(Thread IKs:
Nuns with Guns)
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DaysBefore posted:Even if it's a few steps removed it all comes from Tolkein in the end. Though even the big man himself was unhappy with the idea that all orcs are evil forever. Not because of any wider implications, but because it clashed with his super devout Catholic beliefs in free will. I always get a little annoyed at this stuff. Like, I agree there is some stuff that's kinda poo poo like the whole 'men of the east' being corrupted and all but the books make it pretty clear it's presented as a massive tragedy brought on by the Numenoreans' fall and two of their lords conquering the Haradrim and it's meant as a narrative contrast to the men of Gondor who have similar connections to exiled Numenoreans in their founding. Same with the orcs, they're corrupted and twisted by Sauron. I don't disagree that Tolkien had some blind spots in his descriptions and all and he did indeed have some hilarious early 1900's views but the idea that D&D's racial determinism came from him is just absurd. You can't blame him for nerds like Gygax only half reading his books and going 'right Orcs and middle easterners are inherently evil, gotcha'. Also yes he was unhappy with that for 'wider implications', it feels really lovely to pretend he wasn't just because his catholic values are part of what led him to have that view when he has multiple writings on not wanting people to read his works and think he's saying there's inherent, unredeemable, evil in the culture of some and inherent, unshakable, goodness in others. Unsurprisingly the guy who got his brain real hosed up in WW1 didn't actually believe humanity had inherent evil or good based on what imaginary line you were born behind.
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May 26, 2022 12:59
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Violet_Sky posted:HP Lovecraft says Hello at least lovecraft’s story ends positively, before he died his mental health improved and he was going out more and he came to understand and despise how much of a fearful paranoid racist he was and how it affected his work, trying to do better Catgirl Al Capone fucked around with this message at 13:39 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 13:29
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Dungeon meshi deserves an anime but instead we get incel isekai poo poo At least the official English translation is happening, thanks to Seven Seas.
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May 26, 2022 13:37
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sexpig by night posted:I always get a little annoyed at this stuff. Like, I agree there is some stuff that's kinda poo poo like the whole 'men of the east' being corrupted and all but the books make it pretty clear it's presented as a massive tragedy brought on by the Numenoreans' fall and two of their lords conquering the Haradrim and it's meant as a narrative contrast to the men of Gondor who have similar connections to exiled Numenoreans in their founding. Same with the orcs, they're corrupted and twisted by Sauron. I don't disagree that Tolkien had some blind spots in his descriptions and all and he did indeed have some hilarious early 1900's views but the idea that D&D's racial determinism came from him is just absurd. You can't blame him for nerds like Gygax only half reading his books and going 'right Orcs and middle easterners are inherently evil, gotcha'. Huh, good to know
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May 26, 2022 14:03
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DaysBefore posted:Huh, good to know yea Tolkien did have some weird poo poo don't get me wrong, but for me he's always been a good example of 'genuinely good intentions but completely ignorant of the world outside his sphere'. Like how the Dwarfs are partially inspired by Jews in his stories. On one hand they're noble, proud, people who have survived tragedy and oppression while keeping their culture alive and creating great works of art and craftsmanship. Hey that's cool, that's a pretty high esteem to hold Jewish people in for an early 20th century English Catholic! On the other part of their tragedy is they've been inflicted with a curse of greed that can gnaw at the soul of even their greatest heroes, and while it was meant to be a general symbol of the arrogance and focus on the material world that causes harm to any group...it's still 'hey these Dwarfs are inspired partially by Jews you said and you made them have an inherent risk of magically lusting for gold and treasure...' which is...not awesome in a vacuum! I don't think Tolkien had any antisemitism in his heart when doing that, like I said I think the 'dragon greed' is meant to be a universal lesson since we see every race, even the much beloved Hobbits, suffer from greed/obsession in some form in his works, but yea it is one of those weird things where if you look at it in isolation you're not completely unreasonable to go 'wait, what's up?'
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May 26, 2022 14:37
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Mokinokaro posted:The show is literally funded by Crunchyroll and artificially pushed by them due to it. Funny enough, it's actually not that well known of a franchise in Japan. A bit late, but I don't think that is actually the case. The volumes also sold well in Japan even before the anime, and then the anime increased the sales by a lot too. The characters also did show up in Isekai Quartet (a crossover show with the most popular Isekai franchises). It was moderately popular in Japan, and like most series the anime boosted its popularity. (A lot of anime these days is just meant to be an advertisement for the LN/manga.)
