#up to and including existing IPs like mean girls

[0uroboring]

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[lyricalchrysanthemum]

OOOOO YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT THE TRAGEDY OF KRIS OOOOOO

KRIS LORE LETS GOOOOOOOO

This is going to be a bit about Bill too because they are very connected but I promise the main point here is Kris’s tragedy.

OK so. I’ve mentioned before that there’s a timeline 0 and that consists of RGBY and GSC. And the world was so unstable and on the verge of collapsing in on itself by the end of that timeline that Arceus had to essentially reset the timeline and basically create patches so that it couldn’t happen again.

But the problem is that the work was very shoddy, and various fragments of the old world continue to haunt the new one, with only two people even remembering that there was an old timeline. One of these ghosts was Kris Kawamoto, and the only two people who remember the old timeline is her, and her uncle Bill Sonezaki, the man who destabilized an already unstable world.

But what HAPPENED? You may ask.

See, Kris was a regular bright eyed trainer who was exploring Johto, trying to complete her pokedex. She had her childhood friend Ethan and a strange boy named Silver traveling with her off and on. She was a little feisty and hot tempered but she still had a good heart, love of adventure, and reckless courage.

But that reckless courage ultimately would get her killed in a freak accident involving her trying to register Lugia on a stormy night.

And her uncle, who loved her like a daughter, was DEVASTATED. So much so to the point where he he took to using his box system to try and preserve her soul and have some way to keep her around. Again, he loved her like a daughter he never had, and she meant a lot to him.

It’s a bit difficult to explain how the box system works in the first place but essentially, pokemon can be compressed into data and stored in computers. Only certain Pokémon can go through this method and still roam not just an individual’s PC box, but the entire web, one of these being porygon. And with porygon as the base of his design, he went to work trying to save his niece’s life in any way possible.

But, even with Celebi giving him its blessings, because Bill was using science to play god with his already very iffy design, the existing cracks in the universe began to show themselves more, and it started to collapse. Arceus steps in. The world gets reset.

All’s good right? The world gets reset, meaning nothing happened, even if Bill gets punished with the memories of the existing timeline, and all’s good right?

Well.

A little anomaly, a bug if you will, slipped by Arceus’s notice. It was just one soul after all, even a god would miss that among a sea of god knows who many.

And that anomaly was the soul of Kris, who managed to attach itself to the PC box system after all.

And so when the world gets reset, the box system is created, Kris wakes up with every memory of the existing timeline, including her final moments where she was killed by Lugia. But she isn’t able to roam the world with her own two feet, in fact she’s stuck in a network, stuck behind computer screen after computer screen. Viewing the outside world from other people’s desks.

She doesn’t even realize the world’s restarted, until she comes across a comes across a PC under the name that’s just like her last name, with an IP address that looks awfully familiar, and a desk that looks just like hers. In fact it is her desk. She would recognize her childhood cyndaquil plush anywhere, that picture of her parents on her wall anywhere.

But that’s not her on the other side of the computer screen, it’s a different girl. A girl she doesn’t recognize, but wears pigtails just like she does, and has parents who look just like and have the same exact names off. A girl by the name of Lyra.

She’s been replaced with a girl who’s nothing like her, while Kris is stuck watching her live a world behind a window.

And eventually she would meet Lyra for real and they would talk, getting to the point where Kris starts going along with her in Lyra’s pokewalker. But whenever Kris calls for her parents while Lyra steps away, they can’t understand her. They just hear beeping. Lyra has no clue who she is, or what she even is in this world. (It’s only until later that Kris breaks the news about it to her.)

And then Lyra starts going on a journey like she does, she goes with Ethan Hidaka who’s supposed to be HER friend, she meets Silver Watanabe who’s supposed to be HER rival with Ethan, she goes on a journey with a Cyndaquil just like hers and gets to go and complete the pokedex like Kris could never finish.

A porygon for a friend isn’t a replacement for an entire team of six that the girl in front of her has taken from her.

Sure Lyra takes her along, and for some odd reason Silver and Ethan can understand her through the weird tamagotchi thing and the PC whenever they’re in a pokemon center. So she acts like she’s friends with the other three. But she’s boiling with hatred for both Lyra and her uncle.

She’s stuck in a little computer watching a world where she should have had a place in while she watches a completely different girl in every way but place in the world, have the adventure she wasn’t able to finish.

She was supposed to be dead.

Instead she’s living through something that feels worse.

But she’s not even sure if she could consider it living.

[butchdykeorpheus]

i'm about to spend WAY too many words talking about barbie movie meta btw just a warning. disclaimer this is just one guy's opinion i may not always hold these opinions forever i'm open to hearing other opinions i'm almost definitely missing something here etc etc

ngl i also loved the barbie movie but i feel like some people are hyping it up / expecting it to be Cutting Edge Radical Leftist Feminist Writing when like. it's definitely not that lol. greta gerwig is a great director and frankly i'm surprised she managed to get away with some of the things she did in a licensed movie based on such a major IP but at the end of the day she's riding a very fine line in making a corporate-approved toy ad that's also a satire with adult and feminist themes that's also a coming-of-age movie for tweens and young teens

like gerwig is spinning a LOT of plates with the barbie movie and whilst that gives it a lot of high energy and humour and wry commentary and the ability to touch on a lot of different topics, she's ultimately limited by runtime and also most likely by trying to toe a line set by mattel/WB about what is and isn't TOO far. and the end result is that whilst it's refreshing to see a high profile movie speak so candidly about how stressful it is to be a woman, some of the themes that it touches on end up feeling underbaked, shallow and performative. like the movie mentioning capitalism and white savourism without actually delving into any of that and whilst it's funny to point out how stupid it is for a company selling Girl Power™ to be run mostly by middle aged men the movie just Does Not Have The Time Or Space To Get Into it so we don't get an exploration of what that means for barbie's existence, for capitalist co-opting of feminism, etc and it easily comes off as a "where are all the woman CEOs???" #girlbossfeminism comment regardless of gerwig's intentions

i get the sense that gerwig & co. knew going in that there were going to be criticisms regardless about the limits of the movie's feminism, and included some of those comments nodding towards the "we don't have time to get into this right now" topics the movie touches on intending them to reassure the audience that she's not deliberately ignoring them. and the results of doing that were Decidedly Mixed. i can't really say if i think it was better for her to do that or not tbh i think that's a more individual judgement call

idk at the end of the day what the movie does best is not to make in-depth critiques about structural oppression but to speak directly to the experiences of modern young girls who grow up being told repeatedly that "girls can do anything" (whether in good faith by well-meaning adults or by capitalist marketing) but then start to realise that the world is still hostile to women in so many ways, who struggle to reconcile that message with the realities of how they're made to feel self-conscious and objectified and the observations they can make about the still patriarchal world around them. who are trying to process all this conflicting information while their sense of self and relationship with the society around them and also their physical body is still developing. and, in relation to that, to speak directly to the personal experiences of adult women in the audience who have internalised and tried to accomodate all those contradictions and become worn down by the stress. the priority of the movie is to tell women and girls that you don't have to be extraordinary or successful or pretty to be worthy of respect or personhood, that you don't need permission to be a full human being

through ken, to a lesser extent, the movie is also trying to speak directly to the experiences of young boys who are internalising patriarchal ideals as they mature and promised "rewards" if they live up to a hypermasculine ideal. except ken admits towards the end that being In Charge™ and hypermasculine did not make him happy, but that he doesn't know who he is if not his status symbols and "possessions" (his girlfriend, his house, his car). i have a few small gripes with how the conclusion of ken's arc was handled in that scene but barbie was speaking directly to the audience when she said that he (men in general) can and should find a sense of self-worth without domineering over others or feeling entitled to a woman simply because he's a man. it's feminism 101 lol it's hardly angela davis or simone de beauvoir but it's not an unimportant message to impart on young boys still wrapping their head around the way the world works

to a less direct extent the movie is also trying to grapple with the complex relationship the barbie brand has historically had with feminism, female empowerment/liberation, beauty standards and traditional gender roles, and the ways barbie has been progressive and regressive in turns. again you could have made a 2hr barbie movie about just this topic alone so your mileage may vary on whether barbie 2023 explored this in enough depth for you (i personally would have liked a bit more self-reflection on barbie's role in imparting beauty standards to young girls but maybe that would have been a bit too dark for mattel/WB lmao) but the movie isn't subtle about setting up the simplistic claim that "barbie saved women from sexism" only to repeatedly knock it down. barbieland is a Matriarchal Utopia™ but it's also explicitly in the text just an idea, a plastic stage onto which the real world projects its concept of an ideal world for women. it takes the slightest nudge from the "real world" - gloria being kind of bummed and stressed out by being a working mother with depression and cellulite - for the entire house of cards to wobble. i wish the movie's answer to this was a bit more complex than "what about an Ordinary Barbie?" but i think gerwig and baumbach knew what they were saying when the CEO called that a stupid idea until another suit whispered that it would make a lot of money lmao

and i think that last point is one of the most interesting things about analysing the movie for me, because you can almost see in these moments these little points of tension between gerwig/baumbach and mattel/WB - hints at the things gerwig/baumbach WANT to say more explicitly but can't without possibly upsetting the people bankrolling the project. i'm not smart enough to draw any intelligent conclusions or moral lessons about that btw i just think it would be interesting to look at these points in the movie where gerwig/baumbach noticeably gesture towards criticisms of Pink Capitalism™ without actually Getting Into It and what that says about the state of trying to make feminist/leftist media under the constraints of capitalism. like it shouldn't be lost on anyone that mattel/WB only bankrolled this project in the first place because we live at a point in time where a certain kind of feminism (and even the outrage generated by conservatives who think "women are people" is radical leftist rhetoric, and the ensuing wave of "let's support the thing that pisses of conservatives") is considered profitable

anyway this has devolved into rambling, my point is, outside of a) telling young boys and girls that patriarchy kinda sucks and they don't have to live up to specific ideals to have worth and b) grappling with the barbie brand's complicated relationship with feminism, the movie's feminist discourse is limited and we're kinda setting some viewers up for disappointment by propping up barbie as a radically feminist movie. that's not to say that barbie 2023 should be above criticism at all but yk. you're gonna have a better time with the movie and better be able to appreciate the prioritised messages if you temper expectations rather than being disappointed that the movie didn't advocate for marxism (or if you're not misled into thinking it's something that you wanna watch in the first place). also that no one should rely solely on big budget, heavily marketed movies based on highly profitable IPs for feminist perspectives or incisive commentary on the relationship between patriarchy and other forms of systemic oppression

also outside of the feminist discourse around it the movie is generally just funny, emotional, upbeat and a little surrealist if you think you'd be into that

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

fire emoji + Black Butler. insert smirking emoji here lmao. also fire emoji + grishaverse ships, fire emoji + grishaverse narrative endings/wrap-ups

Black Butler:

OMG I have so many soapboxes here, where do I even begin?? I will give you a laundry list

- Black Butler occupies this really weird place where the subject matter is incredibly dark and yet the tone is light and feels like it’s initially aimed at younger audiences. It’s something I have a lot of mixed feelings about! Because on the one hand jfc it really should not be shown to younger people. The earlier arcs especially are just really hijinksy (despite the backstory consistently being real grim) and then we get to BoC where it’s like “Ciel gets triggered so bad he decides to immolate a bunch of orphans! anyway!” like ???

But also I did personally get into it back in the day as a baby and latched on pretty hard because there’s fucking nothing out there about CSA survivors. Even now tbh? And idk it’s nice to have something with a survivor protagonist where trauma is intrinsic to the storyline while also not being overpowering/the only aspect of the narrative. It’s still a story about dumb mysteries and idk supernatural bullshit. Idk, I just wish it was more even handed in letting the audience know what kind of content to expect and also less… creepy…

- That paired with how impossible the anime is to get into, and the endless filler have really contributed to the IP just being run into the ground. Like the anime at this point is kind of just catered to existing fans. It’s already demonstrably unlikely for uninvested new people to sit through the really bad early art and weird non canon filler content in the early seasons, and a *series* ending to then jump to an entire new timeline that retcons 90% of what previously happened lmao. Meanwhile manga fans are less active because we’ve been dragged through the same fucking storyline for 5+ years at this point and there’s only just been any real movement. And like Yana is clearly putting in less effort bc of TWST (which fair, Disney’s where the money is) but yeah no fucking wonder it’s all downhill.

- 2CT was terrible writing (the way NO ONE ever mentioned a dead sibling??) but it was hilarious and also Yana Toboso’s best writing choice in this series ahgsjgd

- FUCK Sebastian! Hate that bitch! Also want to see him be more evil ASAP. It’s really funny when fans get like. upset. that he’s doing demon shit. Anyway I can’t believe we see that his true form is gelatinous eldritch eye blob (gee that sounds familiar lmfao) and it came up ONCE and never again! I demand body horror

- I know I’ve already told you this but season two was bad but Alois was good!! He used to be pretty controversial before, but atm the fandom mostly seems to like him? Finally some good taste. Also I’m forever upset that Yana apparently considered writing him into the Weston arc and then didn’t? We were robbed.

- LBR we’re never getting a Weston arc adaptation…

Grishaverse:

- I’ve somehow managed to immediately dislike any ship LB has tried to make endgame. Idk I just do not like how she handles endgame ship conflict— it’s always very Gender Roles ime? Like exhibit A is Malina’s everything.

And then Kanej (rip I know it’s both the fan favorite and your favorite) is very cut and dry goodhearted girl demands cruel dude to change. And like it was. fine I guess? I’m not meaning to insult them by including them with Malina lol but it was just boring and not my thing. And it didn’t help that Inej kept being taken hostage, hurt, or somehow threatened to spur Kaz into action. Like I don’t think it was done in a particularly bad way! It just personally put me off the ship.

Then with Zoyalai it’s like slightly better where Nikolai entire thing is like “I am a wilting flower within a gilded cage! I must marry for politics but I would like to marry for love. Specifically my hot gruff general who doesn’t seem to give a damn about me 🥺” Like that is a FANTASTIC basis tbh? But then you already know how I feel about her throwing his father’s portrait into the fire. And then the bit where Zoya has to be in mortal peril for Nikolai to learn how to control his demon completely killed it for me.

- LOL well I don’t think there’s been a truly good wrap up in this series yet? LB is good at throwing things on the page that feel conclusive/follow face value beats. But I can’t think of a single book, let alone series wrap up, that actually tied things up well.

S&B, literally the first book, comes the closest imo? And that’s partly because it’s definitively not a wrap up, it’s obviously the start of a larger story. Also points taken off for the climactic choices about mercy having fuck all to do with anything the earlier story laid out.

After that, I think it’s a tie between CK and RoW for best wrap ups? And that’s not saying much, I didn’t really like what she did with either of them structurally, thematically, or just like on a content “where are the characters at?” level. Again, I think she only understands tropes and recurring beats in endings without fully getting the function of what makes them work and why. (an example being both the SoC duology and TGT operating on an “ending right where you started” circular arc to varying degrees of um. arguable. success)

I might be slightly crankier about this because I haven’t the read the books in awhile lol. I tend to remember things either with undue generosity or ire 😂 But yeah tldr on grishaverse wrap ups: I don’t like them!

Send me a 🔥 and a topic and I’ll give you an unpopular opinion on it!

