Gormongous

I continue to wait for the sign that Prison Architect has finally gotten it together in terms of its thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex, but instead I keep hearing stuff like this and it bums me out. There's an upgrade tree? Logic dictates that stuff like healthcare and labor would be held back by the demographics of your prison, but I guess they're not interested in deepening the simulation of the prison population to the point where viable strategies arise out of emergent gameplay rather than gated mechanics? This continues to be a confusing and slightly off-putting game for me...

Having owned two sets of speakers and three mice from Logitech, they seem to rely upon being chronically unavailable to "solve" all support cases, under what I assume is the belief that their products are cheap enough that you'll end up buying another one sooner or later, no matter how terribly they treat you.

That's a good point. Ryuko has a very aspirational dimension to her as a hero, so even if she incorporates exploitative elements, which she indisputably does, she's not necessarily exploitative herself. Thanks, I'll chew on that for a while.

I'm not much for Black Flag or anything, but I've gotten to know Rollins through his latter-day acting career. The man is never uninteresting in a role. He was really intense as a white supremacist for a season in Sons of Anarchy, and then when I looked him up online, he'd written something really thoughtful about the need to let a fictional character present the beliefs that they hold as sincere, even if those beliefs hateful, because it's not really hate without the sincerity behind it. And then, on a much less serious note, he was Zaheer for a season of The Legend of Korra and sold being an anarchist just about as well as it's going to be sold to me. Long story short, I subscribed to the podcast, because the dude's interesting as fuck. Thanks, Syn!

I definitely think that watching anime as it airs almost demands a heightened sensitivity towards perceived missteps. Since everyone's gets the same amount of time to process an episode and everyone's working with incomplete information, there's no easy way to decide whether something is a temporary lapse, an intentional misstep in service of a larger theme, or the sign of shitty things to come. It just has to be taken on faith, which isn't necessarily bad, but still taints the viewing experience with concerns in a way that wouldn't otherwise be brought up. I feel like that's what's happened with Yuri Kuma Arashi for me. If I watched it six months from now, after word had gotten around that it's a lesser Ikuhara, I wouldn't feel so strongly about it. As for KILL la KILL's sexual themes... I don't know. I waited for the transformation sequences to have a meaning, beyond using old animation references from "magical girl" anime, and they really didn't, besides occasionally involving men. Equal opportunity exploitation is better than nothing, but... eh. One of my favorite anime bloggers posted the article Kill la Kill = Exploitation + Empowerment? a while ago, which I want to believe but am not sure I can. I've watched a lot of GAINAX and GAINAX-imitating anime, but I've never gotten on board with "fan service with a purpose." It's something for which I'm still trying to train my palette, although my recent efforts to watch the Patlabor TV series haven't done much on that front.

Some pixiv artist came up with crossover fanart that could only combine more things that are dear to me if the images played the Baldur's Gate II theme while you viewed them. Sorry for it being slightly NSFW.

Oh, totally. To double down on your cynicism, after a decade or so of throwing parties and buying things, he'll probably be bored enough that running a charity will be a nice change of pace. That's kind of how it seemed with Bill Gates.

Okay, that makes more sense. As far as municipal geography, "St. Louis" is more of a region than a city. There's the core city of St. Louis proper, which is relatively impoverished by the rich county municipalities that are happy to profit from its central location while contributing very little to its upkeep. Then there are the townships beyond that band of rich county land, which are inconvenienced if not also impoverished by the refusal of the counties to build any sort of infrastructure uniting the area that could be used to ferry the poor into their gated communities and downtown promenades. It might be a reasonable prosperous city if incorporated under a single administration that could balance the needs of rich and poor, but instead we have several dozen different cities, townships, and municipalities playing lobsters in a bucket. There's no doubt, whoever gets charged with taking over and fixing Ferguson PD, that nothing will change. No one has their ducks in a row, at least no one who'd let themselves get freighted with this. That's America, really! Or maybe the world.

Is that really what's going to happen? I'd be really interested if it were. St. Louis city police are overstretched as it is, and Ferguson is physically removed from their jurisdiction. Wouldn't it be more likely for them to be folded into a larger municipality that they neighbor, like Hazelwood, Florissant, or even St. Charles?

Some fansub group I follow posted a screencap into which they'd edited the words "Smoke weed erryday" and someone immediately commented, "I don't think that we should smoke weed 'erryday,' but I do think that we should smoke weed everyday." Seriously, a pothead pedant? No hope for humanity.

Yeah, you're right. K-On! does moe really well, and most of its expressions of it aren't derivative, but it doesn't really have a point beyond cultivating a certain aesthetic. I just like it a lot anyway and lost track of why I was making the list. I've just realized the irony of having this conversation while my user title is "Unbreakable Machine Doll," which I just have because I like the cadence of the words but is one of those "enjoy perfect little girls living perfect little lives" anime that Blambo's criticizing. I'll have to change it back to "All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku" sooner or later, anyway.

Chuunibyou is so bad, though. I don't know anyone who actually enjoys it, rather than tolerating it out of some duty to watch all the "big" shows in a given season. I watched the first two seasons on the strength of my misguided loyalty to KyoAni, but there's almost nothing redeeming there. Even the thing that initially drew me to the show, Rikka's character design, is almost certainly ripped off of Another, which is an anime that actually uses its moe trappings to draw the audience into the horror story it's telling. Checking... yep! The manga adaptation of Another began in May 2010, the light novels for Chuunibyou started in June 2011. I'm going to go ahead and call shenanigans. I think we can probably both agree that moe elements exist in a lot of non-moe anime and we don't really notice because they generally work. It's shows that lead with (or are defined by) moe that have an uphill battle to fight with viewers like you, who aren't accustomed to taking on faith (and perhaps rightly so) that the moe's doing something important and not just being titillation. I realize that there are only a handful of shows (Girls und Panzer, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-On!, A Certain Scientific Railgun, WataMote, C3-Bu, parts of Penguindrum, parts of Bakemonogatari, I'm already running out of steam here!) for which moe serves a purpose like that, and that the majority are like Chuunibyou, Nyaruko, Non Non Biyori (also looks awful), and Tamako Market (I got bored of thinking up shows for this list almost immediately, so I just pulled one out of a hat and gave up) that are just using anime for its currency among otaku and its proven earning potential. I don't think I could ask anyone to wade through the latter to find the former, especially if they don't like the aesthetic itself. Speaking of, I'm glad that you weren't turned off by KILL la KILL, CL! As I've reflected over the past year or so, I've come to think that maybe I like that show a lot and that my problems with it would be invisible on a binge-watching schedule. Do report back after watching more!

I've been having a bad spate the past few months where I just have no tolerance for most questions asked at panels or presentations. 75% of them are something the person asking already knows but wants to be seen and heard asking. 20% are something already said in the talk or elsewhere, possibly something too clueless, offensive, or ignorant to ask at all. 5% are questions that actually start conversations not in some way designed to sidestep the questions themselves, and that's probably generous. Really, the hardest part about being a presenter (at least, from my experience in an academic setting) is being able to take the absolute garbage most people consider a passable question, find the actual utility within it, and then answer that naturally while making it look like it was the intent of the person asking. It makes me wish that there'd be re-edits of streams that cut out the questions and just put the answers together as a less-focused second talk.

Well, with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon's presentation as the only rational guy is heavily compromised by his position as the viewpoint character. They have less facility in keeping it up during the second season and the movie, but especially in the first Kyon's definitely lying through omission and misdirection to obscure information about himself and about Haruhi. And then KyoAni went and applied that formula to a dozen other shows, with equal commercial if not critical success, proving that the effectiveness of it in Haruhi is not its thematic depth but just the simple dynamic of a rational dude dealing with irrational women. I think that's a lot of what we've been talking about today, good tropes that are digested by the furious hunger of the anime industry into the bare minimum of what works and then repeated over and over like they're printing money. I certainly got off of the KyoAni wagon after Chuunibyou, because it was such a cynical formula that couldn't even claim to be fun, but I'm sure there are plenty other shows employing different "formulas" that I haven't reached saturation yet. That clip is terrible. Is all of Nyaruko that terrible? Generic character designs, a funny joke papered over with lore, animation that tries to tell you the emotion of a given moment...

Well, the idea is that she appears just to be that stereotype, but there's depth beyond that, running counter to the stereotype. If it weren't possible to stereotype her, her character's arc wouldn't be half as effective, because there'd be no buy-in. That's why I'm saying, the reason Girls und Panzer is good is because it uses its moe to create dissonance in the minds of the audience that is then resolved through the functioning of the plot. Without the moe aesthetic, it'd just be some weirdly downbeat show about a group of girls who drive tanks competitively. Not that I'm complaining, but I love military hardware a bit too much. You know what does bother me like moe seems to bother you? The similar archetype of the Potato-kun in harem-type anime. The male protagonist who's carefully crafted to have no personality besides being vaguely loyal and protective, so that nothing can get in the way of them being identifiable to a male viewer, is incredibly gross to watch a cast of female characters fall in love with, especially if there's a fantastical element that makes them the savior of the universe in addition to every girl's dream husband. It's bizarre that anime's developed this male character who's so oblivious and hesitant that they're functionally a mobile point-of-view for other characters to interact in front of, but it's everywhere now. It ruined A Certain Magical Index for me, which makes me happy that A Certain Scientific Railgun includes almost no Mr. Being-Normal-Is-A-Superpower-Too, and I barely got through Witch Craft Works despite Takamiya being just as bad. And you know, I've seen shows that do the "passive audience surrogate" protagonist fine, but just like a lot of shows with moe aesthetics, it's become a cheat that makes the shows that use it but don't understand it noticeably worse. Speaking of... We probably agree, so long as your argument isn't that getting rid of moe is what'll shock anime back to life. There's a lot of lazy writing and art in the world of anime, relying on iteration, franchise, and shortcuts to sustain itself. With publishers becoming increasingly risk-adverse, it probably can't last forever.

I love the Madhouse touch. I'm not even watching that show, but damn.

I don't think that competency is a function of the stereotype unless the anime itself is not very good. Even though it sounds like I was defending Chuunibyou earlier, I actually despise it for a lot of what it sounds like you dislike in more moe-oriented shows. There are one or two characters who actually have inner lives and can get shit done, one of which is invariably male, and the rest of the characters are useless blobs. I think that that anime, the moe-blob anime, is inferior to the moe anime, which just uses those aesthetic principles to achieve a certain effect. Girls und Panzer invites you to make assumptions about the characters owing to their simplistic and cutesy design, but every character has their own skills and competencies, some expected and some unexpected, that are developed and given full play throughout the show. For instance, there's the mature and motherly ojou-sama who gradually abandons her hobby of flower-arranging to become a gunner, even though she abhors violence, because she enjoys the need for patience and a good eye, but likes the impact (literally) of a tank cannon more than a flower arrangement. And then, later in the show, that feeds back into her flower arranging. It's a moe character arc. Really, for a good show like that, moe is more just a means of giving the audience a non-threatening entrypoint into the fictional universe and a means of disrupting audience expectations once they're in. And yeah, I know that I've got a very conditioned palate for this stuff. I don't expect anyone else to like it. I just don't think moe is the thing killing anime these days. The thing killing anime, if anything's "killing anime" in an age when I can buy a full-length series on Blu-ray for sixty bucks, is a glut of lazy and underwritten half-cour shows, usually adaptations of the latest manga and light novel properties, exploiting moe to sell themselves to a contracting market that somehow still doesn't have much discernment. Even without moe, that exploitation would still happen, through some other facet of the otaku fandom. I know you're not saying that moe is killing anime. I guess I'm having a different argument, mostly with myself. It's not a good thing, but that's the same director and studio as Girls und Panzer and Another (and the director's done Shinryaku! Ika Musume, Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, and xxxHOLiC at other studios). I'm tempted to say that's just his style, particularly with respect to the five female protagonists, and sadly it's one that sells even if it doesn't match the genre of the anime. I'm not even the biggest fan of the aesthetics of the P.A. Works brand of moe when used well, but what are you going to do?

Yeah, the purview of moe is very broad. You can feel it towards an inanimate object like a coffee maker, so there's an argument to be made that it's objectifying even if it isn't necessarily sexual. Still, I feel that argument only applies consistently at the term's highest and most unspecific level of interpretation. It has so many different applications, even within a single subgenre, and many of those applications definitely give their characters more agency, not less. That's really what I meant when invoking the Bechdel Test for K-On!, I think, but a better example is Girls und Panzer, whose characters live in a childlike world, free of mature interpersonal pressures like sexuality and hatred, but are still extremely competent tank commanders willing and able to take care of themselves. The feelings of protectiveness and support that the aesthetic of moe, as an offshoot of more generic "cuteness," is meant to excite from the audience is separate from an analytical inventory of the characters themselves. I guess that's why it's complicated, because it cultivates an affection for a character that is definitely gendered, but more paternal than sexual. It's a very different category of fandom, although now that I'm aware of it and accustomed to it by the anime I watch, I can definitely say that I feel more moe than attraction to, say... Emily Blunt. Anyway, I really should say that if these shows don't appeal to you at all, they don't appeal to you, and that's okay. They're something I only came to enjoy with half a decade of anime watching behind me, which had largely eliminated the entirely reasonable shame about which dium talks. I watched K-On! when I moved to a new city where I knew no one because I needed to watch people be friends with each other, and by the time I had my own friends here, I didn't give a fuck if they thought I was watching high school girls start a rock band for perverted reasons.

I love you too, neonrev. Give me a few hours to parse your post, though.

Thank you! That's what was digging at my brain. I mean, I feel like rich people have some responsibility to give back something. Even if he was just selling a product, it's not like it was made and sold in a total vacuum, so I feel uncomfortable with him just retiring to his mansion to practice DJing for the rest of his life, whether or not he's a dick about it.

It feels really odd for you to list Girls und Panzer, one of my favorite shows the past few years, alongside Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, one of my least favorite shows the past few years, just because they share a moe aesthetic. Moe has a lot of different purposes for different shows, even though the most common effect is the simplification of the show's emotional spectrum to deescalate conflict and emphasize certain feelings in both the character and the audience. In Chuunibyou, the efficacy of the show's themes depend on you feeling indulgent towards and protective of Rikka, so a moe aesthetic is almost a given. In Girls und Panzer, the crux of the show is fairly extreme armored combat with a high degree of realism, so a moe aesthetic is used to contrast that with the mundane lives of the girls who participate in that combat. The goal of neither is strict emotional realism, because neither show would be served by it, and I don't think the vast majority of the audience would mistake the characters and their behaviors for reflections of real life. I don't know. I understand concerns about the exploitative potential of shows where the entire female cast is composed of vapid caricatures, but I don't think many shows are just that. Even if they are, I agree more with your friend than with you that sometimes a simpler show set in a simpler universe with simpler people is pleasant to watch. It's more common with shows dominated by female characters, but that's because more slice-of-life shows feature girls, largely because the audience's unfamiliarity with them make it easier to get away with more outre depictions of ostensibly human behavior. I mean, it's for that same reason that K-On! destroys the Bechdel test in a way that a male-oriented Western cartoon never has and never will. Even so, when they make a slice-of-life anime featuring guys, like Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, you see the same caricatures, except there's no concerns about it being a sexual thing because who the fuck feels sexual about high school boys. Moe is gendered in use, not in intent. If you're interested in reading more, there's not much Japanese scholarship that's been translated to English, but I think that Saito Tamaki's Beautiful Fighting Girl discusses the cultural weight of what you're talking about, along with a lot of other stuff, in depth. There's also Patrick Galbraith's recent book The Moe Manifesto, which directly addresses moe, but I understand that it's a book primarily written for advocacy and doesn't really have much independent value outside of a series of interviews with anime and manga creators about what moe means to them.

I mean, the only language with which I'm familiar that's not Indo-European is Japanese, the principal insults for which fall into the same two categories of "insufficiently respectful form of address" and "term for waste." I know there are gendered slurs there, too, but the obsession with body parts and disabilities doesn't seem quite so intensive. Also, "silly" also meant "blessed" in English back at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It then went from that to "innocent" to "harmless" to "weak" to "foolish" by the end of the sixteenth century. All things considered, it's a very rapid and extreme pejoration of an entirely positive word, which is interesting in terms of linguistics. I've personally been using "monstrous" a lot more, but I worry sometimes that its medieval etymology in describing birth defects isn't the best. Like neonrev, it's something I'm chewing on.

This months-long trainwreck has shown time and again how unexamined these people's lives are by their own selves. With the "Burgers and Fries" chat log, with this chat log, and with every other attempt to show how some asshole was going from Point A to Point B and ended up stuck in the mud instead, it takes any reasonable person mere seconds to see where they jumped the tracks and went sailing over the edge, but they're still dead sure that if it's possible to follow their train of thought, by dint of them having documented it in full, it's impossible not to agree with them.

That last quote from the comments was my daily dose for realizing how far removed to a different reality these guys are. Anita Sarkeesian has been a regular fixture in my corner of the internet for almost three years, and she's definitely not going anywhere. Davis Aurini appeared out of nowhere during #GamerGate, blatantly to exploit the movement's hatred of Sarkeesian, and really just dips in and out of the periphery of my consciousness, not to mention that a meltdown like this shows how close he is to vanishing at any given time.

Ten minutes in: Man, that is a classic Breckon meltdown. Even Jake can't go on about having nothing to say like Nick can in his prime. Please be on every cast, Nick. Not just Idle Thumbs casts, every cast. I'm glad that Danielle's incomparable Toad voice is finally getting the airtime it deserves. It's been my own private meme for months already. Steve Gaynor is the master of callbacks.