A recent cartoon for New Scientist
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale
LIVE ACTION PRACTICAL EFFECTS TABAXI
LOOK AT THIS NOBLE CRITTER
There really is something lost with CG. even the parts you can tell it's an effect have a charm that CG cant replicate
Alguien más es fan de She-Ra y Las Princesas de Poder???
A mí me encanta, Catradora para empezar esta semana💕
Ashley Johnson, Liam O'Brien and/or Sam Riegel next campaign: I have made the grossest most feral, most unromanceable character possible.
Laura Bailey: *Already planning the wedding between they and her character*
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is a romantic comedy about a lonely rich girl who gets engaged to the most precious being in the Solar System but she also has to deal with the weird in-laws.
Would Delia ever try and get over her fear of snakes to maybe make Jessica happy?
she's actively trying!
by this comic, she's alright with seviper in controlled settings where it's calm and she's able pet it no problem. but she built up that trust with jessie's seviper specifically and still has trouble with other snake pokemon
phobias are hard to get over and realistically not everyone does get over theirs. she does her best and jessie helps her but i don't think i'll ever portray her as FULLY over it
The curse of modern fandom is that it has allowed fans to get even closer to artists, but they won't view the artists as people.
Human limits, human mistakes, human feelings, human needs, are never ascribed to artists, and when other fans rightfully point out, "hey, humans are making this, maybe don't harass them or demand they cater to your personal tastes," it gets shut down under, "uh, people who make popular mainstream things are automatically Public Figures who are also probably rich, so eat the rich and destroy artists over every perceived minor fault. <3"
Even though there's, y'know, a really big strike currently going on because those artists are very much not rich or influential or in control of the bullshit.
The more friends I make in the various facets of the entertainment industry, and the more widely my own art gets shared, the more I realize that a lot of y'all genuinely don't see artists as human beings if they meet some arbitrary standard of Being Known Online.
There is no amount of online fame that makes someone subhuman and a valid target for blatant disrespect and harassment.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not actually own and control a piece of art just because you like it a lot. The artists are not subject to your personal whims and tastes. They owe you nothing.
JUST TREAT YOUR STAFF LIKE HUMAN BEINGS, GOOD LORD
So like, I know absolutely nothing about economics but I feel it's fairly intuitive that it's probably astronomically more expensive for these companies to lose out on the positive marketability of attending events like this, to have to instead deal with backlash (probably by spending outrageous sums on counter-cultural propaganda and perhaps even on lawyers, lobbyists and union busters to try to undermine strikes) than to simply just pay and treat their workers better.
A blind idiot could tell you it's plain to see how short sighted and self destructive these companies are by refusing to do the tremendously easy and correct thing to do but... I'm pretty sure *cruelty* is the point and the only thing these companies love more than their monetary bottom line.
Hm, there’s something that Ian Hislop (editor of the British satirical magazine Private Eye) said recently about the strikes in the UK at the moment by the teachers, nurses, rail workers etc.
How it USED to go, is that the unions would ask for a big thing, the government or whoever would say no, and then both sides would compromise in such a way that the unions wouldn’t get EVERYTHING they wanted but still managed to get what they were expecting to get in the first place.
Now how it goes, is that the unions ask for something, and then the government bans strikes and protests. Hence why the rolling strikes in the UK are going on, because basic negoiation is off the table because those in charge see it as weakness and a threat to their bottom line.
I think that a similar thing is happening in the US at the moment with the corporations, because they’re already shaving everything to the bone in the name of saving money and getting the lowest possible price for everything, that they’re refusing to budge on the “studios using AI to write scripts etc.“ because that is their intended end goal and giving into the WGA’s more than reasonable demands will prevent them from getting scripts for pennies instead of tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.
Also, never underestimate the importance of vulture capital: Many companies don't actually care about long term profitability if they can cannibalize their business for immediate profits. Some (Disney, for example) probably assume they can just start over because of the name recognition, co-opoly of their industry, or having multiple product lines to fall back on. Others are fully dependent on gaming the stock market.
I wrote an essay a bit ago about my thoughts on portrayals of one of the most visible wheelchair-using crime-fighters out there by non-disabled writers and artists. Here's an excerpt, and you can find the full essay on my website!
Barbara Gordon is a woman of many names, faces, and identities. Batgirl, Oracle, crime fighter, hacker, able-bodied, wheelchair user, and most importantly: hero. She is one of, if not THE most famous disabled caped crusader to date. In addition to her tenure as Batgirl, she’s had a long and storied (pun intended) history in the role of Oracle, an ass-kicking-techno-wizard-wheelchair-user. But for me, a wheelchair user myself, her representation has never felt whole or true to my experiences. Now with the new series Batgirls, by Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad, I am finally beginning to see my own story in Barbara: that of a real disabled person.
