#this is what symphogear is actually about

[mousegard]

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A VHS INTO THE SLOT. ITS CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE MOVES ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER, RIDDICK. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME NECRO BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED THE GALAXY’S MOST DANGEROUS PRISON. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY COLLEGE CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN COLLEGE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JERKS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE LINES AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNING. THEN I LIFT 

[amplexadversary]

I like the accessibility, but I’d honestly have expected to see more “fuck you, mine’s better” fanslation takes and I am thoroughly disappointed.

I miss getting a bonus packet of translator’s notes at the end of something as well.

I feel like we've lost something linguistically with the rise of professional subtitles for everything because they just adapt jokes and idioms into their nearest English equivalent and lose cultural context. I miss watching anime in 2002 with subs by some guy who was just really passionate about japanese and would fill half the screen with an in-depth breakdown of why a pun works. I'm serious I want that again.

[soulhalberder]

There is a lot to like about Symphogear, the characters are so much more than their designs. I love how Hibiki is basically constantly put through the ringer the entire series, yet refuses to stop being a person who cares but who cares so much for everyone. I love how Tsubasa is constantly trying to be the leader but also struggles and stumbles because she's is so entrenched in her bad coping mechanisms until others are there to pull her out of them. I love how Chris is angry. Like actually angry and has to make legitimately difficult choices that she questions after the fact but still opens up and accepts that people want to help her.

I love how the show doesn't shy away from consequences. The narrative progresses because of the events of prior seasons, and stuff isn't just forgotten and forgiven. Ok, some stuff is forgiven in the eyes of the law, but only because Maria makes a plea deal to protect the others. I love how even though society may say she's forgiven she struggles to forgive herself.

I love that there's two pairs of lesbians.

I love how Chris gets embraced that both couples are being overly affectionate with each other in public.

I love how there's just a song about beef strogenoff that is just wrong and that has a payoff a season later.

I love how the series has inspiration from Madoka without turning into "another madoka" or being obsessed with just being dark.

I love how despite the darkness in the world and the points where stuff gets legitimately very dark, there is more than enough levity and light to show that this is a world worth fighting for and the characters are not wrong to fight for it.

I love how Hibiki learned to fight by watching action films and imitating them and everyone treats it as normal.

I love how unafraid the show is of it's own concept. It knows it's silly, but characters never stop taking it very seriously.

I love how one of the power ups is explicitly very evil and is not only a metaphor for the dangers of falling to that power, but how that danger exists the moment you take hold of it.

I love how one of the side characters is just a ninja in a suit and also an idol manager.

I love how the core cast can only fight because the suits are powered by altruism and sometimes an ancient relic that kills the user the more they use it.

I love how rule of cool and passion so often overrules rules as written because being emotional and passionate is a good thing actually.

I love how silly the weapons get. Chris just has unlimitted Rockets. Kirika and Shirabe have a scythe and sawblades that are twintails that combine into a lot of things but my favorite has to be the murder bingo ball cage. I love Tsubasa's silly leg blades. I love how Hibiki just has her fists so she can hold people's hands because she wants to reach out to them. Also so she can hug her girlfriend which is a very important plot point.

I love how a lot of characters have backstories you can empathize with and want to see them redeemed. You want to see them be better and not fight with the heroines. I also love how there are villains who you can't wait to see them get what's coming to them.

I love how characters try and patch messy relationships up, but seasons later we see that it's only going alright. I love how characters are messy and fail but never stop trying to do better.

I love the music and how characters sing their songs in battle while still being effected by the battle.

I love how its ok to be in love with a show that isn't perfect, and that sometimes you just need to give something a chance.

Watch Symphogear.

[cerastes]

You know, I was just thinking, there's this game I like, I've talked about this one both on and off stream, it's Luminous Arc 2. It's one of those Way of the Samurai 4 games that are garbage games that did some things REALLY well but are still very much not good games overall, but that I LOVE. You know how much I love Way of the Samurai 4. I also love Luminous Arc 2, it's not a good game, it's a game that merits 0 playthroughs, and yet I gave it 2 full playthroughs.

With WotS4, I can explain to you what parts of it are genius hidden in an ocean of shit, but I can't with Luminous Arc 2, I've not done the mental homework on that one, so I did this weekend, and...

Luminous Arc 2 executes the Nanoha-style Magical Girl formula very very well.

Now, you may have heard that Nanoha is a mecha show but instead of mecha, there's magical girls. And that assessment is absolutely 100% correct. Luminous Arc 2 somehow distills the purely Magical Girl elements from Nanoha's mecha-magical girl execution and pulls them off REALLY well.

Allow me to elaborate.

Nanoha nails down the Good Fight Scene. Not just in fight choreography, but also, in essence of what a good fight scene aims to accomplish for an overarching narrative as an element in the bigger scheme that you can't just skip. Think about Code Geass for a moment: Is Code Geass a mecha show? It sure has mecha, but it's not a mecha show. You could replace the mecha in Code Geass with tanks and helicopters and nothing would change. In fact, at least one adaption of Code Geass does exactly this. Code Geass is a great show but it's not mecha in its themes and execution. Code Geass is a not mecha show with mecha. Nanoha is a mecha show without mecha. You can't remove the fights from Nanoha without it not being Nanoha anymore, and in each fight, we learn more about the characters, the characters learn more about each other, and even if any given fight does not move the plot forward, it does move the character arcs forward, on top of being fun to watch.

