glilimith

The summer’s been a bit busy, so I’ve unfortunately fallen off some of the stuff that I meant to watch and fallen behind on the rest, but I think things are actually settling down now.

For our weekly anime time, my friends ended up picking:

• Senpai is an Otokonoko - an absolutely beautiful look at the complexity of figuring out gender and sexuality with some truly gut-wrenching depictions of transphobia and homophobia, both direct and indirect.
• Elusive Samurai - stunningly animated action (Cloverworks is doing the thing they do) and it has made us hopeful that some of the historical figures might finally get english language wikipedia pages (we keep complaining that there are no resources to look at about how close this comes to the real story, lol)
• Dahlia in Bloom - a bit of the odd one out because it, um, looks terrible and the story is a bit rough as well. We’re enjoying the slow-burn romance (it’s a bit too slow for me, tbh) and pointing at all the weird animation quirks (we were SHOCKED when, after episodes of making fun of horse animation errors, we got an up-close shot of a horse and learned that this world had 8-legged horses the whole time and they didn’t tell us, so those were not errors after all)
• Odd Taxi - I slept on this when it came out because the dialogue felt really stilted to me and I couldn’t get my brain to focus on what was being said, but one of my friends insisted, so here we are. It’s definitely gotten better in the dialogue department, but I don’t really see why people call it a masterpiece, at least not yet. We’ll see.

As for my own shows, I had to make some cuts and I’m still a bit behind on it all, but I’m watching:

• Yatagarasu - This one keeps surprising me with its weird twists, lol. The big one two-thirds of the way through made me go read the manga (I may try to find translations of the novels as well), and I learned that the anime blended the first two novels together into a single story (they cover the same time period, but different characters, as I understand it), and I think the story was much better for it. The manga’s pacing, at least on the ladies’ side of the story, was really janky and the tone felt all wrong.
• How to Become Ordinary - Why is this so cinematic?? I really like all the subtle character moments in this show and the extreme low stakes of (most of) the mysteries.
• Twilight Out of Focus - as far as BL anime goes, it’s fine. It’s sort of endearing how seriously it takes itself and how artsy it’s trying to be, but I don’t know that it works that well.
• Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian - I really liked this as a romance at the start of the season, but I’ve become more disinterested as it’s (predictably?) become a harem anime. I’ll probably finish out the season, but if there’s no romantic progress, I won’t be back for a season 2.

As always, I’m going into the season as blind as possible, though I am tentatively hyped for Ranma 1/2.

Also, I’m not sure if this counts as the new season (or as anime, since it was sort of a slideshow), but here’s my thoughts on the first(?) fall show:

A few things:

• What wisp does for herself she also does for the group. Your teammate can afford to bring a frame that’s not survivable enough normally because of vitality mote, and with very little coordination from the group.
• Because of the way reservoirs work, that strength requirement isn’t as much of a tradeoff as it seems. Wisp can afford to tank her efficiency into the ground and still function very very well in any mission where you can stay near your reservoirs.
• You compare her to arcanes, but those are a very large farming investment to get to high levels, whereas she drops from a boss fight / relics. If you’re one of the players that already has everything the comparison is fair, but if you’re looking at a new thing to acquire the two are very different hurdles.

Ultimately she’s probably rarely the best possible choice, but part of the reason that she’s considered “the best support in the game” is that she does so much with so little investment or effort (and that she was given that title before a bunch of older support frames got buffed to stand on par with her)

I am under no circumstances saying you can’t criticize art or say that the writing was bad or whatever you seem to think my position is.

Writers can and do get fired for not doing the job they were hired for and rarely get to lead the creative process (and usually if they do they’re like, writer/director, or a big name). All I’m trying to say is that a worker can do a good job within the bounds they’re given and still have the result be terrible because the bounds were terrible.

You seem to be giving a LOT of agency to writers for the stories they tell. Some stories are going to be something writers worked hard on wanted to write, and in those cases ya they should be blamed for the resulting flaws, but many times they are constrained by the instructions they’re given.

To go back to the metaphor, did the worker decide that the stuff you need goes out of your reach or are they putting it where they were told to?

“Just following orders” absolutely does excuse bad writing as long as it’s not harmful. I wouldn’t get mad at a writer of a thing a studio ruined just like I wouldn’t get mad at a grocery store worker for rearranging the shelves for the fifth week in a row. Just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean doing a stupid and pointless job makes them a bad person. If the writing is racist or whatever, sure, they’re complicit, but writers have to eat and it’s not morally wrong to write a boring script if that’s what your boss is asking you for.

The problem is, nazi is a political ideology, but Russian is a nationality and ethnicity. I agree with your point about gay nazis, but would you say the same thing about gay germans?

It definitely reads like an ai hallucination, lol

I read the books over and over as a child and knew the anime diverged from them but holy shit none of that sounds like the story I’m familiar with except the name jasmine and the fact that there are mountains

Edit: I skimmed/searched the linked page and that description doesn’t actually sound accurate to the show as a whole, so maybe that’s just a singular episode?

There are no rules that can be made ahead of time that catch all the trolls, whilst not gatekeeping innocent folk. Allowing space for people to exist on their own terms means acting reactively, and means that trolls will slip through the cracks sometimes. That is by design, because the alternative is gatekeeping.

I absolutely agree. I think people (myself included) were concerned because the (necessary) ambiguity of rules seemed to be opening the door to times when a user would feel pushed out of spaces by having to tiptoe around other users that they think might just be trolls. It seems to me from talking to you about it that there is generally good faith assumed on all sides, which definitely sets my mind at ease.

I appreciate the clarity on what exactly does and doesn’t get someone banned. That all seems very reasonable to me, and largely answered my main question. Feel free to disengage with this conversation guilt-free if you think my followup here isn’t worth your time. Unfortunately I have reddit-brain and feel like I need to re-explain myself when I feel like i’m not being understood.

With that out of the way: I think you’re missing the point about the examples.

On the User A side, I’m not talking about directly interacting with minors. I’m talking about indirectly interacting with everyone, including minors, but also including adults who don’t want to interact in a sexual manner with randos. There’s definitely a difference, but I think it’s the same sort of effect if User A asks a minor to use their sexualized pronouns vs if they label themselves with sexualized pronouns and then go into spaces where minors may interact with them.

On the User B side, I feel like while “it” is similar in some ways to slur pronouns, it also has some fundamental differences. For one, “it” is already a word we use in other contexts and is not one people can really avoid even if they try, and for another, most “it” pronoun people I’ve encountered intend it to be uses in the object sense, not the reclaimed slur sense. Would User B be treated differently moderation-wise if their pronouns were different reclaimed slurs, like the n-word? I know that there’s no amount of complaining about misgendering that could convince me to use certain slur pronouns.

I do agree that most people are going to be reasonable and those with more controversial pronouns will likely give those who are uncomfortable an out (in the form of alternate pronouns), but I don’t think those people are who anyone is really worried about here, because they seem chill as hell, lol. I get that we’re talking about edge cases of edge cases here, so maybe the whole thing is purposeless anyway.