Sunday Sampler: Jaded Edition

 Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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One thing that consistently gets under my skin is a very specific form of hypocrisy. It’s when someone is being hypocritical but instead of just ignoring it, they instead double down on why theirs is acceptable. I’ve seen this with everything from doxxing to outright bigotry. And right now, I’m seeing an awful lot of it with yet another politician pushing for “healthy” living.

People have been rightfully decrying the whole “make America healthy again” thing pushed by the latest failson in an overrated political family, saying that it’s fueled by eugenics and designed explicitly to stigmatize people with disabilities and/or lack of time/financial access/resources to expensive “health” foods or fitness routines. And that’s true. But it didn’t start with the current admin, and the best reaction you’ll get is “lalala, not listening” when you try to remind people. But I was there, dammit.

People tried to reduce the whole “Let’s Move” campaign First Lady Obama did to “she just wanted people to walk more”, but that wasn’t the truth. Part of that whole campaign was working with numerous “wellness” grifters to push the exact same rhetoric that RFK Jr has been pushing. If you’re unable to work out, because that’s something EVERYONE can clearly do, it’s just because you’re being lazy. If you’re unable to afford, cannot eat due to dietary restrictions (allergies, beliefs, anything), or just plain don’t like the frequently bland “healthy” foods that folks like Jamie Oliver were pushing as part of this, you’re just being childish & picky and NEED to learn better. You had the rise of Dr. Oz and his constant “diet or DIE” shows, all enabled by Oprah & her compulsion to make her viewers join in on her newest crash diets.

And I shouldn’t even HAVE to remind everyone about The Biggest Loser. THAT shit found its way into classrooms. ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

But y’see, all that? That somehow wasn’t eugenics, because of WHO was selling it. Yet, if you were from a naturally heavy-set lineage, if you were disabled in any way, if you admitted that you liked chicken nuggets or soda occasionally, the reactions from the adherents to this “fat equals EVIL and somehow a social threat” attitude were identical. The only real difference that I’ve seen is that the people who wanted to be awful to us in the Obama era were more likely to frame their fat-hate in terms of “I’m just CONCERNED for your/my health” instead of outright fat jokes.

This shit was always here, and it never really went away; it just warped form. You’ll still see people who will decry RFKJ & Oz, yet will blissfully ignore that they used to LOVE Oz when he was aligned with a politician that they liked. They’ll be angry about the whole “national duty to be thin & thus healthy” comments, forgetting that they basically said the same things and frequently still do. Even the Netflix doc about how much The Biggest Loser fucked up the lives of its contestants ends with a tone of “they meant well, because SOMETHING needs to be done about all these gross fatties, it just wasn’t this”, and people are either blowing off that this is exactly the attitude that was endemic to the early 2010s or agreeing with it.

I have zero patience for that uniquely leftist form of “it’s okay when WE do it” hypocrisy, and this is just one of the bigger examples. Some of y’all aren’t as ethically estranged from the people you oppose as you wanna think, and some of us have noticed it. We’ve been noticing it since you reframed your fat jokes as “I just don’t want you to die of diabetes” pseudo-concern, and we’re still seeing you fail to realize or change anything.

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Maybe it’s the cynicism or depression talking, but I find myself asking a question pretty often.

Is there such a thing as NON-toxic positivity anymore? 

Because what IS considered positivity now really strikes me as forced & fraudulent.

Two examples of modern positivity and hopefully two examples of something that will spike my blood pressure

I think the reason sentiments like “Everything will be okay” or “You’re special & you matter” get under my skin is because they’ve become catchphrases. People repeat them mindlessly, as though saying them will magically make anyone & everyone feel better in some way, and it’s easy to tell when someone doesn’t actually mean it. At least it is for me, since it seems like most people even a year or two younger than me REALLY buy into the magic phrases.

I don’t get it. Whenever I see these phrases or hear someone saying them to me, my brain doesn’t feel comforted or put at ease. I feel… dismissed. Blown off. Like no one actually cares about whatever is bothering or upsetting me, but they’re not rude enough to just say as much & thus fall back on cliches to get me to shut up. I’ve seen the truth whenever I give the slightest pushback, even if it’s just asking “why”. WHY will it be okay? WHY do I matter on my own human merits? They never have answers and usually just get angry that the magic words didn’t work.

The example pic of the signs up at the college really made me laugh without a note of joy, since that was where I first noticed the pattern. I was at the end of my tether, being harassed for not letting the RA’s friend play wall-shakingly loud music at all hours without complaint, at a school that wouldn’t let me transfer credits if I left so that’s 3 years sunk, with only a rotating series of Pysch students serving as “counselling”, and would eventually have a massive nervous breakdown. But as I kept inching closer & closer to that, guess what sentiments kept getting thrown at me. I don’t think there was real concern there; there was just a desire to change the subject to something more upbeat. Even the “counselors” did that, when they weren’t talking mostly about their own dating woes (which, given I didn’t know I was aroace at the time, was… so very fun). Whatever school that was, I just know in my heart that there was at least one student who saw those signs & had the same STFU reaction I did.

It’s all part of a larger conversation I wish people would have, instead of dismissing it. One about how, in mostly well-intended efforts to “end the stigma” around mental health & mental illness, all that was created was a new & equally damaging stigma. That there are probably people like me, who’ve turned away from supposed supports or have been told outright that they’re somehow doing their depression “wrong”, because they didn’t feel like being babied. The whole “you matter” scene always feels like it’s talking down to you, assuming you’re just a child who needs a little bit of reassurance to be just fine and that’s all. And because the internet has kinda ruined 90% of psychological terminology and/or prefers to use Buzzfeed quizzes to actual diagnoses, that usually IS all that they need.

