scans_daily | Mod Post: Off Topic Tuesday

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In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like. Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

The Omicron Strain (and how many thriller writers WISHED they'd used that name) continues to spread itself around the world. Stay safe and get your vaccination/boosters folks!

Tornado's caused massive damage in the US. Our thoughts and best wishes to any members affected. (And anyone else too of course)

For a collation of some GOOD news stories from 2021 follow the link.

However, it's been a sad week for the creative arts: Alongside George Perez's announcement about his terminal diagnosis, we have the passing of Anne Rice (author of "The Vampire Lestsat" et al and scourge of fanfiction writers) and Chris Achilléos (Cover artist on pretty much all the Doctor Who novels of the 70's and much of the 80's as well as countless other works).

If you want to see a singularly amazing piece of something between performance art and dance, check this out!

There's an audio adapation of Diana Wynne Jones's classic fantasy novel "Howl's Moving Castle" up on the BBC website

Oh, and in the spirit of the season, does anyone have any proposals for a theme week?

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From:

leahandillyana

This is the most controversial post I’ve ever made here. I was thinking if posting some of my thoughts is appropriate, but in the end decided to share them. I understand that not being personally involved in any of the political topics I discuss makes it easy for me to make assumptions. I can also have biases for various reasons. I am open to discussion and changing of the views. Spoilers to Gen:Lock, Muv Luv and the Poppy War apply.
I am fed up with thinking about situation in Poland and its international neighbourhood. I will write about my fandom experience instead. I have elaborated on my favourite anime series in the newest chapter of my AO3 meta series: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18208784/chapters/88804366 I felt really exciting, as in 2021 alone I’ve watched more new anime than in four previous years combined. However, it’s not really a thing to celebrate. The pandemic worsened the working conditions in anime industry, with animators in particular being overworked to an extreme degree while not being paid for the overtime. The financial issues that made Gen:Lock s1 and High Guardian Spice s1 so infamous among Western fans are the standard in anime industry. For the sake of workers’ rights, there simply needs to be less anime. I’d honestly rather spend years without watching anything new (as I did in the past – the only anime I watched between Gundam 00 s2 and Akuma no Riddle was Madoka) rather than know that a series I enjoyed was created with sweat and tears of the creators. The crunch is actually visible in some animations, Wonder Egg Priority, Blue Reflection Ray and Muv Luv in particular.
As for comics, there were very few series I actually enjoyed.
• I loved Stray Dogs for the unique idea behind the story.
• I loved Demon Days for its beautiful art and Japanisation of American concepts when we usually have it the other way around.
• I loved Far Sector for actually being a science fiction story with a multitude of worldbuilding, interesting characters, and plot that starts as a murder mystery only to turn out to be something of a much greater scope. I subsequently enjoy the newest Green Lantern series, as it is kind of a sequel to Far Sector in terms of genre and characters.
• I enjoyed Way of X for exploring the nuances of Krakoan society and asking some deeper questions.
• I enjoyed the new characters Tynion created for his Batman run: the Gardener, Miracle Molly, Ghostmaker, Clownhunter, even Punchline.
• I enjoyed the new Robin series because it tries its damnest to be a shounen manga, from the plot through the characterisation to the art style.
• I’ve read a lot of manga, but the series that meant the most for me were mostly stories I’ve been following for years. Series I discovered this year that resonated with me the most are are Shadows House, Old Man and the Cat, and Go with the clouds north by northwest.
I took part in a small femslash exchange – check it out here: https://elasticella.dreamwidth.org/54089.html. I got two fanfics, one Harley/Ivy and one Steph/Cass. They made my weeked :)
Interestingly, there are several similarities between Muv Luv and Gen:Lock. On the surface level, both are very politically-charged real robot animations featuring a fan-favourite rabbit-themed younger sister-type character (who perishes not in the cartoon you’d expect her to perish!). The two shows attempt to have the conflict being between two equal sides rather than baddies and goodies, but they do it in a completely different way. In Muv Luv, we have not two but three major factions: the UN-allied Japanese government, shogun loyalist insurrectionists, and the American army. Each of the factions are right from their perspective, but each of these perspectives is limited, and without full understanding of the situation finding best solution is impossible. Paradoxically, the teen main character and similarly underage shogun are the only ones who understand this. While the anti-American insurrections voice sentiments positively reeking of Japanese nationalism, in-story their position makes sense, plus I see unintended parallels with the constant rebellions in Polish history, making me kinda pre-wired to sympathize with the rebels.
Meanwhile, Gen:Lock started its first season as a more realistic and grounded version of Voltron. We have the good side and the bad side, and regardless of the nuances the bad side is not above massacring civilian cities and torturing captured enemy pilots into insanity to use as living weapons. In the second season the society of the baddies is presented as a paradise (as opposed as the living hell conditions of the ‘good’ side, something that was at no point alluded to in the first season, which implied that problems of today were solved at some point before the story starts). It badly, very badly clashes with what we’ve seen of the baddies in the first season and what Yaz told about her time in the Union. Similarly, the gooddies adopting tactics of the baddies to win the war is presented as turning point after which the protagonists can no longer fight for their side. Honestly, it’s as if American soldiers refused to fight Nazi soldiers because of a war crime they witnessed, as if the Germans were not “This, but much, much more”. There are many more issues, like the thesis that an iron hand totalitarian government is needed for a society to survive a time of crisis (historically limiting people’s rights and establishing harsh punishments for minor infractions only accelerated any crisis) or that faith is a necessary component of a civilized society (a sentiment curiously voiced by both sides).
I tried rereading some books I enjoyed the most in the past. The awkward fan translation of Modaozushi now distracts me more from the story, though I believe it to be the fault to the amateur translators. At the same time, I wouldn’t have done it better. I cannot even read the simplified characters version of the novels! I really wish the books to be released in Poland. The web manhua is a much more accessible telling of the story to me, and the illustrations allow me to better visualize what is happening in the story.
On the other hand, now that I know the full plot, rereading The Poppy War bothers me. I enjoy Chinese style of fantasy, I enjoy Japanese style of fantasy, I enjoy Korean style of fantasy, I enjoy some British authors of fantasy, I enjoy some American authors who write horror fantasy, but I absolutely cannot stand standard American style of fantasy, which unfortunately the book is. Despite being written by a Chinese author who translates Chinese fantasy into English for living, aspects of Chinese culture present in the novels feel more like stage decorations for a Western story and I cannot find any influences of contemporary Chinese fantasy in it. If I didn’t know the author, I’d say it was written by an American who loved Disney’s Mulan and Kungfu Panda as a kid and had little more experience with Chinese culture. Even a lot of names have no equivalents in the many cultures of China, despite the novel being set in a world explicitly Chinese. And if it was just that and stylistic issues, I’d just think, “I’m not the intended audience and it’s fine,” but there are other plot elements I didn’t think too much about on my first reading but now they bother me a lot.
The book offers no nuance regarding the greater politics of the world portrayed or the motivation of the invading fantasy-Japanese, who are portrayed as one dimensional baddies to a comical degree, which completely breaks the suspension of disbelief. Honestly the books reads like a power fantasy of a Han-supremacist, given how the equivalents of the foreign nations are treated in the books and how actual minorities in real life China are absent from the books (which is probably why contemporary literature influences are absent from the series – Chinese fantasy and science fiction writers in the last decade or so have been mostly mildly to VERY japanophilic and pro-occidentalic while writing stories deeply rooted in Chinese culture – which paradoxically is also only minimal in The Poppy War series).
I couldn’t force myself to read past the second book and I take back my earlier recommendation. I can’t help but see the genocides of the enemy nation at the end of the first book, while regarding fantasy-Japanese in a fantasy-WW2 scenario, to be somewhat of a veiled apologia of ongoing cultural (and in many cases literal) genocide of various minority groups in PRC, Uyghurs and Tibetans in particular. Paradoxically, despite being aimed at a younger audience the first Avatar series presented the world in a much more nuanced manner – Fire Nation has an evil government and many corrupt people in power, but most of its population are just people trying to live their lives and being brainwashed by a century of propaganda. In The Poppy War the only Japanese and Europeans we see are the soldiers, who are all monsters without exception.
You may find an internal inconsistence in my way of thinking, criticising Gen:Lock for humanising the enemy while also criticising The Poppy War for not humanising its enemies. What I take offense to with Gen:Lock is not humanising the enemies but rather humanising the government – by showing that the life in the Union is so much better than in the Polity by default the show makes the first season’s enemies the good side despite them having broken all laws of war to a much, much greater extend than Polity (whose first act of targeting civilians was the kidnapping of Sinclair in an episode aired two weeks ago). I don’t mind “both sides are terrible” scenarios, but when you have established one side committing crimes against humanity, you cannot turn around and say “look how good they are to their own people!”.
As a final note, I glimpsed a “Anne Rice was a huge racist” discourse on Twitter following the author’s death. I peaked around looking for a discussion regarding her almost aggressive dislike of non-Abrahamic faiths, especially the idea of reincarnation (kinda weird for somebody so much into witchy stuff as her) or her bizzarre ideas of what Europe before the Enlightement Era was like (seriously, everything she set before the 18th century is badly researched AU that should be treated the same as we treat Black Butler and other fantasy manga seemingly set in historical Europe). Like, there’s a lot to be said on how Rice treated non-Western cultures (including Mediterranean and Eastern European ones, because gosh, that was bad too), but instead the whole thread focuses on Louis and Lestat being slave owners in the early chapters of the first novel. The fans taking part in it seemed to be unaware that all these other problems existed, which made me grumpy, and nobody seems to have read Feast of All Saints.

