I’m rewatching inuyasha and have no one to talk to about the fact that Kagura should have lived and by doing so the entire Sessh/Rin weirdness could have been completely avoided. Like I have trouble picturing Kagura pregnant but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and half the time in fairy tales of all locales the kids pop out of the dad’s migraine or some shit and honestly they’d also make amazing godparents (or whatever the equivalent is) to a half dozen adopted mortals and their bloodlines. I’m mad about it and commenting on ao3 fics for this fandom is like screaming into the void.
I have a tangentially related thing. I got big into steampunk decades ago when it was still young. Back then, it was a maker culture, a loosely defined idea of cogs and boilers that gave you a fun little world to practice your craft in. It wasn’t just form, it was function. Hammering brass to make functional goggles, learning the Victorian techniques to whalebone corsets, clockwork to accomplish something we only do now with variable controllers.
Now I look for my people and I find a rusting husk of I knew. Gone are the color and texture, replaced by brown on brown in cotton and leather. Where once gears and cogs were carved to spin and move, now they serve only to be glued to cheap accessories. The gleaming promises of brass and copper and steel, userped by soulless luster of plastics.
We should Never have let the world in.
Steampunk then: What if we combined real Victorian craftsmanship and tech with imagined advanced machines.
Steampunk now: What if I glued two plastic gears to a cheap vinyl corset.
The biggest sin is when you see cheap plastic goggles with gears and spikes covering one eye. The point if goggles is to protect the eyes, not obscure your vision and carry your trash.
Relevant song: Just Glue Some Gears On It and Call It Steampunk
I’ll have to listen to this after work, but I already feel at home in the comments.
Came to share this
No that’s valid tbh. Genres are 100% a part of fandom. I always admired the steampunk aesthetic but never had the resources to get into it. I’ve loved the bits that overlap with stuff like stardust though!
I’m much the same. When I got into it, the brass goggles forum required you to hand make and chare your goggles to be a full member. By the time I had the skill to do that, the forum had died and the fandom was a tag on Etsy for dropshippers.
Maybe you could help a new generation learn the value of intentional steampunk :) bring some of the passion back to the hobby, as it sounds like many just accept it as presented. Share it as a “when I got into this, we made this shit” and how you did it. I might be wrong, but I’m weirdly confident you’ll eventually find a cross section of steampunks that would be interested in the creative element
It’s not quite the same as you describe, but I do carry the tenets of that old steampunk to my modern crafts. Right now I’m making an electric hurdy gurdy cello out of a broken guitar, a kitchen mixer, and 3d printed models of my own construction. If steampunk taught me anything it’s that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
I don’t know what it says about me that I already knew what a hurdy gurdy was lol
That you either passionately love or viscerally hate droning instruments.
I love that you didn’t give up the complex creations. Unlike the other commenter I have no idea what a hurdy gurdy is, but I can appreciate the value of overmaking stuff. Glad to hear that you didn’t let the capitalisation of steampunk kill your passion 😊
Oh you are in for a treat! it’s an antique instrument with a very distinctive sound.
Just update it to a genre subset: steamcraft punk (or functionpunk or some such)
As much as I enjoyed Firefly, the universe created was going to get very complicated and bad if it had been let to develop for the next few years.
They are going to have to explain a lot to justify that Confederate veterans deserved to be the heroes and I don’t think that Joss Whedon was up to that task.
The brown
shirtscoats?? I think the point was they weren’t actually the good guys. The show kinda hits you over the head with that. Mal (which literally means bad) is the main character who goes out of his way to associate with other bad people, and do bad things. The show paints the Alliance as evil but if anything they’re just authoritarian and they’re up to some shady shit but 90% of the interactions with the alliance, Mal is actively breaking the law and has a reason to be afraid of them other than the alliance being evil.The Alliance is a simple allegory for the US. The brown coats an obvious allegory for the Confederacy which happened to spawn a bunch of old West outlaws that we turned in to folk heroes. The entire James Younger gang were confederate soldiers or their siblings.
The show also hits viewers over the head that there are morals that the crew won’t cross, like stealing medicine from that town. It is also in the opening song that, because of the war and his service, Mal can’t exactly settle down and be a good law abiding citizen, so he takes jobs of dubious legality since they pay better.
Mal is the same kind of bad that Han Solo was painted as in Star Wars. He’s not a nice guy, but more neutral than evil and will perform good acts at times.
