#tweet with an audience of three people

[topnotchquark]

The way I see it, Valentino Rossi is basically Italy's Shahrukh Khan.

[sunforgrace]

really cannot be emphasized enough how he didn’t have to do any of that

[mochlus]

I'm a character backstory hater ok. a hater. of backstories. people are always wishing they had more backstory for their blorbo well I DON'T. I don't care. I don't give a shit about blorbo's past ok. I get it I used to be in the camp of "you need to know how a character grew up and what their past was like to Really understand them" but that is WRONG. A character is not a real person. they are a piece in a story and to understand them you need to know the role they play in the story way more than you need some nebulous "past". yes, it is true that many ways people tell stories involve a character's past influencing their motivation for their present, and their role in the story. BUT THAT'S NOT ALWAYS THE CASE! sometimes a character as presented on the page or screen as they are in the present moment is all that needs to exist for them to perfectly fill their role in the story! The way they grew up doesn't matter! Their childhood trauma doesn't matter! I don't want to know more! I want the character to be engaging HERE and NOW! How much I like any given backstory is entirely dependent on how much it helps a character to be engaging in the story being told! I don't care about character pasts for their own sake! NOT EVERY CHARACTER NEEDS THEIR PAST TO BE SPELLED OUT FOR THE AUDIENCE

[realcube]

oikawa tōru who isn't pr trained. like, at all. you'd think being naturally charismatic and attractive would give him a pass, but not when he is wishing death upon the opposing team after losing a match. and not so much when he is rolling his eyes at interviewers after they ask about questionable plays he made during a game.

to avoid that sort of childishness in the future, oikawa decided to start bringing you along to promotional events with him. whenever he receives a query that makes his blood boil, all he has to do is find your face in the crowd, and that is ought to calm him down enough to respond appropriately.

or so he thought.

the first time he deployed this strategy was a club athletico san juan press conference. a host approaches the mic, "question for oikawa tōru."

he gestures for them to continue and they ask, "what would you say to all the people that claim you have past your prime and your skills are declining?"

"who is exactly is claiming that?" he snaps with a grimace, ready to unload an flood of profanties and defensive remarks, until he catches a glimpse of you, rapidly shaking your head in the audience. mouthing for him to 'shut up', and strangely, that works, as he chokes back any mean comments brewing on his tongue and mutters plainly, "i'd say their wrong. i'm better than ever."

the interview nods, briefly thanking him before the next one takes the stand. they declare, "question for oikawa tōru."

he internally sighs, but motions for them to speak. "what are your opinions on ushijima wakatoshi from the swedish adlers replying to a tweet of your promotional image with 'fugly cunt' followed by three vomit emojis?"

"ushijima said what?" his face contorts to reflect his absolute shock and disbelief. you also pick up on how his cheeks tint red with anger, so you prompt begins shaking your head again, crossing your arms to form an x.

oikawa breathes in sharply from his nose and slowly exhales, trying to find inner peace, if it really exists. "well," he starts, shuffling through all the catty, terrible comments he could possibly reply with, searching for one that wasn't entirely offensive. "it takes one to know one."

[zoe-oneesama]

Now that it’s been brought back to the forefront of my mind in regards to yesterday’s SL asks, it really is genuinely kinda nuts how the potions were revealed in Season 2 and have only physically appeared (i.e. not just been mentioned or shown in a one-off picture or alternate timeline) in 13 out of what’s now 92 episodes (not counting specials) since their closest-to-chronological debut. Even more wild is the fact that, like you pointed out, only 3 out of 7 potion powers are canonically known to date. Apparently That Guy tweeted a few years back that one of the remaining ones is supposed to be a Fire potion (which, if true, may be the one Marinette was trying to figure out the “spicy little rock” ingredient for in Mr. Pigeon 72?) that gives the user the ability to walk on lava and/or a resistance to scorching heat, but they haven’t been able to use it since “Fire is something very difficult to use in shows watched by kids, because we have to pay extra-care that they won't see fire as a cool thing and play with it afterwards. Broadcasters tend to prefer not showing it at all.” To which I’m like?? A) You guys STAY hopping between whether you want your target demographic to be little kids or early teens in actual practice. B) There have to be a million ways that you can blatantly write the idea that fire is dangerous which is why the Fire potion would be NEEDED (or, y’know, have more faith in your audience’s ability to intuitively understand that from the get-go). C) If you already understood that a fire power up was genuinely likely to be a hard no-go with your broadcasters, maybe change your plans to only conceptualizing 6 instead of 7 potions before putting them in the actual show???

Right? And like, he said Lava as well. So do something WITH LAVA if you can't use fire! (I bet it would be easier to animate too!) Or, or! Invent a kind of goo or acid that burns LIKE Lava so they have to use the suit! That could be the debut episode, where it's impossible to get close because of the heat and burn of it until BAM! Fire Suit.

It's not like you have to use the suits OFTEN, they've only used the Ice one like two times I think, just do a debut episode and then use it for Ordinary Heroing, like actually running into a burning building and saving people. Pretty sure even kids don't think house fires are cool, so you don't HAVE to associate fire with a "cool" akuma.

A long time ago when I was ranting about this I was informed by a Anon that the others were "revealed" at some convention or expo and they were things like Air and Space (space hadn't been shown at the time), Sun and Moon, and like...Soul? So, what's the difference between Air and Space? Are Sun and Moon supposed to be Light and Dark, how is that following the Environmental Costume Change of the three we know? Wtf is Soul? Maybe it's a lack of cohesion that's making this difficult for them.

The more I hear about them, the more I think this idea was never fully fleshed out and will never BE fleshed out.

[starcurtain]

Hey! I apologize if this question has been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one, but where do you think the idea of Aventurine being a sex slave came from? Other than the obvious factor of it being something fun for the fandom to mess around with, I mean.

It's something I kind of took for granted as being true before playing his quest, but after finishing it I realized there wasn't really any indication. The only thing I can really think of is his master's comments about him having a good body. Is there anything in his behavior you can think of that would lead to this conclusion if it wasn't a popular fan interpretation already/kind of just an easy conclusion to reach with a slave character?

(also kind of related but what do you think of the idea that he sleeps around/with his clients to make deals? he's obviously willing to sexualize himself with the boob window, but that doesn't necessarily mean he goes further.)

As far as I can tell, the idea that Aventurine was involved in sexual slavery comes from three (maybe four) places:

First, the comment from the master about Aventurine's appearance. People were holding this comment up as refutable proof that Aventurine was used in sexual slavery on top of being tossed into the Hunger Games; however, the response from other players on this interpretation, especially the Chinese side of the fandom, was very mixed, with a lot of people pointing out that the context in the game probably meant the slave master was talking about Aventurine's ability to attract attention from fans watching the literal Sigonian Hunger Games, rather than having a direct sexual-slavery connotation.

Second, the comment from Sparkle about stripping naked and getting on his knees for Sunday. This one has way more implication in English than I think it might for an Eastern audience, actually. In English, this pretty much sounds like Sparkle saying Aventurine trades sexual favors for success in his gambles. However, I suspect the original intention in Chinese was more about humiliation. Western audiences don't have as much history with honor-based prostration, i.e. accepting corporal humiliation as a form of reconciliation that Eastern audiences might be more familiar with. And in any case, Sparkle is Sparkle. She probably just went for the lowest blow she could think of here.

