opportunity for people to hear what I'm doing and discover what Alan did and is continuing to do," Lamere said. "I love the fact that he's still influencing people from beyond."

One Never Knows artwork: Jasmine Hirst

[cosyrosemary]

me

The drawing is mine, and I’ll explain why I’m sharing it under another name instead of my actual usernames I’m known for.

I’ve known for about 9 years now that I’m demisexual.

I discovered it by accident. Not even joking… I was actually looking up information on asexuality, because some of my friends were half joking about another friend being asexual (due to the lack of partners, I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️) and I didn’t think he was asexual. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t believe he was. So I got curious and looked it up. I barely knew anything at all. But I did not expect to find my own sexuality in the process.

Growing up I never understood what people meant when they were talking about “that hot guy” or whatever. Sure I could see someone was aesthetically pleasing to look at. But that didn’t make me want to hook up with them. I didn’t understand attraction. Not as a child, not as a teen and even in my (young) adulthood it was a weird concept to me.

I know that because I appeared “straight” to the outside world, that I didn’t suffer like many of my fellow queer people. But I guess you could say I was hiding it. And to be fair, to an extent, I still am.

I’ve been in long relationship (mid teens to early twenties) before, with someone to whom I was not sexually attracted in the slightest. I also did not have a deep connection to them, despite being in a relationship and living together. Whenever we were intimate, it was because he made me. I did not enjoy it, I never really have. I had no desire in that sense. I hated being intimate. And I thought this was normal for women!

It wasn’t until my husband that I realised I could in fact be attracted (both sexually and mentally) to someone after all. I always thought something was wrong with me. Since -despite various partners- I never found anyone particularly hot (and besides my husband, I still don’t). I did not understand what that felt like. And people who knew made fun of me or they didn’t believe me. Especially during my childhood and teenage years. It made me feel like a weirdo.

I’m now a married woman in my late thirties. I have a husband and we have kids. My husband knows I’m demisexual. It doesn’t change a thing for him.

But reading about demisexuality really helped me find some missing pieces of the puzzle.

For the past 17 years I’ve been in a monogamous relationship to my now husband. So I doubt I’ll ever get to figure it out for real, and I don’t have the desire to either because I don’t feel I’m missing anything (thought I can’t deny I’m curious what it would be like with someone from the same gender!). And I have never said it out loud… But I think I’m a panromantic demisexual. How I know? Just something I feel I guess. I always assumed I was straight because I was supposed to be according to the media and those around me.

And yet, I feel like a fraud for even saying I’m demi or grey ace.

When I just discovered my own sexuality, my gay friends did not understand and were upset!? I never felt the need to say I’m also part of lgbtqia+ or queer or that I was deserving to take part in pride. But why the hell wouldn’t I be? I have been oppressed too, albeit less than someone who is actually out.

I don’t feel comfortable yet coming out and I don’t know if I ever will.

But I have been dropping hints -jokingly- that I’m the A+ at the very end of LGBTQIA+

It’s a start.

🏳️‍🌈

[wolfreader]

july 2024 wrap-up - young adult fiction

this month i read six (6) young adult novels.

an ember in the ashes by sabaa tahir 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

i was a bit hesitant because extremely hyped young adult fiction rarely works out for me, especially young adult fantasy. however, the new paperback covers intrigued me, i heard good things from people that don't normally like ya fantasy, and it was included in a buy one get one 50% deal, so i went ahead.

it exceeded my expectations!! for ya fantasy, i found the world to be very well realized and the characters very compelling. i felt like i understood them, even when i didn't agree with them, which seems like a low bar but that's because my standards for ya fantasy are astronomically low.

i felt that i really connected with laia and elias in this first installment. laia is motivated by extreme survivor's guilt and elias is motivated by self-preservation, and i'm interested to see how that changes throughout the series. i'm unsure of how much i'm buying their romance quite yet, but i think there's room for something to grow. equally enough room for sabaa tahir to drop the ball. laia and elias have a lot in common but at the same time their views and their desires aren't exactly the same and i can see them coming into major conflict with each other. whether or not i'm on board with them together depends on how tahir handles that conflict.

while i did make many jokes about elias having to learn that his best friend is a liberal, i feel that i've learned enough about helene to be excited for her larger role in the sequels.

the ballad of never after by stephanie garber 📖 🌟🌟🌟

the "evil all along" trope is perhaps the laziest way to resolve a love triangle. like, oh, you can't think of an actual reason why the main character would choose this love interest over the other? you have to make one of them do a complete 180 degree in character to make the other seem like the better option?

seriously, this went from a low four star to a solid three in the literal last chapter. i'm still going to continue with the series eventually, though my disappointment with the ending of this installment did lower its place on my priority list.

other than that, however, i think this series is pretty great. it's certainly overhyped on booktok, as most things are, but i really like the style and the setting. if you enjoy the fairytale aesthetic and you aren't looking for anything too serious, you'll likely enjoy this series.

