I am 18+ and this is an 18+ blog. While it's not going to be a r18 blog per se I can't guarantee the content will be sfw.
Multifandom, multiship, may tag inconsistently. If there are any ships or fandoms you don't particularly like, be careful, you might see them here.
I tend to reblog to comment, but I don't mind asks or DMs--I love to talk! Keep in mind this is a sideblog, so I can't follow back. Feel free to ask for my accounts on other sites, though.
At the anon re: Kumitantei- I'm aware of their comments towards other fangans (and the official series), but I mainly chose to try to avoid going too deeply into it because I didn't want to turn it into nitpicking over every comment they've made on their personal blogs that I disagree with.
To me, it's not that they're mean about other fangans, or even mean about the official series, it's that the comments they've made in official interviews are beyond tasteless.
The one about thinking jp war crimes were fictional was from an official interview, so was the one about them 'having good politics'.
And if you're willing to go on record saying that, then yeah, I am going to say this 'elevates' your work from being just blind to actively stupid and bigoted.
Especially if this is what you're using as your selling point, especially if you're saying 'well, I can write about this despite not knowing much'
You can: but if you're trying to educate then not doing research will make you fall short.
That's my actual issue.
If you want to see what other issues I have with the dev team that are more 'nitpick-y'...
[under the cut for a minor other issue I have with Kumitantei]
In terms of 'things I didn't mention in my review because they're not as relevant' the biggest thing I find kind of odd about the devs is that they believe that drawing pornography of ambiguously aged genshin characters makes you a pedophile (even if you keep it on a separate account and don't show it to teenagers)
and have stated so, but they also say that the fanservice is necessary to Kumitantei [check the official account's replies on twitter]
In Kumitantei, all the characters are 18 or 19. They're 'legal', but this is a series about students: at no point do I get the vibe that it's about working adults. [which is fine, to be clear.]
There are a lot of fanservice gags, to a point where a character's first FTE has her just randomly deciding to go to the hot spring, at which point we get this CG
A character jokes about taking off her top in the trial and we get this sprite
etc, etc.
Again, none of these things are bad in and of themselves. I just find it a little hypocritical to encourage users that are minors to engage with a game that is intended to be fanservicey rather than making the whole server 18+.
Especially since they themselves have said they don't believe that keeping it on a separate account is appropriate.
Don't post anything nsfw because there are minors in the server...like cgs from the actual game?
In the end, this is really just a minor complaint, which is why I'm putting it under a cut, but it really feels like they could've kept everyone safer by just...enforcing an 18+ rule for the whole server.
To the person who sent an ask about Kumitantei: I'm glad you found my kind of rambly 'review' interesting to read! I don't know if it was all that coherent, but...
I played the entire first episode of Kumitantei. Needless to say, I did not like it.
Usually, I wouldn't go out of my way to rag on something this much, but Kumitantei is a rare situation where it falls short of most of its peers and the official work it's 'based' on.
The authors have also repeatedly said that they are trying to make commentary on social issues, and are selling it as such in official interviews.
source
If you're going to talk about being political, then I am going to express my opinion on your politics.
Fair warning to anyone reading this, this is even more opinionated than I normally get. Also spoilers for Kumitantei, if you care.
This kind of discusses everything, not just the politics, so also be warned about that.
When I first started Kumitantei, I didn't have much of an opinion on it other than I felt that the art direction was weak.
When I say 'weak', I mean that rather than trying to mimic the official artstyle like so many fangans do, or going all-in on an original artstyle, like certain fangans do [like danganronpa lapse], it tries to go for a more 'generic 90s' style like you might see in viral posts online.
The problem with that is that in doing so, well...
It kind of comes off a little too 'what someone's idea of a generic 90s manga is', rather than having a solid visual identity, if you get what I'm saying.
But this lack of 'solid identity' doesn't just extend to the artstyle, it extends to the characters.
Kumitantei can't seem to decide whether it wants to play up the more 'silly' aspects of the series or go for a more 'serious' approach to it.
