Gormongous

Neon Genesis Evangelion as a tokusatsu production like Ultraman: I wish I'd seen this two months ago. Shinji's Lilith getup would have been the best costume.

Absolutely! Wait, what are we talking about?

I was actually just meaning "not involved in a romance subplot" as in "unaware they are involved in a romance subplot, to the point that it has no bearing on their character." My fault for posting at four in the morning. I'm still fighting my way through Honey & Clover, which has only recently risen from "abominable waste of time" to "not sure why I'm watching this." Some of the peripheral characters (well, two of the peripheral women) are interesting, but all the guys are boring and interchangeable, and the central love-object girl is a disgusting moeblob who looks and talks and acts twelve even though we're told over and over that she's eighteen and totally legal. This is an important enough anime in the history of the shoujo genre that I'm going to watch the whole thing, but so far I am thinking that its fame and regard is entirely unjustified.

Really excellent, and also another way of seeing historically and sociologically how #GamerGate is nothing special as far as reactionary movements go. Near the end, she talks about how she would have been happy to have legitimate answers from the people who defaced her survey, but they are too afraid of any new perspectives and opinions that they can't control. I think it would have been worthwhile for her to take the analysis one step further. Even though they ridicule the so-called "SJW" for something similar, the persecution complex of #GamerGate means that all speech is politicized speech to them. In short, you're either for them or against them. It's a Manichean worldview that allows for no other type of expression. They mostly lack the experience to understand how academic standards and peer review enable research to be relatively unbiased, because if they were in that position, they'd manipulate the data to support their viewpoint. That's what they've already been doing for months, given the chance. So, in an environment where all speech is construed as having political content (and in an environment where the existence of that content damages the credibility of their viewpoint and their movement) the only choice is to silence the opposition, because as long as the opposition is allowed to keep speaking, it will continue to spread its politics and thereby threaten the existence of #GamerGate. There's no way this could have turned out for them except total war. I got a little ill typing all that.

Okay, this .gif convinced me that Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun deserves to be the next thing I watch: KarmaBurn tells me that it and Barakamon are two anime where the male leads are not involved in romance subplots. That is unbelievably attractive to me.

Okay, I've got a question (okay, looking back now, just a ramble really) for people here who are smarter than me. My favorite fantasy author, R. Scott Bakker, posted an explanation and defense of the overtly misogynistic settings for his works. It took me a while to fight through the jargon, because he is an academic several levels farther down the rabbit hole than me, but what I gleaned from it generally agreed with me. He wants his fantasy settings to buy into the horrific assumptions of their historical influences, and to have his female protagonists succeed only in light of the unfair expectations placed upon them, in order to discomfort and shock his readers out of the pleasant "progressive" reverie that fantasy novels usually provide as escapism. That's fine, that's mostly what I prefer to a fantasy novel where the misogyny is simply pseudo-historical window-dressing or where an unjustified and half-assed egalitarian society is invented as whitewash. Any kind of persecuting society is an acceptable setting to me so long as its precedents and consequences are fully explored as part of the work's plot and themes. So far, so good. But then a lot of the trim of his argument, in addition to the vast majority of the comments, is dripping with condescension for those "radical feminists" who believe in rape culture when there's "no direct causal correlation" between consumption of misogynist materials and actual physical rape. The word "evolutionary" is also thrown about way too much and "heuristic" criticisms are contrasted with their "rational" responses. So I don't know, has anyone else read The Prince of Nothing series or The Aspect-Emperor series? What do you think about them, since both have horribly misogynistic settings? I mean, they clearly seem like they're meant to be upsetting to me, but does Bakker have to be such a dick about why? It bums me out, although it really doesn't surprise me deep down, given the tone of his other posts.

Not to get punch-drunk with cynicism, but I love that getting the mainstream media involved is a "disgusting, juvenile tactic" but letter-bombing a site's advertisers is totally legit. I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that, were they in the position of right-thinking people, they'd see it perfectly fine and find something else to complain about instead.

I actually like the idea of being forced to pay for different characters and settings in a license individually, insofar as I actually like the idea of licensing games at all, because it would keep licensed games from having the "Hey, look everybody, it's Saruman! Say hi to Saruman, everybody! Okay, bye Saruman!" syndrome from which every other licensed game suffers.

Oh, they're in there, but they're much more densely presented in The Hobbit, with major scenes devoted to each. I was just spitballing anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if they have different tiers of licenses instead that give you rights to major characters only, or certain parts of the world, or if you have to buy what you want from the legendarium à la carte.

Yeah, I wonder, too. I think both Trolls and Wargs are "native" to the regions east of the Misty Mountains, so maybe they wouldn't be found just wandering around Nurn and Gorgoroth, but they should still be there. That they're not suggests a licensing issue, yeah. I wonder if it's because those creatures are associated more with The Hobbit than with The Lord of the Rings, so the Peter Jackson film project has sole claim to them somehow while the films are ongoing...

The comedy bits actually hold up fine, speaking as someone who saw it maybe four years ago? But the romance and global terrorism techno-thriller parts are not distinctive or interesting at all, especially so many years removed.

There are guides to turning off the ads and "featured" content, to the point that it resembles classic 2.2.1 utorrent, but it's hardly worth it.

Especially since there's a history of journalists posting articles about trans individuals in the name of the "truth" that lead to their harassment, harm, or suicide.

It bums me out to think that the first guy you mention will probably add his "story" to what seems like the most popular and effective centrist position right now, "Both sides are guilty of attacks and harassment." It's been frustrating to see #GamerGate gradually recognize that the harassment that almost entirely sustains their movement is also their biggest obstacle to acceptance and decide to level the playing field with unproven and unprovable claims of DDOSing and doxxing by people opposed to #GamerGate. I mean, as far as I can tell, there's no evidence for it at all, right? Not even firsthand testimony? There are the Fine Young Capitalists' exploded claims about Zoe Quinn, there are "open" sites like 4chan banning discussion, and what else? People disagreeing with them, is that what they think harassment is? Maybe there are examples of people from #GamerGate being driven from their homes by death threats, except I don't think I've even seen a single death threat directed against them, so... I really hate how calling out harassment and abuse against you yourself is somehow being a "victim," but vaguely alluding to alleged harassment and abuse four or five people removed is a legitimate position.

I kind of wanted to go into this same thing about reactionary movements, now that Tegan's let the Godwin out. The Nazis got power mostly because they beat up union-supporting communists and socialists on sheer principle. Wealthy capitalists and industrialists, eager for any edge in the global depression, believed from this that the Nazis could be used to counterbalance the unions, so they gave the movement a lot of money, which was instead used by the Nazis to open up bread lines and public works jobs that were lauded by everyone for actually "doing something" about the poverty and unemployment in interwar Germany. With the popularity and support that came from their charity, the Nazis were easily able to crush the communists and socialists, then used the money and manpower that was freed up to turn on their capitalist and industrialist benefactors, ultimately claiming sole credit for the revitalization of the country. We know where it goes from there, mostly. Hitherto, I've been content to see that no reputable website has been dumb enough to court a violent, amorphous, and out-for-itself movement like #GamerGate for a simple boost in traffic, but I could not be more disappointed now at The Escapist's eagerness to play the part of the capitalists in the above story. They certainly aren't getting my traffic anymore, for all the good it does.

"If we ever do anything positive, it's us. If we ever do anything negative, it's not us. The best intentions of #GamerGate count for everything. We're the unaccountable movement for accountability!"

Oh fuck no, Brianna Wu? She's one of the strongest, smartest, most fearless women out there. God, fuck this "movement." EDIT: Okay, I read her tweets and she is totally unphased by the harassment, even though she's taking measures to ensure her own safety: She's actually so strong that she kinda scares me, on Isometric and on Twitter, but I'm so damn glad she exists anyway.

I was happy that this thread got revived, because I knew I'd be contributing to it tonight. I only have sad shit about girl troubles to post here, so I won't, but I love the camaraderie anyway.

I meant to post my response before the discussion moved on, but I'm really uncomfortable with the consumption model of a video game being patterned after the practices of the super-rich, however implicitly. The vast majority of car and comic owners don't collect for the sake of collecting with no intention to actually use their collections, and I don't really know what the endpoint of a game with those assumptions is.

I don't think Tolkien was being intentionally racist. Like you said, he was supremely uninterested in allegory, beyond sundry criticisms of industrialization, and instead wanted to write a new (or restored) mythology for Anglo-Saxon culture. But he was still a middle-class British academic, with all the assumptions and biases that such an identity entailed, and more so because of similar assumptions and biases in his sources. So yeah, the bad guys come from the east and south, they're all brown people, and orcs, which are irredeemably evil by nature, have a lot of black and lower-class traits, although not nearly so many as in the movies. It's not intentionally racist, but it is racist, which is why it's so interesting to me that Tolkien's Catholicism (and, now that I'm doing some reading, his early and deep dislike of National Socialism) led him late in his life to recognize and start to revise some of the elements. I know of very few writers with a similar depth of conviction to undertake such a massive reevaluation of their own work. God, speaking of, I forgot about Tolkien's letter to a German publisher who wanted to translate and publish his book contingent on proof of Aryan descent. He spends paragraphs demolishing the idea of an "Aryan" ethnicity, then regrets to say he is not of Jewish but of German origin, which has increasingly become an embarrassment to him. He really was the consummate Oxford don, first and foremost.

Well, I think "Uruk" is just Black Speech for "orc," the "hai" affix is what distinguishes half-orcs from regular orcs. Of course, video games (and movies, for that matter) rarely are able to resist using a fancy or made-up word over a commonplace one, so everything's "Uruk" everywhere. Another reason why Tolkien is superior to all his imitators, because he preferred to reuse or rehabilitate existing English words when at all possible.

Step 2: no true Scotsman all day every day.

I love that there's a five-minute discussion of the morality of orc genocide in the first part of the podcast. To clarify what Jake and Danielle were saying, Tolkien originally conceived of orcs as captured elves twisted and manipulated by Morgoth, the original dark lord of Middle Earth, so that they were incapable of good. Tolkien grew uncomfortable with this origin as time went on, especially the idea that a good creature could become innately and heritably evil, and spent the last years of his life rewriting the prehistory of Middle Earth over and over to try and find a way for orcs to have come into being without creating a situation in which an immortal soul cannot somehow be saved. Orcs couldn't just be the sole creation of Morgoth, because evil cannot create anything, so Tolkien seems to have been headed toward some sort of aggressive breeding program involving men, beasts, and maybe elves in order to bring out the worst in all, but he never finished revising his writings to account for the new origin. It's still kind of an odd thing, because it shows Tolkien's deep Catholicism forcing him unwittingly to reevaluate some of the racist imagery and stereotypes of his work, but his death prevents us from seeing where that would have ended up. So yeah, as it stands, orcs are just fantasy Nazis and there's no moral issue with killing them, no matter how unjust it seems on the surface.

I think your analysis is spot on, if you replace "Culture drones" with "Special Circumstances" drones.

There's no go-to site for me. I subscribe to the major publishers (FFG, Asmodee/Days of Wonder, Rio Grande, GMT Games, and so on) and keep an eye on the various fan sites. Shut Up & Sit Down is good enough, but relies on their fans' word of mouth and tends to spotlight certain designers a bit much. Fortress: Ameritrash has a broader outlook but is definitely a site in decline. Checking BGG is a last resort because there's so much information and such vulnerability to fads. No good solution, really.