song of silver, flame like night by amelie wen zhao 📚 🌟🌟🌟

this was on my "24 books to read in 2024" list, and though i had lost interest since the beginning of the year i still want to complete that list, so i picked this up from the library rather than buying it for myself. and boy am i glad i did! quite possibly the most book of all time.

this is an aggressively okay book. it doesn't really stand out among young adult fantasy; this could be any of the many "ya fantasy about a young girl with forbidden magic living under an oppressive regime content to keep her head down, keep herself safe, and achieve her own goals until a personal tragedy (and a mysterious man) flings her into rebellion" that i've read and immediatley forgotten about.

however, that equally means it doesn't stand out in any negative way. the exposition, especially in the first third, is very clunkily conveyed. the worldbuilding is lackluster. the two main characters are very interesting in theory but in execution they're very bland. but those are pretty common issues for young adult fantasy; there wasn't anything glaringly bad about it. there wasn't anything that compelled me to dnf, other than boredom and desire to get onto reading something else, and the writing style was quick and easy enough to read that that wasn't a major problem anyway.

it's a shame, because at the beginning of the year i was very eager to read this, but i can't really recommend it. even i, normally very critical of young adult fantasy, can say with confidence that there are many, many better ya fantasy to spend your time reading.

a torch against the night by sabaa tahir 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

i was planning to jump right into city of brass, but because i really didn't enjoy song of silver, flame like night, i wanted to give myself more of a break before i get into a new, adult fantasy series.

very excited to be continuing this series! while i don't think a torch against the night is quite as good as an ember in the ashes, that's a very high bar to reach. there were a few moments that i found a bit odd, but nothing egregious, and those moments themselves were things that might make more sense to me as the series continues and more secrets are revealed.

there was one theory i had about a certain character's backstory that i was genuinely shocked wasn't true, because it felt so obvious to me, but i guess i was wrong lmao!

the ivory key by akshaya raman 📚 🌟🌟🌟

almost a four star! this one has been on my radar for a while but the secondhand listing i was eyeing got snatched up, so i picked it up from the library.

i liked the sibling dynamic a lot more than i was expecting to. i don't know if akshaya raman has siblings, but as someone with a lot of siblings the way the main four characters were written felt very authetic. they felt like a very messy family rather than just normal close friends, which is how a lot of siblings in fiction (especially ya fiction) end up reading to me.

definitely intrigued. it's not a high priority but i think i am going continue with the series eventually, especially since it's a duology and there's only one other book.

a reaper at the gates by sabaa tahir 📖 🌟🌟🌟🌟

once again i'm excited to be continuing the series!

i will say that this book, especially the second half, felt a lot more like set-up for the final book than it's own story. but it wasn't severe enough set-up that i felt bored or cheated or anything like that, it was just a bit frustrating because i knew i wasn't going to get full resolution for any of these plotlines until the fourth and final book, which i don't own yet.

i am very excited to see how the story concluces. i don't want to give too much away because i do think this series is very good and if you like young adult fantasy but you haven't read it you should, but there are certain circumstances that a certain character has found themself in and i'm VERY curious as to how they're going to get out of it in the third book because it seems kind of inescapable to me...

[dipperdesperado]

Solarpunk Gives Me Hope

For the past couple of years, I’ve been really interested in the solarpunk genre. Up until now, it’s been a flirtatious relationship, but I’m ready to settle down. Sustainability and Environmentalism have been a big part of my adult life; I always knew that I wanted to have a positive impact on the world at large, and what better way to do that than to put time into preserving that very world? However, as I got deeper into the sustainability space, I saw a lot of reductive, holier-than-thou behavior and apathy toward meaningful action. Like, recycling is great (if it actually gets recycled, thanks America), but is that it? Is that all we can do? Environmentalism as a movement also has a history steeped in white supremacy, a trend that is bubbling up again.

As you can tell, I got really frustrated with the landscape of the environmental movement. I never heard anyone acknowledge the issues that exist on both sides of the aisle; there didn’t seem to be a lot of care for the people that are most vulnerable to climate change in those conversations. It led me to move away from the sustainability space, wholesale. I didn’t really understand why until I discovered solarpunk. Hearing about this subgenre-meets-movement lit the fire in my heart. Solarpunk represents what I think is the most exciting way to think about not only saving our planet but saving ourselves.

What is Solarpunk?

People have their own definitions for solarpunk, which is as liberating as it is frustrating. One of the best ones that I found came from Solarpunk Rising. Their definition is for solarpunk is “a creative movement that encourages optimistic visions of the future while responding to the climate crisis as well as social inequality”. I’d like to crib off of that one to explain how I think of solarpunk: “a creative movement that combines Art, Sustainability, and Social Liberation with an optimistic lens. It helps us imagine the world we want to see so we can create it.”