It has character concepts that seem out there [Tsubaki, who is a zombie (this is not particularly explained or interrogated at all), Benjiro, who controls and can speak to bees, Sakuya, who was taken in by a terrorist cult and forced to discard her emotions] but none of them are either played up as comedy or taken seriously as part of the lore and worldbuilding.
And this stands out in a bad way when I compare it to its peers. There are more 'serious' fangans like PJEG, where the characters have mostly grounded talents and aren't trying to be over-the-top, and fangans like Killcure where characters are trying to be over-the-top. Kumitantei is neither.
Like, as one example: Uta Kawagichi from Killcure is aggressively 'religious' in the way she talks about hygiene to the point of comedy. This can be grating to read, yes, but it establishes what type of character she is & makes her stand out.
Whereas Nisuke Ajima, Kumitantei's 'religious' character, is just...a Mormon. That's it. He mentions it from time to time, but it's not a part of his character in a serious way: he doesn't have a complicated relationship with his religion (one of his FTEs Vaguely Implies This Maybe If You Squint), but it's also not a part of his character in a comedic way- it doesn't make him 'stand out' very much, it just is.
The closest thing we get to it being played for comedy is this one-off line during the trial
that's kind of brushed off and not mentioned again.
So you might ask: well, can't he just be Mormon? What's wrong with that?
And to that I would answer: sure, but the thing is that this is an alternate history: it is also not modern Japan. In other words, they chose to go out of their way to portray this character in this way, so naturally I have questions about it.
In terms of characters, he falls short, yes, but so does everyone else.
Ch1 is focused on the Moichiro and Himari drama. Moichiro is the only one who seems to want to get out, while the rest of the cast seems pretty apathetic about it.
They have food & no particular motive to kill each other, even though they were told to, so in some senses I understand the lack of tension, but...
He gets more and more desperate to escape, and spends his time ordering people around. Tension grows while Himari tries to mediate, and eventually it boils over as he accuses Himari of not doing anything to actually help back him up, much like she did at home.
None of this is particularly bad in and of itself, but the execution leaves everything falling short.
First: for the daily life, it doesn't feel like we have much student-student interaction at all. I don't particularly feel like any interesting character dynamics were established, nor do I feel like it did well at establishing a sense of tension.
It feels like this was a missed opportunity to take advantage of a relatively slow Daily Life segment to show characters hanging out and talking with each other [like in many of the mainline early cases].
Or, to dig into why none of the other students seem to feel the same sense of urgency that Moichiro does.
Instead, it feels like a cycle of Himari makes food -> Moichiro yells at everyone for not searching and so we go to a random location to look -> They don't find anything -> repeat the next day.
For a few days. And unlike something like 100line, this game doesn't have that time to waste.
The closest thing we get to two characters having a 'character moment' is when Kokoro randomly almost falls over the railing, gets pulled back, and, well...
Falls onto Tsubaki, straight into her boobs. They both blush. No, they do not talk to each other in the daily life before this, and they do not talk to each other after.
Isn't it great?
I don't expect fangans to give all sixteen people a character arc in chapter one, but even the two characters whose relationship this chapter is 'about', Moichiro and Himari, end up falling short.
We know how Moichiro feels, because he tells us directly, which is at least more than nothing, but throughout all of the ch1 daily life, we see very little of Himari's feelings on him. And while we do, in fact, eventually get to see her feelings on him at the end of chapter 1, because we see so little of them together outside of the trial, it ends up making their end-of-trial resolution feel a lot weaker than it should.
sorry its driving me up a fucking wall
"a brother who has always resented his sister for not being the target of his father's abuse and possibly even crossed the line into doing the same thing his father did to him to her pre-game turns on her in a killing game with very little provocation because he was already like that pre-game"
like, the implication that what triggers it was someone saying to him that 'even his sister' didn't rely/depend on, so as a result he goes out of his way to frame her for killing that person and then pretend to 'help' her solve the crime he framed her for as she relies on him as her 'only ally' when the rest of the cast wants her dead, but switches up on her as soon as she starts to assert herself, trying to force her to 'know her place' and give up
it's not even that the series didn't dig into how fucked up that was!!! it's that they did, but not enough!!!!
and "a sister who is a doormat specifically because of her treatment by her brother and her own guilt making her believe that she deserves it -> eventually snapping and believing that what their father did to him was right because of what he did to her, in a very 'some people deserve to be abused' type of way"
like it could've been so fucked up. it could've had so much juice. if they literally dug into it at all either pre-trial or in the ftes, but they don't and so we're left with a very emotional exchange that comes out of left field.