And Nanoha accomplishes this by making the same characters fight each other a bunch. Symphogear also does this. Each fight between the same characters feels different each time, because they are growing in terms of motivations and themes.

Luminous Arc 2 does the same with each of its big arcs. In the optional sidequests, you often just fight some mooks and a stronger, sometimes recolored version of a generic monster. The main story stages of the game, though? You are always fighting someone important or a consequence of someone's important's actions. Initially, you fight an ice witch named Fatima and her cat familiar and companion Josie a bunch. As the plot advances, your rogue's gallery keeps expanding, from the bandit Karen and her gang, who initially seem to be disconnected to the overall plot and is more of a Team Rocket deal, to actual lore powerhouses like Master Matthias and others who I shall omit for brevity. Luminous Arc 2 has three big arcs, and each of these have an evolving cast of reoccurring bosses that you fight for plot reasons, and you get to know each other a lot more with each fight, shedding light on their motivations, and them shedding light, in turn, on the motivations of your own side, which are actually not immediately discernible to you in their entirety.

And this is all really good! You get used to their signature moves, their animations, the way they usually structure their units, a bunch of really cool little things.

And maybe this game is sounding good to you, but make no mistake, it's a pretty fucking mediocre SRPG that you can play with your brain turned off. No cohesion, very little unit identity, incredibly self-indulgent first and everything else a distant second, it's NOT a good game... But what it did good, it really knocked it out of the park.

In terms of getting to know your enemy, their motivations, and how they in turn get to know and let you know more about you... Luminous Arc 2 does it better than most. Which is hilarious because this game sucks in every other department. It's not a good game. I did two full playthroughs and I would do a third.

[joyce-stick]

The Beef Stroganoff Song! (arbitrary subtitle discourse edition)

So, you may have noticed here that the subtitles in this clip (from Symphogear GX episode 3) are fairly different from what you're used to seeing when people post this video, and the phrasing in the subtitles is fairly different from what the associated memes often say

For those who don't know, Symphogear got itself released on blu-ray by Discotek, and with that came with a new translation authored by Noelle (@ulsairi on twitter ) who is notable for being the only trans lesbian anime translator I know of off the top of my head.

Her translation appears, in my opinion, really rather polished and very good, and I strongly appreciate the way it's written and how much character it adds to the dialogue by giving everyone distinct voices and adapting things into more natural English. It's also a fair bit gayer. I haven't encountered many people who've seen these subs, but I think most fans of the series would consider these a net positive change. There are some people who are mad about these subtitles, and they can die mad.

Anyway, let's talk about the different phrasing of the beef stroganoff song. I'm mostly going to compare to Crunchyroll's subtitles for reference since that seems to be what most others go off of. Here's a link to that version.

So right off the bat we can see here that while CR's translation appears to be a lot more, for lack of a better word, functional, Noelle's translation tries to apply more dialectal force "it's beef stroganoff/Yes! It's THAT beef stroganoff!" And generally communicate through the tone how excited the girls are to get started. Additionally you'll see throughout that the latter is a fair bit more lyrical, there's a lot more punctuation and verbal tics and filler phrases written into the dialogue to express that they are singing, which makes sense since Japanese tends to omit a lot of the sorts of prepositions that Noelle threw in here,

Like, Yumi (yes I went and looked up her name on the wiki) just says "beef stroganoffu" because it's obvious from context that it is beef stroganoff, she doesn't need to spell it out, at least, not in Japanese

(We know like maybe ten hiragana and 1 kanji do not trust us on Japanese this is all just basic shit we learned from online guides)

So this probably leads to a rushed translator from Crunchyroll (they are notoriously crunched for time) who's just trying to Get It Done probably not really bothering to throw in extra additional connecting letters to express the tone of the character, only doing so when it's required to make basic grammatical sense in the target language. So they likely didn't think to make the subtitles have flourishes like this that aren't explicitly in the original Japanese. Noelle meanwhile had the time to consider things like this and take such liberties in order to attempt to convey the same tone that was arguably implied by the Japanese, even if not explicitly put forth

And that's about all the things I should not repeat I guess, TL;DR, these subtitles are more fun to read because the translator had more time to think about the best way to make them more fun while still being accurate to the spirit of the original dialogue, who'd have thought!

(In case you're wondering, the Commie subtitles say kind of the same thing here, and y'know, it doesn't seem like a wrong translation, but also I really dislike this subtitle styling, orange on pink with that font and that drop shadow is just kinda bad. I appreciate the effort but like. Come on. Please fansubbers, please think about if the font and colors you chose actually work with the image you're putting them on)

Moving on!

horizontal and middle rhyme with each other so you can almost actually sing this, actually let me take a moment to try it right now- never mind, I can't sing. Hahaha. I don't actually think it lines up that well with the melody But I thought it did! Didn't I? That's significant, that this actually reads like plausible lyrics to a silly song someone made up instead of a literal translation of a Japanese song

Anyway, here comes the first major difference!

So in the Crunchyroll subtitles, Yumi says "it doesn't have to be beef" which in English (in my estimation) sounds a tad scatterbrained, like, "oh yeah sure beef but whatever really it doesn't actually matter," while Noelle's subtitles rather say "Got no beef? Don't you worry!" Which implies something different.

"It is recommended to use beef, but you may substitute something else if you are sorely lacking in beef" as opposed to "Oh the beef doesn't actually matter, zoinks lol!" CR's translation is kind of a bit funnier in how it sorta comes from nowhere without this qualification, which probably lead to this phrase's memeticness, but Noelle's translation seems more reasonable to me so yeah again, tada, yay for sensicalness.

Now here's another interesting change:

Again, the flat manner in which the CR subtitles say "finish with salt" with rendezvous only being included because that's literally what they said, is sort of absent any stronger emotional implication,

Noelle's translation meanwhile going with "don't forget them, they need it" imparts personhood upon the salt and pepper. The implication being that the girls are saying, "the salt and pepper are in love, please reunite them, they must be in gay love together." Or maybe you think the salt and pepper cannot be forgotten and must be reunited because they are Only Friends.

Whether you choose to believe that this is the salt and pepper getting married, or merely subtext, or an interpretation, or salt and pepper shipping bait, this is a deeply important tonal indicator because it reminds you that these girls are ultimately playing with their food!

"And there, now you're in for a treat!" I don't think I need to explain this one.

Now, here's an interesting one!

In the Crunchyroll subtitles, it just says the memetic "boys don't know this." With no context, no elaboration, no clarity, no qualifiers. Boys don't know. Did the boys magically get their brains wiped? Are the boys biologically incapable? Who knows. Nothing is said but that.

Noelle's subtitles, on the other hand, qualify this statement by saying "Boys aren't taught to cook, so they may not know" (And note again how, it says "kno-ow" to emphasize, once more, that they're singing, and also this lines up with the long "ooooo" sound they make at the end of this lyric, so cool)

There is now context! Boys aren't taught to cook! Anime and Japan's culture in general still pigeonholes people into gender roles! And an anime translator just wrote you a hidden translation note about it! You might be a boy, you might know how to cook, but certain boys in another part of the world aren't traditionally taught cooking, so they may not know

They may not, but they could!

Trust a trans person to express gender facts with subtle nuances like this in anime translations.

And with that lovely bit of good translation and good writing and good localization of a thing to make it make sense to people

Mew!

[jjs-brainrot]

BTR and Mayonaka Punch are animes that lose part of their meaning if the girls were not gay for each other. I thought Masaki kissed Live when she caught her. I also thought they were going to kiss after the credits, but even without a kiss, the show managed to convey how much Live and Masaki meant to each other. You can't watch it and not think they have feelings for each other.

I'd also throw in VTuber Legend, Girls Band Cry and Symphogear in that ring as well but 100% agreed.

Live is simping hard for Masaki with the whole specifically wanting to suck her blood to the point she becomes a desperate mess being multiple euphemisms in one. Masaki in turn finally seeing Live as an incredibly important person to her as she's basically the first who seems to actually like her regardless of what she does instead of just tolerating her until she messes up.

Meanwhile Bocchi has gay failgirl energy to the max, complete with fantasies of girls and outright blacking out with an application for her band being in the school festival because she overheard girls talking about how they'd fall for a rocker. And of course Kita crushing hard for Ryo but then falling for Bocchi the more she got to know her.

There's a lot that could be said about subtext vs text when it comes to queer characters and how subtext tends to leave a bit too much wiggle room for interpretation and how there's never really enough works with textually queer characters being represented.

But in general, I feel the type of person that tries to wiggle out of the idea that a character isn't queer despite all the subtext pointing them as such is usually the type to get angry if the character is textually queer (thinking of the people who got angry at ILTV after Rae talks about how she is in fact a Lesbian).

For my part, the idea that characters can only be in love if they make big romantic gestures like kissing just always feels backwards to me.

Maybe it's my aroness talking but it feels like that's just for reaffirmation of one's love rather than the requirement of being in love. Maybe I'm also just hyped up on how good genre dissections How Do We Relationship and Yuri is My Job are about relationships that "x romantic gesture needs to be there for them to actually be in love" feels a bit trite to me.

[txttletale]

bundletober #13: blazing hymn

alright i've fallen behind on bundletober (the series of blog posts where i review and talk about a ttrpg i got in a bundle every day) and am hoping to make up the difference by putting out two entries today. this is the first one, and i'm looking at the mecha-piloting, synthetic-armour wearing, blaspheming-against-God-and-his-angels game blazing hymn by peach garden games.

now sadly this game is not a lyric/blackout poetry game about rewriting church hymns to be about gay sex. someone should make that btw. no it's just about wearing highly advanced battlesuits powered by the song of your heart to kill aliens with weapons of pure energy. which is about as cool.

first off, the layout of this game is unique and stylish. there are hexagons everywhere:

the game puts sparse splashes of dreamy pastel colours amid a constantly shifting set of black and white hexagons. it gives the book a visual identity that is at once both visually distinct and also changing massively from page to page. it's a really cool way to mix things up and keep you wanting to turn the page if just to keep seeing what the next one even looks like.