I don’t think it’s super useful to gatekeep what is and isn’t solarpunk beyond this definition. It is important, however, to highlight the liberatory, social aspects of solarpunk. While it’s fine and dandy to see solarpunk as a cool aesthetic, the real power comes from the real-life, tangible impacts that the movement can have.

Some things that I’d consider to be solarpunk actions in real life:

Proposing legislation to your local government to prioritize walkability in new developments

Writing articles about DIY ways to lessen your reliance on big corporations

Seed bombing an empty plot of land with native species

Airdropping anti-fascist memes to people in public

Solarpunk to me is any activity that centers a genuine excitement for how the world can be with an action-oriented approach.

Connected ideologies

Solarpunk has a lot of compatible ideologies, some of which you may have picked up on already. Just to list some important ones:

DIY: Being able to lessen your own consumption by fixing and repairing/repurposing what you have is super solarpunk

Optimism: It’s hard to imagine a better world if you don’t believe the world can get better. Solarpunk positions being an optimist as the most punk thing you can do in a world that feels made to keep you down.

Renewables (a la Solar): Surprise suprise, solarpunks tend to be into solar! One of the biggest harms to our planet is our relationship with energy. While trying to lessen the total amount of energy we use, we must also replace nonrenewable energy forms with those that are replenishable. Our amount of appropriation of resources can’t continue to exceed nature’s ability to replenish those resources.

Sustainability: Tying into the above ideal, across all facets of society, sustainability should be the goal. We should be able to find a sustainable level of interaction with the environment, with our consumption and lifestyles, and our systems of governance.

Liberation: None of this work would be worth it if our sparkly new world was built on oppressive practices. Centering equity as the lens though which we do all of the above work will give us much more in return.

Conclusion

Before I go, I want to mention lunarpunk. Where solarpunk is yin, lunarpunk is yang. They can be seen as two differing halves of a greater whole, focused on different aspects of their utopic goals. Solarpunk stuff will mostly be focused on tech, while lunarpunk is much more likely to include fantastical, occult, or spiritual ideals. I’m not as well versed on that, so I’m not going to go too deep, but I think it’s worth mentioning, as it’ll probably come up in your research.

I hope this was somewhat interesting to you! I really am jazzed about this world of solarpunk and find the ability of fiction to be a tool for creating the future. It can be in negative, dystopic ways, sure, but I feel like the positive outcomes are also ripe for the taking! I hope that you’re interested in exploring more, as I’ll have some links listed below: my inspirations for this post, along with my list of cool solarpunk stuff that I am constantly updating. Hopefully, we can dream of better futures together!

Sources

A Solarpunk Manifesto (English) – ReDes – Regenerative Design. https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2022.

Andrewism. How Degrowth Can Save The World. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQrI2GBvn5Q.

How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future (Ft. @Our Changing Climate). 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz51PkJy2c0.

How We Can Make Solarpunk A Reality (Ft. @Our Changing Climate). 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-JvyfZVkIM.

Humanity Is Not A Parasite. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j42RbUjofm0.

Solarpunk Is Not Enough. 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaSb2gi1Ew.

We Need A Library Economy. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk.

What Is Solarpunk? 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHI61GHNGJM.

meningeal. “New to Solarpunk? Start Here!” R/Solarpunk, 13 June 2022, www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/vb1ky1/new_to_solarpunk_start_here/.

Our Changing Climate. How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (Ft. @Andrewism). 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twGcjDnOb_U.

Why This Gives Me Hope for the Future (Ft. @Saint Andrewism). 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aauiR9M88.

Reina-Rozo, Juan David. “Art, Energy and Technology: The Solarpunk Movement.” International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace, vol. 8, no. 1, 1, Mar. 2021, pp. 47–60. ojs.library.queensu.ca, https://doi.org/10.24908/ijesjp.v8i1.14292.

“Solarpunk.” Wikipedia, 29 Nov. 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solarpunk&oldid=1124508051.

“Solarpunk: A Genre of Activism.” Solarpunk Magazine, 13 Oct. 2021, https://solarpunkmagazine.com/solarpunk-a-genre-of-activism/.

Solarpunk.fun, Team. “Evergreen: Basically, Solarpunk.” SolarPunk, 25 Mar. 2021, https://www.solarpunk.fun/2021/03/25/basically-solarpunk/.

Solarpunk Reading List

[star-anise]

Putting the Great Corset Debate in context

TW: Body image, diet culture, calorie counts, fatphobia, coercive beauty standards

Gold star to @ryuutchi for guessing the gist of this post!

Historical costumers today are very big on defending corsets. Like a lot of other re-enactors, I know firsthand that corsets can be comfortable, practical garments that can be worn all day, every day, for years, through all kinds of strenuous activity.

Karolina Zebrowska has documented how much anti-corset sentiment was a product of misogyny; Bernadette Banner has talked about growing up in a medical brace more restrictive than a corset; I’ve used corsetry techniques to make garments to deal with my own chronic pain, and make chest binding less uncomfortable.