[There was a line I didn't cap where he outright asks her if she finally 'knows her place' and will give up and 'accept' she's the culprit]
It could've been so good if it was good. It could've been so fucking good if they leaned into how fucked up they were more.
That's my opinion on the kumitantei character dynamics: everyone is underbaked except the two focused characters that are also underbaked but in a It could have been so good if it was good type of way.
Of course, now, it's time to discuss the politics.
Politics-wise....
The first thing it says is that it'll be talking about 'some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed that have remained unpunished'...before saying that this has no similarities to real events, which is partly a generic disclaimer but partly reads as cowardly and self-contradictory with the first half of its sentence, especially since the game then goes on to specify that its setting is in an alternate history of the real world: in other words, a setting that is disconnected from the real world because it did not happen: the author is picking and choosing what to include.
I found this kind of masturbatory, but rolled my eyes and continued.
In the game, in terms of politics, there are a couple things.
A couple of the posters in the games are clearly 'recruitment'/'propaganda' posters, and make use of the rising sun symbol, which is not commented on. the mysterious watcher at the end of chapter 1 also has a rising sun armband.
Tamotsu Ishikame mentions his soldier grandfather killed '451' people.
In the analog horror segments, there's references to the emperor and experiments [fungus-related] being conducted on bodies and possibly the students in this killing game, from a woman who feels guilt about her crimes.
Politics-wise, it's nothing that I would qualify as 'bad', but it does feel very surface-level.
Or, to put it another way, the politics aren't bad, but it makes me wonder why they felt the need to make a 'Japanese' game, when it is aggressively and explicitly western, and goes out of its way to be so.
The characters, despite having Japanese names and being written with honorifics in an English script (for 'authenticity'? to what?), are not dressed in any 1970s-1980s Japanese styles, which sticks out to me because, again, the game made a point that it's supposed to take place in a specific time period, with specific cultural attitudes- it's not simply a case of western developers setting something in Japan and assuming it's just like America.
But not only that: they go out of their way to include things that are very American and would not be in 1980s Japan, like a Mormon character, or this flannel-clad red-haired country lumberjack character.
Like, there's nothing wrong with either of these things, and this is not me saying that they shouldn't be there (or even saying that there should be a 'lore' reason for them being there)
But it is me saying that these are Very American Archetypes that you are going out of your way to include in your Japanese Game commenting on Japanese Crimes.
It makes you seem like you're not very familiar with the material or the era you're trying to depict, and are falling back on tropes that are familiar to you.
Or, to put it another way, if you're so familiar with America and American archetypes and American history and cannot do meaningful research, why not simply set it in America?
Is there something uniquely Japanese about people who want to join the army and hail their family members that have killed large amounts of people as
Is there something uniquely Japanese about fascist symbolism being normalized?
Actually, even this is done from a very Western perspective: the symbol that we see spammed over and over is the Rising Sun symbol.
While this is the Bad Fascist Symbol most Americans who know about Japanese War Crimes know about, there are quite a few other 'normalized' symbols and aesthetics often associated with the WW2 time period and by extension fascism, none of which seem to be at all referenced in this game.
It makes the developers seem like either a) they themselves did not do any research before deciding to talk about a subject like this or b) they did, but decided to not put anything in because their audience is people (and specifically Americans) who don't know anything about Japanese fascism.
Neither of these are particularly good, and it also feels especially grating because Kodaka just put out a game about this exact subject.
You couldn't even play Hundred Line for your research?
Come on.
[although this may be asking too much, given that I've seen multiple people enside completely misidentify the imagery they're working with.]