But if you need more than a pat on the head and a compliment? If you need actual help trusting people again or feeling like it’s worthwhile to leave your house again or to not have that constant low-simmering frustration at keeping up your “acceptable” front all the time? Well, then, you’re just not trying now. YOU’RE the one that just wants “attention” or is being ungrateful.

It’s not gonna be okay, cuz when you act like it will as a matter of nature, you just keep ignoring the things that you could fix. And if you can’t say WHY I “matter”, then I know you’re full of shit. I can’t find comfort in blow-offs anymore, and it only irritates me that apparently I am in the minority for this. As an online friend named Darci once put it, “The people who say ‘it gets better’ only say it because it did for THEM. No one thinks about all the people who it didn’t ‘get better’ for, because they’re not here to ask.”

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This week’s video recommendation: “It’s as if every Pixar writer got therapy degrees and decided every protagonist needs to go through therapy sessions.” Honestly, this video sums up a LOT of my problems not just with recent Disney/Pixar movies & their monofocus on yelling at the animators’ parents via their characters but about what is celebrated in animation circles online. Namely, the desire to illustrate a Very Important Lesson About Trauma rather than actually tell a decent story.

It seems like every single thing that gets a massive following in online animation circles is something that is being EXTREMELY heavy-handed with its messaging, especially if it’s about something they’d probably heard in passing in a Psych class. It’s one thing to use topics like intergenerational trauma (which is an unfortunately common experience) or to have a journey setup be a metaphor for healing from some inner wound. That’s fundamental to storytelling, but when it’s used badly and/or used in everything, it becomes a crutch. But damn if it isn’t the quickest & easiest way to get online animation fans to defend you to the death.

There’s some stuff that I was initially excited for but dropped once it became clear that it was made with this audience in mind. There’s stuff where it’s grafted onto pre-existing characters where it just doesn’t fit, but if you point this out, you get attacked for not seeing some “realistic” or “deep” vision that just isn’t actually present. There’s stuff that instantly attracted this “let’s dissect the intensely obvious message like it’s some well-woven theme instead of literally being stated to the camera” audience, thus ensuring I’ll never bother with it. But so long as animation fandom can slap a vaguely psychological sounding term on it, it’ll get that audience. That’s bad enough, but when animators knowingly encourage & cater to this audience (I can list examples if desired but y’all should know them), that’s when it makes me kinda sad for the future of the industry.

Look, I’m not saying that stories & heroes shouldn’t have any traumatic elements. I’d be a massive hypocrite if I did, and I work HARD to make sure that I don’t fall into that wangst trap. Not sure if I’m successful, but I’ll leave that for any readers I may have to decide (if they exist, that is, they’re as elusive as Bigfoot). I DEFINITELY try to avoid the “turn to the screen and spell it out for the audience so they can feel extra smart for ‘noticing’ something that was already ham-fisted” trend that’s decried in the video.

At the end of the day, it’s movies for people who don’t take therapy to get better and improve their lives. They take therapy to have all of their issues “validated” and treat them like key personality quirks, to be told it’s never their fault & there’s nothing that they need to do to fix it, that’s always on someone else. I can’t stand people like that in my daily life, so why should I waste my time with movies or TV shows that do the exact same thing? More than any art style, THIS is the trend in animation whose death I cannot wait to see.

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Lightning-squared round! The stuff I used to post on micro-blog sites like Xwitter & Bluesky, only without the risk of running into unwell term searchers.

• Look, edgelords, it was already obnoxious enough when a sizable chunk of people online (especially at Bluesky) decided that any & every person who references Jonny Quest in a positive, non-Adult-Swim way HAS to be doing so out of gleeful racism, but you really didn’t need to start doing exactly that to “prove” their stupid point.

• The overwhelming urge to write a Puella Magi universe story that’s also a dig at a very beloved recent comic story that I utterly loathed is killing me. The last thing I need is another writing WIP that I wind up freezing on after a while…

• Oh, hey, speaking of JQ… thanks to the people who appeared out of the woodwork at long last to agree with me that the 2nd season of Real Adventures was the better season. I was alone in that in the old Yahoo ML days and still felt like I was even now, thanks to most TRAJQ fans seemingly being there 90% for either Jessie or shipping or both. Also, the 2nd season didn’t have the lead character voiced by the asshole who’d proudly produce The Biggest Loser and doing a shit job at voice acting too. 

• One of the worst things about the rise of AI videos on YouTube is that there’s even more demand for “face reveals” for anyone who just wants to narrate/use a proxy avatar like a PNG or VTuber rig, since it’s automatically assumed that anyone who just doesn’t want to be on camera isn’t real. Privacy really is a dead concept now.

• Gotta love seeing someone debunking false info that was playing on left-leaning biases to get spread being met with both “well, the other side does it, so let us do this one” and calling the people preferring to stick to the truth “centrists”. Again, I find myself almost respecting the honesty of the right just going “yep, we’re assholes, we don’t care” instead of trying to justify it. Almost.

• Wow, y’all really dropped that whole “don't hold the horrible shit Israel is doing against all Jewish people” thing and just dove right into being awful, huh?

• Saw one of those “like this and I’ll give my opinion of you” posts on Bluesky, and as tempted as I am to do it, I don’t need to be reminded that no one actually likes or cares about me any more than usual.