No offense, but it seems like you only really like this new take on babs because you relate to it more. I get it -- I have a similar disability to yours in that I can walk, but also use a wheelchair a lot.
But you also seem to speak of a place of ignorance when it comes to pre new 52 comics, because you have to put them down to prop Batgirls up.
Both Oracle: Year One and this new Batgirl run both approach Barbara’s disability from the same angle: grief and guilt.
This is the comic that's only about grief and guilt?
This is the comic about Barbara's disabled body being treated as a problem to her? An obstacle to be overcome?
You seem to ignore a lot of the Barbara as Oracle pre new 52 stories, because that is the only way you can cast Batgirls in a positive light. Many of the things you say happen in Batgirls -- like Babs going to PT and it being treated as a normal thing -- are also present in pre new 52 Oracle. We see her going to PT in Birds of Prey, we see her using wheelchair lifts on busses. We see her going to therapy in Suicide Squad, dealing with her survivor's guilt (and victim blaming of herself)
In Barbara’s stories, I see a common theme: to be disabled is to be less-than. To be helpless.
What pre new 52 stories were you seeing that said that? Because sometimes, ableist tropes do pop up. But we see plenty that does not imply Barbara is helpless or less-than. So I'd like specific stories you have examples from.
Barbara is bitter about her disability; I get that.
Pictured: Barbara being bitter about her disability
She acknowledges that her body, even with the chip installed (from New 52), is still disabled. And that’s not a bad thing. She works with herself, not against herself
We see Barbara accept that a surgery on her spine to save her may make her more disabled, and she's fine with it, in pre new 52. We see her encouraging Wendy to accept her disability.
Like I understand being so starved for rep that if someone has a disability that's similar to yours, it's tempting to ignore all the issues around the writing. But this did not happen in isolation, and you have to ignore a lot of Barbara's past writing as Oracle to position Batgirls as the best.
I suggest you read these links here (link). some of them include my perspective as someone who has a disability similar to yours (ambulatory wheelcahir user) explaining why it is still ableist. I hope you hear me out.
Hey! My friend made a lot of great points so I won’t reiterate them, but there is something else I want to mention on top of everything.
In the essay you claim that no disabled writers have handled Babs in canon and hold that against fully paraplegic Oracle, while praising Batgirls with not one but two abled writers. The former is a false claim.
Kim Yale was a chronically ill and dying woman at the time she wrote Oracle: Year One. It was said (and very obvious upon looking at the panels Fade provided) that she was channeling her own experiences and hope in that story, and it is a more genuine portrayal of Babs and disability than mainline DC has provided us in years.
I know it’s easy to assume otherwise, but there’s a reason that Pre 52 Oracle and Oracle: Year One specifically is so beloved among other disabled fans.
My husband and I are currently working on the Evangelion rebuild movies.
And the other day (after watching the second one) my husband starts talking about how the control center for NERV doesn't make any sense.
"It's set up like a command bridge, but the height differences are ridiculous. Why do the levels need to be so tall? It would make it so hard for anyone to talk to each other!"
And I'm just like...
"Uh huh. Weird right. It's kinda like Gendo...has put himself up on a pedestal, isolating himself, and making it impossible to communicate with him. Weird. What a weird choice. Why would Anno design it that way?"
I wouldn't read that much into it. It's just a generic sci fi anime bridge. They all tend to follow that same basic layout to greater or lesser extents. It's essentially supposed to be evocative of all the stations of a battleship conning tower, except all in one room.
Like, here's the bridge of the Macross, which is arguably even worse for communication:
So, I haven't seen Macross, so I can't speak to how it's being used there.
And it should be noted that any analysis of Evangelion needs to account for the "rule of cool" (one of the animators, Kazuya Tsurumaki, talked about all of the Christian imagery in the show by saying: "Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious...There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool.")
But at the same time, if you've seen the final 2 episodes of the anime, it's hard to argue that the show isn't trying to say something deeper about relationships and vulnerability and mental health, using the sci-fi plot as metaphor. (Like FLCL that way.) Like, the show might not make a lot of sense in a Watsonian plot summary kind of way, but it is having some very clear and detailed explorations with theme and symbolism.
Gendo is a domineering, distant authority figure. He lords over Shinjis life and is unapproachable. It makes perfect sense, visually, to exaggerate this command center to wildly isolate Gendo from the people he controls.