The show also played up the Alliance as being more absolutely evil because it had to in order to justify Mal.
There is an unreliable narrator happening here. The source of most of the information about the Alliance is from the crew. Notably, Shepard and Inara do not share those views. Zoe and Mal have very strong opinions about the alliance and the Doctor and River help feed that narrative. But the things they don’t say out loud paint a very different picture. I think had the show gone on, the brown coats would gradually have become another villain and Mal would have had to contend with the reality of who he was fighting for.
especially when it was giving southern us more than other types of wars for independence
There’s no indication that slavery was a factor, only political self-determination
…that phrasing is not helpful to this argument…
We’re not told much about the Independant Planets, certainly nothing suggests that they themselves did anything wrong (other than secede). You seem to have a problem with their superficial resemblence of the confederacy.
Mal and his crew are thieves and smugglers, not pirates or murderers. The ‘Mal is latin for bad’ line another commenter mentioned was a red herring in an episode. They aren’t evil people intent on subjugation.
Firefly’s lost-cause origins are like A New Hope’s allegory for Vietnam, in that the author might’ve intended it, but it is nnnot in the text. Honestly neither is the trans angle on The Matrix. Lana and whatsherface can say it’s about gender, but unless you are explicitly told that (and also previously educated on the subject) there is the barest shadow of that inspiration.
Universally identifiable villainy is difficult to square with specific struggles. The Last Jedi is an anarchist critique of Star Wars and even general leftists Do Not Get It.
Firefly’s lost-cause origins are absolutely baked into text from the opening scene in how the main characters interact with others. The main difference between the lost cause in Firefly and the lost cause in real life is that we don’t really get to see what the lost cause in Firefly looks like. There is the common “Union bad” trope, but we don’t exactly see what cause Mal was fighting for.
I’m not even going to address the other stuff since I’m just discussing Firefly and how other media use their themes has no bearing on how Firefly uses its themes.
We know the Alliance are patronizing colonial aggressors - and the Civil War is about the only context where that cannot be the US government.
Listen. In the words of Gary Brannan, I am thick as mince. When someone pointed out years later that Arrested Development was about the Bush dynasty, I spent several straight minutes going ‘oh my god, and the thing with-- oh my god.’ But even contemporaneously, people said Firefly was about the Confederacy, and all I could think was, no it isn’t.
Firefly’s backstory is that the Alliance looked at every inhabited planet and went “Mine.” There’s a lot of people who could portray the US that way. The South is not eligible. The Confederacy seceded from an established union over their own intolerable bigotry, after decades of violently asserting that bigotry within other states. Lincoln, a compromise progressive whose policy on slavery was just that new states couldn’t do it, insisted the reason doesn’t even matter; you can’t just leave. They flipped their shit before he was even in office and were firing on the US army within three months.
When fiction makes those assholes the protagonists by changing all of the details, it is no longer about that war.
and the Civil War is about the only context where that cannot be the US government.
Unless you subscribe to the death of the author. Joss Whedon said he was inspired to write Firefly based on post Civil War stories in context of confederate soldiers moving out west.
Firefly’s backstory is that the Alliance looked at every inhabited planet and went “Mine.”
There was a unified colonization of that solar system by several Earth nations including the United States and China. That unified group settled the various habitable worlds in system. Because of that initial unifying colonization group, it is unclear if the Alliance has claim from the initial colonization efforts for the entire system or not. However, given that the war started after negotiations between the two parties, it is possible that that it was assumed that the Alliance has justified claims to all planets and that is why the other planets had to declare independence. After all, why declare independence from a country you’re already independent from?
Inspiration doesn’t mean it’s in the text. 50 Shades Of Gray started as Twilight fanfic, but does not contain vampires. I assume.
If we’re going from word choice, why is the end of the war called Unification Day, and not Reunification Day?
Even in your reading, the Union did not have a claim to Confederate states; those states had long since joined the Union. Territories fighting to maintain independence is the story of that Union versus England, not the story of the South versus the North.
territories fighting to maintain independence is the story of that Union versus England
So now you’re going to misrepresent the American War of Independence?
British colonies were at least as separate from Britain itself as you’re saying these planets were. No one would say the United Kingdom included Scotland, Wales, and Massachusetts. The British army was seen as an occupying force by the colonists.
By contrast the United States is a federation of co-equal governments which joined voluntarily. Even if there’s some intense footnotes on the word “voluntarily.”