And yet. There’s an undeniable wealth of evidence that many women in days of old hated corsets. So how the heck do we reconcile these things?

Let’s talk about diets.

A diet is, in its simplest form, what you eat during your day. Or it’s a plan for what you’ll eat during your day. Diets can be hugely varied. The ideal diet for a performance athlete is often around 5000-7000 calories a day, which is the same amount of food that two to five ordinary people will eat in the same period of time. Some diets are very gentle and flexible, encouraging intuitive eating and listening to your own hunger cues much more than any chart. Victorian diets actually promised to fatten women, relieving their consumers from the hideous fate of skinniness.

And yet. And yet. For many people, especially women, “diet” is an enormously loaded word. It’s practically synonymous with restricting your food intake until you’re a little bit crazy, constantly criticizing the way you look, and tying your weight with your worthiness as a person.

That’s not how I generally experience diets, since I was never forced to diet, and never seriously dieted myself. But if I said, “Diets for women aren’t restrictive or oppressive!” I’d be quite frankly wrong, given how often they are--how much women face incredible pressure to be thin, how often girls are forced to diet during their childhoods and adolescences, how much fat women are penalized in completely unrelated areas, like salary and career progression, for their weight.

Diets don’t have to be restrictive or oppressive. But in our day, it is hard to untangle the concept from how coercive diets can be. For many people, “dieting” feels inextricable from being controlled.

Corsets fundamentally served the same function as dieting does now. It alters the body’s shape to appear more socially pleasing. It does so by different methods, but in the era when it was widespread, it carried a similar psychological weight.

This is how Laura Ingalls Wilder describes her experiences with corsets: Of being forced to wear them by her mother, being nagged  by her mother to tighten her laces, having to listen to stories of how her mother, as a young bride, had a waist her husband could span with his hands--an ideal painful and impractical to reach under most circumstances, and a positive hindrance for a girl like Laura, who had to do heavy farm labour in that corset. In the Victorian era, uncorseted women were seen as everything from lazy and sloppy to sexually loose and morally inferior.

Modern movie actresses face the same pressure to look absolutely perfect. A lot of actresses complain about the corsets in their costumes for good reasons: Those corsets are made with only the sketchiest reference to the actress’s real measurements, engineered hugely for aesthetic effect, and worn for a very abrupt span of time without the lead-up of getting used to the corset (and letting the corset get used to you). I have no doubt that being shoved into a corset that changes your shape dramatically and being told, “Go on, get out there and act,” is an uncomfortable experience!

These days, historical re-enactors don’t face as much social pressure or censure for failing to corset tightly enough. A lot of us are wearing costumes in an increasing atmosphere of fat acceptance and health at every size. Those of us who make our own costumes can experience historical costume as the one area in our lives where our clothes are made purely to our own measure--we have all the control that’s denied us by mass-produced modern clothing sizes.

Here’s my contention: It’s not the corset, or the lack of corset, the diet, or lack of diet, that makes corsets or diets awful, painful, harmful, or oppressive. It is the social pressure to push your body past the point of discomfort or pain to achieve certain a social idea. Corsets are so liberating for historical re-enactors specifically because we get the profound freedom of deciding everything about what we wear and how we want to look.

If you have the complete freedom, if you want to wear a corset, to choose the corset that’s right for you, or even more, to have it made for you, corsets are amazing garments. Just like figuring out which foods are right for you, eating them, and feeling good because of it can be a great experience.

It’s achieving that freedom that’s the hard part.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

Sorry, my wifi disconnected so my previous ask may have gotten deleted? If not, discard this please and thanks lol

I was wondering what your thoughts are on CQL in terms of its portrayal/characterization. I know adaptations can change things but I don't know if I agree with fundamentally changing characters or altering them to suit your whims?

Good morning anon, I did get this one and perhaps not the other.

I... have a certain soft spot for some of CQL aesthetically and the acting of scenes from Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan, but, I mostly despise about 90% of the scripting and story changes. (No, I won't ever drop that Yang Xia literally thought the two were just carrying a corpse between them while they traveled miles of China and that's why she made it a sword fetch quest).

Do I personally agree with the adaption changes. There's a certain way to please and respect the original work even with censorship mandates. CQL as an adaptation, was not that. I'd actually vastly recommend Legend of Fei or Word of Honor instead if you want a full adaptation vs canon text original. CQL, was from conception done to wash it of the original thematics, character intentions and the effects of those that rounded them as deeper and a natural progression of gay men falling in love.

One was the way it pawned off Jiang Yanli being so obsessed with the three of them as "together forever". No where in the novel does she say this, as she knows she is bound to be married into another family and grow up apart from Wei Wuxian in some way, SHE was already prepared for this, and Wei Wuxian had always expected to be a servant to Jiang Cheng, but he never said it would be indefinitely even in his promise. There was no indication of "forever together" among the three, Jiang Cheng also only expected forever submission from Wei Wuxian as no one else had expressed a want of listening to him (his parents as his elders having been outright abusive or passively apathetic).