what's the game about? simple. angels have come to earth to destroy it badly. with the power of song, young people can power specially designed battlesuits, called Hymnals, that when not activated collapse down into crystal necklaces. it's a pretty anime concept--the game is pretty open about being inspired by Evangelion and Symphogear, neither of which i've actually seen--but it's cool as hell. the aesthetics of the layout really help bring the aesthetics of the game itself, of technology and ethereal mysticism merged into one thing, to life.

the game uses a pretty simple three-stat system where you build dice pools with a state relevant to an action and can get a full success, mixed success, or failure, depending on what you roll. your characters have two resources, Health, which is what it sounds like, and Gain, which is essentially magical power. because you can swap Health for Gain and Gain for Health at a 1-1 ratio with no restrictions, i'm not really sure why they're separate things--seems like a missed opportunity to not only simplify the mechanics but also create a strong mechanical narrative element by making Gain the only thing that keeps you going--once your song is silenced, you're out.

to create a character, you pick from one of six unit classes--here's where i'd describe the six classes, but honestly, they don't quite feel distinct enough. a lot of the powers you can pick for each hymnal class feel very similar, or are outright overlapping in a lot of cases. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the descriptions of the hymnals, while trying to clarify their combat roles, all end up seeming to repeat themselves or say contradictory things. i think some direct ties between those descriptions and their mechanics would have helped--i'd find it a lot easier to remember that, for example, the 05 Xyston type "brutal in combat" if that flavour text was followed by a direct reference to one or more of its abilities. they do all have pretty different stats--which, in a game with a very simple and elegant combat system, means i'm confident they play very differently once you hit the table. but just looking at them, as a prospective player, i struggle to tell the difference.

i don't have that problem with the next character creation mechanic, though, which is choosing the songs you sing to power your hymnal. each song, as well as a thematically appropriate set of stat boosts, also prompts a pair of revealing character questions. they're the kind of mechanic that i want to get my hands on because they make it fun to create characters, giving real mechanical expression to the emotional fundamentals of who they are.

the combat system itself seems really, really good. it's astoundingly simple--you're encouraged to use a map, but there's no fiddly grid or distance tracking, just the ability to move between being Close, Near, or Far from an enemy. it keeps the numbers low to keep it getting silly and doesn't bother with any of the unecessary bookkeeping and fiddliness that plagues TTRPG combat as a whole. no initiative, no separate turns--there's a 'player' turn and a GM turn, and during the GM turn the GM picks from enemy's listed actions until they've done two for each player. players can use their abilities on the GM turn, and the game encourages the GM to take enemy actions that wil lforce them to--so nobody's ever standing around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the whole table to rotate back to them, and having a lot of enemies doesn't mean the players listen to the GM talk for fifteen minutes.

there's two unique mechanics that i think are very interesting-- Civilians and Condemnation. Civilians are--well, exactly what they sound like. on their turn, players can use an action to evacutate up to 5 of them. this extremely small and simple mechanic is fucking genius. so many games tell you they're about saving innocent people, but yet the only mechanical verbs you have to interact with anyone are violent ones. as elaine scarry says in the body in pain:

so in a way i think blazing hymn puts its money where its mouth is in a way very few combat rpgs with emancipatory or heroic aspirations bother. angels are said to attack populated areas--you're sent to preserve life as well as destroy the enemy. it makes the game feel fundamentally different, like despite the questionable ethics of hymnals (after all, they only work on young people, who then have to be sent into deadly combat situations) there is something heroic you can do.

the second cool mechanic is condemnation, a reality-warping toxin that angels use to destroy the places they're sent to. this rocks because it adds a ticking timer to the battlefield, a passive threat that forces the player characters to be proactive. if condemnation gets too high, not only is the fight going to get harder, but civilians are going to die en masse. it's a great piece of game design that gives the GM a great lever to pull for pacing and urgency.

i also really like that one of the steps of the GM turn is to 'change the situation', whether that means something happens in the narrative or something on the map changes (a train arriving is the example the book gives) or more angels attack. in general, one of my biggest complaitns about d&d is that unless a DM takes it upon themselves to design additional mechanics and encounters outside of anything the game actually gives them, combat inevitably turns into two lines of people hitting each other with sticks until one of them dies. i love dynamic, progressing combat, combat where the stakes change moment to moment. and blazing hymn delivers.

anything else? oh yeah, the angel designs are cool as fuck.

god damn. anyway despite a few minor issues with the hymnals themselves, the core of blazing hymnal is fucking good, a nice tight and razor-sharp combat system wrapped up in pulsing pastel crystalline aesthetics. if you like cool anime fights and like having the rules to back it up but hate complexity, crunch, and tedium, this might be the perfect game for you. it's certainly given me a lot of cool design ideas to take foreward into my own projects.

blazing hymn is available for purchase as a digital download through itch.io

[talenlee]

Game Pile: Princess Wing

Princess Wing is a Japanese indie TTRPG, by Hayato Suzumiya, in which players take on the role of Princesses at the prestigious Princess Training Academy, who defend earth from mechanical monsters called Void through their cool outfits that also double up as multi-purpose military machinery and short skirts. Drawing heavily on a particular kind of anime genre that I mostly know in the terms of ‘like Symphogear, right?’ it’s a card-based RPG where players use a predetermined micro-deck to make strategic moves and drive their narratives forward, and everything novel about it I can think of I pretty much describe in this opening paragraph.