• Sometimes I'll pop on social media, see a moot who has thoroughly deteriorated into just the worst behavior & attitude in the past couple of years, and think to myself, “Yet people like him wonder why the r-slur is making a comeback.” I guarantee you, if you’re reading this & think it's about you, it's not, you're good.

• It's not just the “forever stuck in high school” thing that makes that engagement announcement cringey. It’s that someone whose lyric writing makes me look sublime & poetic is casting herself as “the English teacher”.

• Every story I hear from BookTok related events is worse than the last. It'd be better to be illiterate than to be part of that whole scene.

• Oh boy, Supergirl as an obnoxious Zoomer coed AND the movie's taking cues by a run by my most-hated writer, the ex-CIA asshole? Thanks for saving me time & money!

• “Hey, Wrestlesky, can everyone be normal about the AEW/Arena 2300 situation?” Lol. Lololol. El. Oh. El.

• Funny, I don’t remember the whole “having a dog is contributing to climate change” line getting pushback when Vox & The Nib did numerous articles trying to guilt you into killing your pet. I wanna think it’s cuz people finally realized that these pieces are bought & paid-for by the actual culprits, but given that The Nib also popularized the whole “only bigots own dogs” thing at the same time & y’all still run with THAT, I’m pretty sure it’s just that the “wrong” people are saying it now.

• Every time I see AEW and/or its fans leaning into the “it’s for the sickos” thing, I have one question. Which sickos, the ones that doxxed & threatened someone for not sufficiently worshipping the greasy cowboy or the ones that helped bully both LuFisto & Thunder Rosa into being suicidal? Cuz that’s your online fanbase, and that’s who Tony & Co keep encouraging with the whole “sickos” thing. Maybe one day I'll talk more about this, but I need to gather more wards to scare off anyone from Wrestlesky.

• “I just can't get invested in something if it has ZERO romance in it.” Oh, so YOU’RE the reason that keeps happening to ruin otherwise fine stories.

• Someone needs to tell porndogs that someone or something biting a lip isn’t inherently sexual…

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Well, that’s it for another week. Since I’ve been doing cat pics of my one kitty, I’ve decided to include one of my other cat for a change. Here he is, loafing & silently begging for his dinner, after knocking the paper underneath him off my desk.

He always has a very serious expression when I’m trying to take his picture.

See you next entry!

Sunday Sampler: Crankypants Edition

 Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Sometimes I wonder… how much does the audience you cultivate determine your creative legacy more than your work itself?

I think of this literally every time someone says something nice about Harlan Ellison, either regarding his work or regarding him as a person. And it’s something I fear happening some day in the future with other “in love with their own perceived greatness” writers who have done equally bad or worse things. Allow me to elaborate.

Saying “he insists upon himself” would actually be putting it too mildly.

My first exposure to Harlan Ellison was via a “magazine” show called The Anti-Gravity Room that aired in the early days of the Sci-Fi Channel. It mostly covered comics, with interviews and reviews, but it would also cover wider “geek” media like B-movies or TV shows. For whatever reason, they decided to have Ellison serve as the show’s Andy Rooney - the old coot who gets a little chunk of the show to rant like a drunken uncle ruining the cookout. The one that stood out in my mind & cemented him forever in my mind as a dipshit was the angry ramble about how abbreviating the genre to “sci fi” was somehow responsible for the Heaven’s Gate mass suicides. Because abbreviating it dumbed it down, and that somehow led to a cult…? Trust me, it makes just as much sense if you actually see it.

Now, my dad was a sci-fi literature old-head. He insisted that Ellison was a crank, but he was also a really really REALLY great writer. And he wrote for the OG Star Trek, so he HAD to be great! But while people don’t hesitate to roll their eyes at how dated so many of the old greats are & how poorly their stuff has aged, for some reason, Ellison gets a damn pass. Even though his works are, even for television & filtered through others’ influence, almost disgustingly bleak. This is a man who hates life & pretty much everything BUT himself, and it seeps through his much-ballyhooed work like tonal pus. Odds are that the people who still praise his short stories (or in one case, the adventure game adaptation) would consider them their first “dark” fiction read at some point in their teens or early 20s, and it’s THAT experience that stuck. The idea that a story could have no point but being miserable & hopeless & nothing else. In isolation, that’s fine, but when it’s the same theme, coming over & over again from the same guy… it feels like a deliberate attempt to ignore the obvious pattern thanks to our collective culture fallacy of “unrelentingly soul-crushingly miserable equals DEEEEEEEP” (not that this automatically makes a work “bad” but like all things it’s situational). Maybe it’s from my initial introduction to him being “old asshole blames abbreviation for cult deaths”, but his work has always struck me as bitter, nihilistic, & proud of it.

And that’s before we get to Ellison’s notorious personal behavior. Being constantly invited to cons despite literally everyone knowing he was a complete sex pest who wouldn’t keep his hands to himself, with everyone expected to laugh it off cuz “that’s Harlan!” Suing anyone & everyone who looked at him sideways for somehow stealing his thoughts. A litany of stories about him being an absolute diva asshole to work with on TV shows, with most taking the tone that clearly HE wasn’t the common problem, it was literally everyone else who was (looking at you, Pop Arena*). And when he died, so many of the memorials from his colleagues had stuff like, “He stopped talking to me ten years ago after I told him not to threaten to kill my children for reading something he didn’t like,” or “We hadn’t spoken since he tried to run over my dog because I suggested an edit to a script”. Basically, the dude was the finest example of “dickhead” known to history.