The vibe in Firefly is that most backwater planets were politely disinterested in deepening their relation with the more-industrial core worlds, and then things escalated. Saying the Alliance was more of an absentee landlord than a foreign conqueror doesn’t change how both differ dramatically from half of a country trying to set up its own federal government with blackjack and hookers. And slaves.
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Given how Serenity turned out, firefly’s cancellation was probably for the best, making the reavers the intentional by-product of alliance experiments completely destroyed the nuances of the factions in the war of independence.
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Inuyasha ran out of ideas 10-15 tankobon in, and Takahashi just kept milking it for the money.
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Every fandom that accepts the “x is for everyone” motto is accepting enshittification and casualization with open arms. Air and water are for everyone, even bread has people who dislike it, for something to be unique it necessarily will have haters. The right word is anyone.
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Archer had a bit of a dip when Adam Reed left the writing team but it recovered and had one of the best endings possible for a series that long lived.
making the reavers the intentional by-product of alliance experiments
They were the accidental by-products, so I think some nuance is still there for the factions, although still clearly the browncoats were in the right …
Right, I should’ve said “accidental byproduct of non-consensual experimentation on the population” but yeah, still beyond the pale.
I’ve just started rewatching Archer from the beginning. I loved it at the time, and I agree that it ended very well.
I hope Reed takes some time to contemplate another project to get passionate about, because I loved both Archer and Frisky Dingo.
One of the writers of Freely (maybe Tim Minear?) did a blog post many moons ago where he outlined what some unresolved plot threads were and future episodes. You’re right that it was better off being cancelled. Even Nathan Fillion has said that the reason it’s so beloved is That it never had the opportunity to become bad.
Let me give you the example that stood out to me. Remember in the pilot where Inara gets out a syringe when she hears about Reavers being nearby? Everybody assumed she was going to kill herself. Nope. There was going to be an episode where they got boarded by Reavers and Inara was left alone with them. The crew move heaven and Earth to get back on board and when they do they find Inara barely alive, surrounded by hundreds of dead Reavers. The syringe was full of a Companion drug which kills anybody who has sex with you. So Inara killed then all by letting them rape her.
Mal would have been sweet and tender during her recovery, and that is what would have brought them together.
Probably for the best that one never got made.
Honestly the idea itself, as insane and barely disguised a fetish as it is, isn’t even that bad, to me.
It’s the planned aftermath that is pretty horrendous?
The idea that they would need that for their relationship to evolve in a positive direction when they’re already basically a couple by Shindig is genuinely sad, if they wanted that grim a story beat they should probably place it after they’re already an established couple and Mal has gotten over his shit about companions, then there’s some good meat on the bone in terms of character dynamics to explore.
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Community (2009): Annie was the (2nd) ass crack bandit and Abed took Troys cracking with a shocking amount of grace.
All the major character replacements on MASH were better than the characters they replaced. It’s not that I don’t like Burns and Blake, but Winchester and Potter were just so much more interesting. Trapper John was kind of a rapey creep even for the time, so there’s no question BJ was the winner there. Honestly as much as I love Radar, even Klinger taking over his position was an improvement. There was only so much more they could do with his Beaver Cleaver Goes to War shtick.
I agree wholeheartedly. I like the original characters enough, they fill their purpose. I’m a little sad when the changeover happens, but quickly fall in love with the new ones. A very well done show, infinitely re-watchable, in my family’s opinion. We grew up watching it, and we all rewatch it every other year or so.
In fact, I’m due for a rewatch right about now.
Stargate needed to develop a way to allow Earth to know about the galaxy. It might have even been an interesting way to spin off the show.
There is no way that the US government could hide the SG teams’ budget over years and that the US military wouldn’t have deployed off world technology during GWAT. Fuck, imagine the US Military deploying Zat guns to Iraq.
oh god now I’m thinking about the whole disintegrating thing again
They made fun of that in the show.
RIP Willie Garson aka Martin Lloyd.
It was just a gas leak.
in the ALT TIMElines, the aschen they finally did it, but unknowingly accelerating thier own extinction. and then the alt-U version where the world became aware after anubis attacked earth. With the new series, 10 episodes if they are going for that doesnt seem enough for a scifi to develop properly.
To say nothing of the stun weapons used by those fake SG-1 teams in exactly one episode.
