The New Garage Chronicles

Having a writing project I really don't feel like discussing in public is really revealing to me how much of me doing anything in fandom is me putting out bids for connection, wanting people to come talk to me about whatever it is I'm doing. A lot of me Doing Fandom is just me Being In Public, with an easy open communication channel anyone can engage with because from my perspective I've given a really clear communication channel for how to start a conversation with me. "Hello, fandom: here's what I'm currently thinking about."

This is also why I will occasionally just pop on Tumblr to post whatever current fannish thought is at the top of my head, liveblogging my emotional state while engaging with something. I want people to come talk to me about whatever I'm currently talking about. That's why I'm doing it in public.

Contrasting it to my current fic, which I absolutely do not want to discuss without first screening people I wanna discuss it with for hangups and squicks, and the difference between the two is pretty startling. I'm totally capable of being out of my mind about something in private, and so whenever I am in public about it constitutes an almost totally different mode of communication in my head. It's just that this process is invisible because there's not exactly an "how many times an hour Van texted people on Discord instead of posting on Tumblr" counter up next to my user name on the sites where I engage in fandomposting, lmao

I missed out on the ending of the back-to-Space event in Cookie Run so I'm grinding story keys to see what my favourite alien robot man and his astronaut crush are up to and feeling sad that we live in such a repressed time that I don't feel like I can go on Tumblr to post about how I need them to be kissing about scientific discovery and companionship.

Bubbly-and-unserious December paired with a serious and professional May is a rare treat and in a better world I would be feasting with my peers about it.

Sometimes you speedrun The Derangement.

Grounding knowledge you need to know to understand this analysis:

1) Angela is an android from the game Lobotomy Corporation, and it's sequel Library of Ruina, made by a scientist called Ayin. She was made in the image of a scientist called Carmen after her death, to help with an experiment started by Carmen and Ayin. She was summarily rejected by Ayin for failing to be enough like Carmen, and he never treated her like a person, so Angela has an understandable grudge against Ayin and Carmen for trying to define her life. Despite herself, she still seems to share many of Carmen’s personality traits, such as compassion, even though it has been blunted by several thousand years of emotional neglect. However, Angela also shares quite a few personality traits with Ayin, including his macchiavellianism and even looking just like him once she cuts her hair.

2) Hokma used to be a human called Benjamin, who was Ayin’s student and coworker. In practical terms his whole life revolved around Ayin’s goals and plans – he helped with the creation of Angela, and helped with the continuation of Carmen’s experiment afterwards. Unlike Ayin, Benjamin endeavoured to treat Angela with kindness even though he was apprehensive about her being an AI. The version of Hokma from Library of Ruina is not, strictly speaking, any more Benjamin than Angela is Carmen, being a reconstruction of Hokma as he existed during the experiment rather than a reconstruction of Benjamin from before the experiment.

3) Turns out Benjamin was half-right to be suspicious of Angela – he was eventually killed by her on what may have been Ayin’s orders, and she was planning on betraying Ayin. Although Hokma assumes she did this out of a machine sense of superiority, the real reason is that she’d been so traumatised by her treatment in the course of the experiment that she would take any chance to escape it. As such, Hokma’s grudge against Angela stems from holding a much stronger attachment to his previous identity, as he is still actively grieving Ayin after his death before the beginning of LoR.

4) Angela and Hokma are stuck together for the course of the plot of LoR because she had to make a deal with him and the rest of the experiment’s management team, the Sefirot, to be able to use the energy they had amassed to make her own experiment with the goal of becoming human in the end. They all go from working for Ayin to working for Angela, with the major difference being that Angela’s experiment in theory doesn’t require them to go through trauma enough to cause each of them to have a mental breakdown. (In theory.)

5) "String Theocracy" by Mili is the main theme of Library of Ruina.

I'm taking a pickaxe to my anime backlog, continuing from Planet With to Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, and I'm once again forced to admit that everyone who said this would be my exact shit was super duper right.

To explain the whole premise would be to spoil the plot twist of episode 1, but just the setting of a highly-competitive all-girls performing arts school competing for the lead in the play of their extremely prestigious school festival play was already super fucking appealing to me as someone who loves a good rivalry and is always thirsty for female character centric battle shows and loves magical girls.

What I didn't expect is that the highly symbolic magic system of this show would be so appealing. I tend to be annoyed by allegory, always finding it overly ambiguous and never delivered in the right range of anvil-on-the-head. However, the magic in Revue Starlight being both place-dependent rather than character-dependent, and also theater-based made it interesting until I actually started to comprehend the underlying metaphor -- which I'm always slow at picking up in maybe-mundane-maybe-magic stories. If anything, I think it could be taken a little further. Like, I don't think these girls are old enough yet to have this kind of keen understanding of the limitations of theatre as medium, I would imagine they still have eyes bigger than their hands when it comes to the creative potential of whatever it is that they excel at.