But I found myself wondering if similarly shitty creators could manage to rehab their legacies in the same way. Ellison very much catered to a specific audience, and it’s one that tends to be more forgiving to things so long as they don’t affect them negatively, like the whole convention thing he did. I have one very specific example in mind who would try this, one that I dare not name due to his remaining acolytes (and a few trolling types just looking to be dicks and/or defend the honor of sex pests) searching constantly, but I don’t think it would work for him. 

Cuz this guy? This guy wanted to be seen as “wholesome”, as “supportive”, as “one of the good ones”. And once it was clear that all that was a ruse, the audience that tolerated the “tells” in his work (and despite what some sulking online will say, the tells WERE there) suddenly left in disgust. Now that he can’t rebuild that facade, the audience that preferred it is gone, and I highly doubt they’ll be blowing off his misdeeds upon his death like so many did with Ellison. Instead, anyone who liked this guy’s works will probably be relitigating whether his creative output can ever outweigh his actions, even in death, or just talking about how many people he fooled with his cover act.

This guy won’t have a generation of dorky dudes eager to defend him or minimize his awfulness, and I think that’s a good thing. And maybe we’ll eventually get to the day when we don’t have to keep pretending that Ellison wasn’t a ginormous asshole. 

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*Oh, hey, speaking of Pop Arena, since this is where I can vent safely… we gotta talk about historians’ biases at play and how they color things. Cuz he seems to be aware of this effect but also kinda… oblivious of his own examples? Or maybe just dismissive? Either way, I got stuff to say, mostly in the “dude, y’all have some issues with women” way.

There’s been a trend in PA’s videos, one that I first noticed when he kept repeatedly glazing the Action for Children’s Television group & Peggy Charren in particular. Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s a matter of knowing more about the history of animated TV than him, but the thought of holding up the leader of what was ultimately a censorship advocacy group as some noble crusader against the excesses of capitalism really rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, there were good things that Charren championed, like truth in advertising for toys or less racial/sexual stereotyping. But this group also saw even the most mild of slapstick as “violence”. If you liked ANY pre-70s action animation, ACT is the reason that it was eventually banished until Adult Swim needed something to torture in lieu of actual creativity. Sloppily censored classic shorts? ACT’s influence. The failed “Family Television Hour” that networks hated cuz it was a money sink & nothing met its ridiculous standards? ACT again. Really, about the only real difference between ACT & their spiritual successor the PTC was that ACT was slightly less conservative (see the anti-racism stuff). You can draw a straight line from them to kids’ TV outside of PBS in the 70s being considered a “dark age”, especially animation.

So for PA to hold them up as champions of progressivism and protectors of children from the eeeevils of consumerism struck me as… revisionist. At best. And so much of his praise of Geraldine Laybourne (who, to be fair, is far more worthy of praise than anyone from ACT) being rooted in things she did to cater to groups like ACT or to parents’ groups, that it starts to feel a little strange. And there was also defending the sheer datedness of The Donna Reed Show not via anything with the show itself but with her off-screen career, which is impressive but not the subject at hand. But it’s when you get a female creator who doesn’t do something he likes or can consider “progressive” in some way that PA shows his worst colors.

The biggest example is probably the contempt he shows for the creator of Spartakus & The Sun Beneath The Sea. Now, by no means is that a perfect series, but you can’t deny that it was an original & unique concept. And you can easily do what PA loves to do & transpose it against current political events, with the children of Arkadia working to find a future to save their dying world instead of being resigned about their fates like their elders at its root premise. The work itself is strange & trippy & unique, and it deserves at least a bit of respect for that kind of originality. But because it wasn’t the “right” kind of pro-social messaging-first kidvid that he loves and had repeated sequences, his video was mostly just complaining about it. The only interview he cited was one with a show writer who seemed exceptionally bitter about having to, horror of horrors, re-use animation assets for money reasons instead of having the infinite “budget” of descriptive prose. So if your only reference for anything about the show is PA’s coverage of it, you just got a very shallow & very dismissive of a flawed but unique series. All because the creator didn’t meet PA’s weird standards of a “worthy” female creator.

Even the “sample platter” video shorts show that PA has a narrow view of any shows featured around and/or aimed at girls. When he wasn’t complaining about continuity lockout on a review of Winx Club, he was blowing it off because it was “too” girly to be considered good. And while there are valid complaints to be made about Winx Club (the art style isn’t for everyone, the “everyone gets a boyfriend” pairings earlier on, etc), “it’s too sparkly & girly” shouldn’t be one of them, because finding strength in the “frivolous” & feminine is a key element of the magical girl genre. In the one about an episode of Korra, he was clearly in the camp that hated the title character for being “a bad role model”, i.e. a female character with flaws that would be seen as “kewl” if she were male, notably her temper. He’s from that one particular school of male feminist that I’ve also seen with certain comics creators (I can’t name him cuz he’s a vanity searcher & already harassed me on Twitter for not praising him), one that insists all female characters be flawless role models who are hyper-cabable, who always dress “realistically”, and narratively look down on things like “girl stuff” or “acting like a human being”. Basically, they’re stuck at Buffy, only more boring. It’s made me openly dread if or when his series reaches these series, cuz if it’s that bad in the short videos, imagine how much worse it’ll be in the full length ones. I fully expect PA to echo the Jacob Chapman line of “Korra was an unlikable c*nt cuz she wasn’t a clone of Aang”, just in more polite language. I’m not saying he’s incel levels of misogynistic, but there are definitely some unexamined limits as to what he does & doesn’t consider to be “good” femininity that are pretty apparent to anyone with basic pattern recognition skills (which, sadly, is a dying skillset online).

