crimes and misdemeanors

my name is skylar, I read books Mostly reblog Worm, The Locked Tomb, Transformers. plus Gundam, and just what ever I find funny. Frostburner on AO3 and Spacebattles

[jjs-sweet-brain-eating-parasite]

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

It is somewhat remarkable how much can change in a few years: Motoko is not just an EXPLICIT lesbian in the new Ghost in the Shell adaptation, but also a BOTTOM.

They really took EXTRA EFFORT to make this scene SIGNIFICANTLY MORE lesbian as compared to the 2 pages (or rather, 3-4 panels) it had in the original manga:

Imagine having THAT depicted in an anime 20 years ago that would have been - rightfully - presumed to be the iconic flagship show of the entire season, and that purely on the whim of the studio direction without being able to hide behind the source material.

Science Saru really said "I know artists who use subtext and they are all cowards" and proceeded to devote almost two whole minutes of the episode to making sure everyone knows just how much of a lesbian Motoko is. Quite a difference to the intentionally strong asexual depiction in the 90s movie.

[vvtuhhska]

My new fucking obsession

[1-900-usa-nails]

my takeaway three episodes into the new Ghost in the Shell

[frostburner]

What's the fight for Gay Marriage look like in Worm? Because sure you got Legend out there being the charismatic face of the PRT and being gay, but also Major and supported Nazi gangs in major cities. Sure we got bigger things going on, but this is important! I need to know if Taylor can get married to one of her 8 wives!

[entity9silvergen]

[stormtide-leviathan]

I love how they just let an artist say "kaalia should fuck skitheryx" and then make cards for that

[thecrayongal]

these are from the Tragic Romance Secret Lair Set and this is the actual description for the set

[boringkate]

When I was a kid watching tv was idiot coded and nerds read books, but now scrolling shortform videos is considered braindead behavior and watching tv means you're some kinda intellectual. You might think this shifting assessment of media's consumers might make readers into absolute super geniuses, but no. Only perverts read now.

[txttletale]

if you've followed me for a while, you've probably seen me mention Underside, my dark cape TTRPG inspired by deconstructive superhero stories like Worm, Astro City, Watchmen, and the first season of Gen V.

it's a project i've spent a lot of time on, trying to build a system that tells the kind of superhero stories i like; the shit that treats them as a subculture with a body count, that digs into the dissociative tension of the secret identity, that asks what it means to feel so completely ejected from regular society that you can only go out in a mask and costume.

for a while now, a playtest edition of Underside has been available on my patreon; now, as it's slowly become more and more complete over the course of a year, i'm putting the most recent one up on itch.io

i want to be clear: while this playtest edition is enough to play a full campaign and contains all the mechanics that are going to be in the finished book, it's still a playtest. there's no fancy layout and an entire section (guidance for the Administrator, the game's GM-equivalent role) hasn't been written yet. but for a while, every time i talk about Underside i get the question: "where can i get my hands on it?". so here's an answer to that question; right now, while it's still in beta--if you want to support the project and help me get it over the finish line, or you just can't wait until it's out For Real, you can get it here.

UNDERSIDE Playtest Edition by the HORIZON MACHINE

costumed violence in the dark

[katakaluptastrophy]

Modern AU Abigail Pent who is everyone's favourite cookie-baking teacher/librarian/foster mom/therapist or whatnot is a little perplexing to me.

No, that woman is using her generational wealth to fund an academic career where she writes dense tomes on late antique heresies. She and Magnus are only validly married in the eyes of the church because they have a very, very good canon lawyer. They acquired the teens through a dubious international adoption and have maybe not kept them quite as in touch with their culture as they ought. Is she just really into her field of research, or is she dabbling in the occult in a way that requires knowledge of at least two dead languages and at least one archaeological artefact of questionable provenance?

Still a fantastic parental figure to the rest of the cast, willing to go to bat for them in slightly terrifying ways, etc etc but I'm begging you to let her be the "unwholesome" (ch 35) and "problematic" (CIF) person she is in the text.

[prokopetz]

Game that initially appears to be a porn VN starring a Perfectly Generic Male Protagonist, except when you get to the "here's how the sex mechanics work" portion of the intro the girl has a Magnitude 10 klutz moment and accidentally kills him, upon which the viewpoint switches to her and the rest of the game is a reverse investigative procedural about trying to cover up the fake lead's death.

[prokopetz]

(To be clear, while the game's narrative tone is moderately satirical, the non-fakeout lead herself isn't played for laughs, and she's actually pretty traumatised about accidentally killing a random hookup. There's a bad ending if you max out her mental stress meter where she ends up confessing to a murder she technically didn't commit.)