[stillgirlfrommars]

you’ve got news

So, I already talked about this with @missmorwen​ and I know I don’t have the time to draw and make an actual comic out of it, BUT I cannot stop thinking about this SamSteve-post-engdame-fix-it story (with a dash of BuckyNat, ‘cause that’s just who I am) which is kinda crack and very rom-com (a bit you’ve got mail) inspired and doesn't make much sense, because... PLOT HOLES but * sigh * I kinda wanna share at least the idea so - bear with me:

So, instead of Nat dying, Steve sacrifices his Captain America powers on Vormir and comes back as Skinny!Steve and starts running a political blog called you’ve-got-news in secret, uncovering all kinds of shady business/corruption and becoming the bane of existence of every politician and greedy CEO - but it takes a while for his friends to figure out it's him who’s running that increasingly popular blog (which the new Captain America is actually a big fan of ;)). And the way that happens is as follows:

So, Steve almost died at the end of Endgame. The idiot (affectionate) of course still wanted to fight Thanos, but even with Thor’s Hammer, he took some serious, serious injuries which led to a tough talk with Sam, Nat and Bucky

Like I imagine, that while Steve would not have any regrets whatsoever about giving up his powers, he would still need some time to come to terms with the fact that he won’t be able to participate in the action like he used to. Even though, he actually wants and knows... it’s time to ... start something new, it’s still a process. So, there he is, trying to figure out who he is without the mantle of Captain America, re-defining the way he can and will fight against bullies in the future (cause there is no way he’s gonna stop that).

And to the surprise of everyone, Steve actually doesn’t press for participating in Avenger-style-fights anymore (he still does some of the practical mission planning and shit like that) but most importantly, he starts taking up new hobbies, like cooking or old hobbies like drawing - and he seems happier than he has in a long time, and yeah maybe it’s a bit too good to be true, if Sam starts thinking about it. But, hey, Steve finally seems to be happy so -

Meanwhile, Sam still becomes the new Captain America, and Steve is there while he is adjusting, finding himself in that role. He is there when Sam needs to talk things through, and yeah, it would still be a process like in tfatws series, but ... a little bit less alone, I guess. 

So, the new Captain America fights alongside Nat and Bucky - and it’s good, they work surprisingly well together, but also: those two are stuck right in the middle of a weird assassin!flirting situation (I’m imagening a lot of veeery intense staring at the other while cleaning their weapons or beating someone up, innuendos en masse, dark humour etc.). And frankly, it’s getting on Sam's nerves because they seem to be so oblivious about the whole damn thing. Neither of them is actually admitting to anything, no, they are too busy teasing him about the ‘crush’ he has developed on that mysterious dude who is running the famous political-youve-got-news-blog that gained momentum a while ago and is currently keeping all the corrupt politicians and CEOs on their toes.

So, yeah, Sam might have been caught a couple of times reading or reciting from that blog because - it has actually turned into a pretty efficient way of mobilising people to demonstrate for change and it did give him some tip-offs in regards to who the bad guy really was and yeah. But it’s not a crush... Sam just really likes reading the blog posts, okay. That dude seems pretty cool and they share the same moral code, so... whatever.

What Nat and Bucky and Steve don't know (and he’ll never tell them), is that Sam is actually kiiiiinda already frequently talking with the guy who runs the blog. Anonymously on both ends, of course (because for good reasons both of them are pretty careful about giving away information concerning their identities). And in a way that whole anonymity-thing makes it a lot easier to talk about stuff he finds harder to admit to the people who he knows directly. So, you could say, blog-guy has kinda become Sam's internet friend, but not his crush, no.

Honestly, the crush he is more concerned about (that he also isn't planning on telling anyone about any time soon, cause Bucky would just tease him and Nat would start scheming) is, well, it’s Steve. Because, damn, he likes their get-togethers a lot, the meals Steve's cooking are honestly to die for. They watch baseball together, they do museum-trips... And the way they can talk about (almost) everything... He just feels understood and... yeah, loved (maybe not in the way that he wishes for, but still) and it’s nice to see Steve so happy and okay, maybe it’s getting a bit out of control because Sam took Steve with him to visit Sarah and his nephews and Sarah kinda saw right through his act of ‘hey, this is my best friend’ and ‘what do you mean, I don’t have feelings- okay. Yeah maybe I do’ and told him in no uncertain terms to fucking do something about it and get his shit together.

The thing is, he’s got it bad. But Sam is also torn, because this is the best fucking friendship he's ever had and he does not want to jeopardise that. So, in the end he ends up talking about this with his Internet friend... about how he kinda has this huge crush on his best friend, and his Internet friend is like, ‘TELL ME ABOUT IT, big fucking same here UGH. And I feel like I’m being SO obvious about it all. It’s honestly embarrassing. My other best friend keeps teasing me ‘bout it and tells me to just go for it, but that guy still hasn’t managed to ask out the girl he’s interested in, so, what does he know, right?’. And Sam laughs - at least he’s not alone.

So the days go by (Sam’s pining only increases, Steve took him to a wine tasting the other night and he almost... in his drunk state... almost... but he didn’t) until one day, while blog-guy and Sam are chatting, all of the sudden the blog-guy is like, ‘Shit, I think someone's breaking into my apartment’ and then like, ‘Okay, yes they are’ - and Sam's like, ‘call 911′, and blog-guy writes back ‘mmh think I can handle them’ (and Sam’s like ‘WTF... I know way too many people with zero regards for their own well-being, myself included’)

But then blog-guy is not answering anymore, so Sam frantically calls up Nat who rushes to his flat and Sam says: ‘You need to find out where that IP adress is located ASAP - the dude with that famous blog is in danger.’

And Nat does that multitasking thing where she’s working on the problem while ribbing Sam about the fact that, apparently, Captain America's Internet bestie is that famous blog dude, and- 'Are you sure it’s not a crush?'

But after another minute, Nat sighs and is like, ‘I can't find the location, this thing is encrypted af, it’s impossible.’ Suddenly, she notices something about the setup of the encryption and-, ‘Hang on a second, it was me who set this up for someone back in 2011.′ And as she slips on her jacket, she says to Sam, ‘Come on. I know where we have to go!’

So they make their way to what turns out is Steve's (!!!!) apartment and find him in the middle of a fight against over half a dozen heavily armed people, and yeah - he’s actually doing pretty okay for himself ‘cause he outsmarted a couple of them, but also- they kind of outnumber him, so Nat and Sam get to work.

And Sam doesn't even have time to fully register what that means re:blog-guy until they have successfully defeated the bad guys. After that's done, Steve is like, ‘Thanks guys, but how the hell did you know I was in trouble? Nat... you didn’t bug my apartment, did you??’

And Nat tstsk and then she just laughs because this is priceless and OF CoURSE it is Steve who is behind that blog... (she's a bit mad at herself for not figuring it out sooner, and a bit sad that Steve didn't feel like he could tell her, and that he assumes she has is flat bugged but, also,... kinda impressed.) But then she looks at him with a warm smile on her face, shaking her head, saying, ‘No, I didn’t, Steve.’ Her gaze wanders back and forth between Steve and Sam and she humms- 'That actually makes so much sense oh my god.' So, she leaves them ‘to talk’ ;) and for Sam to explain everything’ - and then it’s just the two of them.

And Sam does explain everything and is like, 'So you're that Blog dude, erm...' He's scratching the back of his neck, cheeks flushed, 'Turns out, we've been talking for months over that blog of yours. I'm (insert-Sam’s-username-here).'- and Steve's eyes go wide and you can literally see him processing that information right then and there and he's sputtering out a light laugh, and he's like 'Hang on a second... I... umm, okay, I gotta ask. So, that best friend you've got a crush on...' Well, it’s now or never -'Is you, yeah..', Sam admits and starts, 'and....' They both laugh again and Steve nods and just says- 'yeah, it’s you, too.'

And then they kiss and yaaay, happy ending!!!

And then the epilogue would be about them having a nice dinner with Bucky and Nat a couple of months later, and the whole time, Sam and Steve are being very much in loveTM. The three guys are standing in the kitchen, while Natasha is in the bathroom and Bucky's making a funny quib about how sickeningly cute Sam and Steve are together - and Sam, well, Sam just raises his eyebrows and is like, 'You know what, you're not allowed to say anything bout that, you and Romanoff have been acting waaaaay worse over the last year. At least we got our shit together in the end, what's your excuse, you are obviously absolutely in love with her!', and of course Nat chooses that exact moment to enter the room, hand on Bucky's waist, dropping a kiss on his cheek and is like, 'What do you mean, we've been dating for 6 months?' And Steve laughs and Sam groans bc .... he loves his friends, he does, but clearly, CLEARLY they ALL have to work on their communication skills!

The End.

[gaphic]

@geeeny02 @ivehadanapophany @lastoneout

THANKS FOR ENABLING ME YALL

ok so, this isn't a criticism of the movie Raya so much as an observation of a corner disney have been steadily painted into with their most well-known IP: The Princesses.

It's pretty clear the studio has been struggling with their princesses for a while now- all of their live-action remakes have made painstaking (and painful) attempts to 'update' their female protagonists, and a lot of those changes are taking aim at the same problem: being a princess needs to like,,,, Mean something nowadays

Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Belle, Tiana, and Rapunzel all essentially become princesses as a reward for being Good. Their royalty is completely meaningless, it's just the romantic idea of 'being a princess' that little girls love.

Ariel goes from being a princess to being a princess and it means nothing, Jasmine's beef with her station in life has barely anything to do with being a princess (forced marriage isn't exactly exclusive to royalty!) and Merida just gets the exact same conflict but worse

Pocahontas stands out as the first princess to not really be a princess, but she's also the ONLY princess based on a person we objectively know existed, and thus a huge outlier. Mulan is the real change. She isn't royal at all, and I get the sense she was only included in the princess brand because... what else were they going to do with her? All their other animated leading women were united, one IP under marketing, amen. So it was either market Mulan alone, which would be strange, or sneak her in with the princesses and really push her more feminine outfits. Breathing a sigh of relief, disney went back to their usual fodder with Tiana and Rapunzel

...Then there was Frozen.

I honestly think it was a coincidence, but Frozen introduced the idea of the princess doing actual royal activities. There's a coronation, a state dinner with ambassadors, a hint of power struggle when Elsa leaves! And then the movie was a SMASH fucking hit and revitalized the hell out of disney's image.

By this time the romantic image of The Disney Princess has long lost its shine, so the mouse is RABID to recapture that success.

Moana gets an aesthetic stand-in for a coronation with the shots including her headdress, and the first act of the movie sets up that she's being groomed to take over one day. She makes executive decisions and helps solve problems, but her being a princess still doesn't really matter to the story, and while the movie was a huge hit, Princess Moana didn't quite slot into the brand like her predecessors did

Frozen 2 got weirder. More vague allusions to governing with evacuating Arendelle, then Elsa is hastily de-princessed and Anna becomes queen offscreen with NO buildup

The live-action remakes? Well. They change the characters a lot. But their relationship to royalty stays very much the same. At first. Frozen comes out in 2013, Moana 2016, in 2017 Beauty and the Beast said nothing substantive about monarchy (just like the live action Cinderella + Maleficent) and everyone on earth hated it, and in 2019? We got Girlboss Jasmine. Oh dear.

Girlboss Jasmine is a PRINCESS alright! She wants to be the sultan! She has no formal policy in mind, but she gestures at slogans like 'my people make the city beautiful' and does complex political maneuvering like... reading maps. But nobody really likes that either

Mulan 2020 basically offloads the princess angle entirely and everyone hates that too

ENTER RAYA.

Did you even notice Raya is a princess? Raya is a princess. She's like the combination of both Frozens and Moana, having the vaguest possible allusions to the responsibility of her position (through her father, NOT herself!!!) and then rushing off on an adventure where her royalty is utterly irrelevant (the movie would actually be better if Raya wasn't a princess- if she was a servant in the palace who didn't know exactly what happened and thought she'd been betrayed by her leaders. If her rival was the princess of her country and that betrayal was the source of her distrust, rather than a broken 30-minute friendship with a total stranger) and doesn't even provide any glamour or romance. And then the movie bombed.

I highly doubt disney will stop trying to do princesses because of this, but I do think they're officially out of ideas. The only way to REALLY justify a character being a princess going forward would be to incorporate it into the story (because nobody is interested in that 'princess as a reward' shit anymore) and there's just no way to do that without a lot of bad press. Cause once you acknowledge a character's responsibilities as a royal in the plot, you're kinda forced to portray it either positively or negatively. Negative depictions ain't marketable. Positive depictions would be pro-monarchist propaganda

You might say 'well they could just go the Mulan route, and use 'princess' as a figurative term' and they are sure as fuck trying to do that in some of their marketing initiatives, but it's just not hitting. Not like they want it to. You can really only play that game with literal babies, because any girl over the age of 10 has developed enough cognition to feel condescended to by the insistence that every woman who accomplishes something is a 'princess'

Committing to that direction would constitute an admission that disney doesn't know or care how to market female protagonists without slapping a crown on them and adding them to the monolith. That's bad press disney doesn't need.

im sure some people will be disappointed by this but i hate monarchy so

[myhahnestopinion]

THE AARONS 2020 - Worst Film

Social distancing can be emotionally draining, so let’s practice. Here’s a list of things to stay far, far away from, and you’ll feel much better for it. Here are the Aarons for Worst Film:

#10. The Grudge

The Grudge didn’t have much good-will from the get-go: the franchise’s timeline-shifting gimmick has long been a distinctive element devoid of any tension. Even with the presence of Lin Shaye and John Cho among them, the multiple eras of eerie occurrences never shake the sense of existing only out of obligation. The scares are equally as perfunctory; The Grudge startles, but doesn’t leave a mark. Director Nicolas Pesce and producer Sam Raimi just can’t bring any life back to the series. Then again, it never housed much spirit to begin with; we shouldn’t hold it against them. 

#9. Scoob!

For the first time in its 50 year history, the franchise begged a different question: Scooby-Dooby-Doo, why are you doing this? Scoob! is one of the most depressing examples of modern-minded corporate synergy, dead set on resurrecting IP no matter how ghoulish the results. The film feigns detective work, but unmasks itself early as a superhero story, breaking up the gang to promote the likes of Blue Falcon and Captain Caveman, Hanna-Barbera characters that barely built up an audience back in the day, without ever solving the mystery of why audiences should care. Its most baffling crime? Shaggy traps himself in Hell to save the day (no, not kidding…). Zoinks, Scoob!, indeed.

#8. Fantasy Island

I’m afraid one can never leave Fantasy Island! For you must see your fantasy through to its natural conclusion, but the movie doesn’t offer one, hinging entirely on a rubbish plot twist. The horror reimagining of the ‘70s TV show is all-around cheap, inviting a new group of people to live out their dreams on the mysterious locale without much spectacle or imagination. A bizarre reintroduction of classic character Tattoo is the only thing that leaves an impression. The mismatched tones of the various adventures routinely washes away any tension from the film, stranding the wannabe franchise without any fans to see. 

#7. Brahms: The Boy II

There was fun to be had in Annabelle Comes Home and the Child’s Play remake in 2019, but Brahms: The Boy II has the haunted doll genre feeling entirely played out. It certainly didn’t help that the film seemed unsure what toys were even in its sandbox; the sequel retcons supernatural origins into the series, but the doll’s antics didn’t become any more animated. Katie Holmes is the latest lead led around aimlessly as The Boy conjures expressions in audiences as vacant as his own. It was hard to imagine someone making a horror film more dull than the original, which also made this list years ago, but, boy, does Brahms make it look too easy. 

#6. Dolittle

If we could talk to the animals, they’d tell us to walk away from the latest Dolittle adaptation. Robert Downey Jr. got his post-Iron Man career off on the wrong paw as the eponymous doctor, who sets sails with his creature companions to find a cure for the Queen’s illness. The voyage is on rocky water from the very beginning, mating footage together from three different directors, and trying to rear wonder out of its lackluster CGI creations. If the climax of your hopeful-epic is pulling a set of bagpipes out of a dragon’s ass, don’t be surprised when the result is similarly crappy. 