The comparisons to my first animation history book are unmissable. This book, “Serious Business” by Stefan Kanfer, wasn’t really a history except in the loosest sense. If you used this now out-of-print book as your sole reference for animation history, you would think Disney did nothing of creative worth, the only good director at MGM was Tex Avery, the only good ones at Warners were Avery & Chuck Jones, the only TV animation worth acknowledging the existence of were Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Simpsons, and CGI animation was just a fad. Hopefully you can see just how incredibly shallow a reference pool that could create. That’s kind of the feeling I get watching PA’s videos, which is amusing, since he HAS talked about historians’ biases & blind spots and supposedly having to work around them. But when there’s clearly a trend towards him doing the same thing, albeit with more rationalization as to why it’s okay for him to do it, it makes his value just as dubious.

Basically, I recommend people do what he’s said in one of his more “rules for thee but not for me” moments: don’t use one person or source as your sole reference. And I’ll add something that PA would probably find anathema, namely don’t solely seek out works that align with your predetermined thesis. That just bolster your confirmation bias tendencies. Because when you do that, you do what he did and dismiss entire worlds as worthless simply because they didn’t fit into a narrow definition of “worth”.

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Madoka franchise, we need to talk.

I love you, seriously. You’ve been a massive creative influence on me, and the original TV series is in my personal top ten of best TV shows of all time. But… see… that’s the problem.

I’m kind of tired of revisiting the TV show over & over & over again, yet that’s really all you want to do.

Self-explanatory, along with my graphic design “skills”

I thought that redoing the show as the first two movies was fine, since it changed the scenes & dialogue a bit but still kept the core of the story & characters the same. And you were doing new things besides it, ranging from the manga spinoffs to the Rebellion movie. Magia Record gave us an interesting new alternate timeline, with a small army of new characters to enjoy, and the anime adaptation was an interesting variation on THAT, going for an entirely different ending. It really felt that the creative team wanted to explore & expand the universe instead of monofocus on their first success.

Then came the eternal wait for the concept movie… which was eventually cancelled. And then came the wait for Walpurgisnacht Rising, which is still “coming soon”. The last spinoff series that doesn’t involve the original show’s cast, a trippy sci-fi light novel series called Null Magical Girl, was never legally localized. Then Magia Record wrapped up, with the Scene 0 plot revisiting the TV show but at least doing so from the unique perspective of an interesting new character with her own role & hook.

The tipping point was Magia Exedra, which opens with… you playing through yet another variation of the original TV show. Yes, it eventually came to include a condensed adaptation of Magia Record’s story, an adaptation of the full Oriko story, and adaptations of the CD stories, with more manga adaptations promised in the opening, but revisiting the same old thing instead of getting to experience something new doesn’t feel fun. It feels like homework, like doing chores before you can do something new & more entertaining. Even the process of unlocking the individual characters’ stories, which was simple yet enjoyable in Magia Record, has become a grindy task designed to bore more than endear you to them.

So it really wasn’t a surprise that, instead of doing something new with the Puella Magi universe, the creators have decided to take the first two movies and re-edit them into a TV series. Yes, that’s right, the movies that were a stylized recap of the TV show are now being recut into a separate TV show. This is the real Law of Cycles right here.

Like Magia Exedra, this just feels like a wasted opportunity. There are so many more things to explore in this world than the endless nostalgic fanservice of “remember the TV show, wasn’t it cool”. Give us magical girls in other eras or settings, be it historical or far future. Give us some of Homura’s alternate timelines like Homura’s Revenge did, or show how the MagiReco girls operated in timelines where Iroha & the Magius girls didn’t live long enough to contract. Give us whole new casts of characters doing their own things within the rules of this universe, be it trying to fight fate in their own way like the Pleiades or just trying to survive.

It just feels like they’re deliberately squandering the potential of the Puella Magi universe by doing this. This shouldn’t surprise me - creativity is basically dead now, since it isn’t seen as “safe” by the money men. But for something that’s imprinted on my creative DNA, seeing it prefer to stagnate instead of move forward is disappointing. 

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My video recommendation this week is from KaiserBeamz, part of his Kyoto Video series about retro anime. This entry looking at Leiji Matsumoto’s anthology series The Cockpit is an interesting study of WWII from the Japanese perspective. 

Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the mythologizing, especially as an American. Just watching something as simple as Tasting History’s series about how different countries had to handle food illustrate that. But the fact this hasn’t been re-released is sad, because I can guess exactly why - people (regardless of political alignment) would see this & assume that it would be as “rah rah go us” as our own WWII media has traditionally been, then kick up a big fuss. It’s a shame, as even what little I’ve seen from the Japanese perspective has been some of the most scathing anti-war media made, focusing on the humanity that gets lost first whenever the powers that be make the declarations. You definitely see that here.

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It took two months longer than I expected because of course it did, but I FINALLY finished the window bunting for my parents.

God only knows how many weird-ass blocklists I'd wind up on for the colors they wanted if I shared this on Bluesky…

You can’t really see it in the photo, but the stars have a bit of metallic gold floss in their yarn. Gotta get some shininess in there. And no, I didn't make the blanket I used for the background; that's a beloved gift from someone far more skilled.

I'm just SO glad that I finally finished this.

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Lightning-squared round! Cuz some thoughts just gotta come out, not unlike farts.

• I think I’d be more willing to entertain the whole “canceling a late-night show is state media silencing dissent” thing if 90% of it wasn’t coming from the same people who defended TikTok & RedNote as “a window into the real China” while downplaying or denying their extremely blatant human rights abuses.

• I don’t dislike Panty & Stocking, but I’ll be glad when the new season is over if only so that literally anything else is being discussed in magical girl circles.

• If the ace-umbrella people on social media could stop being pick-me teenagers obsessed with who can write the most smutfic and/or twisting into knots to justify any & every time their favey-wave YouTuber says something aphobic, even for just one singular day, that'd be a fucking miracle.

• Gloating about retail workers getting their hours cut & thus losing their pay because of your boycott doesn't make me think your cause is righteous, it just makes y'all look like assholes who are just as shitty & callous as those you hate. AGAIN.

• It genuinely bums me out how, thanks to cr*pto bros & memelords, people now assume you’re one of them if you like Shiba Inus. They’re very goofy good dogs, they don’t deserve that association!

• I’m used to modern Xwitter recommending… strange things, but the nonstop flood of accounts focused solely on shipping aged-up versions of the Peanuts kids cuz I occasionally retweet old Peanuts strips about Snoopy’s writing struggles is probably the weirdest.

• Nothing stings in an unexpected way quite like seeing that one social media moot who will happily like & share every stupid pop culture brainfart you produce but always ignores the things you’re doing that require actual effort.

• You'd think Wrestlesky would be saying literally anything about the situation with a sex pest trying for a comeback in the PNW scene, but nah, that might take time away from posting “Fed BAD” & swooning over a greasy megachurch dude who posts “right”. Priorities.

• There’s something that strikes me as so… disingenuous about social media book promotions that try to sell their books by listing off bullet points related to either pithy nicknames for common plot hooks or representation demographics, especially if none of this gives you any idea of what the plot will actually be. Even if the author is sincerely trying to represent an under-represented group in their work or play with a well-worn trope, it always just feels reductive. And apparently these are starting to replace the blurbs on the back/inside cover flap, too? Oof. I blame BookTok for this, just another thing that site has done to make humanity stupider. 

• One day I hope we can have a conversation around depression/mental health/suicidal ideation that isn’t reduced down to “just reach out to someone”, because I can’t be the only person who’s experienced these problems, did exactly that, & was met with a dismissive THHHPPPTT in response by pretty much every attempted contact. 

• “Omg this show is so underrated”, and it’s a clip from one of the Adult Swim shows that exists largely to shit on older works with actual artistry while telling the most 00s edgiboi “jokes” and which has one of those religiously zealous fandoms who think it's a perfect masterpiece & secretly ultra progressive (cuz if it wasn’t, they clearly wouldn't love it so much). See, THIS is why I gave up on Bluesky. Be getting into this unique variation of hypocrisy another time.

• Aww, Wrestlesky is just learning about Kick and how it's a wretched hive of horrorshows. How precious.

• Fly high, Cobra Angel. RIP.

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That’s about it for this week. Gonna sign off with a photo of one of my cats, judging my nightly journaling scarf. I won’t say what the colors are for each potential emotion, but the prevalence of gray should give you some idea of how the year’s been going.

See you next weekend, maybe!

Sunday Sampler: Inaugural Edition

 Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Can you be a Horse Girl for horse-girls?

I decided to try Umamusume for two reasons: One, I liked the designs, and two, I was disappointed at how much Magia Exedra prioritized pointless monotonous grinding over the storytelling & characterization that made me love Magia Record so much. Also, like so many, I went through a Horse Girl phase. I learned how to take care of them & even ride them a little (nothing faster than a trot, though, cuz I’m a wuss). I still have a soft spot in my heart for horsies.

Playing this game has been a true rabbit hole. You’ll learn about Japanese horse racing history in the process of wondering what’s being referenced, all in the trappings of a chill shoujo sports anime. Sometimes you’ll pick a character cuz their name & design is appealing and wind up finding one of the saddest racehorse stories you’ll ever see (Rice Shower). Or you’ll find one that’s humorous yet bizarrely inspiring (Haru Urara). Or you’ll find… Gold Ship.

Pictured: Gold Ship at his most normal.

And that brings me to one of the things that I find the most appealing about these all-girl gacha games like Umamusume or MagiReco. Because you have so many female characters, you can’t just keep falling back into the same general character “types”. Even shows like Precure will tend to fall back into certain set roles per team. But when you have dozens upon dozens, suddenly that same handful of stock “girly” characters isn’t gonna cut it. So you’ll get an absolute gremlin like Golshi (UM) or a mad lass in the best & worst ways like Himeka (MR). Or various characters that feel like nuanced & varied portrayals of neurodivergent people or people with various mental illnesses, often better than works that call attention to themselves for doing so. And these are just the ones I’ve played - Moon Channel has an excellent video on how gacha games & their stories can help train even the gooniest of whales to respect complicated women with their characters.

I highly recommend Moon Channel, BTW. A human rights attorney discusses legal issues & cultural context in gaming & pop culture, often with a dry sense of humor.

So yeah… I have this new stupid addiction, and it’s filled the void left by MagiReco’s ending better than its actual successor. Now, let’s all be glad that Gold Ship doesn’t have access to magical girl powers and/or weaponry…

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I’m still low-key bitter about the reactions to my departure from social media, especially from people who’ve been long-time contacts across platforms. These were people that I considered friends to some degree, and you’d think that a week of putting up “hey, I’m not a good place” hints would have tipped off at least more than two people.