Yeah, uh, I don’t know what I’m going to tell you about this one. Come with me on the journey to not really understanding a book that I’ve spent several days reading and the reasons why I think that is.

Just a note: I’m reading an unofficial translation of Princess Wing. I’m not fluent in Japanese, and any time I think a phrase is badly written or clunky or strange, I let it go. That’s not important to this and treating the game as if that’s vital is a great way to cut yourself out of a lot of really cool translated TTRPGs.

Straight up, the things in this game that stood out to me, from my initial notes:

I like the way it suggests players recruit other players to play NPCs in scenes. That’s a cool idea to make part of the recommended text.

I appreciate the idea of dealing players a hand they get to use over the course of a scene, meaning you can have good and bad moments that you get to pace out, without full control over the.

It includes a section on pronoun use in the game.

And then the followup notes…

Wait, the pronoun use splits everything into a hard dichotomy where players are all ‘she’ and the enemies are all ‘he’? Kinda simple binary there.

Hang on, what’s the resolution mechanic for this game? What do I do if something comes up that’s not in one of these specific tables?

Wait, character creation starts when?

At which point I realised I kinda had to give up on treating this book like I would one written in a more familiar language to me. I think it’s very it’s important to look at games outside of my genre interests and my readership space – I love Golden Sky Stories and had a lot of fun engaging with the hot mess that was Gensou Narratograph, after all. I am an anime fan, but something like Symphogear that this game is pretty explicitly referencing, has never been my interest. What’s more, this is a translation of a Japanese RPG — which means there’s a range of ways I think things should be done because they appeal to me and make clear sense to me, that are culturally signified. I won’t know what I don’t know if I don’t look.

Now, you may think, hang on, but you don’t know anything about Symphogear, so why should we care what you say about the Symphogear-inspired TTRPG? And if you need an expert’s opinion on whether or not it’s delivering on its ideas, then yeah, I suppose that’s a thing. I cannot tell you if this is a game that’s good at being Symphogear and crucially, anything I learn about this game will not be useful for interpreting Symphogear. After all, if I was to just look at this book I might assume that Symphogear is about some very specific, complex machinery that’s designed to work under specific rules and conditions, almost like a kind of murder mystery of a mechanical construction, a system of combat rules that remind me a great deal of Bleach in the way that it relies on hard-to-decipher but consistently-applied rules and mechanisms that don’t actually make the narrative they construct meaningfully engaging.

Y’know, Bleach and Symphogear, two very similar anime that I’m sure won’t annoy anyone with that comparison.

Here’s the thing: I think this game is explicitly and delicately tuned to its audience. I really do, and this is an assumption based on the idea that this game is trying to do a good job, by people who are confident in what they are doing. It has the presentation of a thoughtful, creative, well-made book, after all. How then do I grapple with this mechanically uncomfortable system, awkward problem-solving mechanism and system for narratives that need the whole thing mostly created ahead of time, across a language barrier, and not come across as being, at the very least, a little bit of a dick?

I do not know this audience. I do not know who this book was written for. It is a mystery to me and even obvious inferences – it was for people who read Japanese, probably in Japan, and probably used to other Japanese TTRPGs, of which I know exactly one – can’t be treated as representing a meaningful truth. I am peeking through a keyhole and what I am seeing makes no sense to me.

When I talk about games, I describe them as a machine that makes stories. TTRPGs, then, I tell people, are a machine that makes a machine that makes stories. It is a system that you then use to construct your game, and then you play that game to find out what happens. And twice now I’ve looked at Japanese TTRPGs that seem to instead take one step back from that freedom, away from that creativity.

I think that this game hooks you instantly if you like its pitch. Do you already have a Symphogear OC that kinda works in these five general overtones? Do you already have a character you think of as ‘An Amanda’? Well, here’s what you want, here’s the onramp, let’s go. For me? Someone who doesn’t know what it’s about and doesn’t have a reason to resonate with its looks and vibes? It has no time for me and I don’t find a reason to want to belong to a universe that is primarily about teenaged girls with multiple pages dedicated to showing you the components of their uniforms.

At the time of writing I am coming off watching another strange set of interactions about Dungeons & Dragons by people who do not like it remarking on the behaviour of those that do like it. This space is interesting because there are some valid criticisms in deep and thoughtful ways and some shockingly headassed takes that don’t make any sense to me. One criticism is that it’s really weird that the official D&D tiktok is boasting about the new Players Handbook being the largest one ever, as if to say that getting more book in your book means the game is better. To that end, I’d like to submit that Princess Wing is a game that wants to make sure before you start, you’ve already watched twenty plus episode of an anime ahead of time. By that marign, I think it’s fair to say that makes this one of the best games ever.

I don’t think this game has a bad approach, I just think the approach is one that misses me, and unlike other games I criticise for a bad approach, I think this is a good thing here. It doesn’t want me. It has no interest in me, and it does not care about informing me about its world.

You have to admire the purity.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[anhilliator1]

Sitting here thinking about the sheer amount of absolute WTF-ery in Chaldea should there ever be a collab with Symphogear.

The remnants of the Ignite Module would raise a question from Sigurd.

Idol X gets along well with the girls. Nero and Elizabeth, not so much as they do tend to pester them a bit too much.

The Prillya characters get along really well with them.

The girls are extremely suspicious of Paracelsus due to him reminding them a bit too much of Adam for their own good. (The voice does not help.)

Basically the entire Norse roster would be giving Hibiki weird looks because, y'know, Gungnir, CasCu in particular for obvious reasons. Nobu remarks that she reminds her of Summer Okita - maybe a bit too much. Is friends and sparring partners with most of the martial artist servants, in particular Li (both of them) due to her fighting style being primarily based on Bajiquan. At one point gets ahold of Durandal and is able to use it, much to everyone's surprise.

Miku is well-loved by a lot of the child servants due to her demeanor, and is probably a regular on the kitchen crew. Has likely caught the attention of a lot of the older Chinese Servants due to them recognizing what the Shenshoujing is and what it can do. Is considered one of the people you do not want to piss off because the nature of the Shenshoujing basically means she can shut down your Noble Phatasm with little effort.

Ibuki-Doji would probably mess with Tsubasa due to her being a divided spirit of Yamata-no-Orochi because said Orochi was killed by the Ame-no-Habakiri, the same relic Tsubasa's Gear is powered by. Chiyome would have a tougher time warming up to her for the same reasons. Tsubasa also probably gets along surprisingly well with Kagetora due to relating over feeling less than human (that and Kagetora likes her voice.)

Chris also gets odd looks from the Norse servants, but this time due to vague familiarity rather than recognizing the weapon due to Ichaival's odd status; on a related note, Okki, Blackbeard, and Jinako are very tight-lipped whenever it comes to discussing it. Tomoe nearly spills the beans but gets told to shush by the other three. Gets along well with the sharpshooter servants, especially those that use guns - except Koyanskaya.

Maria gets weird looks from both the Norse and Babylonian servants, the Norse side due to familiarity with the relic, but it not feeling quite right, and the Babylonians because she weirdly reminds them of Enki when transformed. Bedivere manages to figure it out without her telling him due to him being in a similar situation (having an "Airgetlam" that isn't actually the arm of Nuadha) and both bond rather quickly.

Kirika and Shirabe get a load of double takes from the Babylonian Divine Spirits due to them giving off a feeling similar to both Zababa as well as Ninurta's kids (mostly the former.) Get along very well with a lot of the duo Servants. Shirabe in particular picks up several tricks from Melt. Kirika actually freaks Murasaki out slightly due to both sounding vaguely similar to her as well as the fact that Kirika and Nagiko get along like a house on fire.

[gossamer-witch]

I'm not normal about this series.

So, me and my best friend just finished our watch of Symphogear (her first time, my second time through the whole series) and I have come to the conclusion that I just can't be normal about it. I got into the series right before XV came out and that was still a few years before I transitioned, and after a rewatch and having transitioned, I know why this show resonated with me back then. It, like me, is HELLA gay.

I knew it was gay to start, I'll be honest with that, but after being a part of the queer community, I see just how gay this show actually is. Between Miku's near constant pining for Hibiki, Tsubasa having such autistic rizz that she pulls in two (arguably three) women over the course of the show, EVERYTHING regarding Kirika and Shirabe, and a hell of a lot more than I can put into succinct words. I'm amazed that throughout five seasons they managed to keep the show queer.

I guess in a way it was one of the final things that really cracked my egg, and for that I'm really thankful. Cag probably did the most given that she outright has a scene in the specials that is what a lot of trans women say and truly see in themselves (minus a couple hundred years) I think it was the first real time I was starting to identify with characters in a series, and after this rewatch, characters I passed over are the ones I truly relate to the most.

I usually just lurk and look at random images, but I felt I needed to get this out in some form. Yell into the void that this show, and soon to be movie, is something that is important to me. Who knows, maybe someone will come across this and give the show a try and it helps them in a similar way that it helped me. And if you do decide to watch it, all I can say is, "Enjoy!"

[ferhog]

If I may be so bold I think some G-Witch fans are overreacting a TAD bit.

Specifically the odd number of people saying that Sulemio has been "Decanonized" by this statement, or turned into "Retroactive queerbaiting". People, the company's social media saying that the relationship is "Up to interpretation" does not erase what the writers and artists put into the actual show. If you ask me the only sensible response is asking what substances Bandai is on that they consider THIS up to interpretation:

If future releases of the show start removing all this THEN we can panic, but I sincerely doubt Bandai wants to do that, otherwise they wouldn't have let it happen in the first place.

I may be optimistic here but I also don't think this means they're going to be shying away from the relationship in the future like many are fearing. Iron-Blooded Orphans was featuring blatant gay content half a decade before this show and that included confirming that two women were married in an interview after the show ended, so clearly the company isn't utterly terrified of this stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a one-off incident (Which ISN'T to say that people shouldn't be angry about it by the way, I just think the wrong conclusions are being jumped to) especially since it seems to be receiving a negative reaction in both the English and Japanese spheres.