#5. Followed

Followed asks viewers to just go along with a lot of scuzziness, but you’re better off if you don’t subscribe. Truthfully, it’s unclear how much of the found-footage film, comprised of a vlogger staying in a haunted hotel, is actually meant as satire. Even if one excuses the bad acting as commentary on YouTubers’ artificiality, knowing that the premise shamelessly exploits a real world tragedy is hard to block out. Ultimately though, the content can’t get viewers to care much one way or the other. When chasing a smart, scary social-media series, you’re better off unfriending Followed, and following the Unfriended films instead.

#4. Holidate

Watching Holidate made bringing a random stranger home for every 2020 holiday seem wise in comparison. Like most of the rom-coms Netflix presents viewers with, Holidate wraps itself up in a marketable convenience to disguise its shoddy, shallow inside. Stars Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey bump uglies with all the vulgarness of that phrase and all the enthusiasm of a Barbie and Ken doll being bashed together. The two trudge through a series of increasingly irrelevant holidays for a date before a requisite rom-com end back at Christmas, just when you thought a year couldn’t feel like more of a chore to get through.

#3. A Nice Girl Like You

Lucy Hale can get some… Get some more entries on this Worst Of list, that is! The Fantasy Island star plays a woman determined to no longer be scared by her fantasies with the help of a sexual to-do list in this film. Hale puts the “Girl” in “Nice Girl,” being entirely too young for the movie’s material, based on a middle-aged memoir, to stimulate any meaning. The central list, meanwhile, arouses mostly confusion and incredulity at the choices included. Too lifeless to let loose, Nice Girl ends up being really bad, just not in the way it had hoped.

#2. Artemis Fowl

Even with limited releases to be had, Artemis Fowl captured that good old Disney magic for always managing at least one annual unmitigated disaster. Their adaptation of the best-selling children’s novel lacks both a criminal, with a watered-down Fowl for the Disney-demographic, and a mastermind, with no one involved seeming to have re-read the book since its original publication 20 years ago. The greatest of Artemis’ fouls is Josh Gad’s Mulch Diggums, a dwarf who unhinges his jaw like a snake to dig tunnels, farting out the dirt behind him. Then again, it’s an apt-metaphor for a company determined to swallow every IP possible just to crank out crap.

AND THE WORST FILM OF 2020 IS...

#1.  After We Collided

After two Afters, it’s clear that the one direction the franchise is following is down. Rest assured, the only steaminess from this R-rated sequel to 2018’s young-adult romance is the continued gaslighting in its central relationship. The ongoing exploits of Tessa Young and Hardin Scott remain far removed from any fantasy; even looking beyond the nauseating toxicity, the series has a dreadful failure of imagination (The author’s own self-insert only aspires to being an intern at a publishing company.) The secret to the film’s appeal, as far as I can tell, seems to come only by watching After We Collided after you collide your head with a concrete wall.

NEXT UP: THE 2020 AARON FOR BEST DIRECTOR!

[jesterden]

One more thing.

I have people to keep safe. People came forward to me and if they don’t want their names associated, that’s not my place to come out for them. I deleted what I did because the people involved ASKED me too. I made a mistake in posting that and I’ve dealt with the consequences of that.

If we say we don’t post caps to keep people safe, it’s a travesty.

If we don’t post IP addresses (which mean NOTHING in the age of easy to access VPNs, if you want to send a death threat to yourself, you can make it come from North Korea with a free trial of almost any VPN) of the people sending us death threats, we sent them to ourselves. Nevermind the fact most of us don’t use trackers because they’re generally useless because once again, VPNs exist. I’ll never know if that’s actually the IP belonging to the person, or just some random one from another country.

I fucked up in this situation multiple times. And that’s on me. You can believe what you want. You can cancel me. You can cancel all my friends.

It doesn’t change the fact there are caps out there of many of the things we said. Which, here’s the post Katie made, filled with caps, that was entirely ignored because it made Jax look bad. Link here.

Also, we never called anyone a zoophile. We never, ever, attempted to admonish or discount someone’s sexuality. I’ve even deleted asks calling Jax a zoophile because I’m not going to provide a platform for that, because if I do, people will assume I think that.

Providing an IP address proves NOTHING. Providing caps with context cut proves NOTHING.

I provided a platform for people to come forward, and while some of them may not have been the best people, every single person I talked to confirmed the other stories and backed it up. If someone said something that was disproven by other stories, I wouldn’t have posted that, and I would have questioned the other people to provide a cohesive version of events. Which, if you forgot about those caps, including formerly close friends admitting they’re terrified of Jax, here are those, too.

It’s not just a lion game when someone is sending death threats to other people. It’s not just a game when serval got her full name sent to her. It’s not just a game when my friends are getting shit like this in their inbox.

And you guys are doing this... for what? Because they‘re my friends? Because they’re anti-Jax? You guys are sending death threats to a teenage girl and sending another her full name because... is it fun to you? Is it something you actively enjoy doing?

Because in case you’ve forgot, literally everyone that’s being “canceled” are teenagers (except for katie, who is still a good bit younger than jax) meanwhile there is a grown ass adult (who is apparently in at least her mid-20s) admitting to watching our blogs, watching what we post, watching what we do and collecting screenshots of every public conversation we have. Yet somehow, she’s not the stalker.

Please wake the fuck up.

@liosalt here’s your giant post to reblog from me, since lionews shut down. got one from dalt earlier.

[takerfoxx]

Magia Record, Season 1, Episode 1, First Impressions!

So, the long-awaited spinoff to my favorite anime has arrived. Magia Record, adapted from the mobile RPG, the first proper Puella Magia animation since The Rebellion Story.

Now, let’s just get this out in the open: I have kind of a weirdly complicated relationship with Magia Record. On the one hand, though I’ve never begrudged its existence, I just wasn’t interested in playing it. Those hero pull RPG’s have never been my thing, and I try to avoid purposefully addictive games...so they wouldn’t take time away from the addicting games I already have. Besides, it centered around a new group of characters that I didn’t know or care about, didn’t seem to have anything to do with the plot I really wanted to see continue, and seemed to be taking place in a previous timeloop or something. And after getting burned in Oriko Magica and A Different story, I wasn’t in the mood for stories that could just end in another Homura reset. Plus, there was a period where people kept trying to get me to play it despite me being openly disinterested that only made me stubbornly refuse to play it. So when it got a stage musical (what?) and later a full-on anime adaptation (what?!) when Rebellion was still hanging unfollowed on and that Concept Movie thing never going anywhere, well, it made me just a little salty. Not even the promise of the OG squad in supporting roles wasn’t enough to get me excited.

But on the other hand, once I got that out of my system and had some time to think about it, I realized that I was looking at it all wrong. Sure, Magia Record might not be the Puella Magi content I was hoping for, but its existence and continued popularity was nothing but a positive. By getting a foot in that very popular brand of game market, it ensured the franchise’s continued popularity, pouring money and attention into the IP. And studios capitalizing on its popularity with a bunch of different adaptations would only fuel interest in an actual Rebellion follow-up. So this was a good thing. I mean, Gen’s apparently burnt out on the franchise and SHAFT has had a ton of internal issues, so keep things going however you can, right? Play that long game. 

And when the trailer finally dropped, it did get my interest. It seemed to be adhering to the original show’s creepy, surreal tone, which was definitely a plus, and a few of the images looked really cool.

And now the first episode is here, so I can finally enjoy the Magia Record story without needing to play the game.

So let’s go! Spoiler time.

All right, so here’s everything about Magia Record I already knew from picking up details here and there. First, it stars a girl named Iroha, who’s...well, I don’t want to say Diet Madoka, but it’s clear that she’s supposed to be reminiscent of Madoka with her design and demeanor. Anyway, unlike Madoka, Iroha is already a magical girl and has been for a little while, enough to know the score, at least as much as the Incubators want her to know. And her sister is apparently missing, so it’s her goal to find her. And there’s this city of magical girls which have their own society (which, okay, is a really cool concept), and a bite-sized Kyubey is running around for some reason. Also, the outfits are a bit racier than the ones we’ve seen already. Midriffs galore!

Anyway...

So, I do like that it just takes the idea that Iroha’s already made a contract and just runs with it. There’s very little in the way of explanations, it just assumes that you’ve seen the original show and jumps right into things, which I definitely appreciate. I mean, there’s a bunch of girls doing sort of a Greek Chorus, talking over the action and kind of explaining things to each other, but that’s about the extent of the catch-up. And the resulting ambiance is delightfully weird.

That’s something I really noticed, in that the whole feel of this episode was actually more in line with the first half of The Rebellion Story than it was with the original series. Like, not quite as weird, but weirder than the show, sitting kind of in between with what I can only describe as casual surrealism. The camera just lingers in things that we would find weird but none of the characters so much as notice. Whether that is a sign that this world is still more different than ours than we’ve been led to believe or that we are in Homucifer’s new world remains to be seen. Regardless, there’s an air of dreamlike melancholy that hangs over the whole thing.

Something that was very interesting is that while, yes, Iroha does have a missing sister, she apparently lost her memories of not only her, but whatever her original wish had been in the first place, pointing to a connection between the two. Not even her Kyubey (and it’s finally established that all Incubators are called Kyubey, and they really do have a hivemind, which divorces Resonance Days even further from canon) knows what’s up, as he doesn’t remember either.

But as she’s trying to piece together why she can’t remember her wish or what these dreams of a shadow girl mean (it’s her forgotten sister, duh), she still has to carry on her normal life, which now includes going to a boarding school. And I’m just gonna say it: her teacher is hot! Don’t lie, you all saw it too. And naturally, her Puella Magi problems are interfering with her schoolwork. 

Meanwhile, while defending a train from a cool looking salamander witch, she meets and befriends another magical girl named Kuroe, who’s been having major buyer’s regret, seeing how her wish was to go out with a boy that she had a crush on and with whom she has since broken up with. It really goes to show how exploitative the Incubator system is, as that is the sort of witch a lot of kids that age would make. Don’t make contracts with minors, you fuck! But anyway, apparently several magical girls have been having a dream about a little girl calling them to a city called Kamihama (insert Dragon Ball Z joke here), where they would be “saved,” whatever that means. 

Anyway, the two of them are later attacked by the same witch while again on the train, as it seems it was holding a grudge against them and was waiting to set a trap. It also confirms that witch labyrinths can be ambulatory, as it straight up traps them in it and flies through the air, preventing them from killing it as they don’t want to go splat.

It takes them for a rough landing, and then something happens that was perhaps the first thing to make me think, “Okay, now that is cool!” Another witch shows up, this one a sort of pastry walrus, forcing the two labyrinths to merge. But instead of combining into a Walpurgisnacht, the second witch straight up rips the first one in half! And it is metal as fuck!

But then a new magical girl shows up to kill the cookie walrus, saving the pair. And apparently they’ve been dumped in Kamihama itself, and it’s not the safe place it’s made out to be, and our new friend has already claimed part of it as her territory and she’s getting pissed about all the other magical girls getting called there, as it means more competition for her. But she cuts our two leads some slack and even gives them the grief seeds, provided that they fuck off.

And later, Iroha finally has her own Kamihama dream, where she sees multiple magical girls being called to the city, and in that dream she finally remembers her sister’s name (Ui), and her wish (for Ui to be cured of some illness), causing her to wake up.

Interesting. 

So, that’s our first episode. What did I think? Well, I liked it! I enjoyed the slow pace, I liked how it just let us sit there and soak up the weird at various stages, I’m interested in the plot and want to see where it goes. And even if they won’t be leads or continue their main storyline, I am hoping that the OG squad show up as they did in the game.

If there was one thing that didn’t really work for me, it’s that they kind of recycled the original series’ soundtrack instead of making something new. I get that they want to lean into nostalgia for people like, well, me, and it certainly fits the mood, but I wonder if they should have worked harder to establish their own identity. But that’s a minor quibble at best, barely a nitpick. 

So yeah, I’m on board. Let’s see where this goes.

[onewaywardwitch]

Just A Typo (2/?)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Hacker!Reader

Summary: It was a simple challenge between a very competitive group of friends. A challenge that ended very differently than anticipated.

Warnings: Just a bit of language

Word Count: 2140

A/N: Ahhh the feedback on part 1 was amazing! Thank you all so much! Here’s part 2!

There are moments in your life when you know you’ve screwed up. Like when you decide to try the new Starbucks coffee, only to realise it’s as horrible as you predicted, and you’ve wasted €5. Or when you spend all night binge-watching some show on Netflix when you know you’ve got to get up early for work the next morning. Or when you agree to hack into one of the world’s best security systems to fuel your own ego and diminish your friend’s one. And while I've found myself in the first two situations many times, the third was a new one for me.

“I promise to visit you at least once a month when you get sent to Alcatraz,” Becca sang as she all but skipped into Angie’s apartment to join the rest of us. I laughed sarcastically.

“Sent to Alcatraz for hacking? Crime expectations must be low lately if they’re sending hackers there.”

“I’m sure Tony Stark has some pull in the government to get you put away there. You know, when you get caught,” she gloated. It was obvious she thought I was heading down the same route as Sophie. Her confidence only made me want to prove her wrong even more.

Angie ignored our seemingly never-ending banter and carried on setting up my laptop and other work necessities.

“I still don’t understand why you have to have a pack of Haribo with you every time you do something illegal,” she sighed, glaring at me as I stood with Becca.

“Well it’s just common sense, Angie. I can’t have chocolate, it’ll get all over my hands. Biscuits leave crumbs everywhere and hot chocolate is a recipe for disaster,” I replied, keeping my face as straight as I could.

“No, I don’t get why you need sweets at all!”

“That��s a stupid question. You always need sweets. We can’t all live off boiled vegetables and whole-grain everything.”

Angie just looked at Becca in defeat, who shrugged her shoulders.

“Hey, if I get the job done, who cares what I eat?” I strutted over to the table that had my laptop on it. Unfortunately, my confident walk did nothing to ease my nerves as my friends watched on eagerly.

 ~~~~~

“Becca, I swear to Thor if you breathe on my neck again, I’ll break yours,” I snapped. Becca and Angie shared a nervous glance while I typed furiously, the lines and lines of code beginning to make me dizzy.

“Y/N, you’ve proven your point. Your brilliant. A mastermind. A true gift to the hacking community. You can quit now, it’s alright.” Becca was beginning to regret ever provoking me when she saw how much more advanced Stark’s system was compared to the systems we would normally attack for a laugh.

I could sense Angie about to open her mouth when the screen suddenly went blank and the three of us froze where we were; Becca leaning over my shoulder, Angie holding her third cup of herbal tea, and me with jelly rings on each of my extremely tired fingers.

The screen flashed once, before several different boxes popped up. It took each of us about seven seconds to realise we were looking at the feed from the security cameras placed around Avengers Tower.

“Holy shit,” whispered Angie.

“I am the greatest and I’m completely unappreciated in my time,” I grinned, my eyes flickering from each small screen.

“IS THAT BLACK WIDOW?”

“Agh! Becs, inside voice please.” Becca refused to acknowledge my complaint. Her gaze was fixated on the image of the Natasha Romanoff eating what I guessed was-

“A poptart! I have those all the time, we’re practically soulmates!” Becca exclaimed.

As Angie tried to explain to Becca that her comment was only a bit unrealistic, I gazed at each of screens on my laptop. Who would have thought that the Falcon would be spending his day holding something shiny while running away from a very angry, one-armed Winter Soldier? Or that Hawkeye drinks milk straight from the carton and puts it back in the fridge when no one’s looking?

Just as Becca started to talk about the Black Widow’s hair (“I could never pull off the red like she does!”), the laptop flashed black, before more lines of code began popping up again.

“Oh shit, we’re busted. Angie, gummy bear, now,“ I demanded, quickly returning to my state of concentration (which was difficult after seeing Captain America lifting weights). Angie grabbed the bag and put one of the bears in my mouth, only for me to spit it out in disgust.

“Not a yellow one, a red! I'm not a monster,” I yelped before turning back to the task at hand. Nervously chewing on the nicest flavoured gummy bear, I attempted to keep up with Stark’s excellent security.

“Make sure you can’t be traced. Keep the IP address hidden and get out,” I heard Angie mutter behind me. After a couple of minutes, I felt myself relax, watching the screen change to my regular background of the Supernatural cast.

“We are out and I’m going to go down in history as the greatest hacker that ever existed.” I spun in my chair, grinning at the girls as my confidence rose again. “I just hacked into Avengers Tower, admired Captain America’s incredibly toned body for a bit, before successfully leaving without giving away my location or any way for them to trace me. How was that for you Becca?”

She looked at me, a small smile growing on her face. “I'm impressed, Y/N. Shame Sophie’s not here so you could gloat to her too, but that was pretty awesome.”

“I can’t believe you pulled that off,” Angie said admirably, her herbal tea long forgotten on the nearby countertop. I winked at her and held out the nearly empty bag of Haribos.

“Yellow gummy bear anyone?”