[bananonbinary]

weird take about fiction: sometimes, actions that would be abusive in real life, hit different in a story. and sometimes i see people react very very strongly to those actions, and i totally get it, because like, that can be extremely triggering and ymmv on whether its handled well or not, but it always makes me a bit. hm.

like, i think the most obvious one is slapping/hitting. in real life, there is basically no situation where that is acceptable, unless you're actively defending yourself/someone else. but fiction is inherently larger than life, its about how it feels, subjectively, over what actually happens, literally. sometimes a character who has never before been violent will hit someone, and it's intended as like, an indicator of how fucked up everything is. that shit is going down. or, a character will trash a room, throwing things and destroying everything in their path. and then its never mentioned again, everything just continues as if they HADNT destroyed their own and other people's property in a frankly terrifying display, because it was just a cathartic moment to represent the storm of emotions the person was feeling. and when i see people like 'this character is an abuser, the story needs to address this,' i think maybe its actually okay for fictional characters to do shitty things and not have it framed as shitty, by the story itself or even on any sort of meta level, with the intended audience reaction. sometimes the point is just to resonate with your emotions, not to dissect the literal sequence of events.

[bananonbinary]

like obviously ive been on the 'you can portray whatever you want in fiction, its all a pretend game' train forever. but i think the important thing to me here is that, you can also defend bad things in fiction. not just 'they did everything wrong and i love that,' but even 'they were 100% justified when they did [thing that would be extremely bad irl].' cause its like, ok, they did do that, but like it was the only way to tell the story well. dont worry about it.

[txttletale]

and ofc they literally already changed the rules of commander multiple times including when the commander rules committee or whatever was nominally independent and community driven or whatever the fuck, cf. partner (!!!!), ikoria free spells--but this one is just so funny because it's exactly what everyone was tinfoil hatting about wotc insidiously sneaking into the game through the hybrid change and i was literally saying "they can actually print whatever they want, they don't need to elaborately trick you into it" and i have been immediately proven right!!

[half-man-half-lime]

HUGE red flag by Bonesaw tbh

Nobody talks about this but her art is actually SUPER problematic.

First off, ONE of her guerilla sculptures, the anatomical piece she put up in the walk-in freezer of a rec center in Brockton Bay was APPARENTLY made with unethically sourced materials.

Not only that, but her red mist piece was put up all across Brockton Bay without consulting the city for environmental concerns, and was actually toxic, which hurt the most marginalized people in the city.

Then there's her "underwater" piece on sadness she set up under the harbor, which has the same problems as both of the pieces I mentioned, but also apparently had a widespread effect on the mental health of a LOT of people in the area.

Honestly I can't believe she hasn't been cancelled already. It really says things about people's priorities that they're okay with this, and I'm lowkey judging you all for it

[shortandsadandstupid]

she’s literally used slave labor to make some of her pieces in the past, that’s how unethically it was sourced :/

[sigmaleph]

i mean they did give her a kill order. that was a pretty significant thing that happened.

like i understand where you're coming from here but they very much did cancel bonesaw

[kvothbloodless]

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

she white-washed Dolltown but nobody wants to talk about how we prioritize white comfort over PoC representation in art

[cpericardium]

Just found out she ships Mouse Protector and Murder Rat. Unfollowing now

[hateusandseeifwemind]

[pinene]

Can anyone explain wtf is going on here especially a Korean speaker

[tadeadshihamurder]

someone on reddit explained 😭

[no-one-offical]

‎

[desmolbean404]

That is one of the most astronomical fuck up translations I have ever seen.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

I love Tolkien’s works and I’m probably at least 13% Middle Earth by volume. It’s a rich text and very compelling and we all grew up on it and on works directly inspired by it. But I think the degree to which we impose our own values and politics upon the stories and Tolkien himself is incredibly frustrating and more a product of wishful thinking than anything actually reflected in the text.

I don’t even mean this in a “let people enjoy things” way—more than any other author I see Tolkien idolized not just as a talented world builder but as a profound social commentator. To a degree… sure. For some things, sometimes. But for many other things he was regressive and reactionary even for his time and there is an extreme cultural reluctance to engage with that even among people in the Critiquing Reactionary Themes in Media subculture.

For instance: it’s a really common refrain that LotR is “antiwar”. But what is The Lord of the Rings but an exercise in imaging morally compulsory war? It does depict war as something deeply traumatic for the people involved, but it’s also a war in which the enemy is literally cosmic evil and the primary foot soldiers can and should be destroyed with impunity. How can you have a race of noble warriors like the Rohirrim without the existence of noble war? Even in The Hobbit, war is only a stupid, wasteful folly until the inherently evil faction show up. Middle Earth is a setting in which both cosmic evil and the divine right of kings are real and in which war is a painful necessity that’s still ultimately glorious.

[fiore-firelily]

such insolence... guards? seize her! ...no. stop. not like that. you are doing it gay. why are you seizing her gay style

[mira-mira-0n-the-wall]

[graceless-writing]

“How’s your WIP going?”

"Have you made any progress?”

“How close are you to being done?”