I'm not quite done yet, I just wanted to get these feelings out now because I don't actually care how the final conflict between individual ambition vs the inherently collaborative nature of performing arts is resolved. I don't think whatever Revue Starlight actually has to say about that will change my mind about how good this show is, a rare for a show that wears its metaphor right on its chest like this. I'll be reporting back if it screws it up somehow, but for all the airtime is spent on character interactions, I do think this show understands its own messages well enough.

My only real gripe is that once again a show about theatre is stuck in the frame of the "single perfect performance" rather than really contending with the fact that out of all the performing art forms, theatre is the most alive and most immediate. It doesn't have second takes because it doesn't have to, because you don't run a show just once. I had this same problem with the theatre arc of Oshi no Ko, and I think it's just the problem with doing stories about characters dabbling in theatre rather than a show about a real theatre company. A school festival play is a thing you do just once, and I'm not gonna say that's not "real stage acting" or whatever -- it totally is, I'm not a snob -- but it's a fundamentally different kind of stage acting than the kind you perform over and over during a season, which I've yet to see a good representation of.

Happy New Year!!!

I somehow sat down and read the entire backhalf of Homestuck over, like. The past 2-3 days and I delighted to report that this piece of shit comic is still very, very good.

Interesting to occasionally see posts about The Locked Tomb fandom (overwhelmingly sapphic) having a complete disinterest in even the hottest men in the same way most of fandom (overwhelmingly straight) having disinterest in even the hottest women, and how my experience of fandom (invenerate bisexual) being that I know at least one person thirsting after every possible character as variety is the spice of life.

The Elusive Samurai is definitely the best show this season just on the production design and tone control and DIRECTION!!!! alone. It's so insanely stylish and the production is so, so well-considered in its budgeting that every time we get one of the more batshit sequences of visual flair to match the manga, it's breathtaking every time.

I am actively spreading my arms, expecting the three final episodes of the season to be a Feelings Blender equivalent to the first episode. Episode 9 didn't even have a preview. It's gonna be great. I love getting pulverized by the most beautiful animation I've ever seen.

I've made this exact joke many times by now but I fully think that if you ask Sechs what his type is, he will ponder it and then entirely sincerely describe someone tall and athletic with long dark hair (and big breasts), leading everyone in IF to be like huh, the boss is surprisingly shallow when you get down to it, except for Rascal who listens to the description and immediately goes "for fuck's sake, Leader", b/c that is, in fact, just a distaff Shu Starling.

It's been a full week since I finished volume 18 and over that time I've gotten increasingly more disconsolate about Shu and Sechs and literally the What In The Hell Is Your Relationship.

Like I thought Shu joking about Sechs' letter of challenge being a love letter was just Kaidou having a little bit of fun at my expense but the more I think about it, the more I think about the conversation leading up to the start of the battle, the more I think about the conversation after the battle, the more I think about the actual events of the duel, the more I am marinading in the ambiguity of exactly how the two of them feel about each other. I did not expect to get "without love, it can't be seen"'d by this silly shonen light novel series.

"It didn't hide his face whatsoever" and "At this moment, he abandoned his second goal" and "We're not just about killing each other" keep bouncing around in my head. Shuichi Mukudori, the man that you are.

I finished Vol 18 of Infinite Dendrogram, which means I have three more to go, and I honestly cannot believe what a good series it is.

Like. I knew from the start that I would be having fun, it's the kind of "take your lore and power scaling seriously" shonen that I really like, it's got that almost One Piece-esque type matchup system that makes all fights an interesting chess match rather than just a matter of "who has the higher numbers", and between Ray being a very grounded, sensible and calm-hearted shonen protagonist, with most of the wacky hothead energy being delegated to his older brother Shu, and the writer just having a really good sense for how to pace action, it's been a very brisk and interesting read.

Also Dendro has almost certainly spoiled me for other shonen as far as female characters go. Like, Kaidou has an almost Yoko Taro-esque "I just like girls" way of writing female characters that doesn't really take any risks, but also as a result of really liking girls, all of them have very distinct personalities, all of them have comprehensible motivations and relationships with each other, not just the male characters. Nemesis is a great lead who plays off of Ray in incredibly fun ways, Marie, Xunyu and B3 get to act as mentors for Ray (the main character!) and command a lot of respect from not just him, but the readers also -- girls get to be different ages, not all of them are in the age range to be potential love interests for Ray, and they get to take part in the fighting just as readily as all the male characters and there's nary a warrior/nurturer dichotomy in sight.

