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!
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