From:

onsokumaru

I enjoyed very much the Shadows House anime and can't wait for season 2.
All the main characters are great, even those who were introduced as assholes.
John is the best of the best, though.
Between that and The Vampire Dies In No Time, it has been a good anime year for Johns.

From:

deh_tommy

Man, I never saw the first season but reading about what they did to gen:LOCK makes my heart break for anyone who followed the show.

From:

zachbeacon

After reading way too many completely false clickbait articles* this year I was going to do a Festivus “Airing of Grievances” bit where I just complained about relatively inconsequential things that annoy me.

*Turns out [insert MCU character] has NOT been recast, they just generally don’t ask movie actors to do voices in cartoons and games and they never have.

But there’s been a lot of recent activity in this community where tensions have run high over very real things so I figured that could go bad really easily.

This time of year is stressful for a lot of us even in the best conditions and I think its fair to say that “best conditions” are a distant memory for many. Instead, I just want to wish all of you the best for the rest of the year and into the next.

PS: Does anyone have any holiday media recommendations? I’m well into my usual tv/movie standards and I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not going read all the comics and books I want to but am still open to suggestions.

From:

skjam

As mentioned in my post, "Curse of the Cat People" is much more appropriate to the holiday season than you would initially guess.

From:

donnblake

I have a soft spot for Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun," reflections of an irreligious New Zealander on the appeals of the holiday season.

From:

cainofdreaming

"*Turns out [insert MCU character] has NOT been recast, they just generally don’t ask movie actors to do voices in cartoons and games and they never have."

Yeah, I'm always surprised how much talent they've succeeded in getting involved in Star Trek Online.

Bringing the crack since December 2003

Mod Post: Off Topic Tuesday

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