technohalflight

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Masterpost

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[technohalflight]

Okay, so it was both more than I expected and less than I need lol.

It felt like about half the movie was speed running the one year war but with Char in the Gundam. His revenge plot took a bit of a back seat but I guess I can't blame them. They only had like 40min to set up enough of the differences that the new status quo made sense.

I almost wish it was either a full season of a show rehashing the one year war or they just give us it in smaller bits as flashback let us piece it together ourselves. This middle ground was a bit hard to follow, I felt bad for the non-gundam fans I drug a long to the movie with me lol.

Overall though it was a good movie, very encouraging direction with the story and characters. Color me hooked for the series in a few months

Wait this can't just be back story for the movie! I want to see the detailed version of this

What does Char's revenge plot look like without Amuro? Zeon wins but what about the Zabi family, does he still get to murderize them?

More petty drama boy Char but now with the best mobile suit ever made please!

They better give me more than this in Gquak I swear to Tomino

[technohalflight]

Wait this can't just be back story for the movie! I want to see the detailed version of this

What does Char's revenge plot look like without Amuro? Zeon wins but what about the Zabi family, does he still get to murderize them?

More petty drama boy Char but now with the best mobile suit ever made please!

They better give me more than this in Gquak I swear to Tomino

[technohalflight]

Warren Ellis's Supergod is basically one incredibly evocative concept or piece of imagery chained together after another. Sometimes it's also something akin to a story as well

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Raccoon time

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Wait no sorry

Spiderverse is the wrong way to go, cluster with his villains so you get the kiss kill dynamic.

Venom is our Brute- stronger but slower than Spidey, got shafted on the tinker power I guess

Green Goblin is our Tinker - pumpkin bombs, glider, goblin formula enhances his slight physical upgrade from the brute, mover, thinker parts of the group power.

And I think Kingpin is our Thinker - Spidey senses detects danger but kingpin can sense how a plan will endanger who, letting him mastermind plans that protect him and screw over his enemies. And obviously he gets the brute power directly but got left out on the mover

It is very frustrating but interesting to me the extent to which Spider-Man does and does not work as a Worm character.

He works because his powers are a lot more interesting and have some cool niche applications compared to the usual fare. And because his trauma is such a fundamental part of his motivation that you know it's in the back of his mind every day he goes out. So his interactions with the world are very Worm-y, he's having Worm-style fights with a Worm-style mental space. Also, he's unpopular enough to stay an underdog and fit Worm's tone.

He doesn't work because he has way too wide a variety of powers, and outside of the canonical spider theme due to origin (which is strained as it is) there's really not a good way to unify them. Making him part of a cluster raises more questions than it answers. And of course, it is a foundational part of his character that he got powers before his trauma. Reversing that order shakes the foundation and at that point you're likely to have a character that only resembles Spider-Man.

[technohalflight]

Not at all what you were asking but now I'm thinking about spiderman as cluster trigger.

Spider powers:

Brute: strong, durable, heals faster

Mover: super agile, wall crawling

Thinker: Spidey senses

Tinker: web shooters as well as some minor gadgets

Assuming the mover ability is his primary with everything else supporting that, it means there would be 3 other spider people focusing on the other aspects of the power out there

Venom is a pretty obvious Brute focused Spiderman but he doesn't have any tinker ability to my knowledge.

Penny Parker is basically already a tinker version of spidey

And I'm not up enough on my spider lore to know if there's a character that has a better version of spidey sense to fill the gap, I imagine they'd basically be fully precognizant

Has someone done this already?

It is very frustrating but interesting to me the extent to which Spider-Man does and does not work as a Worm character.

He works because his powers are a lot more interesting and have some cool niche applications compared to the usual fare. And because his trauma is such a fundamental part of his motivation that you know it's in the back of his mind every day he goes out. So his interactions with the world are very Worm-y, he's having Worm-style fights with a Worm-style mental space. Also, he's unpopular enough to stay an underdog and fit Worm's tone.

He doesn't work because he has way too wide a variety of powers, and outside of the canonical spider theme due to origin (which is strained as it is) there's really not a good way to unify them. Making him part of a cluster raises more questions than it answers. And of course, it is a foundational part of his character that he got powers before his trauma. Reversing that order shakes the foundation and at that point you're likely to have a character that only resembles Spider-Man.

[technohalflight]

it's good that the Witch from Mercury mech designs are so distinctive because, assuming the kits sell well when they drop, we can con the execs into thinking gundam will sell better with a female protag for at least one more series

[technohalflight]

So, I'm not against people shipping Lisa and Taylor, but it feels wrong when people say it's somehow homophobic that they aren't together, especially because Lisa in canonically aroace.

Like, Lisa is really good aro/ace representation, something we don't have a lot of, and had almost none of back in 2013. The fact that she's never seen as broken (even though it's likely her shard took away her ability to be attracted to people, it's still not seen as a tragedy.) The fact that she's able to live a successful happy life, and she's never seen as missing anything. The fact that she's an archetype we basically never think of ace/aro characters as inhabiting. The fact that her costume is ace flag colored (though that was almost certainly unintentional). Saying she should have been allo for the sake of your ship is the opposite of wanting better rep.