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May 26, 2022 15:06
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Shinji2015 posted:I always wonder how much of it is editorial telling authors not to spend too much time on female characters versus authors not having any idea with what to do with/how to write female characters. People like Akira Toriyama prove that there's plenty of the latter, but there's newer series like Doron Dororon where what looked to be one of the main characters is written off because some people didn't like her. Newer authors don't get a lot of leeway, and if editorial is telling you to do something, you're going to do it. I honestly think it's always been a mixture of both and that one feeds into the other: Editors think shonen's target demographic doesn't want to read about women so they put pressure on creators to focus mainly on male characters, then eventually new creators who grew up reading stories without female characters break into the industry and have no idea what to do with women in their stories. What especially bugs me is how deeply shonen manga seems to take the idea "girls can't fight good like boys" as part of its worldview. Just ladies be good at punching people! This is anecdotal, but it also feels like back when anime was first starting to gain popularity with kids in North America there were more female-led action anime being localized and distributed. Like, when I think back to the sorts of anime that were popular with my peers in the late 90s-early 2000s you were as likely to see shows like Sailor Moon, Utena or the Ghibli movies which featured female leads with direct agency over their own stories, whereas nowadays it feels like those sorts of titles aren't as prominent amongst what is popular with western anime fans?
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May 26, 2022 15:19
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I think anime is also overrun with the anti-woke crowd. The kinds that still continue to whine about the Dragon Maid dub being "too political" love the edgy poo poo. There's still a lot of progressive anime fans but the anti-woke fans are pretty loud.
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May 26, 2022 15:31
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Anime/manga has a similar problem to Western studio movies- the people in charge want a low-risk, high yield bet. In Japan, this tends to translate to "cater exclusively to the demo of shutins who buy porny figurines" so all that informs the direction. Which leads to weird bullshit like Skeleton Knight in Another World going from a fun comedy series about a goofy nerd who is so pumped to be in a fantasy world, with occasional very tame cliche "Oh no the bad guys are so bad they're going to be sleazes let's murder them so that they don't do a rape!" to a series with scenes literally out of extreme rape hentai and carefully cropped shots so the main girl character's massive tits are always visible. Because, well, Goblin Slayer was popular, so that's what people want, right? Gotta cater to the demographic that only spends money on lovely anime! Re: Shield Hero and Geoff's review of it, I was amused that he was so gaga over the villain princess being a ridiculous mean girl, because that kind of character is a dime a dozen in female-oriented fantasy manhwa, without the baggage of... everything else in Shield Hero. I guess you'd have to deal with the main conflict generally being social instead of casting big, fancy battle magic, though.
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May 26, 2022 15:59
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sexpig by night posted:Also yes he was unhappy with that for 'wider implications', it feels really lovely to pretend he wasn't just because his catholic values are part of what led him to have that view when he has multiple writings on not wanting people to read his works and think he's saying there's inherent, unredeemable, evil in the culture of some and inherent, unshakable, goodness in others. Unsurprisingly the guy who got his brain real hosed up in WW1 didn't actually believe humanity had inherent evil or good based on what imaginary line you were born behind. One of the things that I always find so strange about how Orcs turned out as they became ubiquitous is how they're all tribal warbands or something like it. Cause the thing that stuck out to me about Tolkein was his belief that if there is an example of complete evil, it's industrialized warfare. It's kinda all over the place, even in non-book middle earth media, but the horror of destroying the land to fuel warfare at an unfathomable scale never really seemed to leave Middle Earth the way other things did. Orcs, if they're bad guys, are roving bands of assholes who make warfare on a small scale and use hand-crafted or stolen weaponry. Mass production just never shows up as an Orc thing anywhere else. Puppy Time posted:Re: Shield Hero and Geoff's review of it, I was amused that he was so gaga over the villain princess being a ridiculous mean girl, because that kind of character is a dime a dozen in female-oriented fantasy manhwa, without the baggage of... everything else in Shield Hero. I guess you'd have to deal with the main conflict generally being social instead of casting big, fancy battle magic, though. Not just female-oriented fantasy manhwa, they're usually the only real villains in the female isekai manga. Her interpretation isn't exactly hard to find, either. The sexy, manipulative noble in particular is also all over the place in trash misogynist chinese fantasy stuff. It really struck me as odd that he viewed her as a positive when she's one of the biggest negatives of the thing because of how obviously she's there as a stand in for those uppity bitches who need to be put in their place. I think he's just trying to come up with reasons he likes a thing that's so full of red flags. He explains it before hand, too; he likes the character dynamic of the two leads and likes how the other summoned heroes act based on their introduction to the world. That's fine! I think it's okay to like a thing even if it's got clear issues that you don't take as any example of how the real world works. But calling her unique and interesting can only come from a place that's unaware of how prevalent the character is through all sorts of similar stories. Grondoth fucked around with this message at 16:14 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 16:00
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Puppy Time posted:Re: Shield Hero and Geoff's review of it, I was amused that he was so gaga over the villain princess being a ridiculous mean girl, because that kind of character is a dime a dozen in female-oriented fantasy manhwa, without the baggage of... everything else in Shield Hero. I guess you'd have to deal with the main conflict generally being social instead of casting big, fancy battle magic, though.