 ~~~~~

Tony Stark was busy doing nothing in his lab with Dr Banner when F.R.I.D.A.Y. announced that someone was hacking into their system.

“Well what are you waiting for F.R.I.D.A.Y.? Flush ‘em out. And get their location.”

“Sir, they’ve already broke down our firewalls and accessed our cameras.”

That caught Tony’s attention. He looked at Bruce confusedly before again telling F.R.I.D.A.Y. to get whoever it was out of their system using whatever means necessary. As the A.I. was occupied with that, he called all the Avengers to the briefing room.

 ~~~~~

“Barnes, if you could stop murdering Wilson with your eyes for just five minutes so we can start?”

Bucky turned and aimed his glare at Tony instead, still scowling that Sam had somehow managed to steal his arm for nearly half an hour. That man knew all the best hiding places in this tower.

Tony rolled his eyes and clapped his hands together, deciding to get straight to the point. “Nothing to worry about, but someone hacked into the tower and accessed all of the cameras. We don’t know who or why, but F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s nearly got a location, I think.”

The uproar was immediate.

“I thought your security was the best there is!”

“How long have they been watching us?”

“What else have they hacked into?”

Tony grimaced as all the voices overlapped and became louder. His embarrassment that some computer nerd cracked his online defences was obvious from the lack of his usual playful tone and he wasn’t in the mood for messing about now. He opened his mouth but before he could speak, F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s voice rang through the room, effectively shutting everyone up.

“Sir, I believe I have the location of the hacker. It appears they made a slight typing error when concealing their IP address.”

“A typo? Rookie mistake,” Sam mumbled.

“That ‘rookie’ managed to hack into all our cameras pretty quickly,” Bruce stated, looking at Sam pointedly.

“Okay, Cap, take your brooding boyfriend in the corner and bring in whoever it is. It's nowhere near any known HYDRA bases, so my guess? A group of boys hiding out in one of their mom’s basements. Shouldn’t be too difficult.” Steve nodded at Tony and made his way over to Bucky while everyone else left the room, still discussing the infiltrator who was able to beat the great Tony Stark.

 ~~~~~

Steve looked around the apartment in surprise. This was definitely not what they were expecting. The place was clean and lacked any personal touches. That is, if he weren’t including the many Funko Pop figures that were scattered seemingly at random throughout the apartment. He moved towards the laptop that was laying carelessly on the kitchen table.

“Just talked to the landlady,” Bucky said, gesturing towards the front door where a woman in her mid-fifties stood excitedly, trying to catch a glimpse of the great Captain America. Bucky waved his flesh hand at her, hoping she’d get the message to leave them alone. Fortunately for him, one of the neighbours came out and started complaining to her about the thin walls. That made her run off quickly.

“Apartment is owned by a woman in her late twenties, early thirties. She asked to be kept off the books, and your admirer back there had no problem with that because she always paid her rent on time and by cash.”

“Does she have any idea where she could be now?” Steve asked, closing over the front door again so they wouldn’t raise any suspicions.

“She said she left around three hours ago, hopefully to get some food. Her fridge is empty. Except for a tub of ice-cream,” Bucky snorted.

They both stopped talking when they heard the rustling of keys just outside the door. Bucky went to stand beside Steve, who was back beside the laptop. He placed a hand over the gun he always carried in his trousers as the door opened. But he felt himself relax a bit when he heard a familiar tune.

“Is that… Queen?” Steve whispered as the woman began humming to herself. Natasha had taken it upon herself to educate the two veterans on all the music they had missed out on in the past seventy years, including Queen, Michael Jackson, and Adele. This was one of the few songs they actually recognised.

The woman stumbled into the kitchen, struggling to carry all the shopping bags she had tried to carry up in one trip. Her headphones were blaring Bohemian Rhapsody loud enough for the two men to hear clearly. They shared a look of surprise as she still hadn’t noticed them standing a few feet behind her.

 ~~~~~

“But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away,” I sang quietly to myself as I restocked my fridge. I was still on a high from my incredible success with Becca and Angie only a few hours ago. We were going to celebrate with Angie’s cheap champagne, before Becca realised she was about two hours late for work. I left shortly after her to buy more ice-cream, which quickly turned into buying half the grocery store.

“Mama, oooo- OH WHAT THE FUCK!” My dramatic spin while singing didn’t end as well as I had planned. I wasn’t exactly prepared for the two super soldiers who stood by my table, watching me with humour. I tugged my headphones out of my ears and stared at them dumbstruck.

“Captain America… wow such an honour… you’re very… wow. And the Winter Barnes! Oh god, there’s a ‘soldier’ in there somewhere, isn’t there? Very, very… broad.” My voice died off towards the end as the word came out of my mouth too quickly for me to recognise them. The Captain’s eyes sparkled in amusement, while the Winter Soldier was looking at me with interest. He failed to see how this woman caused Stark so much concern.

Captain America opened his mouth to speak, but at that exact moment I coped why two Avengers were standing in my apartment.

“Oh, this is about the whole Avengers Tower thing, isn’t it? The camera, the hacking… I'm not evil! I wasn’t planning on accessing any confidential information and selling it! I don’t do that, I was just messing with friends, I swear!” Apparently, I had lost all control over my own mouth and I confessed to everything without either of the men saying a word. They glanced at each other before Captain Rogers turned back to me.

“You understand we need to bring you in anyway. We have questions you need answer back at the tower.”

I nodded nervously at the pair as they escorted me downstairs to where a car was waiting outside, the Soldier bringing my laptop with him.

“This explains why Nora was in such a good mood when I passed her on the stairs earlier,” I thought to myself. “She never smiles when I pay her my rent, but one visit from America’s golden boy has her skipping to her door!”

[zrw]

Letter 1.0.1

><

I'm writing this to you on Thanksgiving Day, it felt fitting despite us not celebrating it, so instead I will be wishing you a merry Christmas. A tad bit older photo added for depth, immersion and personalization while reading. None of it is scripted in any way, the idea is to make me emotional & it will all be written on the go. Make sure you read it all, and you will never hear from me again. Please do respect my terms also and do not under any circumstances share this letter or it's contents with anybody. Remember, only you will truly understand the context and true meaning of this letter. Quite likely it will change your whole perspective on me, but it won't matter anymore. If you think you're the bigger victim and believe you've had it worse than me & that you've suffered more and dealt with more... well, a bit of a free of charge reality check for you... you're dead wrong. I'm the one who is being tormented maniacally and brutally every other night, to the point where I simply don't know what's real and what's not. Scared of living life, kind of. It's clear to all I made a mistake last year. No weasely lies and fabrications in this letter, this is the Me you've longed to finally see. Anxiety through the roof, among other things/issues. I'm deeply sorry, Annie. Bless you & bless me, more importantly. Please tell me you forgive me. Do not dare to share any of the contents of this said letter with anybody, be a grown-up and act like one for once, you live all alone, now try and impress me, it's far too personal, a glimpse of me, and meant for you alone. Only you will understand the context of this letter. You're not exactly the golden carrot of the yield, but this one should be fairly easy to follow - Keep it to yourself, and stay quiet about this, I'm begging you. You're not legally obligated to do anything, this is your life and you make the rules, you're a good and kind gal, you're by no means a bloodthirsty vampire like some of them, and as I made very clear it wouldn't be fruitful & would shortly after turn into a proper clown fiesta, and possibly a meaningless waste of government resources. You wouldn't gain anything at all from this. I was going to say let me know if you need anything, and I'll gladly donate a fair sum to your PayPal, and it kind of made me realize that is something that would be morally and legally wrong of me to do, it wouldn't feel like a donation, it would almost feel like I'm trying to buy you and win you over, after causing this much pain to your heart, which I deeply regret. (I'll pay for your nsfw future cosplays maybe? Jkjk, leave that avenue to the twonks who'd actually find pleasure in doing that.) I don't donate much anyways online, if I'd donate it'd have to be an actual animal charity, I feel like when people think of charity they instantly think of like some Cancer Foundation or elderly/orphan fund, not that those are not fair causes, it's just that some dying/sick animals really need our support too, and they're just as worthy. After this i'm doing my own thing & staying away from you, promise. I'm a great citizen, mind my own business and never cause trouble. I just needed for my own sake to send something meaningful and pure your way. Everything that you will see here comes from the heart & I will do my best to be as honest as humanly possible. Whenever I begin working on these long 50,000 word essays I always tend to fear that I forget something crucial or run out of time, so let's hope it doesn't happen this time around. The writer usually spends 10 times the time and effort the reader does, so please do sit down, get comfy, and please read all of this letter. This is going on your SC and Tumblr & will be deleted once the timer on my stream deck reaches zero, you have a tendency to take photos and eventually show them to outsiders, this will ensure it's a one-off, and for your eyes only. It is mainly to apologize to you, among other things. To make you realize that in just 3 years time I'll be completely "reformed", as they say. If you must know "breaking the law" to say sorry could be considered as... noble, in most countries at least. Without a doubt in my mind they'd love for us to bury the hatchet and shake hands, but after this "letter" to you I am actually done with you altogether, and you'll not be hearing from me ever again... unless fate says otherwise. Do remember that this and me apologizing to you for being an awful male, this was mostly done so I can live, function and mentally function like a normal human being again, I will get to that later on in the letter, all you should know now is that it was more of a ME thing, and less of a YOU thing, if that makes sense. Needless to say I have 8 VPNs total with unlimited data running on all of my systems including 2 iPads, laptops, and even phones, to ensure that my IP is impossible to find and non-existent. Just a quick pitch, you could've used common sense to figure that one out yourself. Naturally somebody as wealthy as me would be untouchable, at least in the virtual world, where everything is simple and made easy. I am quite clever, yes, yes I am indeed. But I would not use it for evil deeds, deep inside I am a shockingly kind and nice guy. Oh, you were looking for a bad boy? We can talk, my dear, you know full well that I'd be/become anything for you. No candlelit dinners so I can compliment your cheekbones? You have kept your eyes open, and tonight your knowledge of me is getting greater and greater. You could write a book about us. It almost feels like deja-vu, I've been here studying and doing research on you, now I'm giving you the sheer opportunity to do the same. And 4 years after first talking to you online (in 2014), I, I touched your cat's black fluffy tail once, and catbug, she ran right away, it almost looked like she did a tiny leap forward before running. Yes, it was her 100%. I'm a shining star, just waiting to unlock my full potential, it will happen when the right time comes, you can never rush such things. My financial status would only indicate I have great things waiting for me and a brimming bright future ahead of me, should I play all my cards right, I do adore graveyards, but there is no reason at all why I should perish in the next 5-15 years. I can only hope that you're smart enough to not mention any of this to your mom, I realize you two are close, but being a grown-up means you know what to mention to somebody and what is better left unsaid. Wiser to let this one go and keep it to yourself, no need to waste government resources, and do understand that being fortunate and getting me potentially taken to a mental asylum for 3 weeks would not benefit you in the slightest, I've made it very clear that I don't associate myself with social outcasts, and we of course are done for good after this bit, so let's make it count. Being respectful is calling you a lady even though I full well know it's a girl in sheep's clothing I've been dealing with, hard to tame, always needs to have it her way, borderline blunt at times.. how come Annie the girl does not have a feminine soul, a bit odd, perhaps I do rest my case. You certainly are special, as your mom would say, she means you're not like the other girls. You're way different & not necessarily in a good way. Wanted you & Nora for the experience... Do find you both quite boring, even on the dating spectrum, she's the snappy one, you're the calm one. Will surely do better in the future. As far as I go... I'm your little ghost. I'm a spirit, roughly 500 years ago people like me were considered as and called witches, simply since we were ahead of our time. As you know there are good and bad spirits, I would stand somewhere in the middle as a classic inbetweener I've always been, casually swaying towards either or, but ultimately staying put in the middle. Some days I hate you, other days I love you... Yet here I am ending this "letter" to you with the words "I Love You", and perhaps "Muah" on top of that should I feel classy enough, as always, on the cheek, one final time. Do remember that I will always remain near you & overseer your doings, we don't need to interact, in fact it would be silly to think we can't co-exist in eachother's hearts. When you get the strange feeling that you can't find the explanation for, perhaps it's just me, and nothing more. It's been a sheer clown fiesta witnessing the names and things you've called me thus far. What's new, right? At the very least you don't take me for a joke anymore, which is wise of you, since I'm not. The casual 21st century term "stalker" simply insults me. Even somebody with as little intellect as you would know that stalkers are for years, spirits are for lifetime. I'm nothing less than a S-P-I-R-I-T, one with high capability & intellectual intelligence. I've never commented on your idiocy or your weird friends (90% of them are weird), I'm awfully passive and neutral. I've never insulted/talked-down-on the soyboys, e-slags, pre-mature losers, weebs, memers, or entitled punks you interact with every now and then. No point including the 16-21 year old boys and girls in that category, as I understand how these underage and barely of age children follow you, and you see yourself as their "mama" and friend, not strange in the slightest, not the harvest of living inside of a box for the majority of your life, when fantasy is taking over, sis. Those kids are the only community you have left... surely it would be cruel to let them off the hook, you can't let them go, some of them still see you as a role model! ~ I suppose you could say I'm on a whole different level, and people like me tend to not notice people who are "less". But good luck to them, perhaps some day they too will get themselves out of their holes and start moving towards things that actually matter. Speaking of which... God bless Great Britain if you actually end up scoring an actual decently paying job after all your studies. I would donate a fair few braincells to you... If I didn't have such a bright future ahead of me. In a universe where employers and companies actually did background checks on people before hiring, a silly bean like you would never score anything worthwhile. Personal assistant for a single individual would probably be your peak. Back to me... I am a millionaire, as you expected, seeing as how doors just open and close for me and my kind. I never worked even a day for what I have, but the people before me certainly did. Even more wealthy now in fact, as of last year, now that my professor and casual alcoholic of a grandpa is finally under ground, he was respected by many, but his lifestyle choices were hilariously fractured. See? We (are) similar, kind of. Ah, how I hate drinking and alcohol, I literally drink only twice a year and always feel guilty after, I hate people that consume alcohol in the spirit of the party at clubs or live concerts, and those who tend to constantly drown their sorrow and unhappiness into the bottle. I adore a good coffee and tea though. Living a promising life of luxury, hence the 3 years I will take to improve myself, improve my body to the maximum for the sex appeal and quality of life, get your name 'Annie' with a mini thorny rose underneath tattoo'd on my left arm, so I can take you to places and talk to you, enjoy your company & so I would never forget you (not that there is a chance in hell I'd actually ever do, of course, hahaha.), dye my hair pale/pastel color, purple in 2020, letting it heavily fade to soft pink, After that focus on the pastel spectrum of colors, re-do my driver's license, own a 40k car, but have not driven anything in 3-4 years, begin buying land and potentially own more land, farmhouses, households, countryside villas and mansions than some of the more wealthier businessmen in my area; as you can tell "owning" things & writing are two big passions of mine, the latter for expressing myself and influencing others, and so is real estate, country and marketing to an extent, legally change my first name to something sleek such as Jed, Jed Nei... or you know whatever else that feels unique and not-so-common; pick a powerful name that people will remember (and fear, jkjk), basically get my life on the line/on the rails and get a woman who will massage my strong pectorals with oil every Sunday morning only to ensure I will be more than ready to take on the next week. I adore romance, but still feel that death is the most romantic thing out there. Now of course she could cook for me just fine, but i'd actually really want to taste something you've cooked, as long as you do the cooking with just an apron on and absolutely nothing underneath. Oh Annie, unlocking your true potential would be a really easy task for me. You like cherry blossoms, I on the other hand like 400 year old oak trees. However our worlds could of collided & you could of been my sweetheart under the bright sun and moon. Currently own 2 countryside 2 floor homes and plenty of actual land around them, looking to expand in the future of course. Imagine leaving your silly big city life behind. Imagine laying there (on a hill) naked on the grass in the middle of the day, or relaxing in the bikini, depending how confident you are with your own body, and breast size, I also would not be totally satisfied if mine looked so "below average", but god does your bottom/bum make up for it. Loads of flowers that I can gather and give you, or put in your hair, plenty of forests nearby perfect for mushroom picking, hiking or picnics, loads of plants, fruit bushes, ponds, fruit trees, acorn trees ideal for climbing, farmland, greenhouse, ponds big enough for swimming, cyan blue skies large and wide enough for any balloon or kite you may want to play around with. Or if that’s not entirely your cup of tea then we can plan our big vacation to the Canary Islands in Spain, whatever you like, as long as you stay with me forever. You're a sweet creature and I'm certain we could of started something unique & exciting together, but that's all gone now, i'm still certain that I could of loved you right and shown you extreme passion, to go to bed with you and make you feel happy, loved & excited for the next day, our next day together in paradise. This is not a fantasy tale/dream, this could of potentially been our reality, assuming I would accomplish all my goals, and you willing to leave your current life for me. But why dwell on what could of been, I will never feed you fresh strawberries straight from the greenhouse, I will never "own" you, you will never be my girl, my companion, my life's purpose. I see now why I felt so heavily against friendship with you... being your friend considering the things I had planned for us, that would only lead to romance and love, that friendship would be over so quick you could not even call it one. Oh, and, I can be very sensual and passionate at times. And possibly start a IRL vlogging channel on Youtube in 3 years time, just to influence & motivate others and to portray my lifelong journey to greatness with the dozen obstacles I had to face and overcome along the way, making it all even more bittersweet, especially the main final goal, which if you can recall is to become the biggest standalone landowner/businessman in my area. Maybe you'll randomly stumble across the channel one day & wonder what could of been & what you missed out on, not only that but you'd also visually see the beautiful landscape and things I talked about earlier. Oh and I'll definitely purchase at least one or two more expensive cars, driving around with just one specific car all the time, obviously being somebody who clearly is able to afford another one, it feels kind of lame. P.S I've never ever actually been obsessed with you. You were just a girl I liked because of a few key factors/reasons. Plus we seemingly have dozens of things in common.And we have reached the part where I'll try and explain why writing this was needed for me, and my mentality; Are you a demon baby/girl? If not keep reading and don't even think about showing this letter to anybody else. If you are however... Come with me & with the assistance of our genitals let's try and produce a demon child. A bit NSFW, but we're 25 and nobody else is going to see this (Right? Good gal.), so I'd so-so-so take you raw on the floor in every single position imaginable, your front hole would naturally be so loose afterwards that no guy would want to or feel comfortable with doing it with you anymore. White stuff would go in both 'A' and 'V' holes several times to ensure pregnancy is triggered. Jeez, having and making a baby with you would be so unbelievably sexy. Anyways, back on the topic we go, so me and my issues I've been dealing it... I mentioned it at the start & will do it again... If you think you've been affected by this or you've had it worse/suffered more than me... Well think again. Ever since earlier this year I've had horrible anxiety, hearing unnatural beings and things talk to me and gradually hearing their voices around me. I don't think I'm losing my mind or going crazy, but this does all feel very real to me. Always closing my door at night, not even trying to, it just comes naturally to me to do it, much like a habit. I fell in a deep pit, and I'm so sorry to you, I really do apologize, my dear. My darling Annie. now my situation is being abused and i'm being taken advantage of by these demons/ghosts/shades, I'm now shaking for no reason, it's not even cold in here, it's awful. Psst, I'm not a monster. Imagine being too messed up mentally to go to the grocery store/supermarket alone & having to call your mom and tell her to bring you some food and supplies - telling her that the reason for it is that you have a massive headache right now & that you're unable to get out of bed. Yikes, that does sound bad. And to make it even worse, it has happened more than once. I feel like I need a 12-hour nap after sending this letter your way, feel a bit odd all of sudden, please read it all, it's a glimpse of me and my story and life. I can only hope that I will feel better and be able to go back to living my life like a normal human being now that I threw everything out there and apologized to you. I will leave you be now. It's a peek into my life essentially. I really do adore your tight little pale pink p*ssy, and Nora’s all the same, you gals are & stay important to me. Please do respect my terms and do not under any circumstances share this letter or it's contents with anybody. All the best to you and your family. I Love You. Muah. 💞

[xlice-blog1]

If You Read Nothing Else Today, Read This Report on My Free Cams Mobile

The Pain of My Free Cams Mobile

Bingo Cams is among the new no deposit bingo sites. Some might think that a webcam is the most critical aspect in regards to streaming, but they would be wrong. Cover the webcam if you have to, but you can most likely guess what I'm going to say. To establish a cost-effective security camera, you're going to need a minumum of one webcam, or several IP cameras if your house is large. After you turn on the Network Video Recorder, you'll need to have the appropriate network configuration. Espionage equipment is currently readily available from online stores like espionage-store. A cursory inspection of the camera will provide you enough clues to work out the power source and the way to disable it.

The camera is going to keep the bitrate constant, thus the video quality will be different. Pen cameras provide several charging options based on make and model. Every pen camera is a bit different, but charging scenarios are alike between devices.

Well, it may only be a camera in disguise. The camera also includes a CD to install the camera tool software on a computer. Since you may see, spy cameras now arrive in the most unexpected forms! The camera is going to keep the quality constant, thus the video bitrate will be different. If you're a little wary that there might be incognito cameras around you, there are tools that may help you detect them. There are many home security cameras in the marketplace, it can be frustrating to work out which to pick.

My Free Cams Mobile

If you're using any other phone, you may use our strategies on mobile Omegle. So phones need to be banned. A dropped mobile phone could result in business contacts being freely available to anybody who finds it. For each extra camera, you may have to multiply that range of course. All are free and simple to configure. Every place proved to be a cozy place now. Therefore, if you're in a location that appears to have more smoke detectors than necessary, it might be an indication that a few of them are hidden cameras.

The password should have existed the 10000th line. Finally, it's a good situation to force a static IP address so you can easily locate the webcam server even if pi restarts. Then you simply wait for it to finish the setup. The rules setup is quite basic. For the very first option, it's quite a straight forward approach to be able to effectively setup your IP camera to develop into viewable on your device. You must click the option Link Your Aadhaar'. No choice will be an ideal match.

You ought to be able to reconnect without an issue. The issue with tape and band-aids, clearly, is it's only a hack. Actually it's a good concept in order to add sound to your images. Which is it very difficult to sell 1 on 1, is advisable to stake out a couple adult chat rooms in your specialty. The reality isn't quite the exact same. Surveillance equipment when the realm of the absolute most expensive secret service is currently freely on the open industry. An insight into the future with just a glimpse on your phone can be very handy sometimes.

The Meaning of My Free Cams Mobile

Just get in the mode you need and begin recording. All the modes have settings that you could change to customize them to your distinct needs. The full user interface is straightforward to use. Webcam software might not be configured correctly the very first time that it's used. Once you have the program running, look in the File menu and about the interface to find out whether there are any settings you are able to change to enhance the image.

As a result of modern technology, plenty of things have improved when it has to do with surveillance CCTV camera and IP Camera today. In truth, it's more fun than going to a normal store because it is possible to stay on the sofa in your PJs. Well, you need to always don't forget that you would like to speak with Omegle girls only and you are man. Also just since there is a picture it doesn't signify that's the true person you're talking to. With Gekkopod as a portion of your gear, you will be able to capture images in new methods will have people wondering how you did it. Close up images like the very first image on the left will demonstrate some slight bulging as a result of the wide angle lens. Taking a picture with your laptop's webcam is simple, and is an easy way to snap a photograph which is available immediately on your PC.

[newstfionline]

When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life

Kashmir Hill, Gizmodo, July 26, 2018

Monika Glennon has lived in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last 12 years. Other than a strong Polish accent, she fits a certain stereotype of the All-American life. She’s blonde. Her husband is a veteran Marine. Her two children, a boy and a girl, joined the military as adults. She sells houses--she’s a real estate agent at Re/Max--helping others realize their own American dream.

But in September 2015, she was suddenly plunged into an American nightmare. She got a call at 6 a.m. one morning from a colleague at Re/Max telling her something terrible had been posted about her on the Re/Max Facebook page. Glennon thought at first she meant that a client had left her a bad review, but it turned out to be much worse than that.

It was a link to a story about Glennon on She’s A Homewrecker, a site that exists for the sole purpose of shaming the alleged “other woman.” The author of the Homewrecker post claimed that she and her husband had used Glennon as their realtor and that everything was going great until one evening when she walked in on Glennon having sex with her husband on the floor of a home the couple had been scheduled to see. The unnamed woman went into graphic detail about the sex act and claimed she’d taken photos that she used to get everything from her husband in a divorce. The only photo she posted though was Glennon’s professional headshot, taken from her bio page on Re/Max’s site.

Glennon was horrified. The story was completely fabricated and she had no idea why someone would have written it. Someone on Facebook named Ryan Baxter had posted it to the Re/Max page; Baxter also went through Glennon’s Facebook friend list and sent it to her husband, family members, and many of her professional contacts.

“Sorry to be the one to let you in on this,” Baxter wrote to Glennon’s husband, Scott, in a Facebook message.

Glennon waded into the comment section on the Homewrecker story and wrote that it was completely fabricated. A woman named Amy responded skeptically, “Hmmm, so why would someone make up such an extravagant story?”

The story was re-posted on other sites, including one called BadBizReport.is where it has been viewed over 95,000 times. It quickly became the top search result for Glennon’s name on Google. Within a year, Glennon was experiencing the repercussions: Her number of listings dropped by half. She estimates that she’s lost $200,000 in business since 2015.

She was mystified as to the post’s author. She thought it could be a rival realtor, or an acquaintance who was angry at her.

“I was looking at every person in my life and every stranger and wondering who did it to me and why,” Glennon told me by phone. “It makes you rethink every relationship in your life.”

Eventually, after $100,000 in attorney’s bills, Glennon was able to unmask the culprit. It turned out to be a complete stranger who had been offended by a comment Glennon had made about a news article on Facebook.

In 2014, a teenager from Alabama visited Auschwitz and tweeted a smiling selfie from the former concentration camp. It went viral, as people across the internet debated the teen’s choice of self-portraiture. WHNT News, a Huntsville, Alabama-based TV station, posted a story about the incident to its Facebook page asking readers to “share your thoughts.”

A heated discussion ensued. Monika Glennon was among those defending the teen, saying that kids make mistakes, that at least she was visiting the site, and that the condemnation by an internet mob “shows the same judgmental and senseless pack mentality that led to this horrific time in history to begin with.”

A woman named Mollie Rosenblum disagreed. She responded to several of the teen selfie supporters, including Glennon, saying that Auschwitz was a somber place for reflection and not an appropriate place to take selfies. She identified herself as being of Jewish descent and suggested that others didn’t have a full grasp of the Holocaust. Glennon responded to Rosenblum, telling her Auschwitz isn’t “her” place, that it “belongs to all and was a former killing zone of all,” including, originally, Polish people.

If you’ve ever argued with someone online, you’re probably not surprised to hear that neither person was convinced by the other person’s arguments. Glennon forgot about the exchange and went about her life. Rosenblum did not.

Rosenblum stewed over the exchange for a week. It was a low point in her life; a single mother with two sons, she was, by her own account as posted on Facebook, then “in the throws of full blown methamphetamine addiction” and making very poor decisions (including, in 2016, kidnapping). She spent a few hours researching Glennon online and soon knew enough to fake having met her in real life. It was the online version of road rage; instead of pulling a gun on another driver, Rosenblum decided to drop a bomb on Glennon’s reputation. Rosenblum submitted her fabricated story to She’s A Homewrecker, and then, according to an account she later gave to a local news outlet, forgot about it.

There is a constellation of sites on the internet that exist solely as places for people to exorcise their demons, and more importantly, their grudges; She’s A Homewrecker is one of them. It offers the opportunity to publicize a person’s misdeeds so that they are available not just to an inner circle with access to relevant gossip but to anyone who Googles that person’s name. The terms of service specify that posts must be factually true, but if they’re not, it’s not a problem for the site. It’s protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being sued for the things their users say.

Rosenblum wrote and submitted the story in August 2014, but it wasn’t published until September 2015, long after Rosenblum had forgotten about it. It may have languished in obscurity there if not for a person who went by Ryan Baxter on Facebook. Baxter was the one who posted the story to Re/Max’s Facebook page, emailed it to Glennon’s bosses, and sent it to many of her Facebook contacts. Apparently a regular reader of She’s A Homewrecker, Baxter had a habit of compounding the damage to people shamed on the site. Glennon found numerous instances of Baxter posting She’s a Homewrecker posts to the Facebook walls of other people’s employers and friends. Such are the strange hobbies of the modern age.

Glennon wrote repeatedly to all the sites that had posted the story telling them it was false but none of them would take it down. Her only option was to go to court, so she filed a lawsuit in 2016 against John Does, alleging libel and copyright infringement, because the post used her professional headshot, which she had ownership of.

Through the suit, Glennon was able to subpoena She’s A Homewrecker and Facebook for IP addresses, as well as Internet Service Providers to find out the identities of the people behind the IP addresses. A couple of months after she filed the suit, yet another post appeared on yet another site, “Report My Ex,” written by a man claiming to be the husband who had cheated with Glennon, again luridly detailing a sex act that never happened.

“That really scared me because I was afraid men would book me as a realtor expecting me to have sex with them,” Glennon told me by phone. “So I had my husband start coming with me to bookings at vacant homes. We installed a surveillance system in our house because I was so scared.”

Through the subpoenas, Glennon discovered that Ryan Baxter was a stranger in Oxnard, California, named Hannah Lupian. Shortly after Lupian was served with a legal complaint, the Ryan Baxter profile disappeared from Facebook. Glennon has never heard from Lupian, and I was unable to get in touch with her.

Rosenblum was another matter. After becoming aware that her identity would be revealed by her ISP, Mollie Rosenblum doubled down. She emailed Glennon’s attorneys, apologizing but saying that if Glennon continued to pursue her legally, she would “protect [herself] by making their initial contact public.” Six months later, in September 2017, Rosenblum acted on her threat and took to Facebook and the comment section of the BadBizReport, where she apologized for lying about Glennon being an adulterer but said she did it because of Glennon’s “veiled antisemitism.”

Glennon was horrified. She didn’t want more terrible things written about her online.

“I’m not a Nazi sympathizer. I grew up in a poor family in communist Poland,” Glennon said. “I saw the comments and reached out to [Rosenblum] over Facebook Messenger and said, ‘This has reached an awful level of damage that you have done to me. Let’s meet. Please ask me what you want to ask me.’”

They agreed to meet at a restaurant in Athens, Alabama, a town an hour from Glennon’s, where Rosenblum lives. The meeting lasted four hours.

“She had thought I was this mean, rich bitch. That’s the problem with social media. You just make these assumptions about people,” Glennon said. “After meeting me, she did an affidavit admitting everything she did. She understood who I was then.”

Rosenblum did not respond to media inquiries via email or Facebook Messenger. She appears active on Facebook as recently as July 4, but she has been sentenced to four years for kidnapping and the Alabama Department of Corrections website says she started her term in November 2017. Her thinking, however, is well-documented online and in court documents.

Meeting Glennon in person seemed to defuse Rosenblum’s anger. She returned once again to the comment section of the BadBizReport to retract what she had said and apologize.

“Mrs. Glennon is in fact a kind and compassionate person with whom I share many common values,” wrote Rosenblum. “Please accept my deepest regret for the harm I have brought to the lives of her and those whom love her.”

Rosenblum wanted to take the posts down but she couldn’t. On submission sites like She’s A Homewrecker, there is no delete button, not to mention the copies of the post that appeared on other sites.

“These sites should allow original posters to take these posts down,” said Glennon. “I see a lot of people in comments saying they regret it and want to take it down but they can’t.”

Glennon won her lawsuit against Rosenblum and Lupian, with a federal court in northern Alabama finding in her favor on claims of copyright violation, invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and interference with her business. The judge ordered websites that published Rosenblum’s story to remove it. She’s A Homewrecker has already taken down the post, but it remains up on BadBizReport. BadBizReport’s website states that it doesn’t respond to court orders and that “there’s no way in hell to get off of BadBizReport once you’re listed on it,” adding “American lawyers make us laugh.”

Luckily, the judge also ordered search engines, “such as Google,” to de-index all versions of the post “to ensure that it does not appear as a search result when Ms. Glennon’s name is searched.” In Europe, the right to remove irrelevant or false information from your search results is enshrined in the law as “the right to be forgotten.” In the U.S., you have to pay for it.

“You should be able to remove untrue stories without spending $100,000,” said Glennon. “For a person making minimum wage trying to clear their reputation, it would be impossible.”

There is a question as to whether Google and others will comply with the order.

A Google spokesperson said the company reviews all court orders requesting links be removed from search and prefers when parties resolve among themselves in court whether a page should be removed from search results. Last year, Google removed links from search in the U.S. because of defamation over 30,000 times.

Glennon says the experience has left her more cautious online. She locked down her Facebook account so that strangers have less access to her information and, importantly, can’t see her friends list. Surprisingly, she still comments on news articles.

“But nothing too provocative,” she told me.

[recentanimenews]

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 5 Transcript

  Episode 5 of Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast is here, this time exploring the world of manga and how closely tied it is to the anime industry in Japan. Read on for the full transcript!

  The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. 

  EPISODE 5: MANGA IN AMERICA

Guests: Rachel Thorne, Nick Rowe

  Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

  [Lofi music]

  Manga, the section of Barnes & Nobles you had to walk all the way around because the floor was covered in teenagers, or maybe you were those teenagers. Once a vanishingly small piece of a market completely dominated by Marvel and DC, these black and white comics all the way from Japan have eclipsed domestic publishers to represent what might be the largest foothold Japan holds in any U.S. industry. How did we get here? Well, let’s start with the first manga in America, which you might be surprised to learn was actually made in the United States.

  [Lofi music]

  So this podcast is about the history of manga in America and for such a podcast you’d probably want to start at the beginning and, of course, stuff like this is extremely hard to track down since very little before the invention of the internet can be proven to have happened at all. One man I spoke with seems to think he has the answer.

  The Four Immigrants Manga was illustrated in the home of Crunchyroll, San Francisco, California by a Japanese immigrant by the name of Henry Kiyama way back in 1927. Written in both English and Japanese the comic would be indecipherable to anyone who couldn’t understand both languages, making it custom-tailored to the bilingual community of immigrants in the city. What might have been a cultural artifact lost to time can actually be bought today, lovingly translated and heavily annotated by a man named Frederick Schodt, who is going to be pretty important in this podcast.

  Fred is a writer, translator, and interpreter who’s received a number of awards for his work including the Order of the Rising Sun in 2009 for “distinguished achievements in international relations, promotion of Japanese culture, advancements in their field, and development in welfare or preservation of the environment.” But for our purposes he is a member of a group of manga enthusiasts in Tokyo who came up with the crazy idea of translating manga to English called “Dadakai.”

  Back in 1977 a group of friends working in Tokyo including Fred Schodt, Shinji Sakamoto, Jared Cook, and Midori Ueda decided to try translating manga and, through one of Sakamoto’s connections, actually managed to secure a meeting with Tezuka Productions where, to the group’s surprise, they met with Osamu Tezuka himself. Always searching for an international audience for his works, Tezuka agreed to let the group translate his manga Phoenix, a personal favorite of Fred’s.

  This might have been a landmark moment but, while the group had the jump on translating manga for the U.S. market, they were also a bunch of bilingual idealists with no means of their own to distribute their work. The group translated the first five volumes of Tezuka’s Phoenix in 1967 but couldn’t publish it, so they turned their work back in to Tezuka Productions with the hope it’s leaders’ enthusiasm would translate into a release. Ultimately it sat in Tezuka’s archives for 25 years before finally being published in the U.S. by VIZ, who brought Fred and Jared on to translate the remaining seven volumes.

  The first manga to receive an official translation and distribution in America was Kaiji Nakazawa’s semi-autobiographical recounting of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing, titled Barefoot Gen.

  [Barefoot Gen music]

  The english edition was actually translated and printed in Tokyo by a group of volunteers called Project Gen, of which our friend Fred was a member, and then was distributed in New York City in May of 1978 by the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization that had been around since World War One and still exists today, as a cautionary tale against nuclear proliferation.

  Unfortunately it was not popular and the run was cancelled after two volumes, but the cultural importance of Nakazawa’s work would result in two more attempts to put Gen in the American market. The second was a heavily Americanized version in 1988 by New Society Publishers titled “Barefoot Gen: The Cartoon Story of Hiroshima,” again unsuccessful, before finally receiving a fully released translation between 2004-2010 by Last Gasp Publishing, a very ironic name, this time backed by the famous cartoonist Art Spiegelman who himself penned the comic Maus recounting the experience of Polish Jews during World War Two.

  [Lofi music]

  After that not so successful 1978 attempt, it took eight years before someone gave manga in the U.S. another go. In 1986, Taiko Saito had an English edition produced from his long-running story of a one-shot-one-kill assassin Golgo 13. The volume, called Golgo 13 Graphic Novel Series No 1: Into the Wolves’ Lair was shipped to the U.S. and distributed by American Books Nippan. You may have noticed so far, all these attempts have originated in Japan.

  It wasn’t until 1987 that American publishers began releasing licensed and localized manga published in the U.S. In May of that year, First Comics began releasing its run of the bloody samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub, which is basically the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda in Edo period Japan. It’s print was strange for the time, coming out in monthly issues that were square bound and included anywhere from 64 to 128 pages with covers illustrated by none other than Frank Miller, a.k.a. the man you can thank for turning Batman into an edgelord thanks to his “Dark Knight Returns” series. Frank’s 1983 comic Ronin had been heavily influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub, although he couldn’t read Japanese and had just looked at the drawings before its official release. 

  In a two month period afterward, a variety of publishers would release Mai the Psychic Girl, Speed Racer, Area 88, and even Astro Boy, translated by Fred Schodt, and released almost 20 years to the month after the anime first aired on American television [end of the Astro Boy opening plays]. Fans of the heavily localized animation were, ironically, disappointed that the manga showed a lack of familiarity with the story concepts of the TV anime. The TV anime that was, as I said, heavily localized. 

  The next year even Marvel Comics got into the game, beginning their print of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and a guy named Toren Smith would start a company called Studio Proteus which specialized in acting as the middleman for American publishers looking to license and localize manga. Among his achievements were getting the majority of Masamune Shirow’s works such as Appleseed, Black Magic, and even Ghost in the Shell (translated by Fred Schodt) brought over to the U.S.

  At the time Shirow had a dedicated fandom in Japan, but his work proved to be much more popular in the West. His high concept, high violence science fiction titles found a real following in the U.S. and Europe, and this would eventually turn around and boost his acclaim in his native country when Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film adaptation, itself a co-production funded by the UK-based Manga Entertainment transformed the IP into one of the most well-known works of science fiction in history.

  By the end of the 80s, manga had gained a small but powerful cult following.

  That said, most of the stuff they were printing in the U.S. in the late 80s and early 90s would be unrecognizable as manga compared to what we see today, the little roughly 200-page novel-sized black and white volumes popularly known as tankobon in Japan or digest size in the United States. Publishers went to great lengths to ensure that manga would feel familiar to the American comic consumer. So just about everyone in the industry was printing their manga in the style of American floppy, those 32-page single issue comics that have the stapled spines like Amazing Spider-Man or Batman… whatever you- what have you.

  Essentially, in the same vein as much of this chronicle, these publishers were trying to sell manga as American comics and to that end, they also flipped the entire thing over so it could be read from left to right rather than the original Japanese format of right to left, either reversing entire pages or painstakingly reversing the order of panels on the page. This was just how manga was until the early 2000s with only a few exceptions which we’ll go into later.

  Other localization efforts were “colorizing” manga, which sounds uh… bad, when you say it out loud. Most manga are black and white, and black and white comics just didn’t sell well in the American market, so to avoid falling in that pothole, they’d hire artists to professionally treat manga like coloring books. Publishing manga was a risky venture back in the day and publishers did everything they could to lower the barrier of entry for American comics fans to get into manga. 

  I will go ahead and tell you now that all of these were bad ideas and that will become more clear as we continue on. In fact, the number one mistake all the comic publishers made trying to sell Japanese comics was marketing them toward American comic book fans.