Also, just like, the implication that her relationship with Taylor wasn't meaningful because they weren't fucking just seems wrong to me. Like, Lisa was Taylor's first real friend after what happened to her with Emma. They were both bright lights for each other in really dark circumstances. They probably understood each other better than anyone else did. Lisa was still there for Taylor after she had become something too powerful to really be human. Taylor was unquestionably a better person for knowing Lisa, and Taylor was probably the person cared most about, at least during the Skitter era of the Undersiders. (I would say more but I'm trying to avoid serious spoilers). And saying that that relationship could only be romantic, or that it doesn't matter or isn't as meaningful if it's platonic, is fundamentally looking at an aromantic character and saying she should be allo, or that her story is more meaningful if you head cannon her as allo, which is unquestionably aphobic.

Happy aro week. Ship what you want but don't demand your ships become cannon, especially when one of the characters is aro.

[technohalflight]

Skitter: starts out wanting to be a hero, but becomes a villain due to her hatred for systems of power and her love for her freinds, as well as her own naïve mistakes early in her career. Later becomes a hero because she fears the end of the world.

Foil: goes straight from hero to villain because she wants to fuck a doll girl.

[technohalflight]

[technohalflight]

ward should've been 1000 chapters of domestic vicky and ashley scenes

[technohalflight]

My everyday life as a teenage robot

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Another one brought to you by the Patreon Gang

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Do you think were any kind of specific aspects of the culture, industry, economy, etc that made making cartoons in 90s / 2000s better or worse than trying to make them today?

They're literally different worlds.

As a 22 year old neurodivergent, I was able to pitch show ideas directly to executives. Part of that was because TV Animation wasn't a glamorous profession (quite yet), so the higher-ups were genuinely passionate about the medium. I earned good money for the time and was generally trusted to run my show and tend to the crew. I would periodically be handed portfolios, which I would personally review and pass on to other show runners. For the networks it was always corporate, cutthroat, and ultimately about the money, but as an artist you could still have a voice and make art while being paid a living wage.

The pay for a freelance storyboard in 2005 is almost exactly what it is today, but now you're likely to have less time and be required to do an animatic on top of it. Portfolios are online, and (beyond metrics) you'll probably never know if anyone looks at it or not.

Animation got big. Too big. The executives got "glamorous", then the talent got "glamorous". By then you probably wouldn't get a pitch meeting unless you were a celebrity or knew one willing to be connected to your project. Animation eventually got so big that it popped. And that's where we are now.

Most of the people I know from Kid's TV Animation are currently unemployed. I have been off Jellystone for over a year, and I'm starting to get genuinely worried. Like, "move away to save money" worried. Most of the employed artists I do know are on long-running legacy series, and they're concerned about their futures when/if those series end. Right now is not a fantastic time for "animation as a money-making profession". The "glamorous" part popped years ago.

That being said, there are still opportunities out there. If you're just starting out, apparently there's a planned surge in adult and pre-school animation. It's also a great time (as long as YouTube remains sane) to be crafting your own content. But I think that the time of Big Studio Patronage is over for most of the industry. It's up to the individual artist now more than ever, not only to make but to promote their own content.

Back at the height of Billy & Mandy, we mostly pulled fours and fives in the Neilsen ratings, but we occasionally got a seven. For reference, E.R. consistently got eights. It's difficult to say exactly how many people that actually was due to how those ratings work, but it was a big deal for the time. Millions. Enough people that if I had a dollar for each person that just watched that one episode, I would have been set for life. Now, nobody gets a seven. A four is huge. Back then there were maybe fifteen or twenty channels of programmed content as opposed to the streaming smorgasbord we were all just enjoying (and which now also seems to have popped). Point being, even though I wasn't paid-per-view, I was able to use those views as justification for an eventual raise. In modern times, streaming numbers are seemingly deliberately kept secret. You'll never really know how well your show was doing until it's over. Or maybe never.

In modern times, a million views on YouTube is enough to get you noticed online. It's a lower bar for entry in a way, but you've got to get there all by yourself. Once you're there (hello Hazbin) a network may indeed come and scoop you up. Even if they don't, you can probably make a decent living with numbers like that if you're savvy and willing to take the time.

I feel like I could go on all day, shaking my fist at the sky, gray-ass beard blowing in the wind. Was it better or easier making cartoons in the past? It seemed that way to me, but that was a world I knew. There was no AI to sell you out to, and the media was more of a "Wild West" than it is today. I do think that AI is going to continue to displace artists (and soon others), making it even more difficult to get anyone's eyes on anything at all.

Culturally, we lack the common cultural touchpoints that bonded our society in the 20th Century. I suspect that the media landscape will continue to become more "bubbly" and disjointed unless some powerful force swoops in to mandate a common viewpoint. Those are two very divergent, uniquely tiring futures, each presenting a different challenge for an artist's survival.

Outside of whatever our modern world is, animation was made for a century by photographing drawings. If Émile Cohl could do it in 1908, you can do it now. It's a lot of labor, but maybe that's part of what makes it special.

[technohalflight]