But I guess sharing the same “this is NOT OKAY” reactions to the unceasing string of bad news is more important than anything else.

It’s just as well. Bluesky went from a decent place to absolutely painful once it opened to the public. I won’t go into details with some of the more obnoxious things, but I’ll do a quick lightning round of things that drove me up the wall:

• You should be allowed to like & dislike things in peace. Someone expressing their opinion is not a call for debate. Also, if your response to someone not liking something you like is to say that their dislike “doesn’t count” cuz they didn’t subject themselves to engaging with it in full multiple times, you are guilty of the exact same kind of “fandom brain” that you’re mocking others for having.

• Not every single movie/TV show/comic/novel/music genre needs to be a new front in the unceasing culture wars, and no, it’s not solely the conservative reactionaries starting these pointless fights.

• When your rhetoric is identical to actual beliefs held by the Westboro Baptist Church, you aren’t as leftist as you wanna think.

• Using therapy-speak and/or terminology related to neurodivergence as a “get out of basic civility free” tactic is literally taking a bad joke made in the early internet days and playing it straight.

• Sometimes the way y’all repeat capital-d Discourse, especially if it’s exceptionally idiotic like “dog owners are inherently racist because police dogs exist”, needs to be studied, because it’s not just our seniors parroting the cable news of their choice that’s making the universe worse.

• Not unique to Bluesky, but watching people happily repeating & sharing comments from their friends/favorites that they had earlier decried solely cuz someone who’s already shitty was saying it really shows people’s true colors.

I dunno, maybe it’s because social media connects people largely based on shared interests, and my interests unfortunately happen to attract a lot of emotionally & mentally stunted people who would rather double down than admit the world isn’t black & white. In so SO many ways, they are indistinguishable from the Fundamentalists I’ve known in my life, and they would never accept that epiphany.

I just wanted a place where I could be my whole self - like what I like, talk about life from my aroace perspective, dislike what I dislike, vent when I need to, share my enthusiasm & disappointments with people who might actually care, that sort of thing. But I guess that’s just never meant to exist for me in an environment that includes other people, be it online or off.

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Not gonna elaborate or name names (especially with this kind of fanbase), but another factor in leaving is seeing any & all asexuality circles being overwhelmed by shipping discourse. And not just any shipping discourse - shipping discourse that’s transparently the result of a creator wanting to no-homo a fan favorite pairing but also not wanting to look like he’s doing that, so he hastily slaps the “asexual” label on a character instead. What he failed to realize is that fandom NEVER respects any kind of ace presence unless it can be easily erased. So all he’s done is piss off people with his obvious no-homo attempt AND encourage yet another wave of both “aces don’t count” attitudes & “UM ACKSHULLY aces can fuck/fall in love like NoRmAl” assimilationists to shriek in unison.

(Yeah, sorry, I’m not Jenna DeWitt. I find the whole “aces/aros can do normal people relationship things” constant interjections to be alienating & designed to drive out anyone like myself who is both aroace & disinclined towards any of that, all solely to the benefit of those who CAN & thus blend in better. It’s not empowering if it’s used routinely to erase someone else’s presence. That’s a very hard concept for folks like her to digest.)

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Speaking of fandoms that you wanna avoid at all costs, this past week has had multiple announcements for different ones. Again, I won’t be elaborating. But the reactions to the one made me think about just how the concept of a monoculture cannot be adapted to the internet.

One of these works (again, not naming names but some can probably guess) has had a good chunk of its fanbase getting mad when people don’t instantly recognize it or call it “niche”. They insist that it was THE biggest thing on the internet when they were younger, and EVERYONE was into it to some degree. Which is easily disproven by talking to anyone who wasn’t active on particular sites during particular years, since odds are that anything they know about this oh-so-ubiquitous thing is “oh yeah, that thing with the crazy fans”.

I saw this again with another super super niche subject being re-discovered by a new audience, and the original wave of people were livid that they weren’t approaching the work from the same perspective that they did at that age. (Naturally, a fair bit of psych-speak was being used to justify their fan zealotry, so I was already disinclined to align with these folks.) The mere idea that the entirety of the internet wasn’t as intimately familiar with this obscure show as they were was outrageous & offensive, and it’s probably the most off-putting thing I’ve seen outside of actual hate speech.

Look. The internet is VAST. We talk about “dead internet theory” & bots, about social media making it more limited, but it’s really not. Every person has their own now-long-gone favorites unique to the internet, people they followed or discussed for various reasons, who they got some level of joy or entertainment from that are now… gone. And for every person who will go “yeah, I remember that” or “I know that, I love that thing”, there are another ten who will look at you like a confused puppy. In fact, I am going to test this by saying a single name:

Davey-kins.

Either you’re making this face cuz you know, or you’re making it cuz you don’t.

I could list off other examples that would just result in others scratching their heads. “Still am no mushy peas” (Man, I miss Elle & their cats). Oolong the pancake-balancing rabbit (RIP). Coke Heartthrob. Rikka dancing & the Rikka-roll. Torq loves funnel cake. I could go on with examples, literally half of which would be to specific webcomics. Remember The Parking Lot Is Full? I do.