Man, like. I probably could not have picked a better series as my first ever light novel series, huh?

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

.HACK//GU VOL2 AND ONWARD SPOILERS. YES RED I KNOW YOU'VE SEEN THIS ALREADY I AM WARNING YOU TWICE

Anonymous asked: rlly interesting read on ovan, would love to hear some abt ur hcs on him n corbenik

So it's been a hot minute since I watched Terminal Disc so my memory of the details of the canon are very vague, but I definitely think it's likely that the Epitaphs attached themselves to players in reverse numerical order, making Ovan the first and unintentionally the template for how becoming an Epitaph-PC would play out. Corbenik is sort of funny as a Phase because the way it's laid out in the Epitaph, Corbenik serves no function until the Wave wipes out its intended target, and it's left behind to observe the void. As long as the system state isn't disturbed and no new AI begins to emerge, Corbenik stays passive theoretically forever -- but once it is disturbed, it rouses the rest of the Wave to come clean up what was left unfinished.

(I recognise this isn't how we see it play out in R1, I'm basing this on the idea that Morganna designed the Wave to be essentially self-propagating against Aura. The stalemate is the point, the rolling waves razing any fertile ground for her to develop on in favour of perpetual despair and the call of the void. I have a lot of feelings about how the Cursed Wave is basically the software version of weaponised depression, and I will probably eventually talk about how this manifests for each of the Epitaph users, but the important bit here is that Corbenik is the distilled idea of "there is a way out and it's by dying in your egg without ever hatching", which I do feel is relevant to Ovan's characterisation.)

With Corbenik as the rearguard of the apocalypse, it could have easily been the most active (least inactive?) of the Phases during the period of calm after Aura takes over Morganna's duties -- with no AI competing with Aura available to suppress, it was essentially on standby, latching onto Ovan the moment he showed up and then doing nothing until it registered the AIDA that also attached itself to Ovan. Which is the thing that really fucks Ovan over, I think. The body timeshare he has with Tri-Edge is stressful enough, but Corbenik is also perpetually making him identify himself as the greatest threat to system integrity. So he's essentially getting a triple dose of the Epitaph "the solution is Fucking Kill Yourself" heightened self-destructive urge -- from the nature of the Cursed Wave, from the Vagrant AI-fication of the Phases and being (in part) his own natural-born enemy.

On top of this, Corbenik is perpetually calling to the other Phases like "over here! I've identified the enemy! Here is an AI we need to stop from reaching self-actualisation!" So candidates are drawn to him, unconsciously recognise him as having seniority, and then immediately identify him as the threat to be eliminated. People keep forming a kind of proxy disordered attachment to him, feeling compelled to follow his orders but also feeling threatened by his presence and become driven by the urge to destroy him.

(Addition from the edit: Honestly nothing in the game really demonstrates both how genuinely smart Ovan is and what frankly insane force of will he has better than the fact that he managed to make and set his plan in motion while still relatively stable and then stick to that plan even as he started to derail under the stress of everything. Being Awakened from the start does mean he didn't have to go through the worst of the psychologically destabilising candidate phase, but it does nothing about the mental pressure to do something, solve this escalating over time as the threat of AIDA and the general power level of the other Ephitaphs went up. So much rides on Ovan's ability to effectively self-destruct, and after trying to rush into Skeith at the end of vol2, the pressure to get it right just kept escalating, forcing Ovan to railroad himself harder and back himself into a narrower corner. It's Vagrant AI-ass behaviour -- "gotta keep going until it's Over. What do you mean 'what happens after it's over'?")

Haseo is particularly vulnerable to this because Skeith and Corbenik are so intertwined in their roles, the first Phase is the one the last calls the strongest, and his personal sense of betrayal only amplifies the destructive resonance. And the influence goes both ways, the more Skeith perceives Corbenik's host as the main threat, the more Corbenik calls on Skeith as the vanguard to eliminate that threat. Haseo's (perceived) perception of him directly influences Ovan's perception of himself -- with everyone else Ovan is very particular about asserting his own reality, but with Haseo, the way Haseo sees him takes priority over how Ovan sees himself.

So far I think Highspeed Etoile captures the excitement of motorsports really well but we all know the real draw here is that it's taking F1 and then basically genderflipping the driver ratio.

The designs of the cars look a little silly to my eye and the first race had some very poorly thought out retires, but I'm willing to give this a chance.

Hello, my son, I have missed you!!!