Gormongous

If nothing else, I agree that there's really no way not to be a war candidate after 9/11 (and maybe for the rest of this generation). Lots of people voted for Obama as an anti-war candidate and (surprise) he turned out to be the most warlike of war candidates. His use of the Espionage Act and drone strikes is orders of magnitude beyond Bush, which mostly gets a pass because of good intentions and being "one of us." It's a gross world in which we live. However, I do reiterate that the activities of the Clinton Foundation in the Third World are enormously worrying to me and those emphatically aren't the wages of being your average politician. I find it frustrating that Trump's troubled history as a businessman in the private sector is appropriate for us to scrutinize but not the Clinton Foundation's involvement in, say, blood phosphates in Morocco and the Western Sahara. I would feel maybe 65% better about voting for Clinton if the Clinton Foundation didn't exist, honestly.

Agreed!

I don't know when it's appropriate to care about ideological purity except in a primary election. Clinton has some very troublesome things in her record: not gray areas, like voting to go to war against Iraq during a period of heightened patriotism, but consistent behavior as secretary of state where she directed the sale of weapons to oppressive regimes in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and wherever else the Clinton Foundation has found fundraising opportunities. She currently employs the same policy firm as Cruz and Rubio and has been courting former Bush donors for sometime now. These aren't made-up concerns and I was relieved when Jill Stein said in an interview what I've thought for months: I don't fault anyone for voting for Clinton. She's a proven politician in a time of great national anxiety and that's always carried water. However, the aggressive campaign to handwave her substantial faults as baggage that every "true" politician has will not only hurting Democrats as a party, it will hurt America as a nation and (most worryingly, given Clinton's record) it will hurt the world as a community. I'm having a lot of trouble now that the only mainstream candidate (discounting Jill Stein, of course) who has neither the intent nor the history of killing innocent civilians by drone is de facto out of the running. I'm having a lot of trouble now that the party that's supposed to represent my interests has chosen a candidate who that Gaddafi had been sodomized to death with a knife. That video makes me ill and I think about it every time people talk about Clinton as misunderstood or getting a bad rap. I want to vote for no more war and the lives of billions of non-Americans around the globe and I don't have that opportunity, yet somehow that's all Trump's doing and none of Clinton's. Yeah, the narrative has also been aggressively shaped around the identity politics of this election and, somehow, it always breaks Clinton's way. In general, young people of all demographics voted for Sanders, even when the demographic itself voted for Clinton, but apparently the latter is significant while the former is just naivete. Rolling Stone had a good article about how treating Sanders as an insurgent who's been defeated is a mistake that'll be costing the Democrats for decades. Luckily, I'll have a front row seat.

FYI, confederations were introduced in Total War: Rome 2, but only for the Gauls and Germans. It's probably fair to say that this is the first game where that mechanic is actually influential to gameplay, though. As both the Gauls and the Germans, forming a confederacy was difficult to do except by accident, since the diplomatic penalties of conquering your neighbors tended to negate the bonuses that common culture offered, so your fellow Gauls or Germans hated you for becoming strong by the time you were strong enough for form a confederacy. Also, Total War: Warhammer has been described by Creative Assembly as a platform with a ten-year roadmap for content already laid out, so whether or not they go back to history, Warhammer is here to stay.

I'm glad things are looking up, Neon! I have a few friends who also have that farmer mentality and it's very frustrating for me sometimes. They're adamant about staying put, near their family, because that's what counts in the end, but their family's all miserable people (not that yours are, of course) and they're turning out to be miserable themselves. I just want to yell, "Move away, what's the worst that could happen?" but I know it's not that simple.

Oh, I think the fandom is very character-driven, but I don't think most shows and movies are. Part of the reason that most OVA- and movie-exclusive characters are disliked by fans is that they don't fit in the worlds into which they're forcibly inserted (and also they're usually written poorly). People tend to like characters that work best within their respective shows, not characters that are written best by more absolute standards. That might all be shit I pulled out of my ass, too.

I feel like this election has been bad in general for identifying too strongly with any candidate, especially on the Democrat side. I feel like I can't say that I've supported Sanders, especially in the last three months, because I've gotten attacked so many times, not only for being a "Bernie Bro" myself, but for my preferred candidate's actions as a spoiler for their preferred candidate. It's been a deeply unpleasant experience for months. My sincere hope is that the venom of this year's campaign experience leaves people a lot more mellow in 2020. Whoever gets elected, may their presidency be uneventful, and we can have less tribalism all around.

I think that it's definitely an element at play. In general, anime is a plot- or world-driven medium, with the few character-driven examples being the exception rather than the rule (although, especially in the West, they are often the most popular and recognized classics of their respective sub-genres, like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena). The funny thing is that the anime industry has a dedicated role in productions for codifying the appearance and behavior of individual characters (the character designer) and that most voice actors in the industry have their own passionate followings (although the intent is always for the character to disappear into the story, even if the actor doesn't disappear into the character), but characters themselves are subsidiary elements in the vast majority of anime productions, the same way that Western audiences think of the particulars of setting. We're also just coming off the moe boom of the past decade, which prioritized heavily depersonalized characters as ciphers for members of the audience and their desires. It's interesting, I was just reading another post about how the recent movie in the Girls und Panzer franchise, a wildly successful example of the "cute girls doing uncute things" sub-genre, does best when the tanks, with their crews, are interpreted as composite characters, rather than the individuals in the crews themselves. There's definitely a trend that only values characters as part of a functioning whole, whether as a social unit within the fiction of the show or as part of the show itself.

Especially as a response to the post asking for more information, this is easily my favorite post on the forum in months.

Taking it to a contested convention allows him to exert influence over the various administrative decisions of the Democratic campaign and to exact concessions from Clinton's platform. It's the smart money, if he actually believes in his principles: the longer he's in the race, the less time Clinton has to swing back to the right in order to court the centrist Republicans who she's convinced will be the deciding factor against Trump.

A good article on the way that well-respected historians can invent history in their attempts to wring a narrative out of it: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/05/the-ethics-of-inventing-modernity.html

As a way of continuing the conversation in more concrete terms, I was reminded recently of this excellent article on the historical ambivalence toward taking anime seriously in the West and a brief follow-up from one of my favorite anime bloggers that anime fans need to be better ambassadors, too. The blog on which the former article is hosted has also posted a conversation among its contributors about the difficulty of pulling together an anime "canon."

It was actually the Aurora Engine from the first Neverwinter Nights back in 2002, not the updated version of the Aurora Engine called the Electron Engine for Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2006. The first Witcher game was over four years in development, although some of that was trying to find a third-party developer to write them their own proprietary engine.

Honestly, the more I think about it, I think that history is going to vindicate the scores on the lower end. Can you name any other strategy game (or any video game) in recent memory that launched with its "boss battles" nonfunctional because of bugs? The Prethoryn Scourge was actually triply bugged (AI empires don't respond to its appearance, capturing the queen doesn't end the event chain, and planets can't be reclaimed). Ethics drift didn't work because of bugs, sector management didn't work because of bugs, combat was bugged and broken because of corvette evasion, there are only two victory conditions and they are infeasible (unacceptable for a space 4X), there are no ledger or mapmodes (unacceptable for a grand strategy game), federations are just a handicapped version of alliances, it was impossible to negotiate basic treaties with most AI empires, a huge number of basic UX features are absent... And that's not touching on how little there is to do between settling the surrounding planets and facing the (bugged) endgame threats, so little that Paradox's first six months of patches are basically being devoted to building content for the midgame. All the truly glowing reviews (PCGamesN, Destructoid, eXplorminate, etc) focus on how different all of the game's mechanics are (the extensive customization options like the species builder, especially, seem to occupy a quarter to a third of those reviews) and how grand the resulting spectacle is. Most of them don't even mention the mid- or endgame (or, in the case of eXplorminate, talk about them in starry-eyed hypotheticals), but you don't really hear much conversation about how those reviews are "misrepresenting the game." Interesting to note is that Stellaris has settled into a 79 on Metacritic, with an 8.2 for user reviews. Considering the tendency for Paradox fans to rate things on potential and goodwill (Hearts of Iron III has a 77, with a 7.0 in user reviews, which strains the word "generous" close to breaking), I don't think that a 6.3 from IGN is the puzzling outlier that some decry it to be.

Attention science-fiction and fantasy authors: I am hereby banning the use of bards, harpers, and troubadours as representatives of the authorial presence in your novel. No exceptions! Also banned are passages about playing instruments that use literary, rhetorical, or carnal terminology to describe the resulting music (or vice versa). You have been warned.

Not safe for work, unless your work is defending anime on the internet.

No, my bad for helping to create this situation, too. I know most anime's not to everyone's taste, but I do like to believe that there's at least one show out there for everyone. For instance, a business bro who's an acquaintance of mine fell in love with Spice & Wolf because it's an anime about medieval finance and trade. He doesn't like any other anime that I've shown him, though he keeps asking for more. It's really hard to walk a line of "there's so much to love" that's neither defensiveness nor proselytism, and I don't have as much skill as I'd like to have at doing so, but I'm working on it. These conversations, as acrimonious as they can be, help with that. Anyway, I didn't like the Overwatch videos either, they were too much like recent Marvel movies for my taste!

It didn't communicate anything to me or to a lot of other people who listen to the show, that's the whole problem. Maybe, as a friend and colleague of Chris, you know him well enough to know what he thinks anime is and isn't, but for me, it communicated that Chris has a low opinion of anime and that's all. It feel like "anime" as a descriptor is a missing stair for language (ugh, I'm already regretting this comparison a little) where everyone thinks that everyone else knows exactly what they mean but each person uses it slightly differently and it's just a mess of poorly understood but vaguely undesirable connotations. These days, it seems to occupy the same semantic space for media as "hipster" does for people. Anyway, I'm not defending anime, I'm defending functional use of language and a better appreciation of media in general. If you want to make apologies for lazy generalizations tossed out in the course of recording a podcast, that's fine, but I'm going to be on this forum calling them out and you can keep dismissing me as "defensive," as if it's uncool to care about something enough to try to engage people when it comes up. I know you don't care, you're making that abundantly clear. And that's also fine!

I keep trying to leave it alone, but my issue is that critiquing a work from one medium just by saying it's like a work from another medium is what's reductive and saying, "People are always going to use a medium or genre as shorthand for the stereotypical faults of that genre," is what's defensive, but that's just me. I really don't understand why multiple people on this forum (who presumably devotees of video games, another medium with low cultural cachet) are pushing back against the efforts of others just to say, "Not all anime are like B-tier cinematic shorts from Blizzard, here are some examples of more impressive work." It's not being defensive, it's trying to expand the conversation beyond everyone's gut reactions to anime. Also, people keep using thematically coded genres (again, not nationally coded mediums) of historically low repute for their analogies, like horror films and adventure games (although I generally hear people append "bad" when they use those genres as pejoratives, a qualifier that anime isn't typically seen to need). Personally, I think of it more like someone who doesn't like too much silence or abstraction in their video games and complains that some walking simulator is too much like "some French film." Suddenly, when we're using a medium with more legitimacy and with direct reference to its parent culture, it gets a bit more uncomfortable just to throw it around as shorthand for a nebula of features that didn't work for a given person. Even though the flaws of French cinema are broadly known, using the term itself as a means for criticism still comes off as uncultured and close-minded, not discerning. "Anime" gets used as a pejorative, first and foremost, because it's in a cultural ghetto for being foreign, poorly understood, and marketed to children. The actual quality of the works themselves, within their own context, is secondary (and sometimes irrelevant) to their foreignness, their childishness, their lack of compatibility with mainstream Western tastes. That's why I opened my part in this conversation with gifs from conventionally and unconventionally beautiful anime, works to which Blizzard only wishes its cinematics invited comparison, but somehow we're still fixated on the worst that the medium has to offer. Sturgeon's Law is that ninety perfect of everything is crap. That applies to everything, as far as I've been able to tell, so the clearest sign of whether or not a given medium or genre has made it in mainstream culture is whether the ninety percent or the ten percent is taken to be the significant part.

Let's just turn "post count" into a field on your profile that you can enter whatever number you like into.

It clearly needs to be a pretty strong drink, at the very least.

I guess my issue is that "anime" means a lot of things and that its generally accepted usage as a pejorative has transformed the term into a moving target that shifts with each individual's experience and opinion of the medium while still casting a chilling effect over discussion and reception of the medium itself. Something gets called "anime" to describe what's wrong with it: The Matrix gets called "anime" only if one doesn't like it, while no one's copping to the heavy influence of Paprika on Inception or Jungle Emperor Leo on Lion King. The bad stuff is foreign, the good stuff is innate. It's also just a usage that badly lacks precision. For instance, I just watched a couple of Overwatch videos (which didn't suit me at all) and crossed out the elements on your list that I didn't notice: The pared-down (yet still generously interpreted) version of this list of traits doesn't really make me think of anime, not even "anime" interpreted through the holy triad of Cowboy Bebop, Akira, and Dragonball. It makes me think of big-budget video games. However, we can't really critique or qualify a video game by describing it as a video game, so we describe it as something adjacent and hope that the overlap helps others to find our meaning. Like Dium said, I don't expect someone who's largely ignorant of the genre to use anything but the words they know to describe something, but it's a strange feeling to have someone functionally defending that ignorance when people try to complicate it. Anyway, we're recording an episode of Key Frames where we discuss Natsuyuki Rendezvous, a josei supernatural romance the list for which looks like this: I hated it anyway, because one member of the love triangle is a sack of human garbage and that makes the pacing beyond abysmal, but it's very different from the abovementioned "holy triad" and that's part of what we're trying to do with our podcast. Please tune in, everybody: http://www.keyframespodcast.com/

Is it possible to remove whatever makes posts in Idle Banter not count towards total number of posts? There's as much shitposting in the Video Games subforum as in Idle Banter and I think we're all beyond pretending that post count is only for "real" posts.

One of the biggest problems is that "anime" as a term encompasses, at the very least, the shounen, shoujo, josei, and seinen subgenres, basically the "four corners" of modern demographics. There is a lot of variance between Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (an absurdist seinen comedy), His and Her Circumstances (a shoujo romance), and Only Yesterday (a josei coming-of-age story). It sounds like you've watched a lot of shounen and "light" seinen anime, which isn't surprising if you've mostly been using "best of" lists to guide your viewing. The loudest voices on the internet are young, male, and overly nostalgic, so they dictate the content of those lists, just like Grand Theft Auto V, an absolutely awful game to me, is apparently the "best game of all time" according to a lot of publications I respect. I don't mind people not liking anime. I just find the reflexive disdain ridiculous, especially the way that it's used to disparage low-quality works in other mediums, because there's so much anime and it's all so different. Saying that you hate anime isn't saying that you hate slasher movies, it's saying that you hate movies, full stop. That's fine, I know a few people who can't sit through a two-hour runtime of anything, but I wish the tendency were towards explaining that dislike with specificity rather than generalities. In the current cultural climate of video games, where people are saying, "I thought I didn't like video games, but then I discovered all these cool titles in the indie scene," it would be nice for other mediums to be accorded the same consideration. Five Centimeters a Second and The Tale of Princess Kaguya aren't random outliers, they're substantial works in the filmography of longtime industry veterans who are established in specific genres that don't typically get included in conversations about Cowboy Bebop and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Basically, I find it frustrating that anime is treated like a genre, with a shared set of themes and influences, when it's a medium with a lot more divergence than that. No one gets away with damning video games for the faults of FPSes or damning music for the faults of top 40 pop, but with anime... I don't know, I'm regretting this conversation. Use "anime" as a catch-all term for whatever, I'm sure it'll be fine.

And, honestly, I have zero problem with someone using "Dragonball Z" or "Akira" as adjectives to explain why something's too over-the-top (Twig will probably call me out for saying that, though). It's just that anime is so much bigger and so much more textured than whatever you caught on Adult Swim in the early 2000s. It's precisely the "Bleep Bloop, Whatever Happened to Pac-Man" literacy problem that video games suffered from in the broader culture space not even a decade ago. EDIT: I'm actually going over how the use of mediums as adjectives for a situation gradually migrates from negative to positive as public awareness and literacy grows. "It's like something from a movie" means fake-but-in-a-good-way when a couple of generations ago it meant fake-but-in-a-bad-way. "Storybook ending" has been positive for decades if not centuries. "Something out of a video game" still has largely negative connotations of unreality but also some hints of freedom? I'm going to think more on this.