It also made Wei Wuxian cope through the usage of alcohol at the idea of Lan Wangji now not "approving" of him. He did not want Lan Wangji's approval in the novel, he wished for his attentions and stated as such he felt they could be friends because they were so similar. He only grew volatile and distant towards him when Lan Wangji himself did not put up a strong front of liking him in Wei Wuxian's own presence each time they continued to interact. It cheapened Lan Wangji's own growth and realization that the expectation of "good" doesn't need to come from oppressive traditional rigidity as he had been told since he was young, and that a good person is not made by rule obedience.

There is good intentions, and there is Yang Xia. The only ones with good intentions were the director Chan Ka Lam (Who was the one to produce and film the happily touted "alternate" JP CQL ending that removes the separation of the special condensed edition to be more "Wangxian") Wang Yibo, and Xiao Zhan once they were able to lean into the original romance of the original work after fan backlash to the original script approvals from Yang Xia. Unfortunately, when the script you are made to work with is a bit of a turd, you can polish and glitter it as a fix, but the turd is still there under the gold veneer.

[lady-griffin]

I want to talk about how Arcane starts and ends, with its first and last scene in regards to Powder and Jinx. 

It starts with the horrors of war and a strange scratch-like aesthetic over the violence. Then we see two sisters walking along a bridge, as the last remnants of a rebellion continue.

The younger sister, is holding her sister’s hand and has her eyes covered. She’s singing a song

“Dear friend across the river. My hands are cold and bare. Dear friend across the river. I’ll take what you can spare. I ask of you a penny. My fortune it will be. I ask you without envy. We raise no mighty towers. Our homes are built of stone. So come across the river. And find…”

We can presume this is meant to shield her from the horrors, but it’s a bit too late for that now. That odd scratchy aesthetic we just saw, well we get quite use to that as the series continues. It’s how the younger sister sees the world as her mental health declines over the years.

Even though we don’t quite realize yet, she is already traumatized by what she’s experienced today.

The Undercity is rebelling against Piltover, over the mistreatment and oppression that’s been happening for decades. In the end though they are no match for the “superior” city. The rebellion fails, lives are lost and untold damage has happened, and yet those in Piltover don’t take this as a sign that things need to change.

In fact, they seemed to have been barely impacted at all; the violence never even made it across the bridge.

But the two young girls on that bridge were impacted. They were orphaned.

Another on the bridge, one of the leaders of the rebellion who believed in fighting for the cause and knew things needed to change, takes notice of them. His anger fades and he sees the consequences of what happens when you go to war, what you can lose.

He stopped fighting that day and walked away, not because he had nothing to gain from fighting, but because he now has something to lose.

Those two girls. 

Despite Piltover being the City of Progress, they resist actual progress; and when those in charge finally accept that change is needed, when they finally strive for actual peace, it’s far too late.

In the future, the younger sister will be required as a sacrifice for the greater good of both cities, she must answer for her crimes, for peace.

Unfortunately for everyone, that little girl has grown up and she is now shooting a rocket directly at Piltover’s council. Her life changed that day on that bridge and it didn’t exactly get better over the years. 

She’s not covering her eyes nor singing anymore. She doesn’t need to shield herself from the atrocities; she’s committed plenty of her own now.

Things have changed.

She doesn’t have anything to lose nor honestly anything to gain. 

She doesn’t care if she ends up destroying everything and killing everyone. She doesn’t care about the damage that she’ll absolutely leave behind.

She doesn’t care.

She just wants to show them, show everyone what they’ve ignored for so long. She wants everyone to hurt, just like her.

She, for better and for worse, has finally accepted the truth. She has changed. Her sister has changed. They are no longer who they were that day on the bridge, two sisters against the world.

No, now she’s become the monster this city has created.

[eulangelo]

Aight, I’ve got a few points I wanna make and give to you (and other people who hate transandrophobia bs):

1. People have forgotten the very useful term ‘conditional privilege’, which would clear up so much of the black and white thinking when it comes to talking about different forms of systemic oppression. Damn near ALL of us have some sort of conditional privilege, whether we want to admit it or not. This is specifically helpful when talking about social issues between different minority groups because it acknowledges both, the oppression and the privileges we have, while giving room for there to be nuance.

2. Men who are also minorities in other ways (being trans or non-white or not straight for example), will still have access to certain privileges that the women who they share these communities with will not have access to because of misogyny. The ‘conditional’ part only comes into play when it comes to those men challenging white cisheteronormative ways of thinking which will make them targets of bigotry. Since so many transmascs like to bring race into this conversation, here’s an example: while black men are definitely targets of rampant anti-black racism, they still hold privilege over black women and often are the first ones to spread misogyny within their own community, which in turn causes even more harm to black women (especially black trans women) since they already didn’t have access to same privileges given to white people and men.