The show’s constant denial of progress was frustrating, but kept things plausible. 4x02 “The Other Side” really epitomizes the formula where we show up, they’ve got cool shit, they like us… oh no.
I’m still salty that the season 2 ending cliffhanger of The Sarah Connor Chronicles never got to go anywhere.
Well, it was revived and I refuse to watch the revival, but for Tiny Toons Adventures ( revived as something like Toons Looniversity or something like that IIRC ), I rather strongly dislike how they removed Elmira and made Babs and Buster siblings.
I’m especially not for the Babs and Buster change because if that’s cannon to the original show by proxy of the reboot, that would make any moment where Babs and Buster have feelings for each other or the maybe episode or 2 where they go on a date have an extremely incestuous vibe.
As for Elmira, I love how over the top she is as an example of how not to be a pet owner. Or how not to babysit in the case of the one episode where she babysits for a no name, single episode family. Or how in the Spring Break special she gets either government or military help to capture Buster by giving them Harrison Ford, IIRC, with him trapped in a cage.
wtf? “no relation” is an anchor for a few episodes!
That Blake’s 7 fandom was materially better before the show aired in the States. They had gone through the painful sorting out of characters and characteristics and relationships and were developing these really interesting themes of psychological trauma and manipulation that they were beginning to explore - it was really interesting and the themes were fascinating. Them the show aired in the States, they went wild over Avon and all the stories and themes starting revolving around him. I don’t mind him as a character; I do mind his character taking over all of fandom. It’s sort of like if all the Harry Potter stories suddenly and inexplicably became Ron-centric; it’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s weird and people who liked other characters got left out in the cold, and some of us still resent that.
As an aside, when Blake’s 7 fandom split up, that too was fascinating. As was usual in those days, there was a pro-slash contingent and an anti-slash contingent. When B7 fandom split up, all of the pro-slash fans went into Robin of Sherwood fandom, and all the anti-slash fans went into The Professionals fandom. The problem being that RoS was almost exclusively gen and Pros was almost exclusively slash. It was very weird.
What else? That the second season of War of the Worlds should’ve been an entirely different series: the people who loved season 1 were never going to like season 2; and people who had tuned in and disliked the series during season 1 weren’t going to Even try season 2.
That Krycek became such a big character on The X-Files due to one woman who saw his potential and kept talking about it to her friends, many of whom were popular/prolific fannish authors and artists. She convinced some of them (there was incredulity and resistance at first) but it gathered steam, Chris Carter was flummoxed but rolled with it, and here we are.
That the main follow-on series for Highlander: the Series should’ve been The Methos Chronicles and that one’s not even up for debate.
That the final episode of Miami Vice is a masterpiece, particularly with the echoes and parallels to the first episode - and that the show itself took a major downturn the moment they decided to kill off their comic relief characters. That having God in the final episode of Quantum Leap (the original) being played by an actor who was also in the first episode of the series made it much more interesting. That if you were ever interested in Space: 1999, the “Message from Moonbase Alpha” short has some really interesting implications.
That Space Rangers and Moon Over Miami were cut off entirely too early. That Quark is funny as hell for a science fiction fan of my generation, even if it’s extremely dated now. Similarly, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was hella fun and should’ve lasted much longer (though Michael Praed’s Shatner-esque line deliveries were exceptionally annoying at times!). That the Sonny Steel grave arc is majorly under-represented in Wiseguy fiction.
Almost certainly others, but those are the ones that came to mind.
Man, I loved Quark to the point I convinced all my school friends to play our own version of the show during recess.
I haven’t made it past s3 of Quantum Leap yet, but the bit with god sound super dumb, so I’m hoping you’re right and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Krycek in X-Files was a piece of shit and I hated him. 10/10 performance from Nicolas Lea. Haven’t finished the series yet.
Damn, I keep burning myself out by binging a series and never finishing them…
If you’ve got any sci-fi show hot takes, I’d love to hear them!
lol blakes 7 is actually the fic I’m returning to work on right now.
Maybe a Quake movie can succeed where the Doom movies failed. Make Alan Ritchson Ranger and put Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack. I could see Guillermo del Toro having a field day with it.
I’ll watch anything Alan Ritchson does. Dude is totally underrated as an actor just because he’s big and muscular. People act like he’s just a modern Sylvester stalone, but dudes got range and a great comedic ability. Sometimes overblown and blatant (blue mountain state, playdate) and sometimes subtle (titans, reacher), but he always hits the mark.
You might enjoy Noah Gervais’ video called “Playing Quake For The Plot”.
I suppose you think mega shark vs giant octopus was a “failure” too. I’d hate to live in such a picture of success.
The Big Cheese was funded by the same organization that created the Samurai Pizza Cats to justify their outlandish R&D budget. Pizza Cat technology was sunk cost the moment it came up in the boardroom. They’ve just been sending good money after bad for years.
But they’ve still got more fur than any turtle ever had
supernatural fandom, wierd is a understatement after season 5. ive seen some of the cons they did, and if the ACTORS are even wierded out by the fans, they need help.
the angel wasnt suppose to have wierd relationship with the leads, like intimate one, but the fans got the writers to do it eventually.
I’m rewatching a Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for the first time since I think it came out I guess. There’s two things that are striking me. One they all just stand around while bad things happen a lot, but I guess that’s just Anime. The other thing is I have no idea it was so long. It’s too long. I guess I remember it being like you know 28 episodes or something. This show is stretching so much. It should have been shorter.
edit Oh and one more thing, where are all the Alchemists? In a show called Fullmetal Alchemist outside of the first few episodes there aren’t any. It’s weird there’s not more running around.
I should read the manga, I’m curious to see how closely it parallels. I’m willing to bet that early weirdness is the same, and they didn’t come up with the overarching plot until later in the story.
I just heard there’s going to be another Mega Man game. At this point I’m wondering if they have anything to contribute to modern platforming at all. By the time Shovel Knight came out new MM was already looking kind of tedious, and now compared to things like Gravity Circuit, what exactly is the point? Are we just going to reprise the gear system? Is there enough material in that for a whole game worth of new ideas?
when capcom were working with inti creates, they were reliably putting out good games at a time when indie developers weren’t - at least in that genre. now they put out one mediocre game every ten years.
Give me a new Mega Man X, please.
I’d really love to see MMX: Corrupted get finished. They seem to be doing new things within that space at least
I keep following it, it keeps looking awesome, it keeps not being done. :(
C’est la vie. I envy their determination.
It’s kinda sad that they need that name/franchise so bad to sell games. I loved mega man as a kid, but honestly, it’s nothing special. Even as a big fan, i didn’t like the tv show, or anything about mega man, just the games. And even they were kinda clunky and the best part was that you could pick your playing order and steal other robots powers. That is not really enough for a good game. There are hundreds of indie games that are better platformers or games with better lore and everything.
We mostly agree.
Mega man is comfort food. I don’t expect it to do anything new. I just want it to be decent.
I have some very hot takes about the efficacy of the Sailor Scouts given exactly how much Tuxedo Mask does. This is why my ex-wife and kid, who only wanted to enjoy a magical girl show, stopped watching Sailor Moon around me (it had a good three or four beginning to end rewatches before that though).
I have some very hot takes about the efficacy of the Sailor Scouts given exactly how much Tuxedo Mask does.
How much he does? He throws a flower and talks.
There are so many times where the Scouts would straight-up die and/or Negaverse cronies would win the day if he didn’t show up, throw a flower and talk. Enough times to the point where I wondered “Hey, wtf is the message here exactly?”
The message is “we need a deus ex machina right about here.”
Yes, but in a show with major themes about women’s empowerment it’s a weird device to lean on that much.
To be fair, the manga is much better in that regard. Tuxedo mask is actually very useful and might have a better character arc than Usagi herself, being that he starts out as a guy who just dresses up to someone with some powers who still feels inferior to his super badass gf whom he feels he is only holding back, to actually having a crystal of his own and some deep shit crazy powers. I’m not so sure it was supposed to be about empowerment as much as we want to read onto it. Same with all the sapphic views on it, claiming everyone there is gay or at least bi. Have it your way and read into it what you want, but I don’t think it was the actual intention of the creators, neither Naoko nor the anime studio.
I mean they literally give the girls manicures in their transformations, although they wear gloves - simply because the executives planned to market nail polish.
Both the seshi and tuxedo mask have episodes where they are vital though. I hate when he is called a damsel in distress as much as when the senshi are reduced to bystanders. Within the format and with the target audience, with the ease of production goals, I honestly think it is ok to not have them all kick ass every episode.
Sincerely, a huge Sailor Moon fan who is currently rewatching with their daughter. (The pegasus storyline is awful in the anime so far but it might be the best one in the manga.)