Third, the general assumption that if Sigonian slaves were being chained, branded, beaten, sent to death matches, etc., it seems logical that they would also be taken advantage of in other ways. I honestly think this is probably the fairest take--many, many real slaves around the world faced (and still face!) sexual abuse, so if slaves from Sigonia were treated so poorly you could make them fight to the death for entertainment, it stands to reason they were probably also not safe from other forms of assault. We also have no idea what happened to Kakavasha in any of the years between his being a tiny child fleeing the massacre and then being purchased as a slave as a late-teens-early-twenties person. That's a very long time for a child to have to survive on their own on an extremely hostile planet and not face risks of all kinds or end up needing to do unspeakable things to survive. So I think this is at least not that far-fetched, although it's important to say there's nothing in the game that directly confirms this.

And fourth: I read a tweet semi-recently that stated that one of the Chinese (or maybe it was Japanese) names for a quest Aventurine was involved in was actually a reference to a book about a teenage sexual assault survivor. However, when I tried to verify this myself, I couldn't find any quest Aventurine was in that was based on a book about sexual assault in either English, Chinese, or Japanese. It's possible I just missed something, but I'm taking this one with a bit of a grain of salt currently, since I can't confirm it personally.

Regarding your other question, about whether I think Aventurine sleeps around to make deals...

I definitely think he does not, for one major reason.

First, I will admit that Aventurine is definitely willing to use his appearance to his advantage. This is pretty obvious. He wears incredibly flashy clothes, baths himself in cologne, overloads on glittering golden jewels, and absolutely calls attention to his appearance when working with clients.

We see him actively doing this in his Moment Among the Stars video, where he is clearly using his looks as an equal tool (to his wealth), to daze his target.

It's not an accident that he says things like "Use me as you wish," with all the explicit connotations preserved. The implication is there. However, unless he was absolutely backed into a corner, I think that implication is all it will ever be.

The reason I think this is that the devs go out of their way to give Aventurine three fairly noticeable physical behaviors in his in-game scenes:

For one, he has some of the most closed off body language of any character in the game.

Aventurine's default conversation pose is arms crossed directly and tightly in front of himself. This is like "Defensive Body Language 101." By crossing your arms, you put a symbolic barrier between yourself and the person you're speaking to, and also ensure that your hands are up and available in case you actually need to physically defend yourself.

Virtually all of Aventurine's conversations take place from this stance, no matter who he is speaking to (from the Trailblazer all the way to Topaz). He deliberately closes his pose off and tightens up his silhouette, which just sends a glaring "Don't touch me" message.

This closing off is also blatantly apparent when you compare it to the deliberately open poses he strikes while trying to make himself seem accessible to others (like tempting clients) or seem powerful (to intimidate):

Complementing this habit of closing himself off is a second noticeable aspect of his body language: He frequently avoids eye contact to the point that he even holds conversations while entirely facing away from the person he's speaking to.

I might be a bit lenient and say maybe he's doing this to on purpose to be mysterious, whoo~~ But... in all honestly, he just does this with everyone, even with Ratio while trying to talk about an actual important issue (wanting to look into Acheron's real identity). Hell, even the fake Aventurine does it to himself!

We can even say that wearing the rose-tinted glasses in the first place is another intentional barrier, one Aventurine deliberately removes in specific moments to give people the (false) impression that he's "letting them in" to his circle:

Now, this might be a bit more complicated in Aventurine's case, because eye contact has a whole extra meaning when eyes are the defining trait of your species and come with particularly challenging racial stereotypes. So it may be that Aventurine is simply used to conducting conversation while looking away to minimize racial prejudice against his eyes' unique appearance.

However, I'd also argue that the devs deliberately turned his entire model away in cutscene after cutscene to create a clear sense of being inaccessible, unapproachable, and unwilling to engage in the physical intimacy of standing closely, directly facing, and staring at his conversation partners.

While he faces away, he controls both the figurative and the literal direction of conversation, forcing people to keep their eyes on him while he is free to move as he pleases. Over and over again, it just says "I want to be the one in control. I'm not afraid to show my back to you, but you are not welcome to come near me."

And, in fact, that's a third aspect of his character's body language that I am sure the devs did not include accidentally: More so than other characters, many of Aventurine's conversations are conducted from weirdly far distances. Like, half the time he's talking, he's standing all the way on the opposite side of the room!

This habit of speaking from a-larger-than-normal distance is apparent in the first scene with Himeko...

And then in just about every other conversation too:

The bubble is twenty feet in every direction.

Like yes, he does approach and have conversations like a normal person... sometimes... But it is significantly more noticeable with Aventurine than with other characters that he often conducts whole conversations--even with his allies--from a distance. Just genuinely weirdly far apart.

Leaving space for Gaiathra, I guess.

And it's because these significant decisions were made with Aventurine's in-game body language that, when he deliberately alters his own behavior, it is instantaneously noticeable.

In 2.0, he closes the distance, the glasses come off, and he gets directly up in the Trailblazer's face.

It's uncomfortable not just because the player is suddenly being loomed over, but because this behavior has already been subconsciously established for the player as out of character for Aventurine.

The barriers the character himself was putting up are deliberately stripped away so that he can use physicality and demanding eye contact to intimidate his target. He has to reverse his own normal body language in order to come across as domineering (and, I guess if you're into that, appealing in a domineering manner).

And ummmm, just a tiny aside here because I can't resist:

This does mean that when the game goes out of its way to demonstrate Aventurine altering his own normal habit of distant and defensive body language, it is absolutely intentional.

Yes, this is a Ratiorine post in disguise. There literally isn't any other character in the game that Aventurine is shown being comfortable standing so close to and interacting with in this manner. This doesn't occur in every one of their scenes, but Ratio is the only character that this happens with repeatedly. It's not an accident that the devs literally added "They were walking side-by-side" as flavor text.

But look, I'll be fair: There's a great example of this in Aventurine's scene with Acheron too, where he closes the distance and attempts to make eye contact with her--seeking her guidance and closeness--and she is actually the one stepping away, speaking with her back turned, demonstrating her power and control (and issues with connection!) in that scene.

Anyway, this was a whole longggg tangent into analyzing Aventurine's body language, but my point is that, overall, the devs deliberately adjusted his model's actions in-game to give the impression of a person who clearly wants to be in control of every interaction he has with other people, who insists on distance over intimacy, and whose stances and habits suggest that he is significantly less accessible and open than his "Use me as you wish" motto might suggest.

Long story longer, I think that there is almost zero chance Aventurine is willingly ceding control over himself or the actions expected of him to anyone he isn't 100% comfortable with, and I think that using physical intimacy of any kind would be an absolute last resort for him. Frankly, he comes across as more likely to shoot himself in the foot than let someone he doesn't trust lay hands on him.

To me, he reads very much as "You may look, but you may not touch."

[talenlee]

Game Pile: Kentucky Route 0, One of Three Games About America

Script and Thumbnail below the fold!

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist point and click game of what I’d normally call Narrative Adventure, which came to kickstarter in 2011, then came out in 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2020, because you can’t have nothing for free, even things you pay for. The game is a text-driven game without any of the trappings of your typical point-and-clicker where you jam a ladder in your pants and try to work out why you want to put green dye in the water fountain. Instead it follows the haunted mind of Conway, a trucky driver and his interactions with small handful of people on a part of the Kentucky Interstate, while he to find the place he needs to do his delivery, despite being utterly lost.

I enjoyed what of Kentucky Route Zero I played, but the thing that stands out to me in hindsight is its sound design. It’s a beautifully defined game, audio-wise, with all sorts of thoughtful foley for its environments, and the way that even the pieces of the interface that Conway interacts with have their own sort of specific authentic sounds, chonks and thunks and ch-zzzzses.

It’s also visually splendid, beautiful in what it tries to represent in the heightened reality of its setting but also the format of a videogame. These places look good from the angle that’s chosen, creating lines of artwork and bars of cages, depending on what you’re focusing on, and by being a fixed-camera story of its type, Kentucky Route Zero takes on traits of theatre, with blocking and careful positioning and timing all making up part of how the story unfolds.

A story I haven’t finished.

See, I don’t feel like playing Kentucky Route Zero Act V.

Sit down, traveller. Let me tell you a story.

There’s a chance you’ve heard this story before. I’ve anonymised it here, not because I think you shouldn’t be able to work out who it is, but because the idea of focusing on the who runs the risk of ignoring the what. Plus, I don’t want to direct anyone to a person who said something stupid and encourage fights. That’s not the important issue.

This is the story of when someone perfectly represented something, and probably never realised it.

You will sometimes hear me talk about the take that ‘there are three games about America,’ with a tone of utter revulsion and derision. This is from an incident back in 2020, when a game developer and advocate for inclusive games, had an opinion, on the internet. This advocate is well-established and has a big audience, but also, he’s crucially, not a white guy, not a Christian guy, and not an American guy. These are factors that play into what he said, which was, in summary, that while Kentucky Route 0 was no doubt phenomenal, he wasn’t interested in playing it right now.

To this, an actual adult responded with:

This is legitimately the worst take you’ve ever had. There are only about three games that are actually American, and this is one of them. Everything else is designed for export. Kr0 is a precious and valuable thing. It is of immense and intense personal importance.

Now, resisting the urge to argue with a tweet, which is just generally a bad practice that leads to doing things like wanting to be on twitter, and setting aside this tweet conflating ‘this is of personal importance to me’ and ‘this should be of importance to you,’ this position describes the idea that there are only three games that are ‘actually American.’

What does it mean to be ‘actually American?’

America is a pretty pervasive presence, if you’re not aware of it. Most people in the world have to know about what’s going on in America. We know about your Presidents and your Senators and your Constitution, to the point where people can be more aware of how your country’s laws work than their own country’s laws. I’ve often seen it held up as an example of how poorly educated people in say, Canada and Australia are that we believe we have, say, a ‘first amendment right,’ but the thing is you have to ask why there is that.

We watch so much American TV.

We listen to American music.

We try to make our news broadcasts look like yours, because that’s what real and legitimate news looks like. We try to retell your stories in our local languages because that’s what real media looks like. Our children sing songs in your accents because that’s the culture that a multi-trillion dollar economy has pumped into the whole world.

America demands we attend their wars and surrender our living to become their dead and when we are done America sells the survivors a cheeseburger.

This is not a remarkable or controversial statement. You must know, this is not even vaguely challenging to know about. Everywhere in the world is replicating parts of the American empire, because America exports and enforces the vision of the American empire. McDonalds may sell curry in India, but it’s very important that the curry being sold is McDonalds curry because that is how you know it’s an American style curry.

What this means is when someone tries to assert there are only really three games about America, that’s a kind of specialised brain rot that requires you to consider games that are very much about America as not being really about America. And thus we see the other thing about America, which is it’s not enough for America to be the most important place in the world that everyone else in the world needs to recognise, but also, most of America is inadequately America for this vision of America. You saw this in the wake of 9/11, and the election of Barack Obama: huge amounts of American media resurged in extolling the values of ‘real’ America, as opposed to the parts of America where the vast majority of Americans lived, which just so happened to paint a lot of marginalised people living in the cities as ‘fake Americans.’

I am not bringing you unique information. This is just obviously true things if you don’t live within the boundaries of an environment that flatters you as the most normal thing in the world. The vast majority of the world is not America. There are eight billion people in the world, more or less, meaning that America is about 4% of the world, and yet, it is catastrophically, overwhelmingly, deleritously the common touchstone for how things are ‘supposed’ to work. This is through media imperialism, which is mostly supported by American companies exporting all their media to foreign markets extremely cheaply.

‘about three games that are actually American.’

This fascinating piece of doofusry still, even now leaves me agog. ‘Actually American.’ Kentucky Route 0 is actually American, you see, as opposed to… what? Is America’s Army one of them? You know, the game financed by the American Army? What about Call of Duty, a franchise that is in part subsidised by American military complex manufacturers? What about Grand Theft Auto, a videogame that tells the rags-to-riches story of American excess in criminality, setting aside the way it’s made by a Scottish company. Actually American, because American doesn’t mean America, it means one tiny little pool of ‘America’ where the speaker can imagine there’s a realness and an authenticity to the America-ness that doesn’t involve all the messy realities of what it is to be America. It’s the towns of hard-working people, that suffer under your particular description of oppression, whether that’s cities full of nonwhite people or corporations bleeding the country dry, always eliding the social cruelties and terribleness of these places, as if giving people money stops them from being bigoted (for example).

This is then used to recruit these poor, superior Americans, the you know, America Americans, whose sufferings are noble and whose authenticity cannot be impeached and they are then used as a defense against criticism of, you know, America. It’s the same speech Charlie Daniels gave about how foreigners may think they could push around Barack Obama (a dude who bombed a lot of shepherds with the most elaborate and brutal military ordinance in the world) but they were going to have a harder time taking on Americans who wrestled alligators, who at this point have exactly zero recorded drone strike kills.

This is because America America isn’t real.

‘Real’ America is a nebulous nothing that you can project whatever you want onto, and which is also not responsible for anything terrible that America does. It’s not the American Empire, it’s not the exporter of culture, it’s somehow purer, better, a sort of individualised folk who are to be protected and extolled, shriven of all the things about America that make it anything but its perfect idealised form of America.

I could go on.

I really could.

This is something that defines the world I have to live in. I speak English. I’m white. I’m from a coloniser state. I should be able to integrate easily and smoothly into the white supremacist capitalist hierarchy of American culture, but we are told, that no, we are not acceptable. We are only valid as long as our differences are invisible. We, a real people, do not get to have opinions on America, because we do not know True America. When you spell colour wrong in a chat message, when your accent isn’t quite right, when you don’t know the difference between junior and sophomore year of high school, then you are shown, you are evinced, and you are made very aware that you are other, you are outside, you are wrong.

And really, there’s no good reason for it. We send our soldiers to America’s wars, we buy America’s submarines, and we sing your songs. Our currency mimics America’s, our culture permeats with America’s, we even have such a crushing inferiority complex about the empire that there’s an academic term for what we feel about our own media compared to the media of the truer, proper empire to which we are vassal.

The term is ‘cultural cringe,’ and it was coined by Henry Lawson, who you, odds on, have never heard of. In 1894, he wrote:

The Australian writer, until he gets a “London hearing,” is only accepted as an imitator of some recognized English or American author; and, as soon as he shows signs of coming to the front, he is labelled “The Australian Southey,” “The Australian Burns,” or “The Australian Bret Harte,” and lately, “The Australian Kipling.” Thus no matter how original he may be, he is branded, at the very start, as a plagiarist, and by his own country, which thinks, no doubt, that it is paying him a compliment and encouraging him, while it is really doing him a cruel and an almost irreparable injury. But mark! As soon as the Southern writer goes “home” and gets some recognition in England, he is “So-and-So, the well-known Australian author whose work has attracted so much attention in London lately”; and we first hear of him by cable, even though he might have been writing at his best for ten years in Australia.

This is imperialism. This is a way in which we have been induced and brought by the empires around us to accept their ways as correct, as the normal, as default. And that is the mindset you must have if you want to look at the breadth of videogames, with their American ideas like health insurance, readily available guns, the importance of freedom, the ubiquity of air travel, the branding and iconography of types of food and the sports metaphors and then say ‘yeah, this doesn’t have anything to do with America, not really.’

Anyway, this thread, this incident, was a big deal at the time, in that there were a lot of people from within the community of game developers and journalists who seemed very happy to line up and get mad at a brown foreigner for being inadequately enthusiastic about the possibility of playing a videogame. But don’t worry, after a day or two, an apology was forthcoming for all of this fracas, by which I mean, the original developer apologised for being so thoughtless as to, again, express honest lack of enthusiasm in a videogame.

For me, this was a kind of break point, where I started just blocking indie devs on sight. I don’t want to know what they’re involved in, I don’t want to promote their work, and I will hold tiny grudges against them that I do not seek to transfer or encourage in others. This was one silly incident in which a lot of people said something silly because they don’t know better, or they’re arseholes.

None of this is fair to Kentucky Route 0. It’s a game with its own intentions and its own perspective. It’s not trying to make this conversation happen. Kentucky Route 0 has been choked and gripped by this position around it, where to talk about an American game, someone put a cross on it that made it the avatar for All Things America. The wild thing to me is that I had, prior to this point, played two episodes of Kentucky Route 0. I thought it was pretty good, and I liked what it did with the negative space of dialogue options – when a character you’re controlling makes excuses, the excuses you choose show you other things you could be making excuses about that you, the player, didn’t know beforehand. That’s some good Narrative Storytelling Design, I like that a lot. But now I can’t really engage with Kentucky Route Zero because the main thing it makes me think about is how this final chapter, meant to round out the game’s story and present a conclusion and a point, became this flashpoint for a lot of people to be very casually racist.

Which kinda poisons the whole thing for me. It’s an authentic thing, I’m sure, it’s a thoughtful thing, too, but the people stepping up to say I should care about it did so in a way that made me hate them.

Any time you see me say ‘three games about America’ I’m talking about this, and the attitude of a particular kind of American that America is, as always, exceptional. It’s real easy to not realise when you’re just voicing your self-centeredness and how easy that is to ignore the opinions of people around you and what they’re saying. This is what I’m talking about when I mention ‘the three games about America.’

[fade for credit text]

By the way, the three games about America are Crash Bandicoot, Sam & Max Hit The Road, and Bust A Move.

[yumeka-sxf]

There were two panels related to Spy x Family at Anime Expo this year, with the first on Day 1 being Toho Animation's panel featuring both Spy x Family and Kaiju No.8.

The panel started with the SxF portion, with the special guests being the series director, Kazuhiro Furuhashi, and the CODE: White director, Takashi Katagiri. They also had the six SxF ThreeZero figures on the stage with them 😀

The MC asked them some questions, like what their favorite scenes were from their respective works and who their favorite character is. They also showed behind-the-scenes footage of both the Loid/Fiona tennis match in season 1, and Yor's fight scene against Type F in the movie. We got to see both of these scenes in rough animatic sketch form and then in line art form, which was pretty cool (it wasn't clear if photo/video was prohibited at this panel, but I didn't want to risk it by being caught blatantly recording these exclusive clips, lol). Then they showed off some of Anya's unused outfits from the movie.

At the end, they showed this original illustration by Kyoji Asano, made specifically for this event 😁

And that was it for the SxF part of the panel before they moved on to Kaiju No.8...and to be honest, it kinda overshadowed the SxF part, mostly because it featured two of the main Kaiju No.8 voice actors, one of which was extremely hilarious and charismatic. Plus there were a lot more segments compared to the SxF part. The interview with the guests seemed longer, they did three live voice overs, showed a pre-recorded special message from the band that performs the Kaiju No.8 opening, and then they took a group photo with the audience (and maybe something else that I'm forgetting). It seemed like the SxF part took up about 35% of the panel's time while Kaiju No.8 took up 65%. Not sure why it felt so unbalanced, but it was still fun.

Next was the panel on Day 3 for Production IG and their related studios WIT and Signal MD. Heads of each studio were there, including George Wada from WIT. Photo/video wasn't allowed once the panel started, but it basically consisted of an interview with the different guests, then trailers/teasers for their upcoming projects, then a Q&A session.

WIT is the studio that makes SxF, so I was hoping for any news about season 3, specifically if WIT would be more involved with it than they were with season 2. For those who don't know, season 1 of SxF was made by both WIT Studio and Cloverworks. But when they decided to make both season 2 and the movie in 2023, they split up the work, with WIT focusing on the movie while Cloverworks did pretty much all the work on season 2 (which is why the animation in season 1 and season 2 looks a bit different). According to this tweet, the official staff listing for season 3 is the same as season 2, meaning WIT will once again have little involvement. But despite this, they had a slide during the presentation with the season 3 promo image (preceded by the CODE: White teaser trailer, which made the crowd go wild - glad there were lots of SxF fans in the audience!) George Wada also said in regards to season 3 that they're "working hard on it."

I wanted to confirm during the Q&A if WIT would again take a backseat during season 3's production as well, but unfortunately the panel only had a few minutes left when it was close to my turn, and then they opted to pick a few random people in line for their last questions (which I thought was kind of unfair). Guess we'll just have to wait and see if anything changes with that staff listing once we get closer to season 3's release.

Overall, while Takuya Eguchi's appearance at last year's AX was more fun, it was still cool to attend this year's SxF-related panels as well. Hopefully season 3 will either be airing or close to being released at next year's AX, so we'll have even more SxF events!

[tomorrowusa]

Silicon Valley has its own variety of racism. And you'll never guess who is the leading figure in spreading this poisonous ideology. [CLUE: He left South Africa at age 18 when the country had just begun the process of eliminating apartheid and moving to majority black rule.]

Racist pseudo-science is making a comeback thanks to Elon Musk. Recently, the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X (formally known as Twitter), spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers—a dynamic my colleague Garrison Hayes analyzes in his latest video for Mother Jones. X, and before it Twitter, has a long-held reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy. [ ... ] Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.) “People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”

Racist pseudo-science simply sprays cologne on the smelly bullshit of plain old irrational bigotry. Warped theology, which was used to justify slavery, passed the baton of officially sanctioned race prejudice to pseudo-science in the late 19th and early 20th century.

DNA and other real science not only undermine the pseudo-science of racism but has revealed that "race" is not even a valid scientific concept among humans. What is widely regarded as race is defined by rather generalized phenotypes.

There has always been petty bigotry. But racial pseudo-science has been used to justify exploitation, colonialism, and territorial expansion by the powerful and ignorant. Elon Musk certainly qualifies as both powerful and ignorant.

In 2022, just one week after Musk purchased Twitter, the Center for Countering Digital Hate —an online civil rights group— found that racial slurs against Black people had increased three times the year’s average, with homophobic and transphobic epithets also seeing a significant uptick, according to the Associated Press. More than a year later, Musk made headlines once again for tweeting racist dog whistles in a potential attempt to “woo” a recently fired Tucker Carlson. But, his new shift into sharing tech-bro-friendly bigotry carries its own unique set of consequences.

If you are still on Twitter/X then you are indirectly supporting the propagation of pseudo-scientific racism – as well as just plain hate. Like quitting alcohol and tobacco, ditching Twitter/X can be difficult. But after doing so, you'll eventually notice how much better you feel.

[real-total-drama-takes]

Sighs so I’m sure a lot of people here saw that tweet that blew up about a TD movie “supposedly” being talked about by the production crew. I really don’t think this is going to happen and I wish everyone would shut up about it because a movie just doesn’t really work with TD’s format but what’s really pissing me off rn is how everyone is saying if this movie happens it’s for sure gonna be about gen 1. I into another fight with a genwunner about this and need to share some points I made:

So like, think about it: logistically, gen 1 coming back, at least not without pissing off some of the same fans who act like any TD content that doesn’t involve gen 1 isn’t feasible. First off, there’s the voice actors. Some of the gen 1 characters VAs no longer live in Canada and legally wouldn’t be allowed to be hired again to work with Fresh so they’d have to be replaced. Not to mention there’s several POC characters who have white VAs; you’re going to piss people off no matter what happens there (yes, I am on the side that POC characters shouldn’t be played by white VAs, but yeah there’s some people who very strongly disagree with that). Given how much genwunners whined about Chris’s VA change, I have no doubt they’d whine here too.

Second, a lot of genwunners complain that the reboot lacks the “edgy humor” of gen 1. The thing is, too much of the humor from gen 1 just wouldn’t fly today. I tried rewatching Action during the summer and literally could only get about 5 episodes in before quitting because of how disgusted I was by the constant misogynistic jokes. There’s definitely misogyny in the reboot too, but at least Chase and Ripper aren’t spewing it out literally every five fucking seconds like Duncan. There’s just so many jokes in gen 1 where the punchline is racism, homophobia or the characters being sexualized. That last one could be fixed if they visibly aged up the characters and stated that they’re all adults now, but given how many people have said the complaint that Owen wasn’t aged up for his reboot cameo is “ridiculous” I don’t think the genwunner crowd would be too fond of that idea. A highly profitable studio like WB isn’t going to approve a show with problematic humor without seriously watering it down before release because it’s 2024 and they know their studio releasing content like that marketed at children could get them labeled as problematic and lead to a drop in profits.

Speaking of which, a gen 1 movie probably wouldn’t do too well at the box office. Total drama is marketed at ages 8-16, the majority of whom were not alive during 2007-2010 when the first three seasons were airing. Given how successful the reboot was in both the US and UK, it’s safe to say that it’s very likely the reboot was popular with its target audience. When all the kids who watched the reboot hear about the movie, they’re gonna be really confused about why a total drama movie doesn’t have the total drama characters they’re familiar with in it. I know there’s plenty of people who grew up with gen 1 who are still active TD fans, but not a lot of adults care that much about shows they watched as kids and haven’t thought about in years. I’m an adult who loves cartoons (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but there’s def quite a few shows from my childhood that I haven’t thought about in a long time because I grew out of them and I certainly wouldn’t be opening my wallet to buy a movie ticket or streaming service subscription should I hear a movie was made about one of said shows. Again, there are plenty of people who grew up with the show who still care, but I don’t think the majority of the people who watched TD as kids who are well into their 20s now are gonna be all that excited about a movie. I could definitely be proven wrong on this one, don’t get me wrong, but still

As I said before I don’t think a TD movie is actually gonna happen and that tweet was just a rumor/misinformation, but if a TD movie does happen it needs to be about the reboot cast. It just doesn’t make sense for it to be about a cast that isn’t up to date with the standards of what is socially acceptable for children’s shows in the 2020s.

-🐈

[kookies2000]

Watched Matpat video on TADC ep2.

Can I just say this? Only three characters acknowledged the audience/ camera. Caine, Jax, and Ragatha. Caine talks directly at us as the host. He's in the spotlight and makes it obvious. Jax looks at us for fun like a cartoon. In a way that's only obvious to us and no one else. Like in the pilot when he looks at the audience but Ragatha thinks he's looking at her. And finally, Ragatha. She glances at us when she gets stabbed.

It's not obvious to any of the others, and we can easily miss it as the audience. It's just a glance. I would like to acknowledge how they are the only three in Pomnis' dream, too.

And the only three who have some sort of authority. Caine is the one in control of everything. Jax is like second in command physically. Ragatha seems to be at his level, too, but emotionally.

Just a few things I wanted to point out. These three seem to have some kind of power/knowledge the others don't.

EDIT: Amanda and Michael seem to be the most interactive with Goose! Ever since the live they did, we thought it was fan service to the Bunny Doll people. But they talked about Ragathas nice hair in the live and the show. Jax says "epic" in the live and show. They also talked about evil Ragatha in the live and then Goose tweets about evil Ragatha. I'm starting to sweat. Micheal and Amanda weren't just doing fan service. They were staying in character. So now I'm really nervous about how Michael said Jax would be devastated if Ragatha abstracted. I don't think it's the fan service we thought it was.

[khalidistan]

It seems like every year I end up writing an iteration of the same idea. But here I am! Writing it again! If you haven’t seen the tweet that sparked this conversation, I’ve screenshotted the tweet and artwork below. It’ll help inform this discussion. Full piece under the cut.

It would help to check out my essay from 2021 about the emasculation of Abdul Ali from Squid Game, since both pieces share similar references.

Maryam Khalid writes “Orientalist notions of the masculinity of the ‘Eastern’ male as uncivilized also inherently ascribe primitiveness, ineptness and a certain amount of weakness to the barbarized ‘other.���” Those doomed to the mythical Orient are automatically placed lower in masculinity than their white and colonial counterparts.

The reason for this emasculation is to defang them, to ensure they can never attain the same power conferred by white masculinity and to maintain racial purity: “This feminizing divests the male body of its virility and thus compromises its power not only to penetrate and reproduce its own nation (our women), but to contaminate the other's nation (their women) as well” (Puar, 99).

To be South Asian is to be pathologically queer, irrespective of the one’s true sexual orientation. “The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness” by virtue of being from the Orient (Said, 103). There is already a robust amount of artwork depicting Pavitr with tons of gold jewelry and piercings, which to the West are typically feminine accessories. This essentially reduces Pavitr to a stereotype of South Asian culture.

Fanworks use the bejeweled, indulgent, exotic, and sultry attitude as a short-hand for their perception of South Asia. They are “caricatures stripped from movies like Disney’s Aladdin, the Arcana or people’s sexual fantasies about our men,” as allahrakhi writes in her essay on fandom's reception of Claude von Riegan from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a character similarly mischaracterized by virtue of his brown identity.

Puar describes that the (implied white) nation defines “upright, domesticatable queernesses that mimic and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out-of-control, untetherable queernesses” (47). Nonwhite queerness is “untetherable,” leaving white queerness as “domesticatable.” This inability to engage brown queerness forces brown queer people to assimilate into white queerness.

In fandom’s and society’s mind, there is no such thing as a queer South Asian without them discarding their brown identity and adopting white queer practices, behaviors, and aesthetics. Queer South Asians are “either liberated (and the United States and Europe are often the scene of this liberation) or can only have an irrational, pathological sexuality of queerness” (Puar, 13).

Which brings us to the recent depictions of Pavitr in fanworks, stripping him of his masculinities to render him as a vapid, neutered, and yes, whitewashed queer boy, completely unrecognizable from the source material.

Interestingly, this reduced masculinity co-exists, paradoxically, with the idea that men from the Orient are simultaneously aggressive, belligerent, and violent. Elgin Brunner writes: “Such a framing—the association of the enemy with barbarism, as opposed to the self, which is civilized—includes two, often simultaneous, moves, that is: the ‘hypermasculinization’ of the enemy on the one hand, and his ‘effeminization’ on the other… The very same opponent is, by virtue of being categorized as a cowardly barbarian, rendered effeminate.”

The flip side of the effeminate brown man is the hypermasculine brown man, which can be seen through Miguel, one of Across the Spider-Verse’s antagonists. Both instances of brown masculinity confiscate personhood from characters who would have otherwise offered rich, nuanced, interesting perspectives to the story and to the audience.

It would be myopic of me to not mention the implicit genderings of other nonwhite ethnicities in this discussion. Brown men hold a unique positionality to other nonwhite men in a racial triangulation I’d like to examine further in another essay for the future. Brown men can either be gendered the way that East Asians are (feminine, asexual, neutered, timid, obedient) or the way that Black people are (hypersexual, predatory, dangerous, aggressive). Both misgenderings are in opposition to the “ideal” male gender, which is of course, the white man. This fallacy is why we see Hobie depicted as cruel, mean, and irritated in the exact same artwork from earlier.

Many people in this artist’s quoted replies have accused the artist of being white. I have seen some criticisms of the backlash, that people shouldn’t assume the artist’s ethnicity. I think both opinions miss the point: anyone can be orientalist. Membership within a nonwhite ethnic identity does not absolve the individual of perpetuating orientalist or racist depictions of characters of color.

As Edward Saïd said, “Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient” (Orientalism, 20). That is to say, if you write and depict the Orient and people from the Orient, you have to consider your positionality in relation to the Orient. Naturally, this would mean that white people should always be cognizant of their depictions of Orientals. But East Asians can also orientalize, whether it is other ethnic groups like South Asians; or self-orientalization. Similar can be said for South Asians who self-orientalize.

Khalid writes “Gendered identities do not exist independently of other factors, and must be viewed as intertwined with, for example, race or ethnicity if we are to understand the hierarchical organization of identities.” There is no examination of gender without an accompanying racial context. And Pavitr’s emasculation in fandom certainly requires a critical eye for both race and gender, lest we repeat the same dehumanizing characterizations of him in further fanworks.

Works Consulted:

Brunner, E. M. (2008). Consoling display of strength or emotional overstrain? the gendered framing of the early “War on terrorism” in transatlantic comparison. Global Society, 22(2), 217–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600820801887223

Khalid, M. (2011). Gender, orientalism and representations of the ‘other’ in the War on Terror. Global Change, Peace & Security, 23(1), 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2011.540092

Puar J. K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press.

Said, E. W. (1994). Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition. With a new preface by the author. New York, Vintage Books.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I saw some people talking shit about the interview with the writer where they said the whole crew was a polycule on the basis that they did not confirm a polycule beyond a reasonable doubt. When you say shit like that I want to remind you that Jes Tom is in the writers room, and not in filming or editing. They might not get the memo on changes made later in the process and they are involved in pitching and executing ideas, they know what the characters would do better than anyone except maybe David Jenkins because they decide what the characters do.

So if a writer is saying "we want there to be an all encompassing polycule" and an actor (Vico Ortiz) is saying "we filmed a scene where three characters implied to be in a relationship were quickly putting on their clothes after having sex" but we the audience didn't get to see either of those things than maybe it's not the fault of the writer's room that we didnt get it but some other force

Like... Perhaps... The studio not wanting to show it on their network and telling the editors to take that shit out.

Basically, the point: it gets rather annoying when people knit picking looking for a reason to be a hater after Izzys death call the lack of explicit polyamory a betrayal or worse yet say that the writer is on something and dragging us along when the writer in question is literally one of us (nonbinary) and we're so clearly on the same side. The writers like us and they like the show and they want to give us the polycule and, as with most shows, it's the capitalist's fault we didn't get that. Please direct your rage in the appropriate direction. I will be treating Jim/Olu/Archie/Zheng as well as Fang/Lucius/Pete like it's canon and I will be tweeting the foursome art at the nearest HBO max exec so they get the picture. I encourage everyone to do the same.

[dd-is-my-guiltypleasure]

David Duchovny: ‘The X-Files took up my life, but it was a miracle’

It's behind a paywall so if somebody has access I would love to read the article

Update : got it, thanks @aimsies-mctaymellburg

David Duchovny: ‘The X-Files took up my life, but it was a miracle’

As Fox Mulder in the hit sci-fi show, the actor and singer peddled fringe conspiracy theories. Now the 63-year-old says Mulder’s paranoia is everywhere.

In hindsight it wasn’t a great idea for me to kick off an interview with David Duchovny by suggesting that he was a musical dilettante. You’re most likely to know Duchovny, of course, as Fox Mulder, the conspiracy-theory-guzzling FBI agent in The X Files, one of the biggest shows of the Nineties, watched at its peak by 30 million in America alone. Perhaps you saw him as the womanising writer Hank Moody in Californication or the 1960s detective Sam Hodiak in Aquarius. You may even have read some of his five books.

Duchovny, a New Yorker living in Los Angeles, is less known for music, although he’s been making rather decent folk-rock for a decade — songwriting, playing guitar and singing in a honeyed drawl. His 2015 songHell or Highwater has been streamed more than a million times while Layin’ on the Tracks, from 2020, has pointed lyrics about a certain politician (“It’s a killing joke that no one laughs at/ A stupid orange man in a cheap red hat”). He has released three albums, with a fourth due next year, and this month plays Latitude festival in Suffolk and the 2,000-capacity Shepherds Bush Empire in London.

So does the 63-year-old feel that he should no longer be seen as just a musical dabbler? “That’s part of a lazy person’s perception,” he says, bristling slightly. “It’s a lens through which people want to see me. I think music is an innocent art form — you listen to it and you have a response. To bring any kind of baggage to bear on it in the beginning seems to me to be dishonest, but that’s the way things go.”

YouTube clips of recent shows suggest people were having a lovely time, I say. This doesn’t have the soothing effect intended. YouTube footage lingers “because of the horror of the cell phone”, Duchovny says. “It’s a pet peeve of mine.” Is he tempted to ban them at his shows, as artists from Prince to Bob Dylan have? “I don’t know that I can enforce that view on anybody.”

For Duchovny, it’s as much about phones limiting his performance as it is about the audience not living in the moment. “To do something unique or for the first time, to reach for a note or play a different melody — all these are chances you might take if you weren’t inhibited by the fact that somebody is [recording] it,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to fail and the ubiquity of cell phones makes failure scarier than it needs to be.”

Failure is the key to another of his jobs: podcasting. In his series Fail Better, he adroitly interviews guests including Bette Midler, Ben Stiller and Sean Penn about their failures. “I feel like I’ve been failing my entire life,” Duchovny said on launching it in May. That may sound strange from a man with English degrees from Princeton and Yale, who has won a Golden Globe for The X Files and another for Californication.

Is he familiar with Elizabeth Day, the British journalist who has hosted a successful podcast called How to Fail since 2018? When Duchovny announced Fail Better, Day tweeted: “I might invite David Duchovny on @howtofail to discuss his failure to be original.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he says. “If she wants to be rigorous in her thinking, she would investigate what my approach to failure is. I don’t know what her approach to it is. My sense, since failure is universal, is that there’s room out there for more than one discussion.” This is a rather po-faced response to what seemed like a playful comment from Day, and surprising because Duchovny has a wicked sense of humour. He can also afford to be more magnanimous, given that his podcast is at No 12 in the UK chart and hers is at 54.

Gillian Anderson, his X Files co-star, certainly likes his podcast, writing this week on Instagram that she had listened to all of the episodes and found them “intimate and vulnerable … very smart questions, although I wouldn’t expect anything else from you [David]”.

“It’s very sweet,” Duchovny says. “I will email her and thank her. I’m sure somebody running my social media is … I don’t really like to be on social media.” Later that day his Instagram account replies to Anderson’s post: “Thank you for listening, you have an open invite [to appear on his podcast]!”

That encounter would be worth hearing because his relationship with Anderson is fascinating. Despite their chemistry in The X Files there were rumours of friction — although they looked to be getting on swimmingly when they appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show in 2016 to publicise the return of the show, which ran for two more seasons.

When asked by Kimmel about frostiness between her and Duchovny in the Nineties, Anderson collapsed into giggles, laid her head in Duchovny’s lap and put any froideur down to the dampness of Vancouver, where the series was shot. Her hair kept going frizzy, she explained, and “for every single take we’d have to stand there and blow dry my hair again”.

“And I got pissed at that?” Duchovny asked.

“Well, I think it added to the tension,” Anderson said.

“It kinda makes me sound like an asshole,” Duchovny replied.

Anderson had nothing to do with him leaving The X Files in 2002, he says now. “That was just me wanting to have a family, but also to try other things. It had kind of taken up my life. There was no animosity with the actual show and the people that I worked with. I am proud of the show — it was culturally central in a way that it’s very hard to do these days in a fragmented landscape. There’s so many lightning-strike aspects to it that I can’t help but think of it as some kind of a miracle.”

The X Files gave conspiracy theories a kind of nobility — “the truth is out there”, as its tagline ran. Now they are more widespread and pernicious. “Mulder’s way of looking at the world was through conspiracy and that was the fringe at that point,” Duchovny says. “It doesn’t seem to be so fringe any more. It’s really the world that [The X Files creator] Chris Carter foresaw happening almost 30 years ago. He’s almost clairvoyant in that case.” Is Duchovny more evidence-based than Mulder? “Not at all. I’m an artist — I am associative-based and I see poetry as science and science as poetry.” So are there some conspiracy theories that he buys into? “No, I’m talking about art. I think conspiracies are mostly just lazy thinking.”

One failure that has shaped Duchovny is that of his marriage to the actress Téa Leoni, who starred in Bad Boys and Deep Impact. They married in 1997 and have a daughter, West, 25, and a son, Kyd, 22, but divorced in 2014. “That darkness does deepen you. It makes you more empathetic and humble,” Duchovny says. One of the themes of his podcast is “the difference between humiliating and humbling. Often we focus on humiliation in our culture. I don’t see any positives coming from humiliation, but I see a lot of them coming from humility.”

One wonders if the reference to humiliation has something to do with Duchovny checking into rehab for sex addiction in 2008. Could him playing the bed-hopping Hank in Californication be a case of art imitating life? “People never tire of trying to figure that out,” he says with a sigh. “But to me, that’s not what acting is about. I don’t look for things that are mirroring my life in any way.”

Well, there are parallels in Reverse the Curse, the 2023 film that Duchovny directed, starred in and adapted from his book Bucky F***ing Dent. He plays a would-be novelist who has “sacrificed his artistic dream to put food on the table”. His father, a publicist, did the same, publishing his debut at 75, the year before he died. The film has some really funny scenes, including one where Marty and his son have a farting competition in a motel room that ends up smelling like “an aquarium that fed a sock”. That may have come from a line in Aquarius where someone says something similar about a police station. “I might have ripped it off, I’m not sure,” Duchovny says. “ You can ask Elizabeth Day about that.”

David Duchovny will perform at Latitude festival, near Southwold on July 25 and 02 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, W12 on July 27

[lgihtspeed]

SONG OF THE SUMMER — THE DEBUT EP

SONG OF THE SUMMER is the debut EP of fictional pop group LIGHTSPEED. It was released physically and digitally on JUNE 20, 2024 by C ENTERTAINMENT. The group promoted title track LEFT RIGHT for four weeks: two weeks on Korean music shows and two weeks on American television. Their American promotions were followed by live shows in a few of the cities the members are from, including Los Angeles, New York City, and Calgary.

The album covers were designed by ASH. The physical release comes in three versions: SUN, MOON, and STAR. 

They also released six member versions of CD-only jewel cases. Shortly after the album’s initial print, they released a limited-edition vinyl, all of which were signed by one or more members.

TRACKLIST

TRACK 001. LEFT RIGHT Written by Ash Jang, Constance Im, Ev Sharpe, LABYRYNTH Composed by LABYRYNTH Arranged by LABYRYNTH

TRACK 002. GOT IT LIKE THAT Written by Ash Jang, Seo Sejun, LABYRYNTH Composed by LABYRYNTH Arranged by LABYRYNTH

TRACK 003. HAMSTERBOY Written by Constance Im, RHYTHMAGIC Composed by RHYTHMAGIC Arranged by RHYTHMAGIC

TRACK 004. BUZZING MELODIES Written by Seo Sejun, Constance Im, Ash Jang Composed by RHYTHMAGIC Arranged by RHYTHMAGIC

With lyrics entirely in English, most of the songwriting is done by the group members rather than their Korean producers. CONSTANCE and ASH quickly emerged as the group's most prolific songwriters. Production was done by C Entertainment’s new in-house producer duo RHYTHMAGIC and by elusive producer LABYRYNTH, best known for his work with Lightspeed’s label mate, SEJUN. To fans’ surprise, Sejun also made a few appearances as a lyricist, keeping with his tendencies to write songs for everyone except himself.

STATS

13:01 — TOTAL RUNTIME

20M — MV VIEWS IN 24 HOURS

90 — BILLBOARD HOT 100 PEAK

8 — THEMED DANCE PRACTICES

LOOK BOOK

The era’s styling was entirely in shades of black and white and gray. The outfits were inspired by TECHWEAR—coincidentally one of the many themed dance practices—as well as the CYBERCORE and Y2K FUTURISM aesthetics.

HIGHLIGHTS

They were clowned to hell and back for the album title. They also made a disgusting number of “Did I just write the song of the summer?” TikToks, which did not help their case. The only one that went viral was the one of Ev deadpanning the script alongside his signature stiff peace sign ending fairy pose.

The music was well-received and that made the title slightly less egregious. Then Tyler and Mia went on the record and said they didn’t like it and everyone went back to clowning it.

The division between the people with more media training (Violet and Mia) and the people with less media training (everyone else) became obvious very early on.

There were three not-quite-but-almost-there PR disasters. The first happened not long after their debut: Tyler finally deactivated his controversial Twitter account. He probably should have stopped tweeting after he passed the first IGNITE! audition but he didn’t. The fan response was split between those who supported this decision, because idols shouldn’t be tweeting shit about their peers, and those who thought maybe it’s time an idol got to talk his shit. Three days after his account was deactivated, it was reactivated again, causing, in the nicest way possible, a shitstorm on Luminosity Twitter. C Entertainment finally did a bit of damage control by releasing a statement saying that multiple people had access to the account, which no one believed.

The second one occurred during a DIY karaoke livestream where Constance was taking song suggestions from the audience and someone asked for a boy group song. She singled out the commenter, and took a leaf out of Violet’s book by responding she “couldn’t care less about boy groups” and anyway, the people in her stream should just “listen to Lightspeed instead of men.” Never mind that there are men in Lightspeed. 

The third and final close call happened in an off-handed comment Ash made. While they were discussing their favorite and least favorite moments from IGNITE!, he remarked about how poor of a representation their profile pictures were. Having recently re-edited and posted his pictures to Instagram, he had to keep going and mention that ever since he graduated from college, he doesn’t have access to legal Adobe products. Everyone else sat in silence after he revealed that until Violet forced the conversation to move along.

They filmed a dorm tour that went viral because their dorm is a house. With six bedrooms and two kitchens and a second floor. In Seoul.

Between the two centers, Mia was clearly the favored one. She was the center of every chorus and the center of every OT6 photo and styled slightly differently from the rest of the group. 

Ev’s songwriting credit on “Left Right” came from a competition the group members minus Ash and Constance held to write the second verse of the song. To almost everyone’s surprise, Ev won. He was the only person unsurprised, revealing that his university major prior to IGNITE! was English Literature.

The “Left Right” line distribution was surprisingly bad. Constance, Mia, and Tyler sang most of the song, and the rest of them were left with crumbs. #LetEvSing trended on Twitter after their album release, especially because he wrote part of the song.

SHIP RANKINGS

ASH X TYLER (ASHLER) — One of the most popular ships from IGNITE! for their past friendship. Every single publicly available pre-IGNITE! interaction—all five of them—are also subject to intense scrutinization. Haters will say they can't possibly be dating because they dap each other up too much.

MIA X TYLER (MYLER) — The two centers! They were paired together for everything. Their shared dance break in a “Left Right” special performance had a ridiculous amount of chemistry, and then they covered Trouble Maker’s “Trouble Maker.” Absolutely no moving on from that.

CONSTANCE X MIA (CONIA) — According to their shippers, Constance doesn’t look at the Mia in the same way she looks at everyone else. The evidence is in clips of the two of them making eye contact slowed down to 0.5x speed. Also, they were roommates for the entire last half of IGNITE! (Oh my god, they were roommates.)

ASH X CONSTANCE (ASHSTANCE) — They wrote almost every song together, but more importantly, in vlogs showing off the time they spent in New York, the two of them sat next to each other in every restaurant they ate at. Their alternate ship name is Cash.

TYLER X VIOLET (TYLET) — Similar to the above pairing, Tyler acts in a noticeably different way with Violet than everyone else. He’s usually easygoing and quick to laugh with everyone else—especially Mia—but he froze up in all of the one solo conversation he had on camera with Violet. Which is clearly enough to make a ship.

[chaifootsteps]

so if Viv is liking those tweets, isn't it basically an admission that her critics have a point?

like without skipping a beat the argument has gone from

"SA survivors have found the Poison sequence empowering/honest/etc and anyone criticizing me who is also an SA survivor doesn't count / is just wrong" (implying the depiction is not fetishizing SA)

to

liking tweets about how trauma is irrelevant in what preferences people have and "no one should have to disclose trauma to be valid" (implying the depiction not only totally is fetishizing SA, but that there's nothing wrong with that)

this is a pretty classic Motte-and-Bailey style argument

the controversial position is that using SA as a means to titillate the audience is acceptable (or having someone working on a scene about SA who treats it that way is acceptable)

the non-controversial position is that no one should have to disclose whether they've been SA'd or not to work on storylines about it

People have criticized Viv & Raph for doing the former - treating SA like something edgy and sexy - but Viv knows it's not acceptable to defend that position, so she either uses SA survivors who thought the sequence was OK as a shield to say "no it doesn't sexualize SA" or she retreats back to the non controversial position that's much easier to defend to try and force her detractors to argue on her terms.

it's why her defense is so all over the place - it's simultaneously trying to avoid engaging with the actual problems people are having & putting words in people's mouths that she can rebut more easily.

it's fair that people get emotional when they're defensive & some can't argue their case well - but it's why stepping back to make one simple, thoughtful statement that actually engages with the criticism (where a creator feels a response is warranted, saying nothing is an option if she really thinks this is bad faith) would be a wiser move, instead of engaging several different people in debate while trying to move the conversation past what they're actually saying. (look at how LD handled the refund and Zebirdbrain situation - one simple statement, then they moved on. they didn't have multiple staffers getting into three day twitter fights)

the issue is not "people expect staffers to disclose sexual traumas to be allowed to work on scenes involving sexual trauma"

the issue is "if your storyboard artist has a history of treating SA as sexy and treating Angel in particular as an object to be used and abused, then either they shouldn't storyboard sequences like this or extra oversight is needed to depict the topic with care. And if you're going to blatantly rip off both an animatic and a fancomic they made, don't be surprised when people connect the dots and get annoyed about it or think it's disgusting when you use other SA survivors as a means to tell them to shut up about it & then lie that the storyboard artist in question is a victim of SA after they contradict you twice (or out them as a survivor, if that's the case)"

(side note, didn't Viv say she would welcome criticism after the ep was realized? that attitude seems to have vanished)

Thank you for laying it out and putting it into words. She's zig-zagging all over the place...don't let her.