Today on the Magical Girl Project, I'm sampling two shows with very similar premises from the same era: Risky Safety from 1999 and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar from 2001. Both shows involve miniature apprentice-level Magical Girls who travel to the human world in order to pass a test that will allow them to become fully-fledged magic users, with said test requiring the collection of MacGuffins. Both are also early examples of cutesy-wootsy Magical Girl shows made for a male audience.

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is about an adorable pink-haired apprentice Season Fairy named Sugar. Season Fairies are in charge of creating weather in the human world; Sugar’s specialty is snow, which she creates by playing a magic flute. After arriving in the human world, Sugar promptly passes out from hunger and is discovered by the muggle heroine, Saga. Saga is a control freak; she likes to have her day all neatly planned out and diligently sticks to her schedule. However, now that ditzy, playful, fish-out-of-water Sugar is staying at her house, you can bet that Saga’s carefully-laid plans are all going out the window. Two of Sugar’s friends quickly join them, Salt the sun fairy and Pepper the wind fairy, and when you add the fact that Saga’s the only human around who can see the fairies, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~

Risky Safety is about an adorable apprentice shinigami named Risky who has come to Earth to collect souls. She happens upon the muggle heroine, Moe, who is depressed after being rejected her crush and is longing for death. However, before Risky can make Moe’s wish come true, she’s interrupted by her brain-roommate. See, Risky is sharing a body with an apprentice angel, Safety, and who’s in control of their shared body depends on the overall mood: happy events make Safety come out, sad events make Risky come out. The duo move in with Moe and continue to fight over her soul, with Risky trying to claim it and Safety trying to save it, and when you add the fact that Safety has a magical bow whose arrows can make people fall in love with the first person they see and the first arrow she fires accidentally hits a Pomeranian, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~

I was expecting my reaction to A Little Snow Fairy Sugar to being something like “UGH IT’S SO CUTE AND SACCHARINE I’M GONNA BARF.” However I was pleasantly surprised by how un-painful the experience was. Make no mistake, ALSFS has cuteness gushing out of its every twee orifice, but the cuteness has a certain Disney-esque sincerity to it that saves it from being nauseating.

Risky Safety is a more subdued affair, and the sweetness is balanced out by Risky’s more tomboyish, rude, and growly-voiced brand of cute. The quieter tone is complimented by a muted color palette of browns, greys, and creams, in contrast to the more candy-colored ALSFS, although I think Risky Safety is almost too muted, like someone leaned too hard on the desaturate button.

As far as content, both shows are Cute Witch stories at the core, with the added twist of the magical girls being miniaturized and invisible to everyone except their one muggle friend, whose role in the story is consequently expanded. ALSFS tweaks things a bit by having one of the heroine’s posse be a Magical Boy, and adding a couple more Magical Boys later on. Risky Safety is a more interesting twist on the genre due to the sharing-a-body schtick and the fact that the two magical girls are directly at odds with one another, and the evil-ish one is also the slightly more prominent one in the story.

An interesting thing about both shows is that they were among the earliest male-aimed Magical Girl shows on broadcast TV, coming soon after the success of Cardcaptor Sakura and a few years before Nanoha and the height of the moe craze. Also, both shows are almost completely devoid of fanservice and could easily be mistaken for kids’ shows. I don’t know if these two things are related, or how — you’d think the early male-aimed broadcast MG shows would be more fanservice-heavy than later ones because they’d be less assured of success and would want to hedge their bets with lots of attention-grabbing T&A.

Also I’d like to note that even in the short time I was watching and in spite of the size difference between the heroines, ALSFS managed to squeeze in the required Magical Girl LesYay Quota: Sugar really likes to kiss people on the cheek or nose whenever she’s happy, and the first time she does this to Saga, the latter gets all blushy and flustered. A+ effort, ALSFS.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Remember my post of rage about TV Tropes cutting a bunch of pages like Naughty Tentacles and Lolita? Well now you can view a handy list of the pages that got nuked in the latest purge.

It seems that this purge, like the one a couple of years back that exiled Fetish Fuel, was prompted by the ad people cutting off funding and demanding that the site delete certain things. This time around it's porn and pedophilia that's on the chopping block. And actually, I don't have much of a problem with this; porn is so simplistic that it's pretty boring to catalogue tropes about anyway, and while I object on principle to censoring the pedophilic stuff, I can't really get too worked up about creepfests like Kodomo No Jikan getting the boot. Some things just aren't worth starting a fight over. And I do get some enjoyment from the idea of all those creepy TV Tropes KnJ apologists getting smacked with the banhammer.

Fortunately, Lolita was reinstated, although I was pretty disgusted to see how many people in the cut-list thread were like "Well if it means getting rid of all that pedo filth, then I don't mind if Lolita goes down in the process." What the fuck? Lolita is a) a piece of classic literature and b) a book that's all about how terrible and deplorable child molestation is. What the fuck is wrong with you. Fate Stay Night was also reinstated, as was... Black Bird? Huh? Yeah, it was pretty funny to read the conversation between the rather dictatorial owner of TV Tropes and the confused Black Bird readers trying to convince him that, no really, just because it has one brief sex scene involving a teenage girl that doesn't mean it's aimed at male pedos. Really. I mean, I think Black Bird is revolting and horrible, but that doesn't mean it should be censored, especially not on the basis of pedophilia, unless there's something about it I don't know.

Unfortunately, Naughty Tentacles is still in the Schrodinger's cat box. *worries* And I hope Caligula gets a reprieve because I know from watching the Cinema Snob that it has more than enough substance and plot beyond the porn to be trope-worthy. Plus its hilariously troubled production and disjointed finished product are fun to document.

I'm also getting some amusement out of reading the reasons listed for the deletions. Most of them just say something simple like "porn" or "hentai," but something called "Vase De Noces" was explained with "This is known as the Pig Fucking Movie. 'nuff said." And A Serbian Film was simply explained with "EXTERMINATE." Ha, I love how A Serbian Film has become the new internet standard for brain-scarring awfulness.

Anyway, TV Tropes = not actually failing as much as was previously thought. So far.

Edit: Also, thanks to the Black Bird thread, I found this list of the top selling English translations of manga series in 2011. Black Bird was #6. Higher than FMA. Higher than Soul Eater. Higher than Ouran. If you'll excuse me, I need to go weep for the fate of humanity.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Dear Microsoft Word Spell-Check,

Why are you not familiar with the word "anilingus"? I had to use Google to find out how many n's are in it. And no, I was not trying to spell "amblings." Nor was I trying to spell "nailing," although at least that's in the right ballpark.

And now Safari's spell-check is putting red wavy lines under "amblings," but not "anilingus." You spell-checkers need to make up your minds.

(I'm writing a term paper on Justin Chin, a gay San Francisco poet whose work... leaves little to the imagination. No seriously, he's awesome, but you need a strong stomach to read his stuff.)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Okay boys and girls, it's time to descend into the belly of the beast. It's time to examine one of the worst shows that the Magical Girl genre has to offer.

Because while I may have referred to shows like Wedding Peach and CosPrayers as the "unholy abominations" of Magical-Girl-dom, I was mostly being facetious. Aside from some gross T&A in CosPrayers, those two shows are pretty harmless, with their greatest crime being mediocrity. Neither of those shows made me feel like I needed to take a shower afterwards. Neither had me twitchily glancing over my shoulder to make sure the FBI wasn't peeking in my window. Neither made me feel queasy simply from knowing of their existence.

This is what sets them apart from today's specimen: Moetan. As you might have guessed from my intro, it's lolicon. It's a show made specifically for those guys who draw hentai doujinshi depicting Cardcaptor Sakura being brutally raped by anonymous disembodied penises. That group of people was apparently large enough that someone in the anime industry felt it was financially sound to make an entire show for that demographic and broadcast it on TV.

Also I just found out that the director of Moetan is the same guy who directed my beloved Getsumen to Heiki Miina. I may feel the need to sob loudly into my pillow during this review.

Actually I must be getting jaded, because the loli fanservice in Moetan didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I guess Kodomo No Jikan desensitized me to such things, or maybe I was distracted from the fanservice by some of the other stupid features of the show. For starters: What the hell is going on with the characters' ages?

Moetan presents us with a couple of heroines who are clearly children, and then it tells us that they're actually 17 years old. I can only assume this was a pathetically flimsy attempt to provide guilt-free lolicon — "she may look 10, but she's really 17, so it's okay!" — because there is no part of me that believes that the heroine of Moetan is 17. She looks like a little kid, she acts like a little kid, she dresses like a little kid, she walks like a little kid, she talks like a little kid, to the point where the whole "oh but she's rly 17, you guys" thing is just insulting our intelligence. If you're going to make a pedo-bait anime, you could at least own it.

However, I might be able to overlook the bone-headed "she's really 17" contrivance if the show itself didn't constantly keep banging on about it. The other characters will constantly tease the two heroines for looking like elementary-schoolers/behaving like elementary-schoolers/having the intelligence of elementary-schoolers, and while this is ostensibly just a way of provoking that cutesy "stop treating me like a kid!" reaction in the girls, I can't help getting stuck on the fact that the other characters are totally right. Moetan, why do you keep pointing out your own bad writing? Are you trying to do some kind of ironic self-referential humor thing? Because it's not working! If you know that making the heroine 17 was a stupid decision, then the fact that you did it anyway just makes it worse, and constantly pointing this out just makes you look even dumber.

Actually self-referential "humor" is a problem throughout this show. Moetan comes across as a weak attempt at parody, not understanding that a true parody needs to have more substance than just pointing at a trope and going "look everyone, it's a trope!" In the first episode, the transformed heroine teaches her love interest to say the phrase "Don't you think magical girls look the same after they transform?" in English. Moetan, congratulations on noticing something that everyone who has ever watched Sailor Moon has made fun of. But the show doesn't do anything interesting with the Clark Kenting trope, it just points it out, like the writers expect a gold star for having eyeballs in their faces.

This problem with channeling Captain Obvious isn't even restricted to the failed parody elements — the mascot characters suffer from it too. These mascots serve double-duty as the audience surrogate characters, meaning that they spend a lot of time drooling over all the hawt loli ass that's on display. But the writers apparently thought all that literal drool wasn't enough to get this concept across: the mascots also make frequent comments on how hot the girls' outfits are, how pervy the transformation sequence looks, etc etc, and dude. Dude. I FUCKING NOTICED. I noticed that the 10-year-old girl is wearing clothing that appears to be made of wet tissue paper. I noticed this because the camera ZOOMED IN on her extremely detailed ass and taint area SEVERAL TIMES. YOU DO NOT NEED TO POINT THESE THINGS OUT TO ME IN THE DIALOGUE.

Seriously, those bits of dialogue are like the show is throwing up a big neon sign saying "YOU MAY NOW BEGIN JERKING OFF." Sorry Moetan, but I'm pretty sure your audience starting doing that during the opening credits. I doubt they're going to wait for your prompting.

Umpteen paragraphs in, and I haven't even talked about how dull the show is. Thank god for the nauseating bits of "I DIDN'T NEED TO SEE THAT" loli fanservice jolting me into wakefulness, because aside from that and the weak attempts at humor, this show is just a boring pointless slog. There's hardly any action in it! I mean surely a big part of Magic Warrior shows, especially those aimed at men, is rousing bombastic fight scenes, but so far Moetan has devoted only a tiny bit of its time to Monster-of-the-Week fights. Things perked up a little in Episode 4 when the Dark Magical Girl showed up to wreck some shit, but even that was pretty brief.

So in the end, Moetan surprised me by having loli fanservice be only one of its many problems. Snip out all the prepubescent vulva shots and this show would still be a worthless piece of crap.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Today I sampled two vicious parodies of the Magical Girl genre, both directed by the same dude: Dai Mahou Touge and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan.



Dai Mahou Touge is about Punie, the princess of the magical world who has travelled to Earth as part of a test to prove her worthiness as future queen. She dresses in red, she wields a magic wand, and she's joined by a cutesy plushie-looking sidekick with a squeaky voice and a verbal tic, a shy buxom bespectacled muggle best friend, and a Dark Magical Girl rival who wears all purple and wields a scythe.

So basically it's a completely standard and cliché Cute Witch anime. Except that the magical world is a fascist dictatorship, the Dark Magical Girl is the daughter of the good king and queen who were violently overthrown by Punie's tyrant mother, the cutesy sidekick is a hardened cynical badass who only accompanies Punie because she brutally beat him into submission and to this day he's constantly trying to kill her whenever he gets the chance, Punie's magical incantation is "Lyrical Tokarev, Kill Them All!" and her wand has a big red eyeball on it that pops open with a revolting SQUELCH whenever she casts a spell. Also Punie herself is a ruthless bloodthirsty sociopath who prefers to use excruciating submission maneuvers in lieu of magic when subduing her opponents and who is willing to do anything and kill anyone to get her way. One time she dropped a nuclear bomb on the school because she didn't want anyone to find out that the princess of the magical world was bad at math.

Basically it's like if Azula starred in a Magical Girl anime.

And as you'd expect from that summary, it is a barrel of laughs, although you must have a strong stomach for pitch black comedy and cringe-worthy violence. It's really quite a joy to watch Punie merrily skipping around causing mayhem and stomping all over our expectations about what this kind of show is supposed to be like. The show is also graced with a healthy dose of Japanese weirdness — at one point, Punie brings a bunch of vegetables to life and we get to see a sentient potato very seriously commit seppuku with a potato peeler before nobly flinging himself into a soup pot — and amusing shout-outs to other canons — the cutesy mascot's backstory has a bunch of references to gritty U.S. war films, an Alien facehugger makes a cameo, and when the queen is listing off the other witches she beat out for the throne, she mentions Sally, Akko, Majokko Meg, and Minky Momo. Plus Punie herself is a really fun character in a weird way. Of course she's the worst person in the world, but she's very good at being the worst person in the world, and I have to admire how audacious, no-holds-barred, and downright badass she can be.

Anyway, I think this is a pretty excellent parody of the Cute Witch genre and I recommend it.

Then I watched the first episode of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, and to my dismay I discovered that it's pretty clearly a Magical Girlfriend/Magical Harem show where the protagonist is the male lead, meaning that it's disqualified from inclusion in my project. Much as I hate making changes to my master list this late in the game, I'm going to have to delete Dokuro-chan from all my data.

On the upside, that means I don't have to watch any more of it, which is good because it looked pretty crappy. It relies too heavily on gore, even when compared to the already gory Dai Mahou Touge, and it strikes me as a "parody" that tries to eat its cheesecake and have it too by going "look at what a violent nutbar this girl is, having a tsundere Magical Girlfriend would be terrible in the real world, but look how hot she is naked/in her undies/with her skirt up/boobs/panties/knockers/etc." Plus it does that annoying ecchi thing where all the female characters' bodies are super shiny, like they're made of plastic. Bleh.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Tonight at dinner, my nerd friends and I got into a discussion about the mostly female but sometimes male compulsion to "fix" one's romantic partner, and spurred by this, I figured it was about time to write a meta that has long been brewing in my mind about the phenomenon of Bad Boys.

I recall a conversation on Fandom Wank where people were talking about how the fangirls love Zuko because he's a "bad boy," and one person was like "What? Since when is Zuko a 'bad boy'? He's a total dork!" They were right of course, and this led me to a realization: Regarding the old maxim "All Girls Want Bad Boys," the phrase "bad boy" refers to two different character archetypes.

Type A is the motorcycle-riding bad boy. His "bad"-ness comes from his being a rebel. He smokes, drinks, partakes of illegal substances, causes trouble, gets in fights, only goes to school when he feels like it, probably has lots of tattoos and piercings and maybe an outlandish hairdo. He's the type of guy you'd date because he freaks out your parents. Women are drawn to him because they know that life with him could never be boring. He's usually not evil by any stretch of the imagination; he's just... dangerous.

Type B is what I like to call the "fixer-upper." His "bad"-ness comes from his being a villain, or at least an anti-hero, and being evil to some extent, or at least a big jerk. However he has a few humanizing qualities, whether a hint of a heart of gold buried under all that puppy-kicking, or a tragic past that explains why he ended up a douchebag, or some secret angst that he hides behind a façade of indestructibility — whatever the details, it's clear that he has the potential to be redeemed. Women are drawn to him because he's damaged and they believe they can "fix" him, usually with the power of love and boinking.

The two types have a number of other distinguishing features that make them easier to tell apart. For example, if your bad boy is a seductive ladies' man, then you're definitely dealing with a Type A. Type Bs are usually way too wrapped up in their own evil plans and angsting to even notice girls, much less chat them up — look no further than Sasuke and Zuko for examples of this. The Type A, on the other hand, is much more likely to be aware of the effect he has on girls and to use it to his advantage, à la Rich from "Penny & Aggie." Actually, coolness in general is a trait more associated with Type As — James Bond is a great example of a post-high-school Type A. Type Bs are more likely to be complete dorks who take themselves extremely seriously — again, Zuko is a shining example of this. Relatedly, snarking and witty dialogue is another Type A trait — Spike from Buffy strikes me as being a Type A for this and other reasons, at least before his Spikeification.

Basically the difference between the two types boils down to the core appeal of each. Type A is appealing because he's fun and exciting and dangerous; Type B is appealing because he's a "project."

However obviously categories like this are never ironclad, and there are plenty of characters who are a mixture of Types A and B. For example, Ikuto from Shugo Chara is my pick for "Bad Boy Most Likely To Have Been Concocted By Evil Geniuses Who Are Now Fabulously Wealthy" because he's such a perfect combination of both types: he has all the style and flair and seductive "you know you want me" quality of a Type A, plus all the hidden angst and "I'm not evil, I just need a hug" appeal of a Type B.

Come to think of it, a hybrid of both types seems like the optimal form of bad boy, or at least it's what the fangirls seem to prefer. If you have a bad boy who does slot neatly into one of the types, you can bet there'll be a mountain of fanfic in which the fic-writers supplement his personality with traits from the opposite type. It seems like fangirls want their leather-wearing charmers to also have angst and need comforting, and they want their angsty projects to also be smooth snarky seducers who know how to romance a lady. Just look at Draco Malfoy: in the canon he's a staunch Type B, but fandom likes to add a bunch of Type A traits to him, including those memetic leather pants which are straight out of the motorcycle-riding Type A's wardrobe. Or as Fandom Wank Wiki puts it: "In fanon, Draco is known for his cool dialogue and a tendency to wear leather trousers. In canon, Draco is known for barely managing a decent put-down on Ron and a tendency to cry like a little girl in the bathroom." (Of course, crying like a little girl in the bathroom is exactly what makes fangirls flock to guys like Draco in the first place.) Zuko is another clear Type B who gets Type A traits awkwardly shoehorned onto him in fanon, resulting in unintentionally hilarious fics where Mr. "You're Beautiful When You Hate The World" is portrayed as a smooth ladykiller.

As for the reverse — a Type A being supplemented with Type B traits in fanon — that seems to happen less with conventional Type As and more with a subset of Type As who have all the style and lady-charming and witty dialogue and "cool" factor of the average Type A but buck the "not evil, just dangerous" stipulation by instead being 100% evil. I guess you could call this the Evil Is Sexy subset. Anyway, these guys have a lot of the same "fun and exciting" appeal as the standard Type A, but the fic writers often compulsively tack on a tragic backstory to make these dudes more palatable and to give them bonus Type B appeal. Because I guess we can't just enjoy a sexy villain for what he is; we have to humanize him too, which tends to defang him somewhat. (Sometimes this even happens in canon, which I gather is what happened to Spike.) Perhaps it's also to assuage the guilt of perving over an unrepentant douchebag.

Of course, sometimes these varieties of canon-warping can happen to characters who fit neither of these types and who honestly can't be categorized as "bad boys" at all. Just look at Itachi from Naruto. Before the circa-chapter-400 revelation that turned him into a Type B, Itachi was just a blank slate, a plot device with zero personality beyond "stoic" and "unfettered." He was just a random evil guy, lacking both the charm of the Type A and the redemptive potential of the Type B, and yet fangirls often ascribed one or both of those personalities to him in fanwork depending on their tastes. Or heck, look at Draco Malfoy. He became a Type B in the later books, but before that, he was neither type. He wasn't a cool villain — quite the opposite, he was a whiny sniveling little worm and a frequent butt of jokes — but he was also pretty two-dimensional in his villainy, with no hint of a nicer side. But even back then, the fangirls couldn't get enough of him and would subject him to either or both varieties of personality-warping. And wardrobe-warping, natch.

So I guess there are two larger categories of "bad boy": on the one hand, you have the Canon Bad Boys, whose canonical personality fits into Type A, Type B, or both; on the other hand, you have the Potential Bad Boys, who are just assholes in canon, but who, with a little tweaking of personality, could potentially be transformed into genuine "bad boys" of either or both types, with said transformation happening usually in fanon but also sometimes in canon.

Anyway, in conclusion, the term "bad boy" actually encompasses a wide range of personality traits, character types, and audience appeals, to the point where the only thing that unites all the "bad boy" characters under one umbrella is the reaction they provoke in a certain segment of the audience. By which I mean: they cause a lot of panties to become moist.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Welcome back to Chez Magical Girl. Our special tonight is Jewel BEM Hunter Lime, an OVA from 1997.



Jewel BEM Hunter Lime is an oddity because a) it was based on a video game and b) it appears to be the first half of a longer series that was never completed. The first episode sets up the extremely generic plot: six magical MacGuffins have been accidentally scattered across the human world, so two citizens of the magical world are tasked with retrieving them before they absorb too much negative human energy and turn into rampaging monsters. However by the end of three episodes, only three of the six objects have been retrieved, and then the series just... stops. I guess this is what Yahtzee would call "a show that ran out of something."

However that might be for the best because Jewel BEM Hunter Lime is not very good. In fact, I'd almost call it bad. The writing certainly needs some major help, the plot is your standard Monster Of The Week + Gotta Catch Em All affair, and the characters are all obnoxious clichés: Bass is the dim-witted lech whose skirt-chasing boob-grabbing antics are supposed to be funny but just make him seem like a total creeper. Lime is the humorless straight woman whose physical abuse and nagging of her male sidekick are supposed to be funny but just make her seem like an intolerable tight-ass. And Mizuki is the squeaky-voiced muggle best friend whose entire personality can be summed up as "nice." There's also quite a lot of fanservice that fortunately isn't too tasteless or crass, but it's not terribly interesting either. The English dub is actually okay, but it still suffers due to the clunky script and cardboard characters. And with the basic Monster Of The Week setup, you'd think there'd be some action scenes to liven things up, but you'd be wrong — the monsters are mostly defeated by trickery, and Lime's transforming powers are only used to put her in fetish outfits and a schoolgirl uniform. So just fetish outfits. Zing!

The show's only saving grace is something the Japanese have been perfecting for many decades now: CUTENESS. Yes, cuteness is something that JBHL excels at, and I'd almost recommend it on that basis alone. The weekly monsters are absolutely adorable both in design and personality. The first is a chubby little candle who is angry because modern-day humans don't use candles anymore, and he's one of those characters who's endearing specifically because he takes himself completely seriously and has no idea what an adorable little snugglemuffin he is. The second is a chubby coin-purse who continually tries to live up to his identity as an "evil" monster by doing bad things but consistently fails and does good things by mistake, to the point where Lime and Mizuki's classmates adopt him as a sort of class pet when he attempts to steal their underwear by politely asking for it. And the third is similar to the first except he's a chubby medical syringe who says hilarious shit like "YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE WRATH OF MY NEEDLE!" and "EXPERIENCE THE ANGER OF MY SYRINGE!" I should also mention the requisite cutesy sidekick, Poogie: a yellow blob with huge eyes who can morph into any object and who provides most of the few genuinely funny gags in the show.

Anyway, I'm glad I watched JBHM if only for the insanely huggable monsters and mascot, but in all other respects, this show is just mediocre. While Wedding Peach suffered from blandness and CosPrayers suffered from incompetence, JBHM seems to suffer from laziness. It really comes across as something made solely to cash in on the video game, like no one working on the show cared enough to at least try and make it a little less derivative.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

While reading the news today, I found out something very surprising: I am now pregnant.

What's that you say? I'm a pathetic single nerd who lives at a women's college you say? Lesbian pregnancy only exists in bad fanfic and Minecraft you say? Well fuck you, this is AMERICA, the land of opportunity, where you don't even need to have sex to get knocked up. Even virgins can get pregnant here! And by "here" I mean "in the state of Arizona," which is continuing its quest to replace Texas as the most loathed state in the union by passing a new anti-abortion law that defines life as beginning 2 weeks before conception.

Actually as bad as that sounds, the batshit insane pregnant-before-sex stipulation is the least awful part of this law: go here to read a full run-down of all the horrible stuff this thing does.

However, Texas isn't going to take this lying down. It also passed an anti-abortion law two months ago, one of those emotionally manipulative ones that forces a pregnant person to watch a sonogram and hear their doctor describe their fetus. Not only is this cruel to the average unplanned-pregnancy abortion candidate, it's especially cruel to women who want to be pregnant and give birth, but feel compelled to abort because their fetus turns out to have terrible birth defects. You can read one such woman's account of how this law made her ordeal exponentially more painful here.

Guys, I just don't understand this. How has the anti-abortion side gained so much ground in the last few years? What changed since Roe v. Wade that made us start sliding backward at such a drastic rate? And what the fuck is rotten in the state of Arizona? Seems like all the really bad laws are coming from them these days.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Thing 1: There's yet another creepy privacy-violating internet-censorship law afoot in Congress called CISPA. You can read about it here and you can send a protesting form letter to your Congressperson here.

Thing 2: Rawles is hosting The Cunnilingus and Chocolate Day Oral Sex Fanfest which is all about writing oral sex porn that doesn't center around cis dudes getting blow-jobs. Go forth and write/read!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

In the ongoing saga of Questionable Decisions Made By The TV Tropes Admins, the owner recently deleted the Naughty Tentacles page. Didn't lock it, didn't make it a "no examples please" page, just deleted it. Going to that link takes you to a page saying "WE DO NOT WANT A PAGE ON THIS TOPIC" in huge text.

Dude, I get why you might be skeeved out by this trope, and hey, so am I sometimes, but that doesn't change the fact that this trope exists. And in Japanese media, it is extremely common. And like any rape trope, it's used sometimes for fetish and titillation, sometimes for horror and drama, and sometimes for comedy and satire. Puni Puni Poemi, for example, included the trope as a way of viciously poking fun at people who enjoy tentacle porn. Berserk played it for maximum creepiness and tragedy. And PSG threw it in as part of a joke. It's not "all for creepy perverts, all the time." I know I can't be the only troper out there who's an anal completionist: what exactly am I supposed to do when I'm watching an anime and the naughty tentacles cliché shows up and I want to make note of it, either because I object to it or approve of it or am just intrigued by its presence, but I can't do that because there's no page for it? I guess I'll just catalogue such instances under the generic rape tropes, but that's still lacking in specificity.

Some light was shed on this decision when I found this thread started by the TV Tropes owner:

I came across this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feFHnIhJtG4 , which is a well-deserved mockery of a page that makes all tropers look like pervs. Please, I'm begging you, if we have any more crap like this around wiki, please cut list it.

That is all it takes. Just put it on the Cut List.

Somebody linked to this and said:

Basically, purging the Wiki of content that makes the site look like it's full of creepers and perverts.

And somebody else replied:

Except that the wiki is full of creepers and perverts. Everybody has fetishes. Everybody. One person likes Naughty Tentacles, and one person likes crossdressing. Who gets to decide what is and isn't creepy, and where does the line get drawn?

Exactly. I approved of the site's decision to exile the Fetish Fuel trope to a separate wiki, especially since it's so endlessly subjective, and even their decision to lock some pages like Lolicon, because that one tends to inspire a lot of wank. But deleting a trope that is not subjective and shows up in tons of non-porn works in a variety of contexts just because "oh noes, people might cotton on to the fact that we're all a bunch of pervs," like what, are we in middle school suddenly? Is our ~reputation~ with a bunch of anonymous internet people that important?

Edit: What the—

They deleted Lolita.

They deleted the Lolita page and replaced it with that "WE DON'T WANT THIS PAGE" message.

They deleted the page for a widely acclaimed classic of literature that is all about how terrible pedophilia is.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

Apparently FastEddie (the owner) went through and purged everything that contained adult/child sexual content, regardless of how the work in question treated said content. Tsukiyomi Moon Phase (my bad, that one's still up), Fate/Stay Night (??? I didn't even know it had loli content in it), Boku No Pico, Kodomo No Jikan, the list goes on. And dude, I hate KnJ. I think it's utter trash. But I added stuff to the KnJ page on several occasions because I want people to know that it's trash. I want people to know that skeevy crap like that exists. If you just delete all the pages, stick your fingers in your ears, and go "la la la it doesn't exist" then you just allow shit like this to keep festering in obscurity.

And Lolita? LOLITA WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ARRRRRRGH

Though I was amused to note that the Moetan page is still up. I guess because it has no actual sex, it's all just REALLY REALLY GROSS underage fanservice. So I guess showing a fictional person sticking his dick into a 10-year-old is bad, but aggressively sexualizing a 10-year-old so that the audience can luridly fantasize about sticking their dicks in said 10-year-old = totes okay. Or maybe the mods just didn't get to it yet. But wait, KnJ didn't have any actual sex in it either, unless you count the dry-humping scene WHICH I ABSOLUTELY DO but I doubt most people would. IDK.

(Anyone who points out that Moetan's heroine is actually 17 years old will be punched. I know you can't punch people through the internet, but I'll find a way.)

Edit 2: They also haven't nuked Loveless yet. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the double standard. /sarcasm (No j/k, I intend to read Loveless at some point because it looks awesome, but still. And BnP got nuked so maybe it's not the double standard.)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

On today’s menu, we have another Magical Girl show that deservedly takes itself seriously: Genmu Senki Leda, aka Leda: The Fantastic Adventures of Yohko. This one’s a 75-minute OVA from 1985, and its story is your standard “girl falls into another world, transforms into a prophecied warrior, and is tasked with bringing down a local villain” plot à la Magic Knight Rayearth, but it’s the execution that makes this one really stand out.

Genmu Senki Leda is a regal feast for the eyes and ears, so much so that I’m tempted to call it “arty.” The show opens with a nearly 4-minute long sequence that’s devoid of dialogue and has only minimal narration, in which the heroine, Yohko, is composing and playing a wistful piano piece inspired by her secret love for some unnamed guy, and then it cuts to her walking down the street at dusk, meeting the guy on the road, trying to work up the nerve to confess her feelings, and ultimately failing. Due to the lack of dialogue, the whole sequence instead focuses on making the visuals, editing, cinematography, and timing with the piano music as beautiful and affecting as possible. And then this is followed by another dialogue-less sequence where Yohko falls into the other world and spends several minutes wandering around looking at all the very weird flora and fauna. Speaking of which, the design work in this show got a lot of love from somebody: the plants, the animals, the landscapes, the buildings, the enemy soldiers, their robotic steeds, their weapons and gadgets — everything in this alternate world is designed to look truly alien and bizarre. In short, this is not your standard fantasy setting. Also the color palette used in the alternate world is vibrant and beautiful, and while I’m no great judge of animation, it looks like the production staff made good use of their fatter OVA budget. On the aural side, the soundtrack consists of sweeping schmaltzy orchestral music that makes me feel like I’m going to swoon every time it comes on, intermixed with Yohko’s bittersweet piano solo and some hints of synth when the score gets more energetic during action scenes.

Some other recommendable aspects of GSL:

-It passes the Bechdel Test, since Yohko’s main ally is Yoni, the shrine maiden of Leda (the local goddess), and they spend some time discussing Leda and the dilapidated state of Ashanti.

-There are several cool action scenes such as: a) the hand-to-hand fight directly after Yohko’s first transformation, where she opens a can of whoopass on the enemy troops and robots, b) the chase scene on flying-motorcycle-things when she’s trying to retrieve her walkman, c) the battle where Yohko and Yoni both hop into giant robots (the similarities to Rayearth keep piling up!) and fight off the TIE-fighter-esque enemy spaceships, and d) the sequence at the end where the villain traps Yohko in a Lotus Eater Machine, but she awesomely busts out of it and causes a bunch of stuff to blow up in spectacular fashion.

-While the characters aren’t terribly interesting or memorable, they also manage to avoid obnoxious clichés and are likeable enough, which at this point is good enough for me. I also have to commend Ringhum, Yohko’s talking dog companion, for being one of the least annoying Magical Girl animal sidekicks ever.

-And for her transformation sequence, the heroine gets eaten by a giant flower. I don’t think anything more needs to be said.

Before watching GSL, I was unsure of whether to include in my project because a) it’s an OVA film, and I’m limiting the project to episodic serieses, and b) I wasn’t sure if it even fit the genre. After watching, I’m inclined to let the former slide because 1985 was still pretty early in the genre when not much was coming out, and as for the latter, GSL’s many similarities to Rayearth have convinced me that it does indeed qualify for the genre.

A good quality version of Genmu Senki Leda is available on Youtube with English subtitles so go watch it!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Well the Spring Previews on ANN are in full swing and as usual Zac's reviews are the lulzy highlight of the whole affair. Although he's actually held back on giving idiosyncratic scores to things, with the weirdest one being a score of "WHAAAAAAAAAAAT" given to Upotte. Speaking of which, Upotte is shaping up to be the token brain-breakingly bad show of the season: it's a show about moe girls who are also assault rifles, and it apparently takes the basic anthropomorphization concept to extremely fetishy levels, so much so that it had both Zac and Rebecca making grim declarations about The State Of Anime Today. The other WTF-inducing show of the season is Mysterious Girlfriend X, a romance story that involves drool-drinking. This one also broke Zac's brain pretty bad — "spit otaku, that's where we're at now, folks!" — although some of the reviewers said it was a solid show if you can get past the spit-drinking. Which is a pretty big "if" if you ask me.

And I enjoyed Bamboo Dong's assessment of the reverse-harem show as "falling somewhere between Terrible Generic Crap and If I'm Already Drinking, I Might As Well." I feel like I watch a lot of stuff in the latter category. Except I don't drink. :(

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

So I was browsing ANN's list of Spring 2012 anime premieres and um.

Lupin III - The Woman Called Fujiko Mine

UM.

Director: Sayo Yamamoto (Michiko to Hatchin)
Animation Director / Character Designer: Takeshi Koike (Redline)
Series Composition: Mari Okada (AnoHana, Simoun)

... IJUSTCAME

And the woman voicing Fujiko also did the voice of Celty from Durarara. GHH.

Also in the service of the MG Project, I took a look at the Magical Girl shows coming out this season, and dear god is it a depressing sight. Jewelpet season 4 and Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream season 2. That's it. BARF.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

In my quest to research Dark Magical Girls, I discovered that somebody uploaded all of Pretear to Youtube, so I'm steamrolling through it before the copyright police zap it.

So Pretear is a reverse harem anime and—

Wait, come back, I haven't finished yet! Sheesh. What I was going to say before I psychically sensed all of you spontaneously losing interest was that Pretear is also written by the same guy who directed Princess Tutu. And like Princess Tutu, Pretear is a show I'd rank amongst the best of the Magical Girl genre.

The basic plot is a mashup of Snow White and Cinderella except with the damsel in distress protagonist replaced with a plucky badass magical girl, and instead of seven dwarves, our heroine is accompanied by seven magical bishonen who act as her transformation trinkets, merging with her in order to grant her powers. Otherwise, the plot is your standard Magical Girl Warrior affair with naked henshins, elemental magic, monsters of the week, destiny, and a purple-wearing Dark Magical Girl who wants to destroy the world because she's angsty and wants everyone else to be too.

However there are a number of things that establish Pretear as a cut above its peers: Firstly, the heroine is refreshingly realistic. Maybe I've just grown demoralized by the endless parade of quivering moeblobs and shrill genki girls and airheaded failboats that clutter up the genre, but these days the surest way for a MG show to win me over is to have a protagonist who acts like an actual human being, and this is something that Himeno pulls off beautifully. She's actually rather hard to describe because she doesn't slot into any of the usual stereotypes; she's plucky and determined and energetic but also angsty and uncertain and self-critical, and my favorite part about her is how she reacts to situations in a way that feels natural and makes sense. For example, when the seven not-dwarfs first show up and try to get her to become the Pretear, she has mixed feelings about it and turns them down. But while running away, she mulls it over and changes her mind and runs back to the seven bishies, who are currently fighting a monster, and she runs up to her slap-slap-kiss love interest bishie and is like "Tell me what I need to do to become the Pretear!" Most magical girls are either all "Nooo I just want to be normal!" or all "Wheee diving headfirst into magical-girl-hood without thinking about the consequences first!" so it was nice to see a heroine whose reaction was more complex and who had the opportunity to give the proposal some thought before agreeing.

Also, in order to transform, Himeno has to merge with one of her bishies, and yes, it looks exactly as sexual as it sounds. And what I like is that Himeno immediately picks up on the innuendo, and when she first hears the merging process described by one of the (hilariously oblivious) bishies, her brain goes straight to the gutter and she has a minor freakout of "You're 'inside me?' We're 'becoming one?' BRB BRAIN MELTING ASDJKDSLFJDJFK" and it is just comedy gold. I also really loved her "STOP ANGSTING AND GET AHOLD OF YOURSELVES" speech to the boys in episode 7 — that was big "UGH I OFFICIALLY LOVE THIS CHARACTER" moment for me.

Another difference is that the show is significantly less cutesy and sugary than most MG fare. The plot is quite serious and heavy on angst, the Monsters of the Week are genuinely scary and disturbing-looking instead of being wacky golems made of mundane objects, and the show spends a minimal amount of time on filler, delving quite quickly into the dark secrets about the villainess's origins and how she's connected to the seven bishies. Himeno doesn't even have a cutesy animal sidekick/mentor; there's a cute bird-thing that serves as Team Pet, but it hardly ever has screentime. Himeno lacks the usual chunky plastic bling since her harem already serves that purpose, her weapons are pretty straightforward and hardcore — a sword, an axe, a whip, a chakram, etc — and her seven outfits deserve special mention for being really beautifully designed. Basically, this is a Magical Girl show that takes itself seriously instead of being self-admitted foof, and deserves to take itself seriously, harem of wearable bishies notwithstanding.

Another aspect of note is the relationship between Himeno and Hayate (the wind-themed bishie) which gets a lot of development and screentime during the series. Their romance reminds me a lot of Kyoko and Ren from Skip Beat: plucky heroine with secret angst meets cranky, abrasive, but secretly kind-hearted dark-haired guy by crashing into him headlong, they get off to a spectacularly bad start and hate each other, but gradually they get to know each other and realize that their bad first impressions were incorrect, and eventually they've got it bad for each other and only their mutual tsundere-ness is preventing them from sucking face. So with those similarities, I guess it's no surprise that I find the Himeno/Hayate romance to be quite adorable, and I'm pleased to report that so far their gradual transition from "I hate you" to "I like you" is well written and believable.

