Greatest Hits From My Blogs
Collection of posts from my Tumblr blog that I find thoughtful or funny enough to save here for future reference, or as essay ideas! I do my best to preserve the original text, especially when it involves me talking to another person in order to not misconstrue words, but there are couple spelling and grammar liberties taken for making my own thoughts clearer.
Undertale is Not Hard to Play - Jun 2025
I'm not even sure how big of an issue this actually is in the broader gamer streamer guy community, but two of my faves are still being stubborn about these games after nearly a decade and it was just getting under my skin.
Not to discount how rabid the early Undertale fandom was, but I feel like any streamer still hung up on purposefully engaging with Toby Fox's games in a way to counter audience expectations at this point is just developing an Arin Hanson complex. Undertale and Deltarune are games about choice, and UT especially was built with players mixing the perfect routes in mind, but both make it really really obvious that pacifism is a central gimmick.
An audience yelling at a streamer to spare everyone is not because they're insane and controlling, it's a mix of typical chat back-seating (helping the streamer see all there is and get the most out of what THEY believe was the most substantial route) and the basic instinct to not see the central characters of the game's narrative KO'd from the plot. Like, people Liked The Characters of Undertale, and did not want streamers to Stop Seeing The Characters That Make The Game Good because they failed to engage with the game's central conceit. Deltarune is very similar and I feel like the idea of "You recruit enemies rather than nebulously sparing them" helps solidify this approach to the world, but the fact it had to be made so very transactional says something about players. But there is very little reason to go about Undertale and ESPECIALLY Deltarune without sparing enemies unless you are turning a deaf ear to the game's mechanics and thus losing access to parts of the game (on a first, and potentially only, stream playthrough).
And I see little reason for someone to turn a deaf ear like that unless, 1) They want to offer their audience a less perfected experience -- which is valid! It's interesting to see those games in messy routes personalized to the player's reactions, but knowing the game I think "Chat, I'm gonna break it!" and getting their input when the stakes are so high is important. Or 2) For some reason, the demand of playing an RPG in this unconventional manner is really so difficult for you that you get defensive about your need as a player to not engage with its basic meditation on empathy and pacifism. If you see Undertale and Deltarune's pacifist routes as puzzle games based around that moral gimmick and not Another RPG that has some funny choices, you get... Undertale and Deltarune!
Like that was their thing. Undertale definitely wanted you to explore all possibilities, but as much as it was built for you to do that, it also leads you into its more streamlined routes for subsequent playthroughs, and you can't expect your audience to always have faith their favorite streamer guy will get around to that. But then you have Deltarune broken into parts and advertised as having one ending, where it is the most obvious thing to play the pacifist because not doing so LITERALLY literally means you just see less content. You just get penalized for not engaging with the game's central mechanics, and for every enemy you couldn't be arsed to engage with, you lose material for the characters you did choose to save.
It's 2025 and I am tired of Toby Fox games being approached like unknowable, volatile sacred objects, and not games that people really like with interesting mechanics and a lot of chances to screw up not seeing everything you could eliciting intense back-seating.
Tenna is Soft! - Jun 2025
My first take on Deltarune, and more specifically Tenna, which I grow more and more passionate about as the days go by. I'm working on bigger, fatter essays about this stupid guy but at the center of all analysis is this truly.
I'm starting to reach the point of Tenna brainrot where I've beginning to develop that critical eye for his fandom portrayal bolstered heavily by him obviously having some Tumblr Sexyman Bait mixed into him, but as someone who is usually violently repulsed by true Tumblr Sexyman Bait I have been having a blast noticing how he subverts those tropes. For me right now, the biggest tell of people focusing on him as A Tall Guy In A Suit vs the little goofster he is is how softly they draw him, cause it's also my biggest fixation with his design.
Tenna has a uniquely soft and rounded character design for what he is -- a CRT in a shiny suit rendered as an early CG model. Not only did Toby Fox take that aesthetic in the direction of SNES pre-rendered sprites so that instead of being polygonal he would have that unnaturally smooth finish, but he also took the time to blast Tenna's palette with a bright lavender tint and no black outline. Then on top of that even, his CRT head is stylized to be as rounded as possible, and almost every pointed aspect of his character besides hi nose has a soft taper just by nature of the lumpy, clay-like model he is. And these details serve a couple of goals:
First and most interesting to me, combined with the big cartoon gloves and coat-tails, Tenna's softness really helps sell him as a rubber-hose adjacent - and therefore old and nostalgic - looking character without it being too forced. Or even worse, trying to bluntly mimic the rubber-hose style in a way that would have made me furiously critical lmao. Literally the defining aspect of those designs that I see people mess up routinely is how rounded and 3D the characters were. Besides oddities like Mickey Mouse and a few other super early character' ears, characters of that era were overwhelmingly designed to make sense in 3D space, [just with occasional exceptions for readability]. The style is sometimes referred to as the "center-line" style because on reference sheets you would see characters broken down into spheres with lines down the center to help portray depth.
This to say, if you want to get to the fundamentals of that style, an essence that can transcend the most obvious aesthetic tropes of pacman eyes and black-and-white, you make characters very tubular and rubber-hose-y. Tenna is very much that and in a way that dates him back to a nebulous essence of that old cartoon style, as well as making him distinctly a product of clumsy but adorable early CGI [before it began to explore heavier 2-D-like stylization tricks] -- in a way harkening back to the early baby steps of both animation mediums. (And fuck it, it kinda gives me digitized claymation vibes sometimes). Nevertheless, this collection of subtle and unsubtle visual motifs come together to make Tenna appear and feel old, charming, and most importantly, soft!
If Toby Fox wanted to like really, really say "This guy is a TV cartoon!" a far more obvious aesthetic to draw from would have been Hannah-Barbera type characters in the Modernist style, which used economic design tropes that are so embedded in our idea of cartooning you will find attempts at a rubber-hose style accidentally using them, despite the styles being diametrically opposed. The gorgeous Hatsune Miku design for the vocaloid song people keep super-imposing Tenna over is a PERFECT example of the artstyle on a character whose design otherwise has nothing to do with it, emphasizing bold, flat shapes that often don't reflect and sort of real depth. Tenna could have easily been in a style like that, but no matter how many circles you may use in a design like that, they'll never be spheres, they'll never have that sense of depth and therefore almost tangible softness that Tenna's design has. Toby's artstyle, thought not heavily related to either tradition, does rely on flattened perspective and bold shapes in character designs, so it is very interesting to see Tenna arrive intended to portray an era aligned with those pre-existing conventions, [but completely ignoring them to express something else.]
This because, on top of evoking that nostalgia, Tenna is meant to evoke it with a very specific kind of softness -- to make him as unassuming and friendly-looking as possible, almost unnaturally so. I don't think it's meant that the form is a distortion or facade of his normal self, but the fact that Tenna is the softest, puttiest thing in the entire canon so far implies there is a really strong reason why he's uniquely defined by these ideas. I mean, we saw Tenna lose his cool and drop his silly act, and we got The Sprite - which is so gorgeous in its own way - Tenna's electronic theming finally pulling some sharpness out of his design, made unnatural both by bringing attention to his inhuman parts and clashing so oddly with the soft rendering of his model. But even there, the intention is not that Tenna is ['finally showing his true character']; That state was abnormal, and if the electronic in him was meant to conflict with his putty exterior, you would maybe see more angularity in the TV to contrast it. He could have been a real ENA-like, if not by default then in that expression, but NOPE! It's all still cohesive.
In design, Tenna is constantly vying for Ralsei's spot of softest, fluffiest guy around, and any aberration from that portrays him as being uncharacteristically harsh. He is defined by being soft, comforting, fun, nostalgic, and basically not anything that usually defines a Tumblr Sexyman. He's not particularly skinny by cartoon stylization standards (nor curvy, I support you guys though), he's not edgy, he's not secretly cruel (more just has the potential to manipulate people), and he doesn't have those toothy, pointy design sensibilities that define a lot of those characters. He does for like, one sprite, and even then as I said, it's clashing in every way against his default personality. And I feel like when people forgo these aspects of his design, I can begin to assume they are doing so in his personality as well.
With constantly sharpened static teeth comes a more cunning character than he is ever portrayed to (successfully) be. Everytime his suit is drawn to be more angular or his joints more defined, someone is forgetting his it was primarily design to [be a child's platonic ideal]. Obviously the only valid people in the Sharp Tenna camp here are those who draw him in the Modernist TVA style (and everyone else cause this post is not that serious). But as someone who actively has been studying why he doesn't give me the Tumblr Sexyman ick and being really delighted by how he maneuvers around all these tropes in a SUPER visually and narratively compelling way, I am a bit disappointed to see him just drawn like... as TV Head Tumblr Sexyman #9.
DO NOT MENTION HIM next to that asshole from Hazbin Hotel either OH MY FUCKING GOD! Tenna is my (and Kris' (against their will)) best friend from the corny gameshows, cease the slander!!
Bonus: Tenna is Also Your Gay Uncle! - Jun 2025
Tenna is your uncle who you don't see all the time, but everytime he comes over or you stay with him you can tell he was excited about seeing you the entire time. For some reason he seems way more invested in your wellbeing than even your parents and obviously loves kids, but no one in your family knows why he doesn't have any of his own. Never married, hardly ever dated either, you sometimes overhear other relatives taunting him about it.
Then when you're like 14 and realize you're gay you kinda start wondering if he is too and you spend years plotting the optimal interrogation of his romantic life to try and see if you officially have a Gay Uncle, but you never actually ask him cause he's always too busy like baking you a cake or teaching you how to make origami and it's not even worth it at that point.
Israel and the Aswan Dam - Jun 2025
The post rather speaks for itself; The state of Israel fills me with a lot of horror, disgust, and here utter, exhaustion at the plainness of their evil.
Yesterday I was watching a documentary about the building of Egypt's Aswan dam (very awesome), and at one point they zoomed out to show a map of the region and of course Israel was visible, so to be funny I boo'ed at the screen. Then I took a second to say to myself, Hm... maybe it's bad to just without provocation throw shade at Israel? Not because I don't think they deserve it as a political entity, but like, just casually if I'm talking to others it might look too aggressive to make it seem like the state is incapable of existing without being worthy of scorn.
Then like two minutes later, the documentary gave account of how Israel helped England and America attack Egypt for trying to nationalize the Suez on a petty clause, entirely for no other reason than to threaten their attempts at self-sovereignty. The native cultures of that region really can't have jack shit with Israel there as the Western world's wedge, it's insane.
Sinners Shell-Shock - Jun 2025
One of the more opinionated companion pieces to one of my mini reviews. I still absolutely owe this movie REAL analysis, I'm almost scared to return to it it was so good!
Sinners 2025.
Actual (Worse) Words
I don't know how to put into words how much I adore it's exploration of assimilated white ethnicity without disgracing the nuance of the film by just saying "I hate white people".
Fandom Racism
I also really need to stop letting myself be surprised by tone-deafness in fandom spaces.
Guys will literally watch a movie about a mass hate crime and be like, "Wow, the racist murderer is so hot though :3c" because he's a bit supernatural and they cannot read through the half a layer of symbolism.
Historian Hope Pill - May 2025
This is a certain mindset I've adopted since I decided to become an amateur history buff but also since taking a Cultural Anthropolgy class. That perspective on humanity I gained really helped soothe some of my existential anxieties, and while I've had a (different) teacher tell me he thinks the perspective is naive, I think the most vital thing is that it helps me not be paralyzed by the scope of the worlds problems. Something that is a massive problem for my generation with so much at our fingertips through the internet and social media, which, affectionately, his old ass may not have appreciated.
Something super valuable about studying history, especially back into ancient times, is having an appreciation for how enduring humanity is. Like, yeah yeah, in the cosmic and geologic or evolutionary scheme of things we're insignificant, but we have also been through a lot -- of our own making and of nature just throwing shit at us. When you think of history as extending back to before modern conceptions of a state or people or culture, and extend your definition of society to more than what resembles nation-states and continental empires, you realize we have been everywhere for a very long time and it's hard to really imagine an earth without us.
Even if everything gets fucked to shit by late-stage capitalism or like some random disaster, people will live on. Maybe not in hyper-consumerist mega societies, but there will still be idiots gathering around a fire somewhere to laugh at each other's jokes, someone playing with their pet. People have lived under wraps of lovingly made cloths in deserts, people have lived proudly on horseback on rolling steppes, people have found peace and community living in flooding rainforests, people have just been making it even in what may seem to be extreme conditions to us. So many cultures tell of surviving a world-ending flood, so many cultures declared themself the endstate of history only to become chapters in textbooks, and we fucking endure!
And realizing that even these extremes of societal and ecological collapsed have been endured, I can be kinda chill about the fact that nothing will ever be over so we should never actually stop trying to hold together. Holding together doesn't have to mean keeping up an incredibly wasteful and/or inefficient society, it just means doing our best to survive and help those around us. This is not to dismiss the massive amounts of human suffering that come with societal upheaval, but as I am trying to say, focus on helping your neighbor instead of woeing over that which was always destined to fall beginning to fall.
People are more valuable than concepts. Be kind to yourself and others. And uh, if America or something collapses press F to pay respects and think about the cool mythology we'll get to invent about it!
Nintendo Switch Discourse - Apr 2025
My big, fat collective OPINION on the Nintendo Switch 2 and the discourse surrounding its price. To be brief, the fact that it's $450 is Nintendo's problem (which they seemed to have surpassed), there's nothing about their actions that is not better blamed on the economy. And I do genuinely hope people focus on real issues rather than wasting all their energy being mad at luxury electronics, misplaced gamer rage has done enough to ruin the world already. One could even say it got us half into this problem in the first place (cough-cough GamerGate)...
God, I really don't wanna be a bootlicker and make excuses for Nintendo games going up in general price, but at the same time, I feel like it is not worth the energy to sour EVERY conversation about it with such. I think whether the backlash means anything will come on launch day when a lot of casual audiences will look at that price tag and start turning away.
I am both praying for the NS2's financial faceplant at these price points and excited for more cool art and experiences.
On Second Thought...
Why is Switch price discourse just people mad at the economy and blaming it on NIntendo at this point?
Next Day Critique
Switch 2 is coming out at a very great time for people to blame a single corporation for structural economic issues they really should be blaming on their regional politicians lol.
Next Day Critique cont.
This is kinda embarrassing to admit maybe, but I'm just barely 21, so when the original Switch came out I was just about to enter High School -- my parents obviously bought the stupid thing for me. I was still a snot-nosed brat who hounded my mom to get it throughout those first month shortages, and I was complaining to her about it today with the price and she didn't react much. So it's fucking striking me that... video games have always been annoying expensive, and I, personally just me, am literally experiencing this on my end for the first time.
I'm not going to accuse anyone else of this, I don't know the age of the average Nintendo fan, but... I wonder if anyone else like me is so flabbergasted about how expensive the console feels in part because it will be their first time considering a console on their own paycheck. This stupid fucking thing is 8 years old. That's the time to go from elementary schooler to a first year college student for most. I really think the age of the Switch is working against this transition. Not to mention just how many people can very comfortably say, "Oh that looks nice, but I'll stick with the first one', because of its age and massive library.
Interview Ultimatum
So there's been this new article where Nintendo said 'Hey, if you aren't ready to buy the Nintendo Switch 2, that's why we're still supporting the first one!', and it's like, Oh yay! That's exactly everything they should be doing!
I was saying since the first Nintendo Direct that people are going to be very attached to their NS's still with everything they showed off going as far as 2026 (Tomodachi Life and Rhythm Heaven, remember?), and that I was hoping that was their plain if they wanted a good launch. And then the price came out and everyone threw up their hands and that sentiment became truer, but at the same time, yeah, it was clear they were not thinking this was going to be flying off all the shelves. You could always just see from how they marketed backwards and cross-platform compatibility, it's more like the long-awaited Switch Pro than a complete successor.
Yet, there is still complaining I hear. Which is now made more ridiculous by the fact that, no, you're no longer "boycotting" the NS2 by waiting a couple of months to get it (that's not even how that works?), that's just part of their plan. They're also not "price-gouging" right now as much as just putting a luxury option with related price out there while still planning on supporting the first one, the NS1 may still be fairly active on it's 9th birthday!
And then also, also... just for a second... CAN Y'ALL BE FUCKING SERIOUS FOR ONE SECOND TALKING ABOUT "BOYCOTTING" AND "PRICE-GOUGING" WITH THIS STUPID LUXURY TECH TOY!? Is this really YOUR FIGHT? This single company in this luxury goods market promoting a new console at average market price and its games at below the logical inflationary cost is your hill to die on? The most crucial fight in this godforsaken economy?? You think Nintendo is a uniquely evil company for this? They're uniquely anti-consumer for pricing their completely unnecessary to you, luxury goods at the most logical point in the midst of economy chaos? Please send your senator an angry email instead of throwing darts at Miyamoto's face or whatever the fuck y'all are doing.
My Art Has Got to get More Patapon - Mar 2025
Having such an interesting "My Art Has GOT To Get Weirder" moment looking at Patapon 1 and 2 vs Patapon 3, and now vs Ratatan, the series' spiritual successor as well. I have just arrived to this series and I have takes.
Between the two halves of the series is just this really garish transition away from the minimalistic simplicity of the original artist. Going from something truly modernist but still very 2000s to just, much more generic what the kids call "fruitier metro" or whatever. I just finished watching a feature length video essay on the series, and the way the guy frames it, the third game was designed without the original artist's input and it shows so clearly in the new characters. Christ, it's like if Shadow the Hedgehog in all his glory was added while the rest of the Sonic cast was still being designed by Oshima.
Then you have this spiritual successor done by an entirely different artist who's style is amazing and I love it and I'm buying the fuck out of this game, but is also nowhere near the original series design ethos with only some callbacks. Like, there is a reoccurring eye motif, but the vibe is completely different. This one is going for like a slightly creepy-cute thing with heavy emphasis on the cute (more like odd-cute?) as opposed to the very raw wackiness of the original. The lack of detail, the minimalism created its own kind of cute factor that was very flexible whereas this style very loudly screams everything it's trying to be.
I won't get what too into this cause it requires more visuals, but look at Patapon 1 gameplay vs Ratatan's too, and like tell me which one really clearly took art direction and gameplay most into account with each other [in terms of readability].
Also as problematic as it may be, I really like the idea of the "tribal" theme the original went for, I'm a sucker for everything I've heard about the Patapon's little culture and religion and shit linked to music. I think I just really like any style where cutesy minimalism feel like sort of suggestions of a character or theme. The Patapons are these bare, infinitely customizable little guys who could become anything, and them thus being a race of guys in this odd world who grow and figure stuff out works very well. They're very much like Kirby obviously in that sense, but even more stripped down. They're vague, they're whimsical. And the third entry's designs are very clearly trying to be really COOL, and the spiritual successor's is very clearly trying to be CUTE in a way the original could just like, be whenever it wanted to.
I'm having an inspiration moment cause I'm just thinking like man... I want my art to be like Patapon 1. I want to be able to really embrace minimalism and master the art of just letting pure shape and color language just speak for itself. I would love to make art that feels like it's at the Patapon 1 and 2 part of the spectrum of 'Yeah, that was an ART game'. Like that was an artstyle that a game was built around, it was so striking to a developer they built an audio-visual experience around it. Whereas by 3 you get the feeling this was just another game, and the successor which is what it is. The art is beautiful, and evocative in a way I can imagine that same deal from, but it's just not That.
I've not played these games, I learned about them 2 hours ago, take this with a whole salt-shaker.
Dreamwork's Trolls Apologia - Mar 2025
A more opinionated companion piece to one of my mini review of mine.
Look, I'm sorry but not enough people give Trolls 2: World Tour enough credit for possibly being one of the best anti-fascist metaphors in MAINSTREAM KIDS animation.
And I have to say "mainstream" and I have to say "kids" cause if I'm not hyper-specific enough someone could say, 'Erm, actually the best anti-fascist animated film ever is this avant garde small studio film from the '70s which traumatized me when I was 8'. Or like. Spiderverse. But no, I mean like it ha s an amazing anti-fascist message for a baby corpo slop film, and I think it's really, really important those have very resonant metaphors like that.
I want the children who only know movies with bright colors and pop songs to get stories using those to teach them the fundamental ideas of acceptance and the diversity in the world. I don't care if all the genres representing cultures in the Trolls world are just the pop-adjacent cousins of those it claims to represent, because it still primes children to understand there is a greater world of art and ideas outside the current Top 50 list, and might make them turn around and have conversations with their parents about older or less mainstream music. I like that it very unsubtly has the black-coded Trolls (who originally just had one comic relief character) tell the tale of cultural appropriation in the music industry, and how there is a very fine line between the good-guy liberal "we're all the same" and bad-guy fascist "I will make us all the same". I like that it primes children to be comfortable with hip-hop, R&B, and black-centric music's political roots.
I like that the movie is funny and fun and colorful and was made by people who had fun and obviously thought about how to really REALLY introduce how toxic fascist rhetoric is for young children. Trolls good.
Cursed Ranking Video - Feb 2025
Collection of little gimmicks or bits I would perform on the internet if I had the clout to make them funny enough.
If I were a lowstakes video "essay" Youtuber type, the first thing I would do upon getting mildly popular would be to host a livestream with the title of "I Rank The Paraphilias on The Wikipedia List" with a really clickbait thumbnail and everything. But slowly evolve it from whinging at mental illness to genuine Socratic debate about ethics and sexual deviancy.
Cursed Gimmick Blog - Mar 2025
Wanna make one of those "Blorbo is X" suggestion blogs, but instead of X being predetermined it's one where I allow people to suggest incredibly hyper-specific ethnicity headcanons. Not racial like "Blorbo is Black!", "Blorbo is East Asian!, but more like "Blorbi is a Syrian-Mexican Jew from Mexico City!" or "Blorbo is an 8th century Chinese Nestorian Christian!"
I would gladly accept - even encourage - these hyper-specific suggestions to be left for characters who are like, those object guys from the Youtube shows, or obscure children's media characters.
Splatoon Essayist Blunder - Feb 2025
As always, I adore stories that take themselves seriously but aren't afraid to - or even relish the chance to - present themselves as silly as possible. And it's tragic when that purposeful dissonance isn't accepted by some of the best minds in the community...
All the smartest Splatoon Youtube essayists are cursed with a sickness called "Assuming Splatoon Should Overtly Take Itself Seriously When Handling Serious Topics" despite the fact that it's entire - ENTIRE - gimmick is being a post apocalyptic world where hedonistic idiot sea life engage in race wars so they can buy cool shoes.
I'm sorry, if you can't handle the complex group trauma of one of the races in the world being expressed through a VR baby octopus who does uwuspeak I think you're just weak.
Addition
"Big Fry is a bit too magical and Mr Grizz is a bit too cartoony" -- I AM GRABBING YOU BE THE SHOULDERS, LOOK AROUND YOU! LOOK AT THE WORLD OF CARTOON SQUIDS WHO WEAR JORDANS AND LISTEN TO SQUID ROCK! WHY ARE YOU IMPOSING NONSENSICAL LIMITS ON WHAT THIS WOULD CAN BE?!?!
THEY'RE EFFECTIVELY IMMORTAL AND OCTOLINGS LIVE INN FLOATING CITIES UNDERGROUND!
3DWI.scr Playing 5D Chess - Jan 2025
My mini review has all my thoughts more in order, this goes over some of my beef with other interpretations, and one in particular... Fun fact, actually! Said interpretation similarly using "people are more desensitized than ever today" was the direct inspiration for one of my college essays questioning that!
3DWI.scr is crazy cause watching the popular video essays you get supernatural readings which in itself could become its own topic of an essay related to themes in the work about people unwilling to reflect on where the line is drawn between discussing fantasy and reality. But then there is also an interpretation where there is a somewhat supernatural aspect to the story and it is about a sort of community forming around shares subconscious desires to be heard projected onto something else. Mr. Petscop is out here writing like 5D stories, it is SO good.
Addition
I'm also now very against supernatural readings of the text because my first introduction to it was by someone who explained the motivations for abuse committed in the story very oddly... They said in the video something along the lines of "There's a lot of theories about why abuse is committed" and in the commends when someone was more straightforward about those theories, they replied that what they meant was that it was "Very hard for good people to empathize with those motivations'. Which is the most dinging, alarm bells, [LOUD INCCORECT BUZZER] response imaginable.
You are not immune to rationalizing and committing abuse! There is no ontological characteristic defining who does or does not participate in it! I don't wanna hear it! ANd having that mindset going into a story like this and leaning into supernatural explanations for [how characters interact with the in-universe abuse] is stinky AF.
Angel Dust of Hazbin Hotel Fame - Nov 2023
Something really embarrassing I have to admit is that I LOVE the gay spider[*] from the demon hotel webshow[**] as a character concept so fucking much. Any time I think about him I am so infuriated he was the creation of Vizziepoop[***] and not a more promising work combining adult themes and cartoon media.
Like he's a closeted Italian mobster who went to hell and became a gay drag queen in order to indulge in the aspects of his life he never could and he was turned into a funny pink cartoon spider, like WHY ID HE IN THAT TRAINWRECK OF A SERIES?
Realistically he could only exist in an idea like that, but what I hate specifically is that I have very little faith in Vizpo*** to execute on the character properly. Don;t get me wrong, I know she is cooking with him! I know she earnestly with all her heat wants to craft a nuanced and engaging character in him. I've been following her since her Die Young and speedpaint days, and she has adored him and has been working on him for years. I just don't think those years will pay off at all.
I need to steal custody of this stupid fucking character from her, I can't stand it.
[*Angel Dust, **Hazbin Hotel, ***Vivziepop]
Angel Dust After the Fact - Jan 2025
OK, NOW THAT I'VE WATCHED IT I'M THINKING ABOUT THIS AGAIN UNIRONICALLY.
I was really hoping that say, before that last big battle we would get the characters having a nice little moment to talk about themselves and maybe bring up what their lives where like. Hell -- maybe even how they died so they could joke a bit about their potential upcoming second deaths. I think that that is definitely something that makes this setting so interesting, that everyone has not just the over-the-top gag of what they're doing in hell, but of how they got here. And more importantly, some of these characters are deeply enriched by understanding what the fuck their deal was and how it informs their characters in hell.
Those characters is Angel Dust. It's just Angel Dust, he's the only one I know who has a backstory (or maybe HAD...) and it's what makes him compelling to watch and not AS horrifying as he is to audiences not in the know. If you're not in that know because it's not in the fucking show and Vivzie hasn't talked about this since like 2016????: The original pitch of Angel Dust is that he is this over the top flamboyant gay spider in a pinstripe suit because in life he was a mobster. He is in hell for being a mobster, not for being gay as many people were aghast to assume from the pilot and show. And they had no reason not to because IT'S NOT FUCKING IN THE TEXT [OR SUBTEXT] OF THE SHOW.
I know that Vivzie's whole thing is that she wants to express her characters as edgy caricatures first and let their true colors unravel, so to me the hints or reveal of Angel's real pre-death life would realistically come in the form of him having outbursts of stereotypically Italian mob-brat sociopathy. It would be a fun bookend on his stupid little character, giving him one other [equally offensive] thing to concentrate on besides being a genuinely horrific gay stereotype. But just... no. Besides him pulling out tommy guns when it's funny there is NO HINT of this in the show. It's sad, reflects on an egregious miscalculation in concept vs execution, and worse - might imply that this redeeming aspect of his character has been downplayed or removed altogether. Without that shit I genuinely... aaammm not as interested in Angel Dust as I used to be and that is TRAGIC.
Angel Dust... you will always be Antonio Ragno, the most closeted mob goon who died and decided to become the over the top gay clown you were nevere allowed to be in life. *I* care about you taking your death as a chance to live your silly little dreams in a fucked up way.
Hazbin Hotel and Cannibal Town - Jan 11
Watching Hazbin Hotel was a Harrowing experience for sure, for reasons said here and also in my mini review of it. The more time passes the more aware I become of just how BAD Vivziepop is at any level of social commentary while also trying to touch on such horrendous topics both for jokes and in seriousness and it's... painful...
I am amazed by so much about Hazbin Hotel now that I'm finally, FINALLY watching it. There's so much to comment on, but I have GOT to get this out of the way that has been distracting me going into the final episode. I need you to know I'm like grimacing in a mix of pain and amusement right now. I feel like a teacher about to tell a student their essay earned the most entertaining F I've ever seen.
I want to do a little case study in Vivziepop's design ethos in the Cannibal Town bit y'know. I don't have the steam to write a full essay right here, but I will try to get into this and how it relates to something that so fascinates me about her art. I was a fan of Vivziepop back in like 2014 when she first gained some notoriety in the animation community from her Die Young short and I watched nearly every piece of her old art content where she expressed her character designs and story ideas. I was really invested in them when I was younger, I thought and still do think, her designs and ideas are very evocative in a good way, but which have slowly unraveled with time and scrutiny in all respects.
In her show... there's a district in hell run by cannibals, and the WHOLE gag of them is that instead of being your usual sort of racist stereotype they're a kitschy little Victorian looking district who still sing about loving consuming flesh and blood and all that. See, this was evocative IN 2014, but it's not 2014. Which is not really interesting to say in itself because the show is utterly drowning in early 2010s, Hot Topic-ass design sensibilities that I will probably talk about some other time, but what I'm really getting at is the hypothetical thought process behind this.
Vivzie is a lover of all things impish and vintage, so of course in hell she thinks there should be a place full of cannibals who go beyond the usual stereotypes. And in her mind she's imagining how evocative the idea of smiling genteel demons running around eating human fingers is, and goes with it. And a plus for her, it skirts around the racialized baggage attached to the taboo of cannibalism, maybe she even thinks it's anti-racist to spin things like this. But like... it really really stops there.
Hazbin Hotel wants to use its framing of heaven and hell to make a social commentary on morality obviously, and in the way it's doing it it also is creating a sort of statement of class. There is this idea of moral meritocracy that angels are exploiting to keep themselves and those humans they like about those they dislike for arbitrary reasons, and just in the language - written and visual - of how heaven and hell are distinguished you see this slums vs metropolis thing going on. But I mean, someone else can probably tell you about how busted it is, so I won't get into it, I'll just say that comparing hell to any sort of metaphor for a ghetto where disadvantaged and flawed people are grouped together unsafely looks bad [without due care].
This is where I come back to Cannibal Town, which is so so so SO obviously a chance to make the most blunt-obvious social commentary on human exploitation that Vivzie just DOESN'T, cause she finds people in Victorian pristine garb talking about eating flesh funny, and that is the full extent of her conversation on these ideas. There's really, really nothing else it seems Vivziepop feels like saying about a kitschy upper-middle class town of people who eat other people, other than 'isn't it funny when upper middle class people want to eat others'. And it does boggle my mind when so much other talk exploitation, abuse, and class stratification is so laid bare on the table of this show.
In design and narrative, this show really likes to touch on these deep but kinda basic tenets of social commentary, but keeps doing the 2014 Hot Topic reversal of motifs and then just leaves that there like it's something in itself. MMMaybe we could be doing more to say something about how when a bunch of people are arbitrarily thrown together in a lawless area under very broad assumption of moral degeneracy, some seek to wield power over others by reinforcing their mutual dehumanization? And how then those slumlords try to sell scraps of privilege to enrich themselves and stuff, and how bad that is?
Like we kinda do sometimes, but then you have Cannibal Town, which could have so fucking obviously been about liiiike??? IDK, the overlord of the area is someone who takes peoples' souls and then gives them an insatiable urge to consume both physically and material goods, which is symbolized through cannibalism and exploitation of other demons so that they are further reliant on the overlord??? AND they all sit in their little village thinking they're above others because they keep everything so orderly only by running themselves on exploitation and consumption of other human resources. I don't even fucking know man, but I just know that the Cannibal Town in the show is nothing but a joke and wank session for Vivziepop's historical fashion fetish and it drives me up the wall.
2024
Writing Mental Illness Revisited - Dec 2024
Revisiting this old thing but a semester of school later and more about interpretation and headcanon than anything.
As someone who (adjusts collar of non-existent suit) is earning their degree in diagnosing characters with mental illness*, it is actually a very bad idea to do that with any sense of solidity whatsoever. The "science" of psychology and psychopathology in itself is a mess and always the more you look into things the more obvious it is that it's all a mess of spectrums and such. But then, when dealing with fiction, there's an entirely new dimension to it. That being that the character is not real, and serves a distinct narrative purpose above all else.
*I'm literally just one semester into my Psych degree, this is a joke
In case of writing a character whom you know you want to make mentally ill, it is always best to just start with personal traits exaggerated into neurotic traits and then after letting that stew, seeing if it fits into a disorder. If it does, look at that and what other traits are organized around/comorbid with it and see if there's anything else that would be compelling for the character to have. If it doesn't, consider those typical surrounding factors and reactions of popular disorders, but also legit sometimes people just have shits-fucked-soup disorders. In like every category in the DSM there's a vague, general catch-all disorder diagnosis that encompasses a range of issues. You are first and foremost building a character and a complex psychological profile should not be a mold to fit them in, but a research of human behavior that can be used to enhance the character. And also, maybe to make sure if you've already settled on something psychologically complicated or stigmatized for a character, you don't play out old harmful stereotypes.
In case of headcanoning or adapting a pre-existing character, it's even more important to look at what's there as a completely open book when you don't have creator confirmation. And even when a creator says yes or no to a certain specific disorder as inspiration for a character, it lowkey doesn't mean shit because a good character is not a gijinka of the DSM as I say, they're a guy who has experiences that hopefully coalesce into the portrait of a certain mental illness, but which are bound to heavily overlap with like at least 5 others. Even if a character is written to be something really specific, it is just inevitable that more ideas are open, and more ideas should be encouraged without diminishing the intended portrayal cause I mean it's not like anyone is NOT dieing for good representation.
Please be open and patient with your fellow mentally ill fiction enjoyers as well as sensitive to the socially constructed nature of the field of psychopathology when you start giggling and kicking your feet thinking of how fun it is to put blorbo in the label box you relate to.
Internet Horror and The Unspeakable of Nostalgia - Dec 2024
Still riding the high of FTF I wrote a good ramble about what it so tapped into within the genres of Internet Horror that captures me and influences aspects of my original story, Neonverse.
It's fucking crazy when you watch an Analog/Digital Horror piece so good it retroactively makes others scarier because it just executes upon the same ideas so well you better understand what others were going for.
Like -- yes this is still about fucking Fazbear Toddler Fun because it is definitely the one I've seen with the highest level of detail in replicating a very niche old style of media in the late 90s edutainment games. (Not always, but by the end it's like never missing). ANd seeing such a pristine replica - so good that when nothing spooky is going on it actually brings YOU back to YOUR childhood - start DOING THE BIT is fucking ghastly.
Especially the end of the last episode where its beautiful clumsy uses of CG reminded me a lot of shit from the time that leaked into my childhood later. I think namely this show 3-2-1 Penguins, a really fun kids series made by the VeggieTales team. And then when the video started being spooky it hit me how goofy but absolutely fucking horrific it would be to watch something stupid like that and feel it watching you. Feel it judging you. Feel it asking you to remember. Remember something.
Like it now has me looking back on shit like Walten Files which always scared me cause I can't stand (/pos) the way it plays with faces to represent harm done, but now that layer of context, or purpose of the image is so much worse. It's not just that you or Sophie are seeing spooky faces, it's that that grotesque image plastered over the innocuous experience is asking you to remember something. To know something terrible and horrific that your mind and this game/media are struggling to even form into a coherent image.
As I've said before, I think this wave of indie horror is playing on the sort of hyperawareness any generation born after the invention of home video or VHS has of their past. The fact that so much of it is so easily traceable either vicariously through recordings of children's media or literally through family-made (and with YouTube, self-made) archives of ourselves. I think we feel how often media these days more intimately than ever asks us to remember. It's not as literally as displayed in this horror, but it's an implicit message that reaches us at various volumes and with different tones.
The analog/digital/creepypasta trope - with its tendency to conflate the personal and the commercial (especially with the FNAF-like "game I just found was made by the brand extension of my family's old business") - is the fear of that ask becoming louder and clearer and more sinister. It's nostalgia becoming an accusation, of accidentally treading upon demons from your past hiding in the cracks of what most made you feel safe at the time.
Or in the case of Fazbear Toddler Fun, a demon you left in your past has tried to find solace in something, and you with your nostalgic yet cynical proddings have awoken it.
Into Neonverse I
Anyways, this was just the preliminary ramble for my further discussion of my original story which has me thinking very hard about how to incorporate these emotions which the analog/digital horror genre rests upon into my non-horror project.
Like I said in a near copy of this post where I also brought up the much less horror-focused series Angel Hare, there is a lot to explore in the aesthetic tropes and emotional cues of the genre. My project is a lot more like Angel Hare in that way that it is somewhat of a thing that tells you that the recordings are watching you, but not that they want to harm you. If anything, much as a child would like to believe, they want to help you. I think Angel Hare's pinch of horror is more just on the unsettling side than anything, basically a "The Toys/Media Are Alive" bit with some Implications.
The thing I'm going for is a mix of that with a heavier dive into that accusatory side. It begins as a blend of toys, media, and imaginary characters are real and aware of their duty to children, but gets a bit more creepypasta with it. Specifically, one of the characters begins to cut through the vague and undefined layer between the "player"/in-universe child, and themself to remind them of their existence having been a forgotten plaything. See, this is like Disney's W-IR Turbo levels of shit, but I have been GRIPPED by the language of analog and digital horror for so long and have always wanted to use THAT as the reveal.
Specifically, we come back to what I was saying is such a potent and exciting theme in these works - being demanded to remember. The way these series do this is so delightfully gruesome and creative, through innocuous glitches which build into increasingly direct and haunting imagery.
I haven't watched it (pussy ass), but I've heard great things about the cinematography of Skinamarink and how so much of it is literally just shots into dark, barely lit corners of a house - a sort of purposeful play on Liminal Space visuals. The disconnected clips I've seen, despite, as said, LITERALLY JUST BEING SHOTS OF DARK HALLWAYS have really stuck with me, and I think regularly about how so many of my own memories of my childhood home are those kinds of snapshots of random angles I used to sit in as a child. And of course, those pleasant daytime memories would not exists without the parallel flashes of my childhood fear of the dark when creeping around those same rooms at night.
In the Walten Files too, one of the images that sticks with me most is from Bunny Farm when the cabinet (which for some reason is actually housing a PC edutainment-like game) shows Sophie her mother's death. And by shows, of course like Skinamarink we simply have a shot staring into an unlit corner as genuinely blood-curdling screams and blood spill out of the void. There's the implication that Sophie was there to see that if I remember right, which then argues that we're bringing in some traumacore elements - the blurring and black spaces representing the repressed and unthinkable.
I'm not planning on going that far, but as I'm trying to point out, I'm very into the use of those odd memory snapshot-like angles to say "remember". As if the game itself is trying to drag recognition kicking and screaming out of the depths of you mind and can only muster these broken pieces of nostalgic geometry - the purpose of the related Liminal Space movement of course.
This also blends with the other theme of my work, that being play/imaginary spaces. In this story, that is the imaginary world of a child expressed as a video game one. That comes from my experience being hopelessly obsessed with the most mundane of video game spaces and wishing to live in them despite their whimsically surreal and non-euclidean character. I really do think the medium offers an unparalleled kind of immersion because of that lived-in factor of interaction. The way I used to live in those virtual spaces I sometimes find myself trying to re-inhabit my old homes in my mind, and as said I am sometimes left only with those eerie snapshots. But I think because of my familiarity with the brokenness of video game worlds, I don't find them repulsive.
But the problem is that unlike those spaces of video game and other media creation which are at least made with people and characters in mind, there is something unstable feeling about those corners of my memory. That same feeling that liminal spaces tap into exactly, and sometimes I feel that analog horror-like call to Remember. Something. To be brought back, to have a past sense of self invade on my current person.
That feeling I first experienced some 7 years ago now, and it sacred the FUCK out of me. It was not from an analog horror or a liminal space, it was genuinely just form my own stupid head and it's fascinated me enough to inspire this project I've been working on for nearly that long. That ability for a space I once considered safe, my own mind, to implode and intrude on itself and draw that deep psychological pull into some void out of me is what I see in these indie art movements and I wanna eat them.
Into Neonverse II
AAAH SHIT! And don't get me fucking started on Myhouse.wad and how it plays with 3D space, memory, and dreams. The nichely nostalgic action of recreating your house in a game - living out that dream of the Canon-To-My-Mind tweet on how children interact with VG spaces - and thus of looking back on it like a memory. The use of repetition and almost every space in the game sharing the same layout of the house, the mirroring, the text, THE MUSIC!
Memory Entry is exactly what it sounds like to be remembering your childhood home at 4am. And I still get chills from when I was told the song playing in the gas station was a famously unrecognized radio broadcast, the poster child of the "I heard a song and can never find it again" experience. If you want to talk about liminal spaces let's talking about liminal fucking spaces, bro! Myhouse is on a different level.
I regularly think about how the hell to incorporate that shit into the story too. As I've implied, a lot of that uneasy nostalgia I'm trying to tap into is about that experience of remembering a childhood home and the person you once were. I have already countless times tried to rebuild my old houses in the only sandbox I know, Minecreaft, throughout the years alongside one's from my own dreams. Both which will obviously bare resemblance to each other.
The most obvious idea would be to add an area that mimics the layout of my old home, which is the easiest thing to reference - it was like generic NYC townhouse #4. But I don't have a 3D game like Myhouse where I can make a perfect replica, mine is a 2D side-scroller, I would have to get creative. That's actually where the idea of those liminal images comes in, of maybe for backgrounds or some other visual relying on those aesthetics for mood.
Another big inspiration was watching skyboxes in Super Mario Odyssey's sub-levels, some of which are very faint, dark patterns. I think it would be interesting to see those themes go from whimsical and abstract to reminiscent of old wallpaper, which could also be comforting but with context becomes intrusive.
The Fazbear Toddler Fun Madness - November 2024
A catalogue of my slow descent into obsession with Fazbear Toddler Fun, my new favorite digital horror series and FNAF fan-anything!
Started watching one of the 10 million FNAF VHS series instead of doing homework, and it's (purposeful) garbage cheap entertainment game vibes reminded me of the not-garbage, aesthetically-unpolished-only-in-the-UI-and-nothing-else game Sheep Raiders for the PS1. And then it made me think, man, I should make an analog horror series about Sheep Raiders cause I'm the one person on earth who cares about it. But then I actually started having these really deep thoughts about the spirit of childhood media consumption that analog horror twists into fear, - that like, "I saw something off in a game/cartoon that wasn't supposed to happen and maybe I'm the only one who ever did?" But also that can be a very comforting and fun emotion in a way...
My love of Sheep Raiders is because it incidentally intersects two things I care a lot about - early 3D game aesthetics and Looney Tunes - in a beautiful but ultimately goofy way, and it feels very made for me in that sense. Things like its dumb looking menus reinforce the fact that it is a niche, unpolished project made for God knows what market that has found itself lodged in my brain. Sometimes you look at a game you never played and you just know had you the chance to play it as a child you would have lived in it effectively. And I think what makes a good creepypasta/analog horror thing appealing is that it reminds you a bit of that feeling, when you've seen something unpolished enough times that its quirks and skips stand out to you more and more, and you can find something unsettling in that with reflection. I did not grow up on VHS tapes, but I did grow up almost exclusively on movie disks that I would watch so many times they began to skip, or that certain oddities of tone started to stick out to me, or that I felt like the characters and I had formed a bond.
I want to find more analog horror/creepypasta revival stuff that embraces that Way Children Interact With Media Fundamentally Differently niche. I think the best example of this off the top of my head is Angel Hare, which I recommend not cause it's super scary - its actually very not - but because of that it explores fictional character bonds and nostalgia more blatantly. I own one of their kickstarter plushes cause I just think the series is neat for that even if it gets kinda corny. It uses tropes of analog horror as a framework to tell a very different kind of story about PSA edutainment characters that is dear to some ideas I want to write about myself. Namely escapism and guardianship.
I guess to bring this back to FNAF - someone recommend me a FNAF Analog Horror that is not super bad with scopophobia and is about Michael/some kid re-examining their relationship to the animatronics as childhood fictional friends and mascots turned living nightmare and chariot of trauma!
Cawthon Cartoon Homage I
Ok, I'm name-dropping the series I'm watching as Fazbear Toddler Fun because ON ONE OF THE EPISODES THEY FUCKING MIMICKED THE STYLE OF SCOTT CAWTHON'S ACTUAL OLD CARTOONS AND IT IT BRILLIANT! That was honestly such an untapped fucking goldmine of inspiration, Scott's older works are fascinating, I should (pirate and) play some of his older games.
ACTUALLY WHY HAS NO ONE MADE A FNAF ANIMATION SERIES EMULATING THAT STYLE OF SCOTT'S, I WOULD DIE FOR THAT!
(Also, old Christian cartoons in general, but I think Angel Hare and Mandela Catalogue kinda both have that covered to some extent. If you wanna talk about odd tonal dissonance, try telling biblical stories to children on a budget!)
Cawthon Cartoons Homage II
Springtrap being the closest we've ever come within the FNAF series to seeing a human person in Scott's style is so funny cause when you watch his older cartoons you're just like, "Oh, holy shit his humans just look like that". Its so incidentally kinda creepy, and I think it really goes to who how dead on people were with calling his characters odd, and how genius he was for taking that into horror. Like he accidentally had a kind of uncanny but earnest children's cartoon style that people fail to emulate in horror content everyday. What was his problem??
Finale
OH GOD THEY COOKED!!
Fazbear Toddler Fun Cooked...
A further appreciation post from a couple days after the bomb hit.
Lowkey been really fucking obsessed with the Fazbear Toddler Fun analog horror series for days now, and I hate it cause it is utterly phenomenal in ways that just look goofy as fuck to anyone who isn't incredibly in tune both with authentic recreation of niche video game visual tropes and the narrative significance of the Five Nights at Freddy's chronology.
The final sequence of the last episode has unparalleled levels of attention to detail in replicating every ounce of old edutainment game tomfoolery, and to top it off, it does not even stumble for a second in using that to tear the game's in-universe existence and the protagonist apart.
Cause it's not just the period accuracy of the IRL video games but the timeline of the in-universe Freddy's locations and rebrands. Like it's actually a choice that the characters are based around the FNAF2 location cast, just with Foxy likely cause he was so iconic and The Mangle (adorably adapted as "Funtime", Foxy's little sister) alone wouldn't cut it. You can actually assume this is a late 90s game in context of being after the brands peak in the 80s, or honestly if you're weird like me you always got a very 90s vibe from the Toy Animatronics and assume this game was in tandem with THAT rebrand. OK, OK - BUT EITHER WAY. The game as a vapid attempt at a rebrand borrows its cues from the most dramatic and vapid canon reband, and it makes ever call back to the original tragedy sting so much more.
FNAF2's location has always been one of the furthest away form the Bite of '83 and the original MCI, with the FNAF1 location existing more directly in its shadow cause it's where the story was first told even if it's chronologically the furthest from it. The sort of grunge and shoddiness that defines the atmosphere of the other tragedies is not present there, and it's abysmally short run (canonically only open for a few weeks as every other restaurant was presumable open for years) gives a certain innocence and purity to it. The Toy Animatronics did not have the time to accumulate that physical and metaphorical rot which pervades the brand through their felted counterparts. They were literally retired and revived to carry the legacy of that pain, but the Toys were a genius - and short-lived - attempt to almost fully start over.
But this all to fucking say - when the ghost of CC uses the game's stupid little movie maker tool to tell the story of his death, and when he snaps that misshapen model of Fredbear atop the shiny new Toy Freddy on that stage... it's FR. It's so fucking FR. It's so - "How dare you think you can escape... how dare you think you can run from that past while still leaving a trail - while never truly letting go!"
It gets SO WELL at that angle of corporate white-washing and greed that is the ONE THEME in FNAF, to the point I can (almost) forgive it for its demonization of Michael. Because he ties into it too. Oh you think it's just cute and a little messed up that they tried to overwrite the tragedy of my death? You think it's just a spooky little game to come back here, to this complete mockery and erasure of my pain? The way that you said you were sorry, but I knew you never were? Like fucking Christ man.
The magic of obtuse storytelling methods is how they can thread together odd symbolism and ideas into a story in a way something straightforward cannot. Stores of haunting are fascinating because it allows for the expression of harsh and terrible emotions through manipulation of symbols, and I love when internet horror takes that to the umpteenth level in the found footage/found game subgrenre, by twisting those symbols of the truly light and unassuming in media even when it's goofy AF.
When you're dealing with the death of children at a bootleg Chuck E. Cheese, you're going to get a Chuck E. Cheese haunting, but the point is to embrace that. Find the perversity of something that is supposed to be so light and childish being forces to bare a heavy, meaningful pain. For a model of a lumpy, crusty dancing bear in a CG point and click game to be the most chilling graphic imaginable.
Preserving the Camp
Though very Sonic focused, I feel very deeply about what I mean about capturing the overall cultural energy surrounding series like it and how that creates a barrier with my attempts at paying homage.
How will humanity survive without more beautifully self-absorbed, campy stories with the most absurd but stylish plots and characters imaginable whose only central themes are hared of the government and friendship...
Elaboration:
OK, but I have GAWT to make something that is an ode specifically to Sonic the Hedgehog one day. I have my major OC project, which in parts takes inspiration from Sonic, but like IDK man. I do need to make an all-the-way flashy fast-paced story about weird gay animals fighting progressively more insane metaphors for industrialism.
It may... just come down to an AU sometime, but I really do wanna practice having a lot of OCs again and how to synthesize inspirations into original projects. Besides my OC story, I have a very elaborate Kirby AU which I think at this point I'm comfortable selling as Inspired By Kirby even though the way it is is in some ways just as confusing as calling it an AU lmao.
But like, with both Sonic and Kirby, the both just have such a strong self of self-identity that when I think of expanding upon them I can't because the characters and tropes that most identify it are so unique to it. Like if I tried to make my own cast of weird gay animals, I don't know how I wouldn't just come up with the Sonic cast cause the Sonic cast is one of the things I love most about it. And not even them collectively as a cast of weird gay animals, each of them specifically has been introduced and evolved in such an iconic but haphazard way - like how do you replicate that???
That's the kind of thing that you let come to you as you start your own thing, as I hope to one day with my characters. But if you specifically are chasing an homage to that sense of chaos and legacy that only comes from being Sonic the Hedgehog the Franchise, you just have to make an AU or your own take on Sonic the Hedgehog the Franchise.
Which I keep forgetting isn't even that weird to do cause a lot of Super Hero franchises and other long running, generational series basically just constantly let someone in to make license-sanctioned fanfiction and it's the best. ANd then one of the greatest cinematic projects of our century so far (Spiderverse) is just about how beautiful that plurality of expression for one character is like fuuuck maaan!
Fuck me, I'll make an AU someday lol. I love people who do their own Sonic interpretations. Sonic fans will live forever.
Bakshi and Blackness in Cartoons - Aug 2024
CW: For use of anti-black slurs (the name of a movie), and other discussions of historically racist caricatures and sentiments.
Get really pissed whenever I think about Coonskin by Ralph Bakshi because I need to rewatch it to see if it might actually be a fave of mine. I want to go over all of Bakshi's filmography sometime and really digest how he deals with depicting black people (especially in Fritz the Cat cause the black crows are so cute!), cause he's in an interesting perspective where is is undoubtedly sympathetic to us and grew up around us, but expresses this in ways that are sooo over the top we commonly see them now as only acceptable For A Black Person To Do.
Like, he's some white Jewish guy from the slums, he doesn't really have the right to reclaim racist iconography as we think of it today, but at the same time, if someone's doing interesting artistic work, they're doing interesting artistic work. And I, as a black person, have actually been really inspired by that film ever since I watched it.
Ever since the rubberhose style became super hot again cause of Cuphead and Bendy, I've seen people actively downplay how goddamn racist old cartoons were, or I've seen people pick up a clip from an old film, andI just watch in horror like, "Chat... they don't know this is a quietly racist animation trend..." But it's not even just that old cartoons were racist and had racist trends, it was baked into their fundamental styles of comedy and cartooning - they were built to either exclude or humiliate blackness. And I feel like Coonskin is a work that expresses that truth very very loudly, but with some purpose at least.
I personally have wanted to tap into that idea since I started playing with golden age art styles, but for the tone I set in my shit that'd be too overbearing. Plus, maybe as an actual black person something unique for me and not Bakshi is the wish to actually see myself represented in those old cartoon styles as more than just an object of controversy. I've also been meaning to watch more of The Proud Family and works by Bruce W. Smith cause of that too. I heard in an interview he was motivated to draw because he wanted to see black folks in that mid-century, modernist style and like, SAME!
But it's actually way easier to work black features into that super flexible style than it is to brute force them into the centerline/rubberhose ones where their origins can be traced back to blackface. You guys remember that fucking lesson, right? How the entire generic rubberhose face is a play on the Sambo lips, and that's why the mouths and eyes are white but the body is black. If you're unfamiliar with that idea or don't believe it, look up Bosko, Warner Bros.'s first attempt at a mascot and see if you can tell me what he's supposed to be.
It's more of an uphill battle, but not impossible to make it work in those styles. Through, I have also considered the utility of borrowing directly from those racist designs to express a meta-contextual feeling/understanding that that is what you look like as a black person in that time period - that is you in the dominant narrative vision of the time. No matter what you are as a black person, to the historical zeitgeist, you just appear as some flavor of coon, y'know.
It could be a very potent visual tool I think, and I don't know if I'd be considering that if not for Bakshi and my relationship to Coonskin and its theming. Which is the point, Bakshi was one of those racey types who always wanted to get people upset or start a conversation or whatever. It's interesting to look at older but earnest expressions of this that would seem disastrous by today's standards. Imagine "The couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" but true and on steroids.
Further on Blackness and the Modernist Style
Because this post is a banger in my heart, I wanted to reiterate on the style thing. Specifically actually, I wanted to show off some examples of black characters/features presented in the mid-century modernist style that I found in a recent book I read (which gave me those terms):
These are simply in order of me finding them in the book. If you're familiar with what I meant about the rubberhose/center-line style and how it is built for blackface, it's so fun to look at how this new approach to cartooning opened up so many opportunities for ways to draw black characters. But even so, as with the first and third ones, you can see there's room for old stereotypes; A new way to draw racist old gags.
My absolute favorite is that last guy, he is so fucking perfect. He's just a piece of concept art for an abandoned cartoon by a Storyboard studios, but he is immaculate. He is so mild and soft and handsome. Even compared to his contemporaries on this post, he is like decades ahead in terms of design - undoubtedly black in features and shapes but doesn't go for the obvious or stereotypical traits of exaggeration like the lips. He looks so confidently and comfortably designed, it's kind of bonkers. I even wanted to frame him around his co-stars cause just look at how well he fits in with the line-up as Just Another Lad, and not The Black One. Like, that's a character I would expect to be designed today, and it's so sweet to see.
Still, for this (comparatively) stellar track record, I can't overstate how sparse these designed are in a sea of that generic big-nose designs that aaall these studios used. It's a eurocentric sensibility, and honestly the biggest challenge of trying to design a black character for this style at its most common. For example of what I mean, here's the art chosen for the cover of this book:
This is what 80% of characters resemble in this style.
So unless you g o for a more conventional and less abstract approach (much like The Proud Family), you could otherwise try something like the gentleman reading the newspaper in that UPA cartoon, where he still has that big ole shnozz, but it has a recognizably black shape to it on top of his skintone. One of my first introductions to UPA actually was their Brotherhood of Man short, where they simply portrayed every "race" as the same big-nose guy design with different colors. Led to some... interesting uses of yellow and red, but next to the use of stark-white and pitch-black, I think it's fair enough. ESPECIALLY when considering the idea of the short then does not rely on typical offensive caricatures to communicate a racially diverse cast.
Eitherway, I think it's funny that when trying to use generic rubberhose styles it's a struggle to make a black character without falling into the abundant pitfalls of blackface, while with the modernist style there is such an absence of black features in the generic style you struggle to fit them in. This is why the Cuphead artists were fucking GENIUSES in their research, and the fact they made a very unique but still loyal rubberhose character in Cuphead and Mugman deserves an award. Their competition didn't. But I am really thankful to the inherent diversity of design of the 50s and even JUST within UPA, cause it means which I started trying to replicate it, I didn't feel pressured to emulate something specific, but to try to get to the roots of their sensibilities. It is something that has helped my art so much it's insane honestly.
This is my secret essay to tell you to learn about the early history of US cartoons if you see yourself as being influenced by any of the styles. And to be wary of how cartoons reflect historical attitudes and shape popular ideas about the world through "light-hearted" comedic imagery.
Messy Historical Fiction Writing - Jul 2024
In reference to this cool post on how progressive people of the past didn't always reason and speak as we do today.
OMG it's actually so fun to think about characters having limited vocabulary and thinking/expressing themselves in ways without common vocabulary.
The other day I made a whole ass table about how each character one guy knew would try to armchair diagnose his mentally ill ass given they live in like fantasy ancient times. Once again, I should do the kind of hard research OP did in that post for direct quotes, but it's like just fun to try and communicate that.
Addition:
Also please don't be scared to write bigoted characters even ones who are very prominent or otherwise sympathetic. It's really important to be able to step into the mind of those kinds of people to all degrees and understand how they reason and what still makes them human. You gain nothing as a writer or person by blanketing everyone against you as one-dimensionally evil.
Like some people IRL just are kinda fucked up for no good reason. They were born into privilege and see no reason to relinquish it, but it's still worth exploring what about power they value over decency towards their fellow man. There is always SOMETHING at the heart of evil, eve if it's as simple as a self-eating cycle of alienation and exploitation from and of others.
And a lot of people are very very complex in why they become bigots or hold bigoted views. Especially in the past before intersectionality was a really big idea. You could have people who were so incredibly progressive but held on to some medieval fucking views for any number of reasons. Namely fear. The same fear that gripped less politically literally people, but was engraved in them all the same. Or maybe they're just fucking insecure, maybe the idea of justice they have is still very selfish at heart. Making your character an asshole on a fundamental level is fun y'all.
Making them a person or even sympathetic is not endorsement as long as you take the minimum care to express their views aren't true or are grossly oversimplified. There is often a merit from which bigotry springs from, but it's easy to see through with a critical eye people deliberately turn away. And where and why a character does that is fascinating and part of what makes us human. It is a very human flaw to be bigoted.
AI Builds Posting - Apr 2024
Giving some love to one of my favorite digital horror YouTube series out there that really doesn't get enough love.
TRAGIC: Your Current Favorite Piece of Media That Speaks To You On a Deep Emotional Level Is An Amateur Absurdist Internet Horror Series About Amateur Internet Horror, And Is Therefore Unsellable To Most people
Later Elaboration:
Animal Investigator Builds is literally such a great fucking series about trying to make art through burnout, about trying to make art in the shadow of another great work that inspired you but that you can't live up to, about making art when you have a tendency to anthropomorphize and empathize with your ideas and feel a self-eating guilt over their stagnation. About what it feels like to try and make art that is personal when you have nothing left to give, and what it feels like for it to literally suck the life out of you, how you become your own worst critic, nightmare, and abuser. It's so fucking good, and IDGAF it would be worse if it looked or was presented any different. Every crappy looking asset or awkward line read is only a testament to how fucking hard it is to make art and how soul-rending it is to try and put yourself out there when you don;t know what you're doing. I love this fucking series maaaaan.
Final Fantasy VII Remake & Subtlety - Mar 2024
Though kind of just my millionth rag on the FF7R series, I think I touch on something really interesting about the difference between how older and newer games - especially story-driven ones - leave room for player choice to tell a story. There's a lot that FF7R can't help because the studio could never have gotten away with making a game as limited as the OG, but for Christ's sake man.
One of my new surfacing gripes with Final Fantasy VII Remake is how a lot of the moments from the original game that rested heavily on player investment seem completely stripped out of the remake in favor of everything being a constant 60 hour long movie experience.
Like every now and then I hear the original game get shit for not taking its political messaging seriously at certain key set-pieces that are to game-y and chill, like Costa Del Sol and the Gold Saucer, but thats not the whole picture when you consider how much control the player has over the party in that game. Costa Del Sol was just where you landed on the next continent and there was like a guy or two to talk to to point you in the right direction, a few lighthearted interactions to break up the fucked up shit that happened on the boat ride over, and then you could leave. The idea that the original Costa Del Sol indulged in the tourist trap goes only as far as how you, as the player, approached the space. If you got to Costa Del Sol and felt, "Oh, this is a shitty Shinra colonial project, I hate it here," you could book it outta there and maintain some of that disgust. But you fucking can't in the remake and it's horrible.
For some fucking reason the boat ride over is on a cruise ship instead of a military vessel like before, so instead of a funny moment of humanizing the soldiers by being miserable with them, you get this fucking card tournament quest where everyone is suddenly SUPER into all this shit and doesn't care about any of the obvious underlying bullshit of the boat?? And then it's even worse when you get to Costa Del Sol because like... everyone is OK with this glaring parallel to real world colonization and exploitation of island nations?? Even Barret who literally had an amusement park built on the ashes of his home village by the people who burnt it down?? EVEN YUFFIE WHO'S WHOLE SHTICK IS HOW HER HOME WAS INVADED AND TURNED INTO A TOURIST TRAP???
I cannot speak 100% for the original, because I remember it also missing these opportunities, and besides that my memory is hazy, but it's the fact that it wasn't flooded with all these ridiculous cutscenes and extra set-pieces that force you into experiencing areas a certain way, and a way that is just really fucking out of character! And like for as out of character as the original could be, THE REMAKE IS 25 YEARS YOUNGER AND WISER THAN IT, PICK UP THE FUCKING SLACK? But instead we get a fucking beach episode where you can put the girlies in bikinis or some shit. It's such a waste.
AI's One (Missed) Chance to Make Real Art - Mar 2024
A somewhat sympathetic but pensive note on the artistic merit of AI generated images and visual tools
Something sad about the "AI Art" shitstorm is that 'AI' generated images and other stuff totally can be seen as an artform to me, but not as the product of the programs that produced them, but its programmers and the artists of the database that contributed to it.
Computers are tools, and the same way we ooh and awe when we see people make art through a non-traditional tool or process, we could have been doing that with algorithms and appreciating the coding skills required to put it together as well as the artistic sources of it. But, because this idea has been pioneered recently by a bunch of brain-dead, art-hating techbros, many people (very justifiably to me) have a visceral negative reaction to the whole thing.
Computers are a tool, and the same way we ooh and awe when we see people make art through a non-traditional tools or processes, we could have been doing that with algorithms and appreciating the coding skills required to put it together as well as the artistic sources for it. But because this idea has been pioneered recently by a bunch of of brain-dead, art-hating techbros many people (very justifiably to me) have a visceral negative reaction to the whole thing.
It's nice that every now and then the nuances come to light, like when the team of Spiderverse and Klaus discussed their fancy shader algorithms, but like gawd, I hate that we're stuck in this defensive, reactionary state out of fear of what Tech(tm) salespeople and corporations so much more powerful than artists are pushing.
The Disservice of the "Insane Lore" Angle - Feb 2024
A ramble prompted by watching a Kirby "Lore" video that did the very common song and dance of discussing the writing as a cryptic easter egg mess, and not a part of the broader theming of the series and all. Probably one of my biggest media pet peeves not just in the Kirby fandom but a lot of under-respected mediums and series.
I used to be one of those guys when I first joined the Kirby fandom, but every time I hear a discussion of the series writing that starts with "So the Lore is InSaNe-" and not like, "Kirby has a fun writing style that takes advantage of its cute exterior to tell cool stories that reward players' curiosity and leave lots of room for imagination-" I cringe so goddamn hard.
I kinda just hate that people approach things that encourage investment when they don't expect it as inherently absurd. Lit it is fun to joke about how absurd Kirby lore can be, but it really often comes with an air of disrespect or exhaustion rather than like, appreciation that these games are made by people who want to tell interesting stories when they could easily make as much money just making polished fluffy kiddie platformers. And when it's not met with exhaustion, it's met with - like I said before - that tone that it's stupid for a series like this TO have devs who care about writing stuff for it. Which is a whole other thing about people not respecting things made to appeal to kiddie aesthetic or tone.
Maybe the state of low-stakes YouTube video essays just blows cause people play up ignorance and disbelief for engagement, but like I swear to god I hear people use this tone for like actual narrative based games sometimes. Some people don't like, appreciate when a game is made by people who care a shitton in ways that aren't direct gameplay feedback. And they especially don't appreciate it when it comes from something with any sense of tonal dissonance, intentional or not.
Anyways, I love games made by insane people. I love games made with teams who feel like they wanna make something work or say something so bad. I love that energy, especially when invested into something that could easily rest on its laurels or which obviously won't be taken seriously. I love this in a lot of classic campy 2000s games, I love this in insanely niche yet passionate fan-works, and I love it in the Kirby series and its writing. Can we please stop talking about it like it's an annoyance or complete joke?
The Legacy of Mythologized Violence In Fantasy Media - Feb 2024
Explained in the text. Mish-mashing art with completely contrasting vibes can lead to some very intriguing introspection as you try to find where they relate...
Watched the NIN Broken short film and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power in the same day and it had me fucked up in the crib ranting to my bestie about how humans have been abusing art since ancient times to romanticize violence and teach people to forgo their compassion for one another, and how deeply embedded that legacy is in all art and culture, even down to stupid magical princess shows (the She-Ra reboot is good btw)
I'm just fucked up over how we're comfortable romanticizing war and violence if it takes on a certain mythical air, but all those aesthetics of mythic wars of good and evil come from ancient propaganda that was just as corrosive to those people as contemporary propaganda is to us today. Like,,,,
DID YOU KNOW MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS GOT PTSD???? THAT WHILE THE WAR STORIES WE USE TODAY AS FANTASY FLUFF WERE BEING WRITTEN THE PEOPLE THE WERE BASED ON SUFFERENED TRAUMA FROM IT??? I heard that like years ago and I'm still not over it.
Disney's Cinderella and Lost Disney Magic - Dec 2023
Piggy backing off of Star-Ocean-Peahen's great post on how Disney's Cinderella translated the fairytale into a film and filled in many of its logical holes with my own observations on how a lot of those smart writing choices are missed by people who don't see the utility in Disney's common tropes. Peahen's post was abbreviated here but I recommend reading the whole thing.
@Star-Ocean-Peahen:
After watching Cinderella (the original animated movie, which was my favorite as a child), it strikes me how it solves many common problems people have with this fairy tale. Like:
- Why did the Prince want to marry a lady he only met that night? Because his father was going to force him to marry someone, and he genuinely liked this woman.
- Why did Cinderella want to marry a man she only met that night? Because marriage was her best and most secure way to freedom. Fucked up, but you can't say it's unrealistic for the setting of a fairy tale. She also genuinely liked him.
- Why didn't Cinderella save herself? Because in real life, abuse victims should not have to shoulder that responsibility, and usually can't. In real life, you need and deserve an external support system. Asking for help, in this kind of situation, is very important. She is saved by others because she is loved. Because she is not alone. Because she has friends who love her, and want her to be happy and safe and free. Because in real life, people who want to help someone who is suffering are like the mice. We can't pull out miracle solutions, but we can provide companionship and if we're in the right place at the right time, we can help the person find a better life.
- Why didn't the Fairy Godmother save Cinderella from her abusive household, or try to help her sooner? Because she's magic, and magic can't solve your problems. Quote: "Like all dreams, well, I'm afraid it can't last forever." This (and Cinderella's dream of going to the ball) is a metaphor for pleasurable things in bad circumstances. An ice cream won't get rid of your depression, but it will provide you with a momentary happiness to bolster you, as well as the reminder that happiness in general is still possible for you. Cinderella doesn't want to go to the ball so she can get away from her stepmother and stepsisters, or so she can meet someone to marry and leave with. She wants to go to the ball to reminder herself that she can still have things she wants. That her desires matter. That is important because the movie does a very good job of illustrating Lady Tremaine's subtle abuse tactics, all of which invisibly press the message that Cinderella doesn't matter. While going to the ball and fulfilling her dreams may not be a victory in a material sense, it is still a victory against Lady Tremaine's efforts.
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My reblog as @FruitsOfHell:
I'd like to add to the "Why Did Cinderella marry someone she just met?" because it speaks to a lot of what I love about the film and dislike about a lot of Disney movie criticism.
Throughout the film, Cinderella is established to be a very romantic character, which can be easy to take for granted with how ingrained in us that is for a Disney Princess, but in the context of the film it is a properly established trait. (Along with her kindness as defiance, which is another aspect taken for granted).
The ball is this one night in nearly her whole life where she'll see anything but the dusty corners of her house, and you can tell just how much it means to her by how she reacts to it in the lead up. To her gladly accepting an obvious trick from her step-mother at the opportunity, to her failing to convince herself that she'll be fine missing it, to her once again naive joy at the mice's dress, and her despair when it's destroyed.
When she arrives literally by magic she is utterly star-struck; she just wanders around the castle bright-eyed not even with any objective. Then, from out of the blue this incredibly handsome man appears and whisks her away to dance in the spotlight as a gentle waltz plays, they then walk through a lush moonlit harden under the stars, yadda yadda - it's that Disney magic.
But what I'm getting at here, is that that Disney magic is diegetic, Disney artists have written and drawn that charm into this film to SERVE THE NARRATIVE, not just because they're Disney so there must be sparkles and music. Cinderella feels those sparkles and music after a life of nothing but hay and laundry and brooms, and it's instantly a life-changing experience to her that culminated in dancing with that beautiful man.
The day after when she's reacting to the news of the Prince's search with her step-sisters, there's this great shot where they're scrambling to throw their laundry at her, and she is just standing their in an absolute dreamy daze, thinking about how she had danced with a Prince who was now doing anything to find her. So dazed, in fact, it becomes her downfall as she then neglects her duties to merrily hum and dance away to prepare for him, setting off Lady Tremaine.
The film very much does everything in its power to make the fairytale makes sense in a feature length film context, and this includes rather strong characterization of Cinderella and why she would follow fairytale logic. It's still because she is a fairytale character, but as a more grounded actor than a damsel in a 5-page story, she manages to bring that magic with her mixed with a fleshed out bittersweet naivety that the film wants you to understand the power of. How important it is to dream and imagine a better life for yourself in face of everything, the importance of not letting abused turn you cruel and spiteful to others (specifically those she has power over such as the animals of the house, the film is fine with her anger towards those who abuse her, and how spreading kindness will be rewarded. Very basic nice things like that, but executed beautifully and magically.
I feel as though a reason why some of this characterization is lost on people - besides cynicism - is due to the animation of the film, and how heavily rotoscoped Cinderella is in body and face. Rotoscoping can help make a character feel realistic, but if it's too juxtaposed with cartoonier figures (like the step-sisters, the King, the Duke, even Tremaine a bit) that acting instead becomes stiff in comparison. I won't go into that theory, but it did take me 3 watches and hyper-awareness of that to notice many of the characterization details I did.
Pixar's Elemental vs Disney's Zootopia on Racial Allegory - Dec 2023
People shit on Elemental for its race/culture allegory looking even more reductive and rigid than Zootopia's on the surface, but I think it actually used it super well. It feels a lot more like a very broad fable-ish metaphor than the sort of hard world-building with direct racial parallels found in Zootopia. Zootopia aged poorly because it was so fucking direct in its parallel imagery to real world oppression with the police angle, whereas Elemental is just generally about the experience of being an immigrant. The way it uses the infrastructure of the city being actively built for some and harmful to others is really clever too, I adored how they used that.
It also helps greatly that Elemental was written by a POC from the perspective of the marginalized because it helps to make the metaphor feel more cohesive. The choice to make Judy the main focus as a perpetrator of the systemic predator oppression that greatly mirrors real world anti-blackness aged like milt to me, it screams white guilt complex. And the fact it spends a lot of time not engaging with forms of prejudice besides the bunny oppression until it gets to that feels very flat. Elemental immediately explains its main allegory very strongly and from the perspective of those it affects, so there's no fluff or time spent ignoring the issues from the privileged perspective.
Literally the thing that will instantly kill your fantasy oppression metaphor is being white guilt-y about it or not thinking super hard about what you're paralleling if you're going to be as blunt as Zootopia. Stuff like accidentally giving the oppressed group a reason to be oppressed as you do with the predator-prey dynamic. It's just the biggest fucking red flag and shows little understanding of why these systems exist in real life. In Elemental the metaphor obviously uses a lot of imagery to show that the fire people are meant to be east asian-coded, but beyond that, its content just being a story about class and immigrant families. About being from different worlds and feeling like they're impossible to combine, because of experiences and backgrounds, which is expressed as being fire and water.
Unlike being a bunny and fox, that imagery is a bit less loaded and can be turned into a sort of mutual harm as it is in the film with Wade being at risk of evaporating as much as Ember is at risk of being put out. And, in the end, it's found that water can just bubble a bit as metaphor for a compromise. Which is fine enough and where the more fable-ish approach to the allegory became clear to me.
It's also used very cutely for their personalities too in a way that comes back to the background divide - Ember being fiery, anxious, and high-strung from pressures to support her community, and Wade being all blubbery and emotional but mellower because he lives in a supportive upper-class family. It's just a lot cleverer on a couple of levels than the bumbling between predators as black and brown people, but also their oppression is bad, but also they are dangerous, but also its cause of a conspiracy, and also prey are kinda like white women, and there's intersectionality but its shown horribly.
Despite Ember's racial coding, no matter how you code Wade's family, it doesn't matter because it is simply about - 'you live in a city that has integrated for you, and I don't' - which could apply to an upper-class family of any background, cause it's more of a class thing now. Even if he was black-coded (which I've seen from fans likely because of his VA, I don't remember if he was in the film's text), it still works cause there ARE affluent black families whom by nature of having been here and integrated are in that privileged role over a poorer immigrant family of any other race.
Allegories for class or upbringing usually age better, the systems that create those are a lot more basic and less loaded to parallel on a surface level than racism or misogyny. No that they CAN'T go really deep, but it's easier to not come off as blatantly offensive as long as you're not like a eugenicist about it.
HBomb and Plagiarism: Become Your Own Critic! - Dec 2023
Prompted by browsing opinions on the 2023 Plagerism and You(Tube) video essay by Hbomberguy. The video did genuinely really inspire me to be more confident in my own creative voice and opinion, but I was also peeved by people trying to be purists about how they engage with video essays and online reviews. I hope my two comments don't sound contradictory, I just think the best takeaway from the video is between being someone who watches other's media analysis a uncritically and someone who scoffs at the idea of relying on others' opinions on anything.
My other fun addition to the Hbomberguy video stuff is not just that you need to start checking everyone's sources just to make sure you aren't being duped, but to not use them as a stand in for media consumption/experiences either. Like I'm not gonna lecture you on reading sources cause I am the first one to not and that's my laziness, but like sometimes more important than checking the original analysis of something is just to see the thing being analyzed yourself. That;s not even about misinformation or lying, sometimes people's opinions just SUCK ASS.
Like there are YouTube video essayists I overall kinda respect, but they have dogshit opinions on some things. I used to love Jack Saint's bad faith, overly critical analyses of throwaway kids films, until I realized he also saw films that in my opinion had a lot of merit [the same way], and it turned me off from him. Big Joel is cool as hell, but anytime he gives his opinion on animation save like a few points, I completely glaze over and find him annoying. The other day I watched a video essay on the "Magical Negro" trope, and the first movie sourced interested me, is I watched it and I hardly understood why they put that in, it framed the movie as something it wasn't.
Just in general, it's good practice to make sure your opinions on media are your own and experience it yourself. MY biggest takeaway from the Hbomb video wasn't to throw rocks at Somerton or start obsessively fact-checking every essayist I watch, but to make sure I have a baseline of what they're talking about myself and not letting anyone throw around media examples with reckless abandon. The Celluloid Closet and Tinkerbelles and Evil Queens is on the watch/read list now, but the first thing I did from the words he stole from Celluloid Closet was watch Rebels Without a Cause out of curiosity of this gay subtext in a 50s blockbuster. And it was a super interesting experience that has given me my own unrelated opinions. Not to discount whatever important queer reading and historical importance the film has, but I'm happy I also have more than just that cause I Watched It Myself, not someone's specific and unavoidably biased reading of it.
The video isn't about cultivating suspicion but cultivating appreciation for the skills of analytical/informative/opinion writing. So even when people aren't being lying grifters, it's just good to be your own critic and media analyst. Maybe you'll even contribute to that world yourself, or maybe you'll keep all your cool opinions in your heart and die, who cares. The point is that unlike some people, your opinions and words are your own. It's a beautiful thing to have your own creative voice.
Later Addition:
Wanna add something cause people are coming at this post kinda hot:
There's nothing wrong to me about watching videos on media you haven't, never planned to, or because of the video, don't plan on consuming. The entire point of reviews as a subset of video essays is to help you allocate your time and money, and it's not a moral failing to use those as that and not go to a thing afterwards. It's also not "not engaging with people's opinions", cause you can do that just from the video. A good essayist of course sites examples of their critiques in full context, and you can gauge from there is they're being honest enough.
For example, I was never planning on watching Disney's Wish - I do not like it from appearance and don't feel like supporting Disney right now - but even from reviewers I like, I've seen them misinterpret things they've complained about. They still gave me a satisfactory overview of the film, and I just scrutinized their opinions based on their good-faith efforts to represent it totally. That's a thing you definitely should always do, as well as watch out for videos that seem to be missing context on certain points.
There are also lots of videos where some of the media being brought up is not being deeply scrutinized, but is a prop to another discussion. In that, the opinions you're engaging with are broader topics, where it's also really not a big deal if someone doesn't want to look at every piece of media thrown around in depth. But it's a good practice for your own enrichment, not like moral reasons. I'm just suggesting that you should make a habit of exercising your creative voice independently, no that relying on others' is bad as a viewer. (If you're making your own essay it's the opposite of course).
We do not have time to watch every 3-hour movie, watch every 7-season show, nor play every 60-hour game that is explored in an hour and a half video essay. That's why those videos exist, so people can express experiences just not everyone can get around to. When done right they still teach people the analytical skills to apply to other works, which is healthy whether the person then immediately does so on the source of the video's critique, or something random the watch a week later.
Five Nights at Freddy's Movie and General Series Writing - Nov 2023
FNAF was one of my first fandoms and I hold a lot of fondness for it that bubbles to the surface now and again. Years of falling in and out of love with it and its lore have left me with some takes I felt like sharing in lieu of the 2023 movie.
As someone who knows a good amount of FNAF lore but kinda doesn't give a shit about it anymore, I don't understand when people say the FNAF movie was just lore fanservice. I thought the plot was fun and established its own rules and stakes rather well, and I found myself engaged by this Mike's struggles. It's different from the Mike of the games (the last time I checked), and I'm happy they went with a protagonist who would better fit a movie's plot structure than a never-ending series of teasing games.
I know stuff like Vanessa being Afton's daughter is kind of a lore revelation I believe, but I twas also a good twist in the film and made her compelling. I'm kinda fucked up over characters who have loyalty to people they know are monsters but don't know what to do with it. And I'm also happy as fuck they didn't pull a Fanny (as fun as she could be), she just got to be normal and conflicted.
Other than the 2000s B-list kids movie conflict with the evil aunt - which honestly is corny in a good way - my only gripe with the story is that WHY Afton did the murders isn't established. He didn't get enough time to be a villain me feels, especially for how obvious the twist is, but like how often do murderers get good backstories in cheesy horror flicks? At least he didn't go on a tirade about remnant, the weird ass sci-fi magic the series brought in past "souls can haunt things" is wack to me, and I think from the film you can just extrapolate that he wanted power over his victims or somethin'. Which, I mean, is a common motivation for serial murder.
The movie is very cute and corny for what it is. Sometimes I wish it leaned into its melodrama more, but it's very fun. And it was worth it for the puppets alone. Speaking of the animatronics - I adore the characterization of them in this film, the biggest draw of them as horror mascots was always the mix between kid-friendly [and] fucked up and haunted. Them being sweet to the lil' sister and just wanting to play with her even if t meant murder was fun as hell. Personally I would've enjoyed seeing the kids also interact with the original personalities of the CHARACTERS of the animatronics, like forcing the machines to do their old bits even though they're in a horrible state. Driving home how decrepit and devoid of life the place these poor kids are trapped in is, yet they still just want to have fun and enjoy the silly cartoon animals. Stuff like that is what draws me to the aesthetics of the series honestly.
Later Related Post:
My dedicated take on FNAF as a series is that if you only count the main games from 1 to UCN you have an absolutely batshit insane and incoherent yet satisfying enough story for the series. From that you get the story of William Afton and his wacky murder spree that blows up in his and his family's face, Henry, the good natured business partner and bystander to the chaos, and the legacy of the Freddy's franchise permanently haunted by its inability to get go of greed in the face of tragedy.
Even though I think the series long ago wrote itself into oblivion with a lack of direction or substance to it's nightmare of a story, there is one core theme to it that I think is executed very well - that being to leave the demons to their demons and let sleeping dogs lie. Which is so ironic for this series it's almost Shakespearean but I digress.
I feel like I rarely see the anti-business aspects of the series talked about, which is like it's most strongly written feature both comedically and thematically. The games fucking loathe whoever the hell is ever running the locations at any point in time, with jokes about nonchalant health and safety violations and lackadaisical regard for the rights and lives of others. Which ends up [complimenting] Afton himself if he's not straight up running the joint. Afton and the in-universe franchise are parallels to each other, both unable to give up on selfish and destructive pursuits in face of complete backfire and tragedy, and they both come out if it haunted as fuck and haunting each other. Even though I said fuck everything but the game canon (meaning remnant from the books), I do think the pursuit of immortality is a good motive for Afton just cause it makes it similar to the Fazbear Franchise's constant need to stay relevant no matter what.
This then makes Henry a great foil to both the Franchise and Afton, being just as honest fucking guy who doesn't seem interested in abusing the legacy of his creations nor motherfucking child murder. And Michael as well being like his father physically, but being someone who can tell when he's fucked up and hurt those around him and repent for it. Even going through hell and similar consequences as his father but still staying on track to redeeming himself. If you squint and ignore a bunch of bullshit and focus on some reoccurring motifs, you can almost slap together a compelling tragedy about a mix of personal and corporate greed suffering supernatural wrath.
The animatronics too only ever seem to become worse the more I learned about supplementary material. Just stopping at "most of them are normal and got haunted, and sometimes Afton made wacky terrible monstrosities with haywire AI", is good for me. And it's insane it took till like, Sister Location for their animosity towards the night guard (Mikey Afton) to be explained, but it works for what I was saying about Mike's character; That he's literally going through twice as much hell as his dad did over a fifth of the sins and holds true throughout the whole series. I appreciate the interplay between the animatronics as children's mascots and haunted abominations landing on them having an [entirely reasonable] but bloodthirsty hatred towards their murderer. And for the toys, it was probably just that their facial recognition software was seeing Mike as William, and they were doing their job to protect the kids perfectly fine.
Even past UCN, as the lore and what plot there is continues to be shot full of holes and repaired with scotch tape, that theme of misfortune from greed is at least still there in Glitchtrap. But then once again, HOW ARE WE ERITING THIS AND HAVEN'T STOPPED YET?
Writing Characters With Mental Illness - Nov 2023
Elaborating on some tags I left on another post about mentally ill/disordered rep in media.
So like about my last reblog: personally I think it's usually a bad idea to write a character with the intention of making them fit into something like a mental disorder. I have plenty of characters who straight up have mental disorders I can list, but I didn't make them to be like that. I make a guy first, and flesh them and their personality and psychology out a lot, and then often I'm like, "Hey, they kinda fit into this," and then I use that to inform what other parts of their character might be like.
Because mental disorders are just a label of dysfunctional behavior that often clusters together, a mental disorder doesn't make you the way you are, it might predict other issues you have, but doesn't endow you with them. It's first and foremost a description of how someone behaves in a dysfunctional way that gives people an idea of what the hell is wrong with you.
A lot of people, I feel, also forget that with most disorders, you don't need every symptom listed to be diagnosed with it, and even if you don't reach the criteria for an explicitly listed one, there's usually a catch-all generic disorder, because this shit is a very tricky science. People are tricky, people's minds are even trickier, and psychopathology isn't some sort of precise measuring tool.
Because of that, if you're just gonna look up a disorder and say, "OK, I'm gonna make a character who's all that", you're... you're just gonna make a gijinka of a DSM criteria list. You're going to literally make a stereotype, no one is that simple, even people who meet all the criteria meet it in wildly different whats. In ways that would change based on opinion, from psychiatrist to psychiatrist LMAO.
Oh yeah, and then also that book (and all official info understandably based on it) can be so fucking wrong too.
Reblog From @OneHelluvaCritic:
I agree. It can put a character into the “character is the mental illness” trope.
Best example of that is the movie Split. They took a man with DID and made him a superhuman that has like 100 evil alters inside of him. It's actually fucking goofy how it turned out. It paints people with DID in a negative light and one person with DID might not be the same as another person with DID.
The same problem with a character in the TV series The Good Doctor. Again they took an autistc man and turned him into this superhuman that can cure illnesses because he's autistic. They completely ignore that autism is a spectrum and there's nuances to autism.
My Reply:
Oh man that’s like a whole other beast, but also one of the most common examples of what happens when you write a character to be a diagnosis first and a psychologically fleshed out character second.
People who write like that literally don’t comprehend mentally ill people as people in my opinion. The fact that they have to imagine them as these magical or dramatized caricatures to find them engaging enough to base a story around is kind of insulting.
People tend to love characters not intended to be a certain disorder who incidentally come across as such because in that case, someone is writing a person, and not a mystical creature dressed up in psychiatric language.
Liminal Space Video Essays - Nov 2023
One day I have gawt to find a really good video on liminal spaces and weirdcore/dreamcore/etc. Like, it is suuuuuuuuuuuuuch an interesting fucking trend, and deeply intertwined with the nature of the internet. It's a collective sharing of the sometimes existentially horrifying nature of memory and nostalgia that could only come together into a community as is now from the worldwide scope of the internet.
Like... without the internet there have definitely been explorations of the concepts of these dead static worlds, conglomerations of the mundane into something new and supernatural, but the way it's mixed with the indie creative cultures of the internet I think breathes life into it in its most perfect form.
The rise of the internet and 3D games and other such shifts being in the early childhood of this generation too adds so much. That artificiality and just barely covered up uncanniness of that era of technology really did something to our brains, and I love seeing that explored man. Like MAAAN, I LOVE INDIE INTERNET HORROR MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Later Addition:
The best one out there I've seen is SuperEyePatchWolf's on Backrooms, Liminal Spaces and such and such. I actually have a very distinct memory of watching that one with my mom in an [apartment] that we had been in the on-and-off process of moving out of for months, and that I had my own personal connection with. Like I think by contextualizing it with his own experiences and greater context of art outside of what's typically associated with the aesthetic (literature and 19th century paintings), he really really made a good thesis on what that aesthetic is and what it's trying to do.
I wouldn't make an essay on it myself because almost every one I've seen is by people more my age who's depth of context on art and horror/surrealist media in general is pitifully shallow. And they very often cannot even say the distinction between "this thing influenced this movement", and "this thing was a precursor to this movement". And a lot just falling into describing the emotional features of the art ad nauseum without any deeper analysis of what goes into it.
And the issue is that that would kinda be me sob emoji, like I don't blame them they're doing their best. But I really need someone to do the whole artistic/cultural/psychological breakdown fr. This is, in my opinion, the most fascinating artistic movement/trend/whatever of our lifetime. And I want it to get that big juicy tasty analysis it deserves.
Nimona and POC Representation - Jul 2023
I saw a post about the representation of characters of color in Nimona (2020), and seeing as a POC perspective seemed to be missing in the replies I figured it would be good to add mine. I was less piggybacking off OP and more using it as a chance to say something that had been bothering me about the film. In retrospect, I sounded way more harsh than I meant to, I do respect Nimona for it's racial narrative, but as I said, it's not as powerful as emotionally Nimona's.
@VoidPumpkin:
Seeing analyses of Nimona is fun because they have really good insights and are analyzing every inch of this movie but in virtually all of them there is a gaping hole where the very obvious messages and metaphors in regards to race and racism in this film lay.
Like tell me, do you believe the story of a brown man, brought in by a black woman in an attempt to fix the systemic issues in a system where ancestry is valued over merit, is framed for the murder of said black woman by a white woman who is fueled by paranoia that a black woman’s efforts might upend the system, the supposed threat this brown man and of dangers that don't exist and a desperation to fulfill the legacy of a white woman who is a literal metaphor for the way bigotry is taught (in particular homophobia/transphobia). And thus the brown man is villianized for something he didn’t do and is forced to find support and companionship in another victim of the system, with this story ending with the white woman willing to destroy everything than let the brown gay man and a trans girl change the system/her mind, has absolutely no racial implications or messages surrounding race.
My Addition As @FruitsOfHell:
Personal take here (dw, I'm a professional black person), the racism and classism felt very on the nose to the point of being distracting to me. Cause it can do all that very obvious stuff all it wants, but then it still just typecasts the only two important characters of color as victims, and then heavily centers the story of a white-coded character's oppression. Not to mention that in its bid to do so it still ends up killing off its one important black character after a few lines of dialogue.
From what my friend intimately familiar with the source material has told me, that whole racism/classism problem is completely new as well, with the original knight academy having nothing to do with bloodlines and the old white knight of you're barely being brought up. Like it just feels like they wanted to add on these explicit layers of bigotry, but they did not at all flow as naturally into the narrative as the queerness. I think the story still works best when it's about Nimona's queerness, and in a way I think the metaphor of her experiences works well enough as a broad allegory for any kind of bigotry. WITHOUT adding in a black woman who exists to be killed, and a brown man who now only exists to be bullied by his white peers. If they'd stopped at the latter and just diversified the cast a bit more it would be less glaring to me at least.
There's still merit in a story just being so blatantly and obviously about racism, but it's a bit patronizing too. Like I said, when the story is mostly about a white-coded character.
EDIT: Ambrosius is Asian and I didn't realize upon first watch because I assumed he was still white like in the source material - oops! So there are 3 important characters of color, and Ambrosius's place in the narrative about model minorities and colorism is rather cool. But my main problem is still that the characters of color are not as internally and emotionally dynamic as Nimona is as a queer person. In a way, while Nimona feels like a very fully fleshed out allegory for an oppressed person and feelings of antagonism, betrayal, and despair, Ambrosius, Ballister, and the queen kinda just feel like pawns being moved around to create a story about institutional racism. Once again a story that I'm happy to see, but I think lacks a bit of depth.
Small Addendum:
I have like really really specific opinions on how you cast POC in a story like that where you want to REALLY specifically say something. Like I'm happy the movie WANTED to say "black and brown people who earn positions of power still aren't trusted by their peers", but you said that with one character who exists to Be Good and then is killed instantly, and another who spends the whole movie making puppy dog eyes until a white-coded punk character tells him he should be meaner. I can't even say Ballister's characterization is a problem, it's just Noticeable. And really all I can say is that I Notice Things, which is what I mean by those metaphors being "too glaring" to me. And I say this because NIMONA is right there whom represents queerness in a more elegant, allegorical, as well as literal sense. She, from the beginning, is allowed to be loud, proud, angry, punk, and have complicated feelings between antagonism and submission. By comparison, the messages about race and class feel a lot more flat.
Ask Sent By Oomfie @Eldritch-Elrics:
Q:
Re.Nimona: First of all great thoughts, really appreciate your perspective! Second - I believe Ambrosius is coded as Asian in the movie? He's at least voiced by a Korean actor. IDK if that changes anything about your analysis (esp since he's light-skinned), but I wanted to point out that the queen and Ballister aren't the only POC there!
A:
TY ^_^, when I scrolled a bit through the tags and reblogs the opinion seemed missing, and as much as I love this movie, it's just itched me.
And about Ambrosius. NGL, I only realized that might be so after I posted those and read a bit farther down the RB's lmao.
If Ambrosius is meant to be Asian-coded, I think that's epic, but a bit weird cause he's meant to be related to the big white knight of yore and like... if we're going to talk about racism maybe that should have been brought up? Like maybe it could have been cool if he had to deal with being the blood relative of this figure yet not the same race/not fitting her image, and that could have been part of why he was so sympathetic towards Ballister. That could be why his hair is dyed and not naturally blonde actually! But the world doesn't seem to be explicit in its race relations, so that isn't brought up or explored in a way that would have made Ambrosius the sort of explicit rep it would have been nice to see. Which is ironic with how blatant this is on the surface with Ballister and the Queen.
I saw some people saying he's cool model minority rep, but kinda every POC in the film is, which is my problem. It just rubs me a little wrong how one-sided and un-dynamic Ballister, the queen, and now even kinda Ambrosius are in their feelings towards the institution internally. Outside of being framed, on the verge of witnessing a war crime, or sympathizing with Nimona, they show little animosity or complicated feelings towards the institution; they have very clean and pure opinions.
I would have liked to see something like Ballister taping into some internal pent up frustration with being a token when he decided to bring down the institution, or him and Ambrosius explicitly bonding over not fitting molds as POC. Or... anything to work with about the queen. Maybe her fretting over Ballister, or showing some awareness and exhaustion beforehand. IDK. I watched the movie once a few weeks ago so if I'm missing details my bad. And on that note, thanks for bringing that up.
Mental Health Resources on NPD - Apr 2023
I've been trying to get myself to treat this blog more like a personal interests blog more than a specific fandom one, and part of that is gonna be me talking about not-fandom interests. Technically this one is still fandom related
Why the ever-loving fuck is it so hard to find resources on NPD that aren't about abuse victims??? I'm so serious, I understand the important on educating people about warning signs for abuse, but there is NOTHING east to find on this disorder that is not related to this specifically. Like beyond the fact that it paints NPD as Abuser Disorder, is it not also important to create resources for people to reflect on their own possible shitty behavior? People with NPD literally struggle to tell how fucked up their actions are, it would be really nice to have more resources to help them not only realize that but cope with it ithsdfkdsh??
I am very very interested in psychopathology and also have been suspecting myself of having a personality disorder for a while now, and boy is stigma just so so fun at making research for self and writing just so so difficult. The one I suspect myself of having isn't that bad to find resources on, but NPD is a nightmare. And especially with how stigmatized it is, I really want to find resources on it primarily from people with it, and not 93820932 pop psych articles about how slightly shitty behavior makes you a narcissist.