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Their head is full of pansies

@jjjanedou

welp, just call me jjjam • they/them • 21 • (some kind of) active fandoms: ORV, Pathologic • some long forgotten fandoms: Warframe, Smile for Me, BatIM

okay, small announcement

first of all, somehow this blog already has 140 subscribers (10/29/20). thank you so much for that!!

you all came for my drawings (hopefully) from different fandoms

and, since this blog looks more and more like a dump of reposts for completely different fandoms, I decided to split the content

now, my drawings can be found under the tag #jjjane’s art, and my answers to questions (and just text posts) - under the tag #jjjane answers

I don't want to create a new blog just for reposts or just for art, so this is the solution

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A Cleft-Mouth Shark purportedly caught on rod by a young boy. In some areas, these wide-grinned aberrant sharks are considered a rare trophy as well as a delicacy.

This is fanart of the game Dredge! I really recommend it!

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im reading dungeon meshi and the thing about it that is transfixing me is how clear the priorities are in the way the story is told. like i do not think i have ever read a story where the epic ice golem fight got exactly as many pages as the resting and recovering afterwards (!!!!!!). the way that the resting and the eating and the being together and talking IS the point of the story more so than any of the classically "important" and "exciting" combat and action of adventuring. the way the page and panel budget gets allocated so every meal is prepared, cooked, eaten, and enjoyed onscreen, lavishly and in detail. the way the classic adventuring aspects and action scenes set up character beats that almost always pay off during a meal. the sacred, joyful, loving relationship the main characters have with food and hunting and eating. the way the plot and character backgrounds hinge upon eating. the plot is delightful and complex and compelling and the characters and world are deep and fascinating and full but despite being full of things dungeon meshi always retains a perfect clarity of focus: this is a story about food.

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you know I couldn't be a cowboy because I'd be stuck with my partner in the dead cold prairie night and our horses would be tied up and we'd be huddlin around a crudely made fire because it was too far to go back to the ranch and he'd play the sweetest song on his harmonica, the kind that you felt in your bones and your heart and that the hymns had nothin on, and then he'd finish and we'd both lean in a little too close and my hand would be on his bandanna and his whiskey-breath would be hot on my lips and I'd realize that maybe it wasn't the touch of a woman i'd been hankerin for

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yeah I'll be honest I don't know wtf possessed me here

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The Pathologic Russian and English analysis: Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky

So uhhh.... Turns out my priorities aren't as messed up as I thought, which is why it took me a whole month just to finish this thing. Let's cover some basics shall we? The approximate structure will, depending on the length of this analysis, go as follows: I’m gonna tackle Patho Classic and the three healers from each other’s perspective, look at shared dialogue options and then talk about all the other important NPCs and how they interact with the playable characters. Since Patho 2 only has the Haruspex run, we’re gonna move through that a lot faster in a similar fashion, and then we’ll look over Marble Nest.

What I’m going to be focusing on: there’s a huge amount of dialogue between all the characters in the story, and I couldn’t possibly note down all the differences at once. I will mainly be trying to relay the “voice” of the character that is present in the original Russian version and noting the biggest differences. If there are also pieces of dialogue that shine a different light on a few story aspects, I will point these out too. Mainly I will talk about how the characters in these interactions seem to treat each other (which will be difficult, since opinions of characters change frequently in this game), note interesting mannerisms and sometimes quote the fun differences and try and fail to explain why the use of this specific idiom is funny in this context. Sooooo yeah.

The Bachelor

we’re doing pathologic musicology again. everybody shut up. i’m sick of writing about bel canto musical traditions and my jstor subscription dies tomorrow i think. so i’m pre-emptively saving pdfs about ethnomusicology.

interesting side effect of the town’s culture being mostly built around cattle rather than horses is that the soundtrack of p2 in particular has essentially ended up creating an entire musical history and lexicon that is identifiably SIMILAR to that of The Area Near The Baikal Rift Valley while being obviously different.