I also think the handling of the fairytale elements deserves special mention. The show gets major kudos for being able to breathe new life into the tired and not-very-good-to-begin-with Cinderella story by making the stepmother an overall nice person who is genuinely in love with the father, making one stepsister a lulzy sitcom-esque rival who is too ineffectual to be hate-worthy, and making the other stepsister have lots of sympathy-inducing angst behind her ice queen façade, so Himeno's dislike for her new family is less about them being puppy-stomping cartoon villains and more about feeling like a fish out of water, a poor girl suddenly thrust into a rich lifestyle and clueless about how to act or how to make her snobby stepsisters like her.

However, that's not to say that Pretear is perfect. The fight scenes are pretty short and lackluster, so if that's what you watch MG shows for then this one is going to disappoint. The focus is more on the people and their relationships and emotional drama, so the action gets short shrift. Also, I'm no expert on animation quality, but the budget for Pretear looks like it was on the modest side, so the visual quality is really inconsistent, although the art style is quite nice. And the soundtrack is... honestly dreadful. It sounds like easy listening or elevator music, with the exception of the memorable J-Pop opener.

And I have one big complaint regarding the requisite "boyfriend turns evil" plotline...( spoilers )

But overall, Pretear is a very strong Magical Girl show and I recommend it.

As a final comment: I think it's hilarious that when Himeno first uses the Wind Sword, the glowy magic power comes out of her crotch. Just, unmistakably starts blossoming out of her pelvic region. Given those O-faces she makes during her transformation sequences, I shouldn't be surprised!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

I always feel bad for posting about depressing stuff on this blog. It's bad enough that I had to hear about the depressing stuff, but now I'm inflicting on you guys as well, like passing on a cold virus. But if I don't write about it, then I just end up stewing over it and making myself more angry. Bleh.

Depressing stuff du jour: I stumbled across a 2-year-old news story about a woman who was fired from her elementary school teaching job after she admitted in a Huffington Post op-ed piece that she had spent one year as a sex worker prior to entering the teaching profession. She didn't tell her students about her past as a sex worker. She didn't fill their innocent heads with sordid tales of whore-dom. She just mentioned it in an op-ed piece, and she signed her name to it because she wanted to demonstrate that she was unashamed of her past. As a result, the Mayor of New York City personally requested that she be fired, no other school district would hire her, and a media frenzy ensued that invaded every aspect of her private life.

The really sad thing is, I bet she could have gotten away with admitting her past and even signing her name if she had acted all like "Oh boo hoo, I only did it because I was desperate and I needed to feed my eight starving children but I hated every second of it and boo hoo prostitution is so horrible and I'm such a poor widdle victim." The only reason she got tarred and feathered so badly is because she had the nerve to not be ashamed. She broke society's rules of How Prostitutes Are Supposed To Act, so it didn't matter that she was a great teacher, it didn't matter that she had left sex work behind her and become a "wholesome" law-abiding member of society, it didn't matter that she'd never been convicted of any crime, nope, she's an evil whore and must be kept away from our kids.

I really have no patience for the people hand-wringing over how having an ex-prostitute for a teacher would corrupt kids. I shouldn't have to explain to anyone why that notion is fucking stupid. The only argument that has the least bit of merit is the one saying that she did something illegal, and we shouldn't be encouraging kids to break the law. Like, would you want an ex-con or an ex-drug dealer teaching your kids? Perhaps not. But to that argument, I would reply that illegal =/= immoral. There are plenty of people out there who have done illegal things because they believed the laws were unjust, and there have been plenty of unjust laws in this country's history.

Also, after reading the comments on the Salon article, I have this to say: I am getting extremely fucking sick of hearing people say "You should have known better" to someone who just got screwed over. Maybe it's because it reminds me of rape apologia — "You should have known better than to wear that skimpy outfit!" Because it's easy, isn't it? It's very easy to kick someone when they're down, it's easy to say "Har har, I'm smarter than you" to someone who is already very aware that they did something stupid that has now ruined their lives. But is it stupid? Is idealism now synonymous with stupidity? Does smug cynicism automatically make you smart? Because that's this woman's only crime: she was stupid enough to think that maybe the world was an awesome enough place that she could be honest about her life and not get raked over the coals for it. She was stupid enough to think that she wouldn't lose her whole career because of something completely unrelated to her job performance. She was stupid enough to think that hiding behind embarrassed anonymity was a bad idea because it would send a negative message. She was stupid enough to think that she could help debunk some toxic stereotypes about sex workers. She was stupid enough to think that she could do some good in the world. Yeah, what an idiot, am I right?

I say this as an admittedly very cynical person: You do not fucking sneer at someone because they had the gall to try and change the world for the better. You do not fucking punish someone or blame them for their misfortunes because they had the nerve to say "Hey, maybe the world is actually an okay place!" So to all those people going "What a dumbass, what was she thinking, she should have known how it would turn out": Y'all can just fuck right off.

Stories like this are what make me think that in feminism, prostitution is the last frontier. By which I mean: prostitution is the thing we're still going to be fighting for even after everything else has been fixed; prostitution is the thing that will be the hardest to change people's minds about, even moreso than rape. In the Salon article, the woman herself points out that a lot of the people who were getting up in her face and shaming her were fellow women, many of whom just couldn't understand how she could consider herself a feminist. Prostitution is something that a lot of women, even women who proudly identify as feminists, still consider shameful, wrong, and degrading, and so for a fellow woman to willingly consent to this shameful, wrong, degrading thing is unforgivable. We as a culture might be becoming more open-minded towards women who have sex and enjoy it, but there's something about women who have sex for money and enjoy it and choose that life, rather than being forced into it under tragic circumstances, that really brings out people's viciously Puritanical sides.

I feel I should also mention: After reading several articles on this subject, I did not see anyone mention the men that this woman serviced during her time as a sex worker. Not their names, not where they lived, nothing about their character or their professions. She lost her career and had her personal info smeared all over the internet. The men who hired her, the ones who participated in her illegal and "immoral" activities? No skin off their noses.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Since I've been talking a lot about Dark Magical Girls lately, I figure it's about time to discuss one of the main codifiers of the trope: Sailor Saturn.



At a glance, Sailor Saturn looks like your typical by-the-book DMG. Dark hair? Check. Wears purple and black? Check. Cold, aloof, and stoic? Check. Angsty? Triple check. Starts out as an enemy of the heroes but later joins their team? Check. Has her frozen heart melted by the pink-haired heroine? Check. Has tons of parallelism and LesYay with said pink-haired heroine? Check. Hell, she even has a creepy-looking scythe as her signature weapon and she's prophecied to bring about the end of the world.

But there's one big problem with categorizing Saturn as a Dark Magical Girl: she's not evil. She's not even an antagonist. The Outer Senshi think she's their enemy, but she doesn't share that opinion. She gets possessed by the Big Bad, but unlike with Chibiusa turning into Black Lady, it's done by force instead of manipulation. Furthermore, the pink-haired heroine who's responsible for Saturn's redemption arc is not the protagonist but the protagonist's daughter, who spends most of her time as a joke character.

If Sailor Moon had debuted in the past ten years, I'd put Sailor Saturn in the same bin as Homura from PMMM: characters who are set up to look like Dark Magical Girls only to turn around and subvert the trope. However Sailor Moon came out in 1992, back when the DMG trope had barely started to exist and certainly hadn't been codified yet, so I guess Saturn falls into that weird category that TV Tropes calls the Unbuilt Trope: when a trope gets subverted before it even gets properly established. At any rate, even though Saturn technically isn't a DMG, I tend to put her in that category anyway because it seems clear to me that she had a major hand in defining the trope for later works. Tsubami from Cyberteam, Rue from Princess Tutu, Fate from Nanoha, Dark Cure from Heartcatch — they're all following in Saturn's footsteps.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

OH MY GODDDDDDDD SO APPARENTLY THE FIRST EP OF AVATAR KORRA CAME OUT AND I AM LIKE PEEING MYSELF WITH EXCITEMENT BUT I'M IN CLASS RIGHT NOW AND PLUS I'M A LITTLE SCARED TO ACTUALLY WATCH THE EPISODE BECAUSE I MIGHT DIE OF AWESOME

GGHGHGHHHGHHHH

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

So the Hunger Games movie has come out! I haven't read the books, and I'm not planning to see the film, but I have to say: it warms the cockles of my dried up cynical little heart to see so much buzz and excitement over a major motion picture whose protagonist is a strong competent badass three-dimensional young woman. Every time I overhear some random person IRL start squeeing over the series, which has been happening constantly in the past few days, it gives me the warm fuzzies. I even heard one of my straight male college-age friends getting on his fanboy soapbox about how the film was okay but the books were way better. Take note, producers of fiction: boys are capable of liking stories with sensibly-dressed three-dimensional female protagonists!

That said: There has been some absolutely mind-boggling levels of stupidity on the internet amongst Hunger Games "fans" who were shocked and horrified to discover that the movie had cast a pair of black actors in the roles of Rue and Thresh. Even though these two characters were clearly described in the books as having "dark brown skin and eyes."

I don't know which is making me headdesk more: that people are so horrendously racist that they'll go from liking a character to disliking her and will be unmoved by the tragic death of a 12-year-old girl simply because she turned out to be black, or that people have such terrible reading comprehension. Okay, the first one is obviously worse, but I'm still amazed at the people getting up on their high horse about how the film should STAY FAITHFUL TO THE BOOKS, YOU GUYZ, even though this shit was clearly stated in the books. Is our school system really that broken? Apparently what tripped some people up was Katniss observing that Rue was "very like Prim in size and demeanor." Since Prim is pale and blonde, some readers assumed that Rue must be pale and blonde too, even though in the same sentence Katniss pointed out Rue's "dark brown skin and eyes" and even though "size and demeanor" have nothing to do with a person's race or coloring. Some other people are going "Well sure Rue has dark skin and eyes, but I didn't think she'd be black." What the hell did you think she'd be, Italian? And ugggh shade-ism, treating medium-dark/non-African skintone as acceptable but dark/African-descended skintone as bad, get the fuck oooouuuut.

I think the most revealing comment I read was this one:

Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture.

The mod of the @hungergamestweets tumblr said this in response:

Remember that word ‘innocent’? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.

I can't really add anything to that, except maybe to point at The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and the Missing White Woman Syndrome page on TV Tropes. But that one word, "innocent," really says it all. This stuff makes me wanna barf.

But yes, still cheered by the whole "Hollywood blockbuster written by a woman and starring a dangerous lady" thing. And I am glad that the filmmakers didn't whitewash Rue and Thresh, unlike some film adaptations I could name. *cough*Failbender*cough*

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

I know you're probably sick of hearing about that MGS cutscene, but I've watched it several times (FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES, SHUT UP) and I keep finding more details to alternately nosebleed and boggle over. For example, the first time we see Raiden, we're treated to a pan shot that crawls up his body, giving us a nice view of his legs and crotch, and after the fight, we get a similar pan shot of Vamp from the back, in which we get a good look at how tight his pants are and how nonexistent his shirt is. Also, at the end of the fight, when Raiden and Vamp are stuck together with the katana, there's this bit where Vamp actually hugs Raiden closer to him, and we get a close-up shot of the katana's point pushing further out of Vamp's torso, complete with a messy splurt of blood. Um. I'm not familiar with Vamp's powers so maybe he had a practical reason for impaling himself further on Raiden's katana, but uh, the imagery is still pretty suggestive.

... it just occurred to me that this is only one cutscene. Jesus, what must all the other ones be like? If I ever do play this game, will I have any blood left by the end?

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.

Well I'm still a little dazed from watching that MGS cutscene. I had visions of mansex dancing in my head all day long which was quite distracting. Relatedly, I'm still puzzling over the fact that the sexually insecure dudebro fanboys are able to play these games without fainting, and my only guess is that they're just completely naive when it comes to the female gaze. Since they've grown up in a culture dominated by the male gaze where the only same-sex fanservice is the girl-on-girl kind, it just doesn't occur to them that someone might sexualize a male character, and so all the manservice and homoeroticism and dudes running around in latex fetishwear just goes right over their heads. Aww, how innocent. *pets*

Actually, "naive" is probably the right word, because Wikipedia informs me that Hideo Kojima and the costume designer (who are both dudes) gave Raiden skintight clothing and bishie good looks specifically because they wanted to bring more women into the fanbase. So yeah, that shit was intentional. Although that still doesn't explain why all the other male characters are running around in similarly fetishy outfits. I'm forced to wonder who the target demographic of this series really is.

And one more thing about that cutscene: Given Vamp's schtick of lecherously drinking people's blood, I am continually hilaritized by the writers' decision to make Raiden's artificial blood white. Of all the possible colors! I mean, when you have a dude gleefully lapping up another dude's white bodily fluids, my brain is going to go to some fucking obvious places. Or maybe that should be "obvious fucking places," ba dum tish.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.