3. That kid who responded to you claiming that you need to ‘listen to trans men of color’ while linking literally only 5 other transandrophobia truthers of color while I’ve seen hundreds of trans men/transmascs of color talk about how much they HATE the term gives me the same vibes when white kids try to tokenize their friends of color to prove a silly ass point 😂 And yes, they’re black but going back to my previous point: just because someone is a part of a certain community does not make them the spokesperson of that community. Being black and transmasc simply means you’re a person who has the lived experiences of being in both of those communities, not that you get to call the shots on what’s acceptable or not in either of them. Especially, if you’re only trying to use your identity to ‘prove someone wrong’ and not actually have legitimate sources or reasons behind the existence of this term.

4. My last point (I promise 😉): transandrophobia truthers want the privileges of being men while still being able to claim the victimhood of being women and it very much has it’s roots in the white victimhood mentality that they often can’t shed, even after they’ve come out and/or started to transition. This may sound mean or harsh but honestly, a lot of the white/white passing trans men and transmascs who push this term so hard still have white womanhood to fall back on. They’re still used to their voice being the one that’s taken seriously, even by cis men. That is a specific kind of privilege afforded only to white women (or those perceived as such 👀). They want the treatment that they see cis men get for being men, yet still want access into women’s spaces (particularly those where trans women are uplifted) so they can speak over women without being called out on their blatant misogyny.

Like, this is something I can attest to personally: whenever I hung out with white trans men irl, I could not feel safe around them because of the egregious amount of racism and misogyny they carried with them. They would always find a way to blame women either for not accepting their aggressive performances of cishet masculinity or for the way feminine men are treated by cishet society when they still got called out on their misogyny while they did the ‘uwu soft boy’ aesthetic.

I genuinely think the only reason so many transandrophobia truthers exist is because they want to gain a ‘monopoly’ on oppression while never taking any accountability for their own bigotry, specifically towards trans women/transfems. And to be even more honest: I don’t think trans men/transmascs have such hyper specific issues that really call for a term all their own. This is just my opinion but every single issue they have tried to bring up as ‘unique’ to trans men/transmascs…is literally something we share with other trans people or TME people. Reproductive rights and proper prenatal care (literally sharing it with cis women and nonbinary folks who aren’t transmasc). Assault based on our genitalia (literally can happen to anyone, even trans women). 😐😐😐 like…c’mon now…

yeah i p much agree with everything, and ive seen the op of that post saying that transandrophobia is the intersection of the transphobia+misogyny that trans men face (quoting word for word). to me that whole movement is literally just rebranded radical feminism with trans men being the focus instead of cis women. they will gladly play the victim whenever called out and absolutely refuse to own up to their wrongoings in a way that's typical of white cis feminism, where they believe they can do no wrong and that whoever calls them out is a predator/aggressor that wants their death or physical harm. similarly to them they revolve their activism on genitals and biological sex, saying "transandrophobia is the oppression against trans people who menstruate" or bringing up the reproductive health issue to back up why we need a term to talk about these transmasc-only issues (despite completely ignoring afab nonbinaries who arent men or masc-aligned). they will also pretend to be progressive and supportive of any and all identities yet they have no issues when misgendering a trans person they disagree with (not only has this happened to me, there's witches-of-color and visibility-of-color who were the victims of an actual harassment campaign perpetrated by transandrophobia truthers and they were repeatedly misgendered and had their gender identity invalidated multiple times by them) because deep down i think they know they don't really give a shit about making activism for transmascs, they just want to center any and all discussion of trans issue over them to discredit transfems and to not be held accountable for their tme privilege at all. it is a highly dangerous mindset and it should only be publicly condemned.

[clown-on-gorkhon]

Daemon AU returns! Featuring the Olgimsky’s. Started this set months ago but waffled so much on Capella’s animal and had so much other stuff to draw that I practically forgot about it. Wall of text under the cut. c: 

Capella - Stork

“One day, I will grow real wings. Heavy, lifting wings...”

After the Polyhedron falls, the daemons of the town’s adolescents mysteriously settle all at once. For Capella I knew I wanted a bird, and went through a lot of options before settling on a stork. In myths, storks are associated with delivering babies, which I felt appropriate for the leader of the town’s children, whilst also echoing Victoria Sr’s swan daemon. (Victoria was sometimes called “White Swan” according to the wiki!)

Other forms I considered included capybara, a ferret, a cassowary, and a butterfly, so let’s just say those were Thomkin’s preferred forms pre-settling. X) (I picked the name with a cute, fluffy creature in mind then never bothered to change it.)

-

Vlad Jr - Lurcher/Staghound 

Here’s where I admit my process for picking daemons is like 30% animal symbolism and 70% aesthetics and vibes. Look at her, she has a little mustache. A large game hunting dog/herding dog cross felt appropriate for the heir to the Bull Project- a working animal, but one set apart from those it was bred to oppress. Domesticated, but not the one that ends up getting eaten. A working dog is at the intersection of loyalty and intelligence but also obedience and lack of independence. Eudora is always close to Vlad’s heels- practically tripping him up at times. A nervous and ungainly creature that adores its master unquestioningly. Her tail tends to betray Vlad’s state of mind. 

