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!
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