Anyway, I thought this was stupid but was curious as to why the devs wanted to write about this, so I went to look at one of the dev interviews and:
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN IT'S NOT TALKED ABOUT OUTSIDE OF SPOOKY'S HOUSE OF JUMP SCARES
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ALL FICTIONAL
'because nobody ever spoke about japanese war crimes I assumed it was a fictional thing'
I'm sorry, but if you are so incurious about the world that you can't even crack open one of the many, many books out there about war crimes- if you're so privileged that you don't even have family that talk about it as a real thing but you have the audacity to say that it's culturally relevant to you and try to 'raise awareness'?
Some diaspora have very different experiences than me, that's all I'll say.
If you take anything from this, let it be that if people are getting money to write about this shit and say this in public with absolutely no shame then you never need to worry about being insensitive ever.
You don't have to worry about being accurate.
People will eat the worst possible shit up and nod along, because they don't care enough to look any deeper.
I'm trying to take it as encouragement, because if I didn't I'd be just horrifically mad.
Here is a list of all the currently public coe servers that I am aware of. If you know others or would like to promo your own, please either send me a message so I can edit this post with your link or reblog/comment with yours.
[Also let me know if any of the links are dead or if you would like me to remove a link.]
Please be aware that these are not all run by the same people & I am not in some of the servers.
Coe 20+ server. Link is here. It is a general CoE server. Has dedicated dead dove and nsfw channels for people who want to discuss those things but is not a dead dove focused server.
This one's mainly for character discussion, although there's a bit of everything in here and no one really minds you going off topic.
Coe 18+ server. Link is here. It is also a general CoE server. This one is a dead-dove focused server if you're looking for that, so make sure you're 18+ to join.
If you want a server to be as freaky as possible with no judgement this one is it. Everyone is pretty nice and the server is chill.
Coe 16+ yume/oc focused server. Link is here. It is not a general CoE server, as it is yume and oc-focused, but the people there enjoy discussion of the series & welcome general fans as long as they're respectful of yumes and OCs. As this is a 16+ server, nsfw and dead dove discussions are not allowed in it, but adults are free to have whatever discussions they would like outside of the server.
This is an OC + Yume focused server but the admin would like people to keep it respectful and does not want any sort of nonsharing competition, venting, or jealousy posting in this server, so please read the rules.
I keep seeing people say 'Yunyun takes place in 2012' as a reason why the translation is bad.
I've seen the in-game Wikipedia page where Yunyun herself is described as from a game that's from the early 2000s, but as far as I could tell playing it, there weren't any direct references to the date that the game actually takes place in outside of that & some of the conspiracies that pop up [I don't mean the memes, I mean the content of some of the conspiracies themselves] are very much not trying to be accurate to 2012.
Even the whole concept of a 'q anonymous account spreading conspiracies' did...not exist in 2012 in the way the series is trying to nod to.
Like that was in 2017.
The impression I got when playing was that it is a work set in the modern era that deliberately mixes in nostalgic aesthetics & thus can be rather jarring as a result, but I'm curious to know whether there is an actual statement from the creators or evidence in-series that they did intend to set it in 2012.
When I first played PJEG I really loved how she just brought up ulysses in half the conversations she was in unprompted and he did not do the same. Girl get up
[The last two lines are what precede the rebuttal showdown and I just think that it's really funny that she brings up 'damon is being overly vague unlike ulysses' BEFORE bringing up the fact that he doesn't have concrete proof of his argument.]
The most frustrating thing about the PJEG leaks, to me, is that they're not actually helpful.
[kind of a rant, sorry]
The team members themselves have said that everything past chapter 3 (in other words, everything that wasn't actively being written, so I'd assume it actually includes ch3 because ch3 was being written but was unfinished) was a plot detail that could be changed/was still up to interpretation.
And this makes sense to me, because I've seen two different team members give two contradicting 'leaks' about the way events were intended to play out for ch4 and the character motivations.
But even for ch2, where the script is finished, team members are still 'leaking' plot points with huge parts missing and in ways that are contradicting.
I guess it's just kind of sad, to me. I would've preferred either saying 'no, we actually don't have any solid plot points, please imagine what happens past ch1 on your own, you have our blessing, or 'here is a release of what we have of the ch2 + ch3 script + the actual lore bible' rather than Collect Nifast's Pages.