For the name, I wanted something warm and loyal-sounding. 

Eudora = Eu  (“true”- Greek) + doré  (“gold”- French) 

(It also sounds a little like "adore". At least that was my reasoning, then I found out Eudora is an actual name in Greek, and means “good gift”!) 

-

Vlad Sr - Babirusa

On your right you’ll see a capitalist pig, and a wild boar standing next to him SJDFHKSJD

Apart from that awfully tongue-in-cheek association, the babirusa is a species with a very strange defect, possessing tusks that will continuously grow, sometimes until they pierce the creature’s own skull and kill it. Unchecked growth to the point of harm felt like an apt analogy for the kind of ruthless capitalist Boos Vlad is. This one was very easy to pick.

The name “Nagoya” was pulled from Nago, the vengeful boar demon from Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke, who ironically became a demon due to the exploitation of its environment. I can’t remember if daemons can eat or drink in HDM, but I’ve decided that Nagoya does- she gets her own glass of wine at parties, and is very discriminating about the quality of roast beef. 

[wickwrites]

Wonder Egg Priority Episode 4: Boys’ and Girls’ Suicides Do Mean Different Things (But Not in the Way the Mannequins Want You to Think!)

So, let’s talk about this for a second. After I got over my initial knee-jerk reaction, I realized I wasn’t sure how to make sense of exactly what the mannequins were arguing for here. So let me rephrase their statements to make the argumentative structure more explicit: Because men are goal-oriented and women are not, because women are emotion-oriented and men are not, and because women are impulsive and easily influenced by others’ voices and men are not, boys’ and girls’ suicides mean different things – girls are more easily “tempted” by death, and therefore, more likely to require saving when they inevitably regret their suicide. While Wonder Egg Priority, so far, seems to agree with the vague version of the mannequins’ conclusion, namely that boys’ and girl’s suicides mean different things, it refutes the gender-essentialist logic through which that conclusion was derived.

The mannequins choose a decidedly gender essentialist approach in explaining the difference between girls’ and boy’s suicides; they argue that the suicides are different because of some immutable characteristic of their mental hard wiring (in this case, impulsivity, emotionality, and influenceability). Obviously, this is a load of bull, and Wonder Egg Priority knows it. The mannequins are not exactly characters we’re supposed to trust, seeing that they’re running a business that is literally based on letting these kids put themselves in mortal danger. As faceless adult men, they parrot and possibly represent the systems that force these girls to continue to be subjected to physical and emotional trauma (it’s probably more complicated than this, but four episodes in, it’s hard to say more). So, we’re probably supposed to take what they say with great skepticism. Also, the director, Shin Wakabayashi, has recently said that in response to these lines, Neiru was originally going to object, “When it comes to their brains, boys and girls are also the same,” (which unfortunately is not exactly true and is somewhat of an oversimplification, but the sentiment is there). While that line ultimately did not make it in, Neiru does reply with a confused and somewhat indignant, “What?!”, a reaction that gets the message across.  Neiru is not a fan of gender essentialism, and as a (more) sympathetic character, we’re supposed to agree with her.

That is, the differences between boys and girls is not something inherent to their biology or character, but something constructed by culture and experience. This rejection of gender-essentialism is apparent in Wonder Egg Priority’s narrative, which takes a more sociocultural perspective on the difference between boys’ and girls’ suicides. It says, well of course boys’ and and girl’s suicides don’t mean the same thing, that’s the whole reason why we’re delving into the experiences specific to being a girl (cis or trans) or AFAB in this world – to show you how girls’ suicides are influenced by systems of oppression perpetuated by those in power (ie. the adult, in this specific anime).

And all the suicides we’ve seen up until now tie into that somehow. For instance, Koito is bullied by her female classmates who think that Sawaki is giving her special treatment. This is a narrative that comes up over and over again, in real life as well: that if a young girl is being given attention from an older man, then it’s her fault – that she must want it, or at least enjoy it somehow, and that it signifies a virtue (eg. maturity or beauty) on her part. And if Koito is actually being given such treatment by Sawaki, an adult man in a position of power over her, that is incredibly predatory. 

And we all know that child sexual abuse is something that overwhelmingly affects girls, with one out of nine experiencing it before the age of 18, as opposed to one out of 53 boys (Finkelhor et al., 2014). Regardless of whether Sawaki was actually abusing Koito or if the students only thought that he was, Koito’s trauma is ultimately the result of this romanticized “love between a young girl and adult man, but not because the man is predatory, but because the girl has some enviable virtue that makes her desirable” narrative. Similarly, in episode 2, Minami’s suicide is driven by ideas related to discipline and body image in sports, which while not necessarily specific to female and AFAB athletes, is framed in an AFAB-specific way. For instance, take the pressure on Minami to “maintain her figure”. Certainly, male athletes also face a similar pressure, but we know that AFAB and (cis and trans) female bodies are subject to closer scrutiny and criticism. We know that young girls are more likely to suffer from eating disorders. And Wonder Egg Priority situates Minami’s experience as decidedly “about” AFAB experience when her coach accuses her change of figure due to her period as a character failing on her part.

 Likewise, episode 3 delves into suicides related to “stan” culture, this fervent dedication to celebrities that is overwhelmingly associated to teenage girls. And Miwa’s story, in episode 4, explicitly shows how society responds to sexual assault. When Miwa does have the courage to speak up about her assault, she’s instantly reprimanded by basically everyone around her. Her father is fired because her abuser was an executive of his company. Her mother asks her why she couldn’t just bear with it, telling her that her abuser chose her because she was cute, as if that’s supposed to make her feel better about it. Wonder Egg Priority shows that this sort of abuse is a systemic problem, a set of rules and norms deeply engrained in a society and upheld by all adults, regardless of gender, social status, or closeness (to the victim). Wonder Egg Priority says that, yes, girls’ and boys’ suicides have different meanings, but it’s not due to some inherent difference between the two, but the hostile environment in which these girls grow up. Girls are not more easily “tempted” by death, they just have more societal bullshit to deal with.

But Wonder Egg Priority goes further than just showcasing how girls’ (and AFAB) experiences are shaped by sociocultural factors. The story also disproves the supposedly dichotomous characteristics that the mannequins use to differentiate girls and boys (i.e. influenceability/independence, impulsivity/deliberation, emotion-orientation/goal-orientation). If the mannequins are indeed correct, and that girls are just influenceable, impulsive, and emotional, you’d expect the girls in the story to be to be like such too. Except, they aren’t. Rather, they’re a mix of both/all characteristics. This show says that, certainly, girls can be suggestible, but they’re also capable of thinking for themselves. For instance, when Momoe asserts her own identity as a girl at the end of episode four, she rejects the words of those around her who insisted that she isn’t a girl. If she were as suggestible as the mannequins believe her to be, that would never have happened – she would have just continued believing that she wasn’t girl “enough”. But, she doesn’t because she is equally capable of making her own judgements. Likewise, Wonder Egg Priority shows that girls can be impulsive, but they can also be deliberate and pre-mediating. When Miwa tricks her Wonder Killer into groping her to create an opening for Momoe to defeat it, she’s not doing it out of impulse – it’s a pre-mediated and deliberate choice unto a goal. And Wonder Egg Priority continues, girls can be equally emotion oriented and goal oriented. Sure, the main girls are fighting because they have the goal of bringing their loved ones back to life, but those goals are motivated by a large range of emotions, from guilt to anger, grief, compassion, and love. 

Being emotion-driven doesn’t mean you’re not goal-driven, and vice versa. In fact, in this case, being emotional drives these girls toward their goals. In other words, none of these traits that the mannequins listed are either “girl traits” or “boy traits”. Being one does not mean you can’t be the other, even if they seem dichotomous at first. Wonder Egg Priority’s diverse cast of multi-dimensional female characters allows it to undermine the mannequins’ conceptualization of gendered roles, refuting the idea that these (or any) character traits should be consider gendered at all.

As an underdeveloped side thought, I think Wonder Egg Priority’s blurring of gendered roles is also well-reflected in its style. There’s been a lot of talk about whether Wonder Egg Priority constitutes a magical girl series, and I think that’s an interesting question deserving of its own essay. Certainly, it does follow the basic formula of the magical girl story: a teenage heroine ensemble wielding magical weapons saves the day. But it also throws out a lot of the conventions you’d expect of a magical girl story – both aesthetically and narratively. Aesthetically, it’s probably missing the component that most would consider the thing that makes an anime a magical girl anime: the full body transformation sequence, complete with the sparkles and the costume and all that. Narratively, the girls are also not really magical girl protagonist material – they’ve got a fair share of flaws, have done some pretty awful things (looking at Kawai in particular; I still love you though), and aren’t exactly the endlessly self-sacrificing heroines you’d expect from a typical magical girl story. On the other hand, the anime also borrows a lot from shonen battle anime. We get these dynamic, well choreographed action sequences full of horror and gore, the focus on the importance of camaraderie between allies (or “nakama”, as shonen anime would call it) exemplified through all the bonding between the main girls during their downtime, and in the necessary co-operation to bring down the Wonder Killers. That said, this anime is not a shonen; the characters, types of conflicts, and themes are quite different from those that you’d find in a typical shonen. The bleeding together of the shonen genre and the magical girl genre, at the very least (and I say this because I think it does way more than just that), reflects Wonder Egg Priority’s interest in rebelling against conventional narratives about girlhood and gender.