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May 26, 2022 16:06
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KingKalamari posted:I honestly think it's always been a mixture of both and that one feeds into the other: Editors think shonen's target demographic doesn't want to read about women so they put pressure on creators to focus mainly on male characters, then eventually new creators who grew up reading stories without female characters break into the industry and have no idea what to do with women in their stories. What especially bugs me is how deeply shonen manga seems to take the idea "girls can't fight good like boys" as part of its worldview. Just ladies be good at punching people! That's a good point, and that cycle isn't going to do much to improve things. I'm also frustrated by how deep the "girls don't punch as hard as boys" shonen trope goes; I've been watching
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May 26, 2022 16:27
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If they want a brutal isekai so much just loving watch The Twelve Kingdoms they will not watch Twelve Kingdoms because it's about a girl 
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May 26, 2022 16:36
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There's only one good isekai and that's Drifters. No I will not elaborate
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May 26, 2022 16:36
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Wasn't there another old pen and paper RPG world where it turned out the creator wrote for straight up Nazi publications under a pseudonym? If I remember right it was one of the few big ones that wasn't European fantasy (surprisingly).
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May 26, 2022 16:39
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Yup it was Tékumel, which given its depiction of "tribal" people it isn't really surprising. The author was just that particular type of Nazi who classes certain types of Muslim people as Aryan.
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May 26, 2022 16:47
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Oh I thought it was Confessions of an MMO Addict Edit: That's a Japanese light novel not a pnp rpg, derp. And I got the name wrong. Kaiser Mazoku fucked around with this message at 17:02 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 16:50
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Archer666 posted:There's only one good isekai and that's Drifters. No I will not elaborate The best is the one where a DBZ superfan dies and comes back as Yamcha. He then uses his knowledge of events to make Yamcha an extremely strong fighter.
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May 26, 2022 17:08
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:Oh I thought it was Confessions of an MMO Addict Yeah I don't think there's anything wrong with the writer of Confessions except the poor woman got so sick the series never concluded. EDIT: The director of the anime however seems to be an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.
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May 26, 2022 17:15
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Shinji2015 posted:That's a good point, and that cycle isn't going to do much to improve things. I'm also frustrated by how deep the "girls don't punch as hard as boys" shonen trope goes; I've been watching Yeah. I dig JJK but it showed those cracks really early on and later things get worse. It's a little funny that one of the best shonen battle mangas for this representation is Hiro Mashima's Fairy Tail - which I stress does have a multitude of problems - but some of the strongest characters in the comic are women and they actually fight. Soul Eater was also pretty good. Fire Force... might be? It depends on how generous you're feeling.
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May 26, 2022 17:27
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Shinji2015 posted:I always wonder how much of it is editorial telling authors not to spend too much time on female characters versus authors not having any idea with what to do with/how to write female characters. People like Akira Toriyama prove that there's plenty of the latter, but there's newer series like Doron Dororon where what looked to be one of the main characters is written off because some people didn't like her. Newer authors don't get a lot of leeway, and if editorial is telling you to do something, you're going to do it. Well if you listen to certain One Piece fans on twitter it's because the authors wife is jealous and won't allow him to look at any other women, so he's only allowed to draw them based on her. Some fans really do come up with the most fantastical reasons, rather than acknowledge that an author they like might not be perfect.
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May 26, 2022 17:37
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CYBEReris posted:at least lovecraft’s story ends positively, before he died his mental health improved and he was going out more and he came to understand and despise how much of a fearful paranoid racist he was and how it affected his work, trying to do better That's actually not true. By all accounts Lovecraft towards the end of his life felt somewhat more positively towards Jews, probably because he married a Jewish woman, but was just as racist towards Black people as he ever was and was apparently if anything becoming even MORE racist towards Asians.
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May 26, 2022 17:56
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Cannibal Llama posted:That's actually not true. By all accounts Lovecraft towards the end of his life felt somewhat more positively towards Jews, probably because he married a Jewish woman, but was just as racist towards Black people as he ever was and was apparently if anything becoming even MORE racist towards Asians. Yea I think you're thinking of Howard with that positive ending. He's the dude who wrote Conan and was from a tiny Texas town where he never really got out even there and it wasn't until he started going to cons and poo poo that he got shown 'hey your whole thing where half your enemies are spooky not-Africans is kinda buck wild' and seemed to genuinely take that to heart and at least try to show positive elements of those places and make it more 'okay these specific bad groups are who Conan was fighting, they're just normal people on the whole'. Lovecraft 'softened' on Jews because he literally married one and frankly call me paranoid but I don't even believe he did, just that he learned to not call his wife's family the loving k-slur out loud. He remained as racist as ever and did indeed get even crazier about the spooky scary Asian people he was convinced eat baby skin to make egg rolls or some poo poo.
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May 26, 2022 18:09
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Maybe they are thinking about the letter or diary entry from Lovecraft floating around on twitter a month or so back. In it he said he was a dumbass for being racist, iirc it was like a few months before his death. I didn't look into the source so I don't know if it's actually legit, but even so it was too late to affect any of his works.
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May 26, 2022 18:16
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Solitair posted:Geoff plays with fire.
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May 26, 2022 18:23
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah I don't think there's anything wrong with the writer of Confessions except the poor woman got so sick the series never concluded. Yeah the anime director got outed as a nazi several years ago. I think Mothers Basement did a video on it.
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May 26, 2022 18:28
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sexpig by night posted:Yea I think you're thinking of Howard with that positive ending. He's the dude who wrote Conan and was from a tiny Texas town where he never really got out even there and it wasn't until he started going to cons and poo poo that he got shown 'hey your whole thing where half your enemies are spooky not-Africans is kinda buck wild' and seemed to genuinely take that to heart and at least try to show positive elements of those places and make it more 'okay these specific bad groups are who Conan was fighting, they're just normal people on the whole'. It appears to be gone now, but there used to be an article on Wikipedia about "The Character of Robert E Howard" that examined his attitudes towards women, race and other such social topics. A segment I will always vividly remember is the one that discussed how his views on race softened over time and how it mentioned his racism was tempered by his correspondence with other writers. It lists one such author whose name I forget noting they held much more progressive views than Howard did, and then it lists Lovecraft who the article noted "Had much more racist views than Howard's own" and I just really love the unspoken implication that Lovecraft was such a weird, racist creepo that it made REH examine his own attitudes and try to be less racist.
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May 26, 2022 18:31
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Grondoth posted:One of the things that I always find so strange about how Orcs turned out as they became ubiquitous is how they're all tribal warbands or something like it. Cause the thing that stuck out to me about Tolkein was his belief that if there is an example of complete evil, it's industrialized warfare. It's kinda all over the place, even in non-book middle earth media, but the horror of destroying the land to fuel warfare at an unfathomable scale never really seemed to leave Middle Earth the way other things did. Orcs, if they're bad guys, are roving bands of assholes who make warfare on a small scale and use hand-crafted or stolen weaponry. Mass production just never shows up as an Orc thing anywhere else. This really is the weirdest thing about orcs, yeah. If anything, somehow the Iron Horde from Warlords of Draenor is the only other example of this I can picture off the top of my head. And that A) needed time travel and B) is in one of the franchises that leaned hardest into the idea of orcs as tribesmen.
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May 26, 2022 18:33
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Hel posted:Maybe they are thinking about the letter or diary entry from Lovecraft floating around on twitter a month or so back. In it he said he was a dumbass for being racist, iirc it was like a few months before his death. I didn't look into the source so I don't know if it's actually legit, but even so it was too late to affect any of his works. https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md You are probably thinking of this letter, which made the rounds on the internet as "Lovecraft regretting his racism", but is more about him being disillusioned with reactionary movements for political reasons. H.P. Lovecraft posted:All this from an antiquated mummy who was on the other side until 1931! Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today ... & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections. Flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs!
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May 26, 2022 18:37
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KingKalamari posted:This is anecdotal, but it also feels like back when anime was first starting to gain popularity with kids in North America there were more female-led action anime being localized and distributed. Like, when I think back to the sorts of anime that were popular with my peers in the late 90s-early 2000s you were as likely to see shows like Sailor Moon, Utena or the Ghibli movies which featured female leads with direct agency over their own stories, whereas nowadays it feels like those sorts of titles aren't as prominent amongst what is popular with western anime fans? I also felt that when Gamergate was happening and everyone was furious at women for being in things too much. (Y'know, before everyone was a TERF mad at women in another way) Because I was a weird kid that took like 6 years to stop watching nothing but animated stuff.Granted I was watching mostly cartoons at the time. You had Sandy being cool in Spongbob and Numbah 3 and 5 being fun characters in Codename Kids Next Door, Mandy and Raven doing the same thing in theirs and even in actual shows focused on girls they were great! Powerpuff Girls, Kim Possible, The Proud Family, My Life as a Teenage Robot. Aside from being like 8 or something (All I remember for sure is that it was Elementary School) and embarassed talking with one of my friends about liking the Powerpuff Girls show and them being like 'No same' and neither of us being bothered by it after that afterwards I was just completely lost on the whole crusade.
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May 26, 2022 18:38
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Everybody I knew was watching ATLA as it aired, and that show had Katara and Toph as pretty unambiguously the strongest fighters among the main group outside of Aang in his super power state. Also Azula, who is the most credible threat to Aang for a good chunk of the story. And like, there was zero dumb nerd rage over it. What a time to be alive.
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May 26, 2022 18:51
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SimonChris posted:https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md That's probably it, I never read it before just remembered it popping up on twitter.
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May 26, 2022 18:57
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Dawgstar posted:CJ the X has COVID. Also a new video about Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove. https://youtu.be/5Sz40XPPtKQ This video is about five minutes about Kronk and twenty-plus minutes of transcendental ranting about the wellspring of artistic endeavor. I mean, I don't usually mind the tangents in CJ's video essays but this one was more tangent than essay.
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May 26, 2022 19:09
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Slayers was and still is my jam. Lina Inverse is the GOAT.
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May 26, 2022 19:15
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Junpei Hyde posted:Have we considered that "oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!" is the activation phrase for sleeper agents to make inane forum arguments to distract us from the truth? What the gently caress is wrong with you
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May 26, 2022 19:22
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:Slayers was and still is my jam. Lina Inverse is the GOAT. Heck yeah. "Superpowered lady who is a hot mess but gets poo poo done when the chips are down" is a longstanding stock plot of anime that needs to make a comeback in a big way. Gimme more Slayers, Dirty Pairs, Sailor Moons!
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May 26, 2022 19:27
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Skippy McPants posted:This video is about five minutes about Kronk and twenty-plus minutes of transcendental ranting about the wellspring of artistic endeavor. I mean, I don't usually mind the tangents in CJ's video essays but this one was more tangent than essay. Sounds like they had Covid brain which is a pretty fun thing to have. You’re like drunk and don’t care what you say.
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May 26, 2022 19:28
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KingKalamari posted:This is anecdotal, but it also feels like back when anime was first starting to gain popularity with kids in North America there were more female-led action anime being localized and distributed. Like, when I think back to the sorts of anime that were popular with my peers in the late 90s-early 2000s you were as likely to see shows like Sailor Moon, Utena or the Ghibli movies which featured female leads with direct agency over their own stories, whereas nowadays it feels like those sorts of titles aren't as prominent amongst what is popular with western anime fans? There are still plenty of magical girl shows and shows with women leads but it's up to people to seek them out basically.
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May 26, 2022 19:29
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KingKalamari posted:Heck yeah. "Superpowered lady who is a hot mess but gets poo poo done when the chips are down" is a longstanding stock plot of anime that needs to make a comeback in a big way. Gimme more Slayers, Dirty Pairs, Sailor Moons! They did , it's called Dirty Pair Flash and like Bubblegum Crisis 2040 seems to completely miss the point of what people liked about the original. I don't know why but it seems there was a trend in the 90's to remake 80s anime without the thing that was actually interesting.
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May 26, 2022 19:36
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Imagine reading exclusively shonen, a word that literally means "boy youth" and being like "where's all the strong cool girls???????"
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May 26, 2022 19:42
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