  In fact, I’d go as far as to say the biggest mistake ever made by publishers was ever putting manga in comic book stores to begin with. Working out of comic book stores actually prevented manga from finding a wide audience for three reasons. The first is that comic shops are a small market with limited customers who… ah, I’ll just say are of a certain type. The second is many stores had no interest in carrying manga at all either due to prejudice against or unwillingness to accept the risk of carrying an unproven foreign medium. The third is that the comic shops who were interested had to order their manga through a company called Diamond Comic Distributors.

  If you haven’t heard of Diamond, they’re a distributor that comic shops almost universally are forced to work through to stock their shelves. Diamond has been around since the early 80s and have become notorious To. This. Day. for… I guess forgetting what they have in stock? Just entirely forgetting. After the initial order of an upcoming manga, titles tended to disappear from their catalog forever, even when the publisher can confirm there should still be volumes in stock. How and why this is is anyone's guess but it leaves retailers in a position where you can either take a risk and over order an upcoming manga or play it safe and miss out if you want to restock. Guess which option most of them chose?

  Manga publishers were leaning into a small existing comic reading demographic through unreliable distribution which, unfortunately, prevented manga from breaking into the mainstream.

  It wasn’t until the 90s that manga would begin to find its legs in the U.S. And for that we can probably thank none other than a small (at the time) company called VIZ Media. Although far from the first to publish manga in the U.S., VIZ, which was founded in the anime and manga mecca of San Francisco by Seiji Horibuchi in 1986, was the first to make a real footprint focusing primarily on publishing manga.

  Now they had one major advantage that other startups did not. It was a subsidiary of Shogakukan, a major Japanese publisher that founded the Hitotsubashi Group, a major partnership of Japanese publishers including Hakusensha and Shuiesha… two publishing companies ALSO founded by Shogakukan. This is important because these three companies were then and still are three of the most successful manga publishers in Japan. Shuiesha in particular is notable for one of their almost 30 manga publications, one of which you may already have heard of called Weekly Shonen Jump, a weekly collection of manga chapters that has featured titles such as One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Naruto. 

  Blessed with the most direct pipeline to a Japanese license holder that would exist in the U.S. for the next few decades and no small amount of seed capital, VIZ was able to be strategic, limit their costs, and ride out fluctuations in the comics industry. They were publishing manga as early as 1987 but wouldn’t find major success until they began their first print from the mangaka who would become VIZ’s #1 money maker for years to come, Rumiko Takahashi. 

  [Lofi music]

  In 1992, VIZ began publishing Takahashi’s second major long running shonen hit, Ranma ½, a romantic comedy martial arts series about a boy named Ranma who falls into a cursed spring and turns into a woman every time he’s splashed with cold water. It would also be the first anime licensed by VIZ, released in 1993. At the time, the manga became the greatest success in the history of manga in America. You see, the manga was sold in comic shops but the dubbed VHSs made it onto the shelves of video stores like Blockbuster, which was a thing that once existed.

  Thorn: At the time, video rental stores were becoming a thing, and yet the major producers of content in the U.S. were really cautious about putting things on VHS, because they thought that it would be pirated. And so you had these rental shops, but they didn’t have a lot of stuff to put out, so they would put literally anything that wasn’t pornographic on their shelves. 

  Meet Rachel.

  Thorn: My name’s Rachel Thorne, I teach about manga and comics at the Kyoto Seika University, and I’ve been doing so since 2000. And I’ve been translating manga into English for… about 30 years. 

  Rachel was the translator for VIZ and the original translator for Ranma ½. She also translated Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga and is basically the only person allowed to translate the works of the woman considered to be the “founding mother” of shojo manga, Moto Hagio.

  Thorn: So you got all kinds, back in like 1990, there was just all kinds of weird stuff in video rental stores. Obscure documentaries and things, just anything, they would put it out there. So- and yet, everybody had a video deck and they wanted to watch stuff, so they would go to the rental store and they would say “oh, what’s this with big eyes?” And it’s like Speed Racer [laughs]. Because I think back then, people would see the big eyes and they would think “Go, Speed Racer!” And that’s how Ranma took off, and I think that’s how anime in general took off was that they were getting on the shelves in rental stores, and rental stores were being visited by just ordinary people and not some, not some narrow group, and then that fed back. And then, you know, of course the success of the anime then helped promote the sales of manga and then people became aware that manga was a thing and we started to gradually grow from there. 

        Finding an escape from the limited comic market, Ranma earned fans through its anime that drove interest in the manga. This just so happens to be the formula anime was essentially invented for, driving fans to buy the comics and associated toys. Ranma ½ sold so well that they did the exact same thing with Takahashi’s next long-running work, Inu Yasha, which they began publishing in 1998 and put the anime out on Adult Swim in 2002 and which recently found its way to Crunchyroll in December of 2019.

  The formula hit critical mass when Pokemon finally hit the U.S. in 1998 and VIZ’s concurrent manga release, issue #1 of Pokemon: The Electric Tales of Pikachu, would hit an industry first of becoming the best selling comic in the U.S. With manga now handily kicking Marvel’s ass you might be wondering how that formula works with the MCU being the biggest movie series in the history of cinema. Well…

  Rowe: The movies are very different from the comics, and that has to do a lot with Marvel, the way Marvel markets and sells their comics. The connection between the comics and the movies is nonexistent. When a movie comes out, they don’t have any kind of concurrent themes or relevant themes or you know, connections to the movies, it’s all its own continuity. And stuff that’s the storylines that they pull for the movies are out of print and trade when the movie drops, and for six months after the movie drops. I mean, it’s a complete disaster. So yes, people have been coming in saying “hey I saw Into the Spiderverse! Where’s the comic?” And our answer to that is “uhh…,” because there is none. And that’s just a fatal mistake on their part. So it’s a very different beast.

  Basically when it comes to anime. What you see is what you’re gonna get in the manga, which usually has a straightforward single chronology. If you liked Ranma ½ the anime, you could just pick up issue one of the manga instead of sorting through everything Marvel has ever done to figure out which run of Spider-Man featured the Vulture as Mary Jane’s father. That was Nick Rowe, by the way…

  Rowe: So my name is Nick Rowe, I’m the manga guy at Dr. Comics Mr. Games in Oakland. I’ve been doing it since 2007-8, ish? So I started, I took over this section right at the beginning of the crash in ‘08. But I was also here through the Tokyopop boom and even here during the single issue stuff back in the early days. So I have a lot of experience slinging manga in a comics store. 

  He’s been slinging manga at Dr. Comics Mr. Games, Diamonds’s #1 manga account west of the Rockies for the past 10 years. Basically, they move more Japanese comics than anyone outside of the East Coast, making them an aberration among comic shops. Nick himself has been in the industry since manga was coming out in flipped floppies, the versions trying to look like Western comic books, 20 page, staplebound, with all the panels rearranged to read left to right, you were listening earlier, I hope.

  Speaking of which, VIZ takes credit for printing the first unflipped manga in the United States. Their original Neon Genesis Evangelion run in 1998 was promoted as being released in “authentic Japanese right-to-left format” in response to popular request by their readers. But just as likely it was the result of a request by the author Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. It was followed shortly after by Dragon Ball which also went unflipped, this time DEFINITELY because the creator Akira Toriyama requested it. You don’t say no to him.

  [Dragon Ball Z, Goku Pushes His SSJ Form to its Limits!]

  It made Goku. And you don’t say no to Goku. Unless you’re Frieza. I gue- okay, okay, I guess you can say no to Goku, but you get the point. 

  Both, by the way, were still sold in those stapled leaflet 32-page floppy formats. You can’t win every battle. I’m sorry. 

  In the midst of their early 90s success, VIZ was operating on a tried-and-true business model with popular Japanese properties. They had no reason to deviate from their course but for some reason, but still they asked themselves what would turn out to be THE question that would shape the future of sequential art storytelling in the United States…

  What if… women… also read comics? Crazy.

  Thorn: There was no plan to do any kind of shojo manga at all. Of course, I suggested it almost as soon as they hired me. I suggested it and they said “oh no, girls don’t read comics in America, and the comic book shops would never carry it.” And as I said, the Editor-in-Chief at the time who was Sotoru Fuji and he said that at the time that he really wanted to do Bananafish. We ended up finally doing Bananafish, but that was before then, before then. I don’t remember how I finally managed to convince them to do it, I think I had started doing a column for Animerica about shojo manga and I guess they just decided to give it a try because I pestered them so much. And so the first thing we did was something that was easy to get the rights to, that was short, and not too like flowery and not too girly and that was a couple of short stories by Keiko Nishi, The Promise and Achieving the Bond. And that was the first title released, I believe, onto the Flower imprint. I’m pretty sure they used the Flowers imprint. It’s a goofy name for an imprint, but it actually comes from at the time VIZ was a wholly owned subsidiary of Shogakukan, and now it’s Shogakukan and Shueisha both, but at the time it was just Shogakukan. Shogakukan has used the title “flower” or “flowers” in their shojo manga for decades and decades, so that’s where that came from. And so Keiko Nishi’s Promise was the first, I believe, Flower imprint, in fact I’m sure that was the first Flower imprint. And then after that we did- they thought that it would, we could take a chance on science fiction, so we did Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven, which is a classic science fiction shojo manga and that was well received. And then it sort of gradually snowballed from there. 

  In 1994, VIZ started out a new imprint of comics called VIZ Flower Comics focusing on shojo manga, starting with romance Promise, following high schooler Reiko’s struggles with her mother remarrying with the help of a childhood friend, and including titles like They Were Eleven from the aforementioned manga luminary Moto Hagio.

  The relative success of this run could be considered a miracle. Since these were being sold in comic shops, an arena historically resistant to any kind of content meant for women, the fact that they were moving these manga at all almost seems like they were succeeding in spite of themselves.

  VIZ was so close to the right answer, which would eventually be discovered by a new company who would become the biggest name in manga for the next decade. In 1997 a new name appeared in manga publishing.

  Tokyopop.

  Originally known as Mixx Entertainment which got into the manga industry with a manga compilation magazine called MixxZine that had several titles arranged by chapter much like a traditional Japanese manga magazine. Now you can go on Wikipedia and find a laundry list of attempts to print Japanese-style manga magazine anthologies in the U.S., and they generally fall into three categories. Ones that last two, five, or 10 years before going under. Most of them don’t make it to 10. The format just didn’t really catch on with American consumers. So what made MixxZine different?

  Uh… basically they had Sailor Moon.

  Sailor Moon had a rocky history in the U.S. Originally airing in 1995, the show basically bombed. Lack of confidence in this cartoon meant for little girls caused the network to place Sailor Moon into “dead” early morning time slots, which is what we in the industry call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, the series was doing well in Canada and after 12,000 fans went to the trouble of signing a petition to have it re-air, the show was brought back on USA network in 1997 and then the golden land of all anime airing in the U.S., Toonami, in 1998. Obviously, the series took off and Tokyopop, having grabbed the manga license before the anime became popular, was suddenly sitting on a gold mine. Lucky them.

  Where VIZ was backed by Shogakukan, Tokyopop established a sweet deal with Kodansha, which is one of Shogakukan’s main competitors, during their golden era and they started cranking out manga. They leaned heavily on shojo titles like Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket, CLAMP’s Rayearth and… also everything else by CLAMP. If you ever went to a Borders in like 2002 or 2003, you’re probably VERY familiar with that name. Focusing on manga for girls had never been done before in the U.S., but Tokyo had a strong recipe for success. 

  Cutting their costs, and ignoring comic shops entirely.

  Thorn: What made the difference was the price, and they were able to make their books so cheap by just cutting corners everywhere, they cut corners on everything. The translators were paid terrible, terrible pay rates, and I’m sure the editors were poorly paid. There was not really, as far- they just had really bad production values. But since their readers were like 10 years old, the readers don’t really care so much about the details, so that really worked. They got the price down to low dollars, which was almost like dumping, in a way, in the sense that they had- they HAD to have been losing money at the start with that. Because that’s a big risk in house, to make the per unit price that low when you know that there’s a chance that only like 1,000 people will buy it. You know, our VIZ graphic novels were expensive because we had low print runs, and that’s just the way capitalism works, you know? You can only make an item so cheap if you know it’s not going to sell that well. And of course manga, paperbacks in Japan, are really cheap because they know that they’re going to sell huge quantities of them, so they don’t have to make a lot of profit per unit.

  When it came to cutthroat cost saving, Tokyopop was second to none. Although VIZ was the first to print both collected volumes in 1993 and unflipped manga in 1998, Tokyopop was the first to make it the rule rather than the exception. The 5-inch-by-7 1/2-inch “digest size” volumes pretty much synonymous with the word “manga” today were a Tokyopop standard print.

  Much like VIZ, they marketed on the authenticity angle, calling it “100% Authentic Manga” most similar to Japanese tankobon. Turns out if you don’t need to hire anyone to flip the pages, reformat the art to American comic size, source full color art covers for each chapter rather than one per 10 chapters for a collected volume, and you hire most of your translators out of college campuses for record setting low industry rates, you can save a lot of fuckin’ money on authenticity. This let Tokyopop undercut their competition by a devastating margin. Most manga sold anywhere from $12 to $18 and Tokyopop delivered this line at around $10. 10 dollars.

  Up until that point producing a quality product had been the emphasis on most publishers like VIZ and, it turned out, this may have been doing more harm than good. Sure Tokyopop’s volumes yellowed and fell apart at record speeds, but if your 8-year-old daughter tugs on your sleeve in Borders and asks if you’ll buy her something that looks suspiciously like an actual book priced for just $9.99, how do you say no?

  [Lofi music]

  Did I mention Borders? ‘Cause that brings me to the ignoring comic shops part.

  Tokyopop was one of the first manga publishers to score a wide distribution deal with a big box bookstore, Borders. Comic book stores were (and often still are) a place that a lot of women don’t exactly feel welcome. Not the best place for a publisher printing metric tones of women’s comics daily. Selling manga at Borders not only put Tokyopop’s manga in front of a massive new potential audience instead of the usual comic shop regulars, it also put them in front of real, breathing women!

  Thorn: Now our approach was to kind of like try to shoehorn shojo manga into the existing comic book fandom, which was, you know, a difficult task because it was almost all guys, and it was all technicolor long johns and macho men beating each other up and it was all in color and it- those people hated manga, they hated manga particularly, but they even hated shojo manga even more than that. And I have to admire Tokyopop for having the guts to just like totally ignore the whole comic book market and go straight to paperback.

  Borders became a cultural touchstone of manga in the U.S. The image of entire aisles becoming impassable for all the teens and pre-teen tweens sitting on the floor quietly reading manga that they may or may not intend to purchase became known even outside the manga community.

  This was a period of huge prosperity for the manga industry. The seemingly impenetrable western market that Japanese publishers had been trying to secure for decades broke like a collapsing dam and Tokyopop was riding the wave. Seeing Tokyopop’s success, VIZ leaned even more heavily into shojo titles and manga sales exploded in the U.S. The secret all along had been to find new readers and especially. Especially. Women. All of whom, or most of whom, were new readers. And they’ve stuck around. Nowadays even male-focused magazines like Weekly Shonen Jump estimate their readership at about 50% female.

  At Tokyopop’s peak, perhaps getting bored with publishing, founder and CEO Stu Levy began to use the business to fund his own vanity projects, pushing his own DJ Milky persona and engaging in some questionable collaborations. In 2004 Levy cowrote the manga Princess Ai with Courtney Love, yes that Courtney Love, featuring illustrations from the famous NANA mangaka Ai Yazawa… because “ai” means “love” in Japanese. These behaviors would compound the problems that Tokyopop would run into further down the line.

  Manga was rocketing toward its 2007 peak, having grown by 350% in 5 years. where it would capture 200 million in sales with 267 new titles entering the market. Turns out this was the highest manga sales would ever reach. 2007 was a peak that turned into a landslide, with manga sales plummeting uncontrollably every year before finally leveling out in 2012. 

  These dates just happen to roughly coincide with the death of Borders Books. Huh. Imagine that.

  In 2006, Borders began to lose profits. Amazon was on its stratospheric rise and Borders just couldn’t figure how to make the online sales thing work. It floundered for the next 5 years, losing over a third of its annual profits in steep decline, before declaring bankruptcy in 2011. This was bad news for all manga publishers, but most of all for Tokyopop. Borders represented ⅓ of their manga sales right up until its demise and their wide distribution deal turned back on them when Borders began to crumble...

  Rowe: The reason Tokyopop was so heavily stocked by Borders stores was because they signed a contract. It was something absurd like a 70% returnable contract. So Borders could essentially order books from Tokyopop for free and just line their shelves with as much stuff as they wanted. And that’s why when Borders folded, they folded owing Tokyopop like millions of dollars. Because they over expanded, they stocked all their stores with tons of Tokyopop books, and they didn’t have the money to pay Tokyopop. I don’t know if they’re actually returning the books and taking part of that, but it was a terrible deal, I don’t know if other publishers signed a similar contract, but it’s- I mean, that’s why Tokyopop vanished before the crash. 

  Keen eyes and ears in the industry noticed that Borders decline wasn’t Tokyopop's only problem in the late 2000s. Tokyopop had ceased printing new Kodansha releases for a few years. With the founding of Kodansha USA in 2008, the writing was on the wall. In 2009 Tokyopop announced that Kodansha was letting their licensing agreements lapse without renewal. The same year, Kodansha USA began their Kodansha Comics imprint, gobbling up the lapsed licenses along with Del Rey Manga.

  Rowe: I called Tokyopop about a week before they announced they were closing, because I just got fed up. So I looked their number up and just called them and was like, I was ready to yell at them. And I talked to them and I was like “what is going on? What’s happening?” And the person who spoke with me just dumped all this information on me, and I was like “wait a minute, Kodansha’s recalling all these licenses?” I mean, that’s what I considered to be like the major event of the crash, is the Kodansha recall. Yes, Borders closing and Tokyopop going under was a big factor, but the Kodansha recall is a huge turning point. And so seeing that happen and all of a sudden our manga sales were like really solid, and then… it was a black hole. Almost overnight. 

  With no new Kodansha licenses on the horizon and Borders sales decaying, Tokyopop lost 47 of its roughly 100 employees in two rounds of layoffs in 2008. This massive blow would mark the beginning of a long period of floundering as the company tried to find its feet in other media, attempting to leverage TV adaptations of their remaining properties and originals.

  In summer of 2010, Tokyopo began recording its ill-advised AMERICA’S GREATEST OTAKU, a reality show featuring Stu Levy a.k.a. DJ Milky himself, touring America on a bus covered with anime characters along with six college age anime fans competing in challenges for a chance to win a trip to Japan. 

  [America’s Greatest Otaku Tailer plays]

  Among the judges was, somehow, acclaimed anime director Hiroshi Nagama who, at the time of this recording, was recently announced as the director of the upcoming Uzumaki anime on Adult Swim. I don’t have anything clever to say about that. That’s just cool.

  In 2011 Borders would declare bankruptcy, prompting another round of high profile layoffs at Tokyopop for which Stu Levy placed the blame on unremunerated debt from the former retail giant. The next month, Tokyopop shuttered its Los Angeles headquarters.

  After spending nearly a decade on the top of the manga industry and representing a major force for delivering content to a female audience, it seems a shame today that Tokyopop is best remembered for preying on private artists.

  Their “Rising Stars of Manga” program that began in 2003. What became a series of annual competitions where aspiring manga artists, mostly north american, could submit their work with the top 10 winning a cash prize and their work published in an anthology. The grand prize winner would be able to pitch their manga idea to be published by Tokyopop. This was followed up by their Manga Pilot program which had a contract that was hugely controversial.

  So, when Stu Levy announced his triumphant return in 2015, the community was less than enthusiastic and comic book artists were quick to warn aspiring creators against participating in any Original English Language programs he was running.

  But it wasn’t just Tokyopop that fell during the bubble burst...

  [Lofi music]

  Rowe: There were a lot of other manga publishers that folded at the same time. I mean, Raijin had a very limited run, but they were around the same time that they were in and out kind of in the middle there. ADV was publishing manga for a long time. They had some success but not a whole lot. Bandai even had their own manga line for a little bit. That disappeared. CPM was another one, Iron Cat was the same thing. There were a lot more manga publishers that nobody knows about anymore because they disappeared along with Tokyopop. 

  Still, many larger publishers pulled through and in 2012 manga sales began to recover on the back of a new movement in the American manga market. With print sales down and local bookstores on a decline thanks to Amazon, manga publishers started going digital. VIZ launched their digital manga service in an effort not only to reach the growing online market but also to combat a growing problem in the manga industry, piracy. That familiar, familiar problem.

  By now scanslators (people who scan manga, translate them, and throw the images up on a website that will definitely use your computer to mine bitcoin) were a major force in the manga market and it was much easier to read a new manga chapter a few days after its release than wait for a new volume to come out, get off your computer chair, and drive to a store.

  Comixology had already launched their reader in 2009 and began making partnerships with publishers like Dark Horse, Kodansha Comics, and Oni Press to put their manga on their online catalog. In 2014 they were acquired by Amazon who, having launched the Kindle back in 2007, were intent on not being left behind in the new digital age. Nowadays just about every publisher operates concurrently or even exclusively in digital, releasing their newest manga volumes on one of several services before putting out only their tried and true or guaranteed successes out on the print market… which probably also means ordering them for delivery on a website.

  Despite this, manga piracy is still… pretty bad.

  Anime has reached a point where basically every anime is licensed and released within hours of each episode getting televised in Japan, making official sources the first to distribute videos, but there’s just way too much manga. There’s too much. Along with light novels which are becoming an increasing share of what’s circulating in America, there’s no way all the manga that comes out in Japan could get licensed, much less translated and released in a timely fashion. Which leaves room for pirates to ply their trade. 

  Compounding the issue is a general apathy by platforms like iTunes to regulate themselves, making it all too easy for pirate apps to not only sneak in but also become some of the top results for searches of the word “manga.” Also, manga is just kind of an expensive hobby. Deluxe prints can run up to $20 a volume and digital volumes aren’t a whole lot cheaper than print. Even with anime now being spread over Crunchyroll, Hidive, Funimation, Amazon, Netflix, and now YouTube, even their combined subscription fees will have trouble comparing to the check an active manga reader can run up. 

  Nowadays kicking over a rock on Twitter will instantly reveal some anime avatars contorting themselves through logical loopholes to justify their theft, claiming that the authors don’t care who’s distributing their work and that there are no financial consequences to the creators despite all evidence to the contrary.

  The most recent development may shine some hope on this problem. In 2018 VIZ released the Weekly Shonen Jump app, probably the biggest innovation in manga since the digest editions. It offers Shonen Jump’s entire back catalog while also releasing new chapters at the same time as they’re released in Japan. Which might sound familiar. All for the low price of 2 dollars a month. Two. 2 dollars. A month! 2 dollars a month.

  This is the first time this sort of accessibility has been given to a Japanese catalog and is probably the greatest deal as far as content versus price goes in the history of comics. I swear they’re not paying me to say this, I do not work for them. I don’t know anyone at Shonen Jump. Anyway this roughly puts at least the Shonen Jump portion of VIZ’s output on par with anime simulcasting and, who knows if other publishers start following suit manga may be cheap and fast enough to finally start chipping away at the manga pirates. Assuming the lawsuits don’t...

  Now, no podcast about a form of Japanese media in America would be complete without mentioning localization and theft and with manga, it gets real weird, mostly since so much of it is official? Quote unquote?

  There have been at least two unauthorized Astro Boy comics that’ve made it into circulation. The first was a 1965 adaptation of the Astro Boy TV show licensed by NBC without Tezuka’s knowledge. He later claimed it was both piracy and horribly drawn. In 1987 this happened AGAIN when Chicago-based NOW Comics started an Astro Boy series drawn by artist Ken Steacy. It was cancelled in 1988. Probably also horribly drawn.

  Plagiarism was a big issue in the 2000s when manga was just mainstream enough that people were aware of it, but didn’t think anyone would spot them copying a professional’s work from another country. This being the era where an internet sleuth on Reddit will call you out within 10 minutes of you putting your traced work out there. One of the finalists of Tokyopop’s 2006 Rising Stars of Manga applications submitting a series called “Samurai Zombie” had panels that were pretty clearly traced from Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal. But none of these stack up to the bizarre tale of Incarnate, originally called Skullduggery, a 2009 series printed by Radical Comics by a guy named Nick Simmons. Son of none other than KISS’s own Gene Simmons. Man, this is fucked up.

  Early into Incarnate’s distribution, VIZ Media released a statement that fans had notified them that Incarnate had plagiarized everything from plot elements to character designs to exact panels directly out of Bleach and they would be looking into the issue. Needless to say, the series was cancelled shortly thereafter with a public apology from Nick. Apparently even Bleach’s author Kubo Tite caught wind of the situation who, to his credit, tweeted that his primary concern was the fact that Gene Simmons’s son was a comic creator.

  The market has been changed forever by digital, but manga is once again a booming industry. Today there are over 50 companies actively publishing manga in the U.S. Years of Shonen hits from the pages of Shonen Jump have VIZ resurfacing as the king not only of manga but all comics, representing about 50% of comic sales in the U.S., dwarfing even the combined sales of Marvel and DC (despite each serving as the source material for series of global blockbuster movies). 

  It took manga quite a while to build up steam in the U.S., working its way in from the fringes of comic shops and the back rows of bookstores, but films have to enter with some fanfare. 

  Next up, we’re gonna take a look at the very first animated film from Japan to hit the U.S. and how anime movies have grown from box office obscurity to pulling in millions of dollars opening night… while still getting snubbed at the Oscars. 

  [Lofi music]

Thank you for listening to Anime in America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you’ve enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica to watch the adaptations of SOME of the manga mentioned. 

  Special thanks to Rachel Thorn, and Nick Rowe, and if you find yourself in Oakland, California, maybe stop by Dr. Comics and Mr. Games to say hi and maybe buy a manga from a nice, independent shop. 

  This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian and Jesse Gouldsbury. 

  By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[shirlleycoyle]

Disney + and ‘The Mandalorian’ Are Driving People Back to Torrenting

TV is exhausting now. Where once the future of streaming promised to cut down bloated cable bills and create a more efficient customer-provider service—“Imagine a future where you only pay for the 10 channels you actually watch,” I remember excitedly telling my parents earlier in the decade—the reality is that now, there are simply more channels that you need to pay for.

Aside from traditional cable, which remains a must for any sports fan at the absolute least, there now exist more than a half-dozen prominent streaming services (and lots more small ones), all filled with a couple of buzzy shows, some old favorites, and endless filler crap that makes the library of content seem more valuable than it is. And if keeping up with the Emmy-nominated offerings of services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime didn’t already feel like a financial strain, the launch of Apple TV+ and the fawned-over premiere of Disney+ might have done it.

By my count, if you want to watch shows on HBO, Apple TV+, Disney+, CBS All-Access, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix, it’d run you $60.93 a month or $731.16 a year, and that’s before factoring in a standard cable package for live events and other shows, or the other streaming services sure to launch in the near future. (NBC’s got one coming down the pike.) Of course, nobody has to pay for all these things, but the problem here is that, with the arguable exception of CBS, all of these services have at least something resembling a buzzy hit show. If you want to watch, for example, Euphoria, Dickinson, The Mandalorian, Fleabag, Killing Eve, and Stranger Things, you’re going to need a lot of accounts.

With two of the largest companies in the world joining the game this month, adding their own movie stars and iconic IP to the slush pile, it’s worth wondering if the streaming revolution has officially failed TV and movie fans with its endless mitosis and fragmentation. Instead of letting viewers just pay for the stuff they watch, they’re forced, instead, to choose between equally flawed packages where the fun and/or high-quality shows get bundled with pointless crap that jacks up the price. Unlike Spotify and its clones, which include essentially all the music a person could want, one relatively cheap subscription to any Movie/TV streaming service doesn’t give you access to more-or-less the entire history of moving pictures. And unlike Spotify and its clones, which have caused a massive downturn in music piracy, the shows on all these platforms are ripe for stealing.

Piracy has never truly died, whether it occurs when users torrent files through thepiratebay.org or 1337x.to, or download shows through Usenet, a site like MegaUpload or Rapidshare, or find cleverly hidden files on Google Docs, Facebook, or even Wikipedia. Hell, there’s even a thriving network of USB drive-based piracy in some countries.

But in the era of Netflix’s dominance as a legit streaming service, piracy’s prevalence fell greatly. Between 2011 and 2015, Bittorrent’s share of upstream traffic on North American broadband networks dropped from 52.01 percent to 26.83 percent. More recently, an EU study found that the number of young people (age 15-24) who intentionally accessed illegal content dropped from 25 percent to 21 percent from 2016 to 2019. And visits to piracy websites dropped from 206 billion in 2017 to 190 billion in 2018. But now, more paywalled content means that viewers either can’t afford to pay for everything they might want to watch or don’t feel like dealing with a bunch of different services. There’s already evidence people are turning back to piracy: Bittorrent’s traffic freefall has stopped, and has seen a recent small bounceback.

“If people have to spend more money to satisfy their movie and TV consumption needs, a large group will either consume less or look for alternatives,” Ernesto van der Sar, owner of piracy trend website TorrentFreak recently told Motherboard. “A likely result is that more people will pirate on the side.”

A simple glance at torrent websites shows that plenty of people are stealing from the brand new steaming services—episodes of The Mandalorian and Dickinson all have hundreds or thousands of seeders and are among the most popular shows on torrent sites. I reached out specifically to Disney, Apple, and Netflix to ask what their policy was on going after pirated content, and haven’t heard back, but it’s obvious that these companies assume that at least some of their viewers aren’t paying the full price for their services. Given that you can watch as many as six simultaneous streams with Apple TV+, and four with Disney+ and the top Netflix package, the more common form of piracy—password sharing—is built into the system. But for pirates who don’t have any access to the legit services, what makes stealing content particularly appealing in this age is that there are few if any people who face consequences for the crime.

Since the discontinuation of the “six strikes” copyright policy in 2017, there’s been lax enforcement of copyright laws. Rather than going after individuals for exorbitant fines for downloading a handful of songs like copyright holders did a decade ago, enforcement these days has focused on the providers of pirated content, with the much more efficient goal of taking down entire streaming sites rather than just a few of their visitors. Of course, as the continued resilience of The Pirate Bay shows, the current strategy isn’t particularly effective at stopping piracy, either. But it does mean that those who only download already-stolen content are safer than they’ve ever been.

And the widespread use of virtual private networks (VPNs) and the less common but more secure use of services like Tor means that people are getting better at pirating, too. Even if you’re not breaking the law, you should pay for a VPN, because there’s reason to suspect ISPs are monetizing your browsing data. But having some form of VPN is non-negotiable if you’re downloading content illegally. Typically, if a pirate is using a torrent program to download files peer to peer, their IP address is visible to anyone using the program. (That’s how copyright holders could track down pirates and take them to court.) But with a VPN, a pirate’s data gets laundered through the location of the private network—meaning someone in New York could have a public IP address showing Chicago, Toronto, or anywhere in the world. If a pirate is careful, it’s much harder to know who they are.

None of this is to say you should steal—it’s illegal! But whether you’re on the business side spending millions of dollars on new shows, or you’re just a girl who likes to watch hot people punch each other for a few hours every week, it’s clear that companies are overwhelming customers with products, and a breaking point is coming where people won’t be able to pay for all of it. As more and more streaming services launch, each with their own content walled off from the others, it’d be ignorant and naive to think that piracy won’t increase with it.

Disney + and ‘The Mandalorian’ Are Driving People Back to Torrenting syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[retrorendum-blog]

ARMS - Review

ARMS is Nintendo’s second new IP since the Gamecube, and it has given the people who haven’t actually played it with a mixed set of reactions. After the original reveal trailer back during the Nintendo Switch press conference in February, many people thought that it was just a gimmick game to show off the joycon’s power, and wouldn’t end up being much deeper than Wii Sports boxing. Will ARMS hit it’s mark or take a punch to the face?

Title: ARMS

Available On: Nintendo Switch

Reviewed On: Nintendo Switch

Info: Nintendo, 2017

WARNING MINOR SPOILERS FOR ARMS

Story: ARMS takes place in a world where a mutation exists that allows the effected individuals to stretch their arms out to almost unimaginable lengths. According to the ARMS Laboratory this "ARMS” mutation has existed for around 1500 years, and effects a very very small slice of the population. No one knows how the mutation occurs, those who receive it just wake up one day and have extendable arms. Of course with a mutation such as this it is natural to create a world famous championship fighting show, and that show is what you play in ARMS. As of the day this article goes live there are 13 characters/ fighteres in the world of ARMS, as well as a secret boss character that I’ll leave out for spoiler reasons. 

Spring Man - A classic upbeat pretty boy fighter

Ribbon Girl - A famous pop star turned brawler to please her fans

Master Mummy - An undead freak seeking revenge for his family 

Mechanica - A genius young girl who built a suit with extendable arms to participate in the league

Ninjara - A ninja student who joined the fight as his graduation project

Kid Cobra - A popular streamer and snakeboarder who was born with the ARMS mutation 

Twintelle - A well-known actress who uses her stretchy hair to fight 

Byte and Barq - A robot dog and cop duo 

Min Min - A ramen shop girl with noodles for arms 

Helix - A green gooey failed experiment from the ARMS Lab 

Max Brass - The reigning champion of the ARMS league (also planned to be the first new playable fighter)

And finally,

Biff - The friendly announcer for the ARMS League who has one hand on the top of his head.

Each character has their own signature arms, backstory and goals for winning the ARMS League, but aside from what I’ve mentioned there isn’t much story. This might not be the case forever though, because Nintendo has stated that they will be releasing free fighters, stages and ARMS as DLC later on, with included lore tidbits alongside. ARMS’ story and lore is pretty interesting, but it really is bare bones at the moment, so I can’t rate it any higher than 6/10.

Visuals/ Music: The art style and tone of ARMS is one that feels like is was custom tailored to the springy, colorful world the game takes place in, and never leaves you bored while you’re experiencing it. Each locale you visit while brawling is bright and vibrant, and no two stages feel even remotely similar in tone, shape or lighting. There aren’t any texture problems in the game, and the only thing that ever bothers me while I’m playing is Spring Man’s character select model (if you play the game you’ll see what I mean, but that’s just a personal gripe). Aside from that, every character is beautifully modeled and the unique character design rivals the likes of Overwatch and Pokemon in creativity and detail. Even the menu system is slick and bright for the most part, the only exception being that the main menu (which you don’t spend too much time on) is pure black and yellow which some people find obnoxious. ARMS also has the single smoothest and most satisfying Party lobby system of any multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Each stage has a special theme to accompany it as well, and while you probably won’t hear them much during the fights, listening to the soundtrack outside of gameplay is great. My only complaint with the music is that it’s really obvious they wanted the main theme to be integrated into the game everywhere, because chunks of it are woven into over half the stage themes. It’s a great main theme, and very catchy, but it annoys me that it shows up everywhere. The visual and audio design of ARMS gets a 9/10.

Gameplay: Finally, we can talk about ARMS gameplay. ARMS is a fighting game unlike any other, so much so that I honestly don’t know what to compare it to. 2-4 players are thrown into an arena, each equipped with extendable springy limbs and a set of 3 different fists or “ARMS” to choose from. Each character has different stats in speed, strength, and health, as well as an interesting ability ranging from self heal and time slow to quadruple jumps and an arm turning into a dragon. These differences allow you to really find a character that fits your playstyle, and along with every character being able to equip any ARM eventually by spending currency in a minigame called the ARMS getter, any person can customize their own fighter. The main focus of the single player content is the Grand Prix, which is essentially the Arcade mode of ARMS, you play through ten consecutive battles against AI opponents, with the occasional minigame mixed in. Through the Grand Prix you can learn a little about the lore of each character, as Biff tells small snippets before each match starts. There are currently 7 game modes in the game that you can play single player with bots, local multiplayer with up to 4 players, or online in a rotating lobby. Of course you have 1V1 battles, which is the core experience of ARMS, but you also can play 2V2 with each team tied together to force teamwork and communication, and 1V1V1 which is unbalanced and annoying. On top of the fighting there are also 3 different minigames to choose from, Hoops, V-Ball, and Skillshot. The final gamemode is 3 players versus a boss, which can be incredibly fun and challenging on the higher levels. The fighting of ARMS is fast-paced and addicting, but isn’t perfect. It’s difficult to play two player local online, as the lobbies don’t always have room for an extra player, 1v1v1 always ends up with one person being ganged-up on so the other two can just play a normal fight, and grab spamming is definitely an obnoxious (but effective) tactic many people use online. Despite these issues and a lack of a true campaign/ story mode, ARMS delivers some of the most intensely gratifying gameplay I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in the last few years. Gameplay receives an 8/10.

Verdict: ARMS is a game that I can only hope will grow. It’s in very early stages now, so it’s not clear whether or not it can climb up to be a major franchise for Nintendo, but things are looking pretty good for this wacky fighter as far as the first week goes. I’ll definitely be playing it for a while with my friends, and I should be dipping back in every time a new character, game mode or map is released. ARMS has surpassed Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as my second favorite Nintendo Switch game, and will likely hold that spot until Super Mario Odyssey and Skyrim come out in the winter this year. I can’t recommend ARMS enough, but if the lack of single player content is a let down for you, you should still consider picking it up maybe in a year or at christmas when more content has filled in the gaps. ARMS gets a solid rating of 8/10.