Definitely Not Frankincense

Fawning over / bitching about stupid things. Also some crappy fanfiction I don't know if I want to own up to.

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one of my least favorite genres of shoujo is where the heroine and narrative keeps telling us she's masc as hell and constantly mistaken for a boy while she's an alto speaking in head voice at best, a yamato nadeshiko personality by default, E cups, the artist distinctly draws girl and boy faces differently and hers has exactly 0 boy traits, and the most masc her casual clothes get are t shirt and leggings with a pushup bra and ohhhhhhh how she wishes to be a Normal Girl but Normal Cute Girl Things Don't Suit Her and she ends the series wearing a skirt 6 days a week instead of 5 as a show of Progress and Self Acceptance

this is a plot and character that has happened more than once and it's never interesting and if i hear "Normal Girl" said wistfully one more goddamn time i'm gonna throw my chair

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"You were a terrible disaster of a person whose inaction I could never excuse, but you were still the only one who never made me feel less than. You let me quietly sit next to you when the world uninvited me from humanity."

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i'm not crying

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I know the whole waifu/husbando stuff has been around well before AI. Since fiction was first made, we've had people who decide they'd rather fantasize about being lovers with a fictional character than seek someone real. For more than one reason.

I think it'd be an interesting study to see how differently it affects different groups. Separate it into man/woman/other humans, and different types of fiction like books, tv shows, celebrities, anime, games, and AI.

With the big qualifier being that they self-report being totally uninterested in real relationships. (So even in the case of celebrities, they wouldn't actually want to be in a real relationship with that celebrity. Just the fantasy of their public persona, which they are aware is a public persona.)

I want to know what kinds of impacts it has on their platonic bonds with real people, their sense of loneliness, how much they believe their fictional lover could have genuine feelings for them, their grasp on reality, etc. and the differences in how much or how little impact there is across identities.

What brought this up? I've been seeing a lot of stuff about AI girlfriends and the whole 'male loneliness' thing, but just like there's never been coverage about 'female loneliness', I haven't seen much about the impact of AI boyfriends (and of course everyone outside the binary basically don't exist when this stuff is the topic). So, having the differences actually be studied would be neat.

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I got curious about Baroque merch and figured a post with some pictures all in one spot might be nice since it's such a stupid title to try and find anything for. Why couldn't you have thought ahead some 20 years to title your game something more search engine friendly, Sting?

Some of it is just from suruga-ya which is easier to search, but a lot of them are from old mercari listings. In no particular order.

A transparent bag.

Marketable Plushes of the protagonist and Archangel (nuigurumi)

An.. acrylic clothes hanger. Gotta be honest, merch for older stuff was so much more interesting than what we get today. Who the heck was asking for a Baroque hanger? I don't know, but I kinda want it.

A floor mat. This is super cool. This is ultra cool. Does your favorite franchise have an ultra cool floor mat for sale? No it doesn't. But it deserves one. It deserves a cool one like this, but I can guarantee you that if floor mats became standard pieces of merch, they would be the lamest garbage you could think of. Like, it'd just be a character's face, and it wouldn't even use new art. It'd be the same key art used everywhere. Man. Baroque got the coolest merch.

A cushion. With the most obvious lil guy to put on a cushion.

A B2 sized poster.

An A4 sized poster.

koi kare cards of the protagonist and Archangel. They're going for over $50 each. This is objectively far less cool than the floor mat or hanger.

A pouch. I love it.

Fake tamagochi keychains. They're made of rubber, from what I can gather from listings. I can only imagine how delicate they are by now.

Pins and another pouch that makes everything look cute. Why can't we have more pins like this? Cool pins. Not stupid giant can badges with boring key art. Baroque got all the cool stuff.

Some kind of acrylic keychain. Kinda hard to see the detail in this awful picture.

More acrylic keychains. The backs are blank and I don't get why. Just print the same picture on both sides... I could be wrong, but from the other pictures on the listing, it looks like they may be layered and slightly holographic. Like, you turn them and parts of the dudes blend in or pop more from the background.

Tarot cards. I think one of the guidebooks or something had the illustrations for each card in it. It was scanned and uploaded to the internet archive. Too bad the raw cards themselves weren't scanned.

Rubber key chains of the tarot cards.

And the most boring stuff for last somehow. Acrylic standees. The worst thing to ever happen to merch.

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I've done localization-adjacent stuff before and hoo boy let me tell you if I got the job of localizing UT/DR, even with a mountain of clarifying notes for every single line and Mr. Fox himself sat beside me to ask any questions round the clock, I would be sobbing the entire time and feeling quite like ending it all. People don't understand what a task those games in particular are. Y'all gotta grow some more respect for language in general.

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Vent pieces shoddily disguised as character exploration are my least favorite

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if i ate a nickel for every Strong Female Character who turned ultra submissive once she got a boyfriend, i would be very ill

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some idiot: actually you see ff7 is all about how cloud absolutely hates aerith and wants to get away from her at all costs

square: [posting clerith for valentines day] 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

some idiot: really this fanbase just don't have any reading comprehension

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Tifa is super cool

Tifa fans are the least cool

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Kinda hilarious to see an account with lots of reblogs of anti-LGBTQ and antichoice posts apparently being a baraou fan (they liked my Richard post)

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Women Writing Men moments in coming of age stories where they try to describe the horrors of puberty and they're off by double digits on what age certain things happen for the first time.

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Part of one of the songs from the Requiem of the Rose King musical. I had it laying around after showing this part to a friend and figured I'd upload it here before deleting it from storage.

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I'm so tired of doomed yaoi, why do I keep ending up here I even KNEW this guy died BEFORE I SAW HIM

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One of the subsets of the Depression Diet is being hungry, wanting to eat, but knowing that if you eat, you have to brush and floss your teeth and you don't have the will to do that and your teeth are more valuable than your life so you just don't eat

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bitches be out here demanding flac while i'm desperately clinging to the 40kbps upload from 2001 that i found hidden away untagged in the dusty corners of niconico

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Whether you can understand Japanese on any level or not, if you are a fan of Richard and Henry, I urge you to seek out the musical adaptation that came out this year.

They get so many duets. I don't know if it's objectively a good thing or a bad thing that they also had Richard smile a lot to remove the outward ambiguity of how he feels about all their interactions, but after steeping in misery for so long, I like it. They get to be so cute together.

Also dang Henry's actor did not falter even slightly when picking Richard's up while singing. No pause, no stutter, no strain, and no wires from what I could see either. What a badass.