Oh, sure, Evangelion itself is absolutely about communication issues. I'm just saying I don't think the command center design is really part of that. It's just a giant robot show command center, they all tend to look like that to greater or lesser degrees, and on the surface Evangelion was trying to evoke that sort of classic feel. At the very least, absolutely no one in the NERV command center has any trouble talking to each other, and Gendo in particular, that being one of the few places people CAN talk to him.
IMHO Gendo's sitting on a pedestal because the commander sits on a pedestal in sci fi anime, and Anno is first and foremost a giant nerd for things like that (and also worked on Macross). It's not impossible, but I think the command center design is the same as the religious iconography, more coolness factor than intentional thematic choice.
In any case, a few more examples from Gunbuster (also Anno), Gundam, Giant Robo, Yamato...
Ok, but I think that kind of...makes the point.
Vs (Gunbuster and Nadia, both by Anno)
Command structures which have the captain elevated are just...how that works. The extreme exaggeration in Evangelion is noticeable and feels deliberate. It's also much more emphasized than in Gunbuster or Nadia, which don't have multiple long panning shots of these command centers from multiple angles and dramatic lighting like Eva does.
The structure is so large that at scale, individuals are dwarfed and lost in the shot. Rule of cool, yes. But the visual storytelling, how the characters are framed, is also supposed to impact how we perceive the characters and the organization of NERV.
So, to my husband's original observation- it's not just dumb anime nonsense and bad architecture to have the NERV HQ built this way. It's portrayed this was to convey tone and characterization to the audience. And I think that disregarding the fact that the emotionally distant domineering father is placed in that specific spot kind of...I dunno, doesn't give Anno enough credit for the visual language of the series.
Like, Gendo also wears those super reflective glasses- why? It looks cool. But also the eyes are the most emotionally expressive part of a person, and Gendos reflective glasses work as a mask to hide his emotions and thoughts from the audience. Is that just a coincidence too?
Eva is a work that plainly and deliberately is using metaphor to explore its theme. And it feels... dismissive to ignore the visual symbolism within the story.
My husband and I are currently working on the Evangelion rebuild movies.
And the other day (after watching the second one) my husband starts talking about how the control center for NERV doesn't make any sense.
"It's set up like a command bridge, but the height differences are ridiculous. Why do the levels need to be so tall? It would make it so hard for anyone to talk to each other!"
And I'm just like...
"Uh huh. Weird right. It's kinda like Gendo...has put himself up on a pedestal, isolating himself, and making it impossible to communicate with him. Weird. What a weird choice. Why would Anno design it that way?"
I wouldn't read that much into it. It's just a generic sci fi anime bridge. They all tend to follow that same basic layout to greater or lesser extents. It's essentially supposed to be evocative of all the stations of a battleship conning tower, except all in one room.
Like, here's the bridge of the Macross, which is arguably even worse for communication:
So, I haven't seen Macross, so I can't speak to how it's being used there.
And it should be noted that any analysis of Evangelion needs to account for the "rule of cool" (one of the animators, Kazuya Tsurumaki, talked about all of the Christian imagery in the show by saying: "Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious...There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool.")
But at the same time, if you've seen the final 2 episodes of the anime, it's hard to argue that the show isn't trying to say something deeper about relationships and vulnerability and mental health, using the sci-fi plot as metaphor. (Like FLCL that way.) Like, the show might not make a lot of sense in a Watsonian plot summary kind of way, but it is having some very clear and detailed explorations with theme and symbolism.
Gendo is a domineering, distant authority figure. He lords over Shinjis life and is unapproachable. It makes perfect sense, visually, to exaggerate this command center to wildly isolate Gendo from the people he controls.
two things.
First of all, those designs, regardless of how common they are, can still be using Height to represent that someone is standing taller in the chain of command.
secondly do you know what I noticed in this shot?
how sterile it is, how much empty space there is. and the only exists are through doors. everyone IS isolated outside of their own group.
Here is the remake of the anime Battleship Yamato
Look how packed it is. and how everyone is at walking distance from one another. The captain is still shown at a slightly higher elevation, but it is not to the degree Gendo is.
Meanwhile, here is the bridge for the Mecha anime Gaogaigar
Which to not go into details, gives plenty of focus to their role in support of the main robot. It's design is also made to have a sense of camaraderie and warmth. it has warm colors, it has green, etc.
Most importantly here is that, while the circles can show the hierarchy, everyone is at the same height. Because everyone in here are friends and get along.
So like. while the overall design was probably meant to evoke common conceptions of Sci-fi anime. it's most noteworthy features (the height difference AND the size of it), aren't things an Anime Bridge will necessarily have. There was an intent there.