It's also worth noting that this stuff is almost certainly going on behind the scenes with a lot of franchises. Series like Nanoha and Symphogear are famously very sapphic but their lead couples have never kissed or verbally acknowledged their romantic relationship presumably because there's also men in charge who think there's more value in things being "Left to interpretation". Not saying that it being more common makes it okay. I just think that the people saying that they now want to drop the franchise over this should consider if that means they should give other franchises the same treatment. No moral consumption under capitalism and all that.

TLDR: I care more about what's in the show than whatever the PR team says. Ichirou Okouchi has been liking tweets of people praising the romance and art of the two kissing. He knows what he made.

[rayar32]

HI. SO. I HAVEN'T POSTED IN A WHILE. here's why!

(tldr: my brain was stupid and only wanted to post fan art, so I'm actively going against it by posting All of my art here, OC or fan art)

okay so, I started posting on this blog again because of the great Twitter Exodus™, when I realized that maybe, putting all my eggs in a single barely working basket wasn't a good idea. at first, I was mostly posting whatever came to mind, because really that's my overall philosophy when it comes to posting art/thoughts online. turns out however, that I ended up gathering a small amount of Symphogear heads when I became obsessed with the show a year ago, and started cranking out art while in the shores of my fiery obsession. now, that? that's great actually! I love seeing everyone's comments and funny tags about my art, it's absolutely wonderful!

however, because my brain isn't normal at all, it also meant that I had built up expectations for myself. I started posting OC content, but it just wasn't hitting as many interactions as I wanted to, at least compared to all the fan art which, is understandable, completely so! however, it did also discourage me from posting anything related to OCs, and instead made me want to post only fan art.

turns out, however, when you force yourself to post only one thing it becomes really, really unfun to actually post things. so, that's why I haven't been posting things; I, as an artist, draw a lot more OC stuff than fan art. I love making stories, and it's something that's always deeply fulfilling even if attached to another fandom, like with my Symphogear OCs.

so what am I gonna do about it? well post Symphogear OCs, and literally any other art content I make. I'm making this officially my "very professional art archive" blog, broken up by my stupid thoughts and answering asks every now and then. so yeah! expect almost daily posts from now on, as I haven't stopped drawing at all since I last uploaded here-

[animebw]

Thinking back on it, I'm realizing there aren't many straightforward idol anime I actually like. Like, Zombieland Saga is lots of fun, but the idol stuff is consistently the weakest part of it and I always feel myself tuning out whenever that's the focus. I guess I liked Heroines Run the Show before it went to shit in the back half? Does Ya Boi Kongming count? Symphogear, technically? Maybe Hanayamata? I dunno, I feel like all those shows have asterisks that keep them from being straightforward idol-y enough to qualify. Meanwhile, by far the most traditional idol show I've watched so far has been Shine Post, and hoooooooo boy did I end up hating that one.

I think the problem is, as I grow increasingly cynical and jaded in my old, withered age of 25 years old, the overwhelming positivity that defines the idol genre starts to feel forced and cloying. It's easy enough for "believe in yourself and try your best" to work as an overall theme if you're sincere enough to pull it off. But the second that theme becomes an obligation or an afterthought, it can very quickly turn a show into the most suffocating, shrink-wrapped piece of sanitized goop imaginable. It becomes a way for a story to avoid being about anything, spouting generic platitudes and cynically designed cuteness with all its edges sanded down and dull. When I look at the weaker idol anime I've watched, I don't see stories that come by their earnestness, well, earnestly. I see coldly calculated, market-tested corporate branding exercises that say nothing, express nothing, and don't dare step a single toe out of line. A plastic smile plastered across an empty styrofoam mannequin, babying its audience with lazy, simplified moralizing because it doesn't think they're capable of anything more complex than Teletubbies, and god forbid we lose a single audience member trying to actually make an artistic statement.

But that's the thing about Juuki Hanada as a writer.

When this man wants to get messy?

He gets fucking messy.

So much of what makes Hanada's writing so powerful, in comedy and drama alike, is how well he's able to let the reins go of his characters and let them crash into each other. Snappy one-liners and comebacks battling for dominance, chaotic personalities setting off fireworks of all kinds through their interactions, but also raw, ugly emotional confrontations that don't sugarcoat anything out of fear his audience isn't mature enough to handle it. Not all of his stuff is a masterpiece- I could spend hours talking about how badly Kyoukai no Kanata's plot falls apart in the second half, Steins;Gate gets more and more exhausting the more I think about it- but even his weakest works carry the unmistakable passion of a writer holding nothing back. And when he's firing on all cylinders? You might just end up with the single greatest coming-of-age tale this medium has ever produced.

And it turns out, that sensibility is exactly what a show like Love Live needs to succeed. Because even the most optimistic, inspirational story imaginable needs that edge to temper itself against. The sheer chaos of its lovable cast bouncing off each other isn't just what makes the comedy work so well, it's what lets these dramatic moments sting the way they need to. Because it's only in recognizing these harsher moments- failure, frustration, despair- that its triumphs are able to be so meaningful. I care about Muse because I've seen what it looks like when they fall short, and I care about Honoka because this show lets me see her at her lowest, at her most human and vulnerable. These characters aren't just plastic simulations of cute girls selling a fantasy; they feel like a real friend group, messy and anarchic and free. Free to express themselves with the full palette of the human experience, even the parts most of us would rather pretend didn't exist. And it makes their successes matter in a way they wouldn't if we didn't have that grounding in the unbearable chaos of being.