Point is, there is no one thing or person that is so well-known online that it could avoid being considered “niche”. Even The Most Documented Person In History (IYKYK) will be a new discovery for someone at some point. So of course the thing some of you used as a substitute for forming a human personality in your teen years cuz no outside of Tumblr could stand you is gonna be “niche”. Everything online that we love is “niche”, doubly so if it ever breaks containment & winds up on the offline world’s radar. And frankly, unless you think that’s a weird reflection on yourself & how much people love you, that’s a perfectly fine thing.

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Every time I start to think about posting my original works (or even fanfics) on AO3, I see something that effectively wards me away from doing it. Be it the general site culture being mostly focused on shipping & related works, the site itself being blocked by different malware programs on different machines, or just not being sure if it would be noticed at all, I always wind up not doing it. Now I have an actual good reason for it.

Apparently there are reports of people having either their original non-fic works deleted, even if they’re posted without intent to profit, or of having fanfics for smaller fandoms deleted, both without much warning. They’re also spamming replies to these with “warnings” disguised as super generic feedback. The whole thing feels exceptionally shady, and it only gives me ammo for my theory that no one wants to read anything that isn’t “hey, it’s that thing I recognize” and/or (eyeroll) spicy. If AO3 wants their site to live up to the reputation as “this place is saving creativity & writing as a labor of love”, maybe they shouldn’t be penalizing people because their works aren’t attached to big omnipresent franchises.

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I FINALLY figured out how to do an African flower granny square! And as is the custom, I went with the brightest colors I could find.

I am so proud of this eyesore, you’ll never know.

The outer round was the whole reason I went with those colors. “Black with neons” is catnip to me (blame New Gen era wrestling costumes), and when I saw “Cosmic Candy” in Joann’s Big Twist Jellybean yarn, I had to buy some.

Unfortunately, it was released shortly before Joann’s announced its closure, and I only got 4 skeins, which wasn’t enough for the blanket projects that I usually like to do. And because it was a swiftly discontinued variety, the aftermarket prices were absurd. So I tried to figure out what to do with this, and then I went through my stash, found some solids that matched, & decided to give the pattern that had previously vexed me another shot.

Not sure what I’m gonna do with it, but I’m definitely gonna make some more.

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I can’t be the only person who finds it obnoxious when someone mono-focuses on a series or character that I otherwise like to the point of mania and thus starts to like it less, right? Is this a self-diagnosed autistic online thing? The refusal to just… write it off as no longer what you loved and move on, instead constantly posting complaints & contacting random creators & generally just being an annoying pest? I’m going to give a recent example, courtesy of Bluesky, and if you recognize yourself in this, maybe try to re-evaluate yourself instead of just getting insulted.

Lately people have been… less than happy with Marvel’s handling of Ms. Marvel. They killed her off in the middle of a bad run of a Spidey book, they made a big showy memorial event out of it, then immediately used Krakoa’s stupid resurrection nonsense to revive her AND reveal she’s also a mutant, erased all memory of her death storyline ever happening (MONTHS after it was done), tweaked her powers to mirror the energy thing from the TV show I didn’t watch as well as her stretchy powers, and have finally crammed her into the designated “plucky newbie girl” role in the X-books. It’s a mess, and it’s also a reminder of why I stopped following her book after Civil War II. 

Ms. Marvel is a character who fits into the “small-scale hero” role the best, and every attempt to drag her into the wider Marvel universe has only harmed the character. The only time it worked for me was the one storyline (in her own book) about making clones of herself to meet all of her new team book obligations, where it was played for comedy. She’s been used horribly every time she’s taken away from her own setting & supporting cast, and adding her to the X-books has only made that even more apparent.

However, after a while, it’s healthier to cut & run. Constantly posting about how badly she’s been handled, then quoting & adding to your own posts, then quoting & adding to THOSE, isn’t gonna fix anything. If anything, if someone involved with the character sees this, they’ll blow off any legitimate criticism you have because it’s buried in literal layers of fan rage. And that’s if they can find any in the midst of the criticism increasingly skewing towards conspiracy theories. No, I don’t think every single person involved with this is Islamophobic or thinks that a Pakistani-American (real or fictional) has never experienced racism. No, I don’t think adding light shine effects to her new powers “betrays” the original writer’s wishes by “girlifying” her (in fact, while I don’t think GWW meant in her comments to portray “sparkly equals girly equals weak & stupid”, that certainly seems to be how a lot of fans have interpreted her words, and as a magical girl warrior fan, you can imagine why I would take issue with that mindset). I think they’re just Comics Dudes. They’re clueless & don’t know better, nor do they want to know. And you’re not gonna sway them to change anything.

I get it. Marvel especially loves to ruin everything you once liked. I dealt with this during the whole Krakoa era that has permanently ruined the X-universe in multiple ways, and I’m dealing with it again now that my long-time favorite Doug Ramsey is being put through the “smart people are inherently evil” treatment & turned into Apocalypse. At least I WOULD be… if I hadn’t decided to just move on. I used to love the X-books, the characters, and the messages. But that’s in the past, and so is my love. It’s moved on to being something else for someone else. It can keep going and doing its thing without me. Same goes for anything new with Ms. Marvel or with Big Two comics in general.

Just saying, when you keep doing this, you start to sound like you’re two steps away from marching into a comic shop with pepper spray & sending Marvel glitter bombs in “protest”. And diagnoses-as-hashtags in your social media bios don’t fly as an excuse for that level of behavior.

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Just gonna close out with a picture of one of my cats, staring at me intently because I am not feeding him at that very instant. See you next Sunday!