classic’s soundtrack interestingly arrives at a similar point to this with completely different means in that the classic soundtrack is basically just. ‘is it bleeping and blooping? ok sick ship it’, while also borrowing at points quite clearly from the actual musical traditions of the region. which produces the effect in the listener of, basically ‘this should sound… other than how it does? but it makes sense?

p2′s soundtrack is trying more obviously to do Authenticity in a way that. has historical precedent, certainly (hi borodin). but it is also trying to do that by borrowing from musical traditions that don’t completely mesh with the way that the town’s musical traditions would have developed. because the town-on-gorkhon is very fond of bulls, culturally speaking, and not horses.

a lot of the extant classical music from the area where pathologic is (presumably) set is not only literally About Horses, which are culturally important, but musically refer to the various gaits of The Horse. (this example is in tuvan but it is not only about horses but the 2/4 rhythm is Trotting-Like. buryat music uses similar music and the same scale, and many of the same instruments, as tuvan music.)

this is not something that bulls particularly have, and so while bulls occupy an equivalent cultural position in the town-on-gorkhon this obviously necessitates a completely different musical tradition. which is also one that doesn’t really exist in the real world, but for which vasily kashnikov and theodor bastard have pulled from existing traditions. they have, however, also created an entire musical language that feels like a place’s musical language essentially out of whole-cloth.

the way that they have done this is essentially to take something about the culturally important animal (lowing, for the bulls – similarly to how actual tuvan, mongolian, baikal, and yakut music refers to horses’ gaits). and then to use that as a basis for the musical ‘world’ of the game, in a similar way to how extant music uses horses. it’s most obviously used in ‘song to boddho’ but a lot of the music in p2 makes a lot of use of drone which could quite easily be interpreted as The Sound That The Local Culturally Important Beast Makes.

(also the p2 soundtrack has a passacaglia in it. this isn’t relevant to this conversation in any way but it’s neat.)

These days, there is a strange focus on what is “necessary” in fiction whether it’s complaining that it’s not necessary to show sex scenes or violence when you can “just imply it” or the perennial dunks on Moby-Dick for having those damn whale chapters. If you press people on these complaints, they explain these things are “unnecessary” or “pointless” because they don’t move the plot forward. Can’t you just cut the whale chapters and get the same story? Couldn’t you skip past depictions of horror / violence / sex / jokes etc. and lose nothing? For these types of consumers—and consumer feels the right word here—the ideal story seems to be a Wikipedia plot summary. The story beats with everything else removed. Efficient and streamlined. Why waste time on atmosphere, thematic exploration, or mere funny or thought provoking sentences? Get to the point!
Yet I would like to humbly suggest this thinking is entirely wrong. The unnecessary is most necessary part of art. Art is exactly the place to let your eye linger on what fascinates it. Art isn’t an SEO optimized app or a rubric for overworked teachers to grade five-paragraph essays. Art is exactly the space—perhaps the last space left—where we can indulge, explore, and expand ourselves. If we can’t be weird, extraneous, over-the-top, discursive, and hedonistic in our art, where can we be?
Of course, it might not be interesting to you. If you don’t enjoy an artist’s vision, that is of course well and fine. The problem is not in disliking X or Y in art. It is in arrogantly declaring X or Y to be wrong. Or perhaps it is less arrogance than self-doubt. When someone says X scene was“unnecessary” I think what they really means “I didn’t like it and feel self-conscious about that.” It is often uncomfortable to ask ourselves why something has caused a reaction in us and easier to declare it bad or wrong or unnecessary, especially if we have the mindset that we’re consumers who are paying not to be catered to not challenged or surprised.
Where this attitude worries me the most is when people begin to declare entire realms of human experience “unnecessary.” I frequently see people complain about darkness, unlikeable characters, angry art, political art, and more. Why is it necessary, they ask, to focus on dark things when the world is so dark? What is the point of being angry when we could all use cheering up? Isn’t everything so political already? At some point, we might as well declare all of human experience off limits and call the whole thing off.
And yes, of course some things are just bad. There are poorly done sex scenes and boring digressions and uninteresting chapters. But the best way to experience art is to experience it. Not to spend your time debating if every shot or sentence or lyric is necessary. What is the point of a flower in a painting? What is the necessary number of verses in a song? What is the utility of the archaic torso of Apollo?
If you’re asking what is the point, then you might have missed it entirely.

sure part of the queer experience is being othered but an even bigger and more powerful part is belonging to the othereds

someone finally put it into words. yeah. being socially alienated is upsetting but it is an entirely unique feeling to look that alienation and say “actually, no. i’m the one rejecting you. i have my own space full of the other people you alienated and it’s even better than what you have going on.”

the sense of belonging you can gain from a group of socially alienated people coming together feels so much like a rebirth that it may as well be one.

This is a great take and I would like to adopt “Feelings Yakuza” in English actually, I feel like it conveys the whole thing way more obviously than “anti” (not to mention the muddled meaning of “proshipper”).

To avoid harassment, EA and SEA artists have started pre-emptively blocking users with "proship DNI" or any variation thereof in their profiles as a result of this article and said feelings yakuza are getting pissed that their DNIs are being hard enforced by the other side. How very dare.

This article at least cleared up one thing for me! I knew proship means “is cool with the idea of shipping characters” so I really honestly thought that antis should mean “is against all shipping all the time”

Let me tell you I was CONFUSED that the antis kept shipping stuff anyway, but only some stuff. Like, huh???

Oh but THEY think proshipping means shipping “bad stuff” specifically, not shipping in general. Okay okay

THIS. THIIIIIIISSSS.

I was there when the "proshipping" term started gaining traction, I was there when the rainbow meat emoji combo was created for the Hannibal fandom. Both of those things mean "ship/read what you want, it's FICTION".

They don't mean "bad stuff". They mean "I may have a visceral squick to what you read, but I'm not going to demand people stop creating that content".

So the term "Feelings Yakuza" is BRILLIANT. I love it.

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since the cowboy and the samurai were both dying out in the 1800s i want an action adventure historically wildly inaccurate comic about the last cowboy and the last samurai teaming up BUT one of them is gay and the other doesn’t understand what being gay is and there are multiple comedic mishaps resulting from this

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after lots of frantic googling of “were samurais gay” “were cowboys gay” “how did gay samurais work” “did gay cowboys love each other” ad nauseam i have decided that it’s actually funnier if both the cowboy AND the samurai are gay but not for each other and also they both have their very culturally specific understandings of gay social politics so both of them still are equally like “dude why are you like this” to each other

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samurai, trying to comfort the cowboy who just got dumped over pony express: when my lover left me for another man, i killed both him and his new lover, and proved to all in shudo that it is what happens when you leave me for another, and i felt much lighter. would doing that also help you?

cowboy, absolutely reeking of the flask, who stopped howling purely out of confusion to try and figure out if the samurai was being serious: dude what the fuck is wrong with you

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the depictions of homosexual identity at the time are painstakingly accurate and very clearly heavily researched, and this is purposefully in direct contrast to how absolutely absurd and crazy the entire rest of the premise of the comic is

I was trying to study and started drawing this in the margins. Sorry for my handwriting, here is a transcript if you need it: KDJ: Sooyoung-ah HSY: hm? KDJ: when you shared my story to those other worldlines…the ones where I myself don’t exist… HSY: hey, are you going to be ungrateful again?

KDJ: Hah? No– I just KDJ: Do you think they write their own stories about us? HSY: pffft KDJ: What? HSY: You know they write fanfiction about us now. in this worldline. KDJ: You’re kidding. HSY: Yeah, Anna Croft goes on twitter to talk about how its… HSY: “problematic” KDJ: huh.. HSY: Actually, three of the biggest author accounts got doxxed last week. [image of Uriel saying ‘huh!’ and ‘ah, not this one too!’] [image of Jan Hayoung saying ‘nooooooooo’] HSY: Two turned out to be Uriel. The other was Jang Hayoung KDJ: Do I want to kn– HSY: You don’t want to know. HSY: You know, I do think that 1% of you out there is probably dreaming fanfiction stories of you. Us. Everyone. HSY: For you…I hope they dream a million happy endings.