Love Live is not a deconstruction, or a subversion, or a dark parody or anything so gauche. It's nothing more of less than a straightforward, inspirational idol show. But it's a straightforward, inspirational idol show that knows it doesn't have to sacrifice its raw humanity to shine with the brightest stars in the sky. And that, folks, makes all the difference in the world.

[magical-girl-brainrot]

THEY'RE DONE, AH.

so, as voted by y'all a little while ago, you wanted to hear about my angel magical girl project! (doesn't have an official name but that's fine)

the loose plot is that these seven got sent down to earth to fight a rather ill defined evil (this is not me being "i haven't figured it out" about it. it is, in story, ill defined). having been turned human and their power contained in some magical girl transformation trinkets but like, sort of sci fi flavored.

because angels are bio mechanical in this setting (down to elaborate on that on main at @sbpstudios.), so the sci fi vibe makes sense.

speaking of! i took inspiration from Yuki Yuna is a Hero and Symphogear design wise! i don't do sci fi stuff much so i took to the magical girl works that i think do that pretty well.

i imagine this story is probably pretty monster of the week/slice of life like for the first half or so, before things get Serious. most of what these seven do is fuck around and find out, trying and failing to get leads on their mission and get this shit over with.

i could talk about actual characterization but aaaaa- brain is goop. so if you wanna hear stuff just send asks.

ANYWAYS THAT'S IT THAT'S THE POST THANK YOU FOR COMING!

[newspropaganda]

so you say that the characters don't grow in zexal, because every protagonist gets better as the series progresses.

You don't say. That's literally the point of being a duelist. Nobody's out there going "I'm going to start dueling and be the worst possible duelist because I never want to get better."

At least Yuma didn't start as the best and have 1 loss in the history of his life, like Atem, Jaden, and Yusei. You can throw in Yuya and Yusaku too.

Minimal losses and superior skill! Wow! That definitely makes the duels interesting.

At least we actually got to see how Yuma became the best. Not just "The Yu-boy is the best, no-one can beat him, he saves the world!"

That's a classic yugioh thing. And once they make someone who isn't the best right away, somehow that's trash?

And Astral, the so called plot-convenient monologue machine, would Zexal be better without him?

No.

I'm sorry that some people state what they've learned. Like his observations.

Of course he told yuma about things that he already should know about. Astral doesn't know about that stuff and assumed that yuma didn't either. If you can remember correctly, they didn't start well.

And he doesn't exist purely to spout that stuff at yuma. he's literally the reason that yuma grew as a duelist and that the inevitable doom that his planet would suffer. If Astral didn't exist, his world would be destroyed, and so would Earth.

And nothing says "compelling villain" like power-hungry millennium item hunting guys with associates that hate a pharaoh for existing, either. Darts? He didn't have a reason for being evil. some orichalcos stone decided to turn him against mankind.

How compelling!

and you sure weren't complaining about Seto Kaiba. He does what he does because he has a brother, a rival, and a profound love for a a blue eyes white dragon and money.

And for your information, literally every yugioh villain had some sort of tragic past. Bandit king bakura? His town went up in flames and he was the only survivor. Pegasus? his fiance died. dartz? his kigdom was destroyed and his wife was turned into a monster. marik? he got an excruciating back tattoo.

What's new? Atem isn't here, so villains are suddenly different?

They've been like this since the dawn of yugioh.

Now I didn't say that it wasn't made for kids. The entire franchise was made for kids.

I'm sorry that you can't find anything good in the anime, but at least TvTokyo did something different from the usual "protagonist gets rival. no prob. he beats him. protagonist gets enemy. no prob. he beats him. protagonist proves himself to be the best by winning every tournament he's ever been in."

sure, yuma completed some of those, but he never even beat kaito, his rival.

and no-one said that zexal was sophisticated and mature. no-one did.

but some people here pay attention to the actual thing we're watching, not some pity party in their heads about how they think the show sucks.

And others just grew up with zexal. I, for one, did. And i've watched the dub and part of the sub.

maybe if you'd finally stop letting something pass through one ear and go out the other, then you'd see the reality in some things.

people are entitled to their opinions, and just because you see things one way doesn't mean that everyone else should feel the same way.

Oh, and about the "Bad Duels" and stuff, I'm sorry that the duels are more life-like than they were in other series. Sometimes it's nice to have a change.

Last I check Zexal was the most boring and souless Yu-Gi-Oh show that hardly had any investement to get people into and now your telling me that people care?

BRUUUUU Yugioh was aways Gallop original trilogy just like Symphogear up to GX.

[magicalgirlagency]

I have pretty high hopes for Princession Orchestra actually, knowing who's creating it it seems like it's going to be a more non-mecha/ traditional magical girl version of Symphogear which is great for me because I was always sorta fascinated by Symphogear's concept of musical magical girls that have to sing while fighting but was turned off by practically everything else about it

That still doesn't alleviate my anxieties. I mean, that was just a preview; what if there'll be candid shots of the heroines' tits and asses on the final product?

And what about the fact that the director of Prisma Fucking Illya is on the staff, as well?

I am not taking any risks; if this turns out to be yet another jerk-off material, this series is Shadow Realm-bound.