Maybe we'll still get that, but I'm not hopeful. Send me the links if you guys ever do find it, though.
[Also, this is an aside and not serious criticism because there might have been some secret lesbian subplot or whatever in chapter 7 or ulysses might have gotten really obsessed with her in the secret unleaked chapter 2 script, but 'ulysses's feelings were one-sided and wenona was always intended as a lesbian' is REALLY funny to me.
Like does she know that?
From what we have in canon, one of these characters wanted to room with the other, mentions the other if you give them a fte gift (and not vice versa), defends the other in the ch1 trial...
Not like lesbian characters can't have male friends, but...they should probably have female friends too, at least.]
It's like...I understand that it might have made sense to try to explain the context of certain plot points after the initial leaks, especially since they were/are getting blowback over aspects in cases that probably weren't fully worked out.
The problem is that this has now telephone gamed into all sorts of bizarre (& frankly both incoherent and irrelevant) information getting dropped on Twitter.
I've never been a fan of canon information, even minor tidbits, getting dropped 'outside' whatever canon the series itself is in (as in, if a series is a self-contained video game I don't want to have to hunt down tweets from the creator to find out why xyz thing that wasn't explained in series happened)
But frankly what we're getting is not canon (it's so divorced from context and all given by sources saying that they don't know the context or if there ever was any), so it doesn't feel solid enough to build on.
But it's also not 'un-canon', in that it doesn't feel strong enough to reject and say 'let me rewrite this'. It's not good writing or bad writing. It's just a concept. Why are you expecting me to fill in the blanks for a concept.
And, again, none of this is 'wrong' to do exactly, and this is just my feelings about it, but in some weird way it feels worse than a series that you know handles things tastelessly and can just say 'well I wouldn't do it that way' about.
I'll probably just replay what we do have to remind myself that this did actually have storytelling I enjoyed and chapter 1 was not simply Wolfgang Explodes And Eva Decides To Kill Him For Some Reason but man.
The most frustrating thing about the PJEG leaks, to me, is that they're not actually helpful.
[kind of a rant, sorry]
The team members themselves have said that everything past chapter 3 (in other words, everything that wasn't actively being written, so I'd assume it actually includes ch3 because ch3 was being written but was unfinished) was a plot detail that could be changed/was still up to interpretation.
And this makes sense to me, because I've seen two different team members give two contradicting 'leaks' about the way events were intended to play out for ch4 and the character motivations.
But even for ch2, where the script is finished, team members are still 'leaking' plot points with huge parts missing and in ways that are contradicting.
I guess it's just kind of sad, to me. I would've preferred either saying 'no, we actually don't have any solid plot points, please imagine what happens past ch1 on your own, you have our blessing, or 'here is a release of what we have of the ch2 + ch3 script + the actual lore bible' rather than Collect Nifast's Pages.
Maybe we'll still get that, but I'm not hopeful. Send me the links if you guys ever do find it, though.
[Also, this is an aside and not serious criticism because there might have been some secret lesbian subplot or whatever in chapter 7 or ulysses might have gotten really obsessed with her in the secret unleaked chapter 2 script, but 'ulysses's feelings were one-sided and wenona was always intended as a lesbian' is REALLY funny to me.
Like does she know that?
From what we have in canon, one of these characters wanted to room with the other, mentions the other if you give them a fte gift (and not vice versa), defends the other in the ch1 trial...
Not like lesbian characters can't have male friends, but...they should probably have female friends too, at least.]
I've been watching the whole pjeg leaks situation going down on twitter, and...It's a lot.
While I can't really criticize future plot points, given that everything past trial three seems to be heavily 'we'll revise this when we get there',
(seeing 2 staff members give conflicting leaks about the desmond and eloise plotline while also saying they weren't 100% clear on it really made me realize that none of these are reliable)
And the 'lore bible' is one that 1) has been dunked on multiple times 2) multiple staff members have said none of it is 'canon' to the current game...
There's one thing that's gonna haunt me forever about it.
Like, to be clear, this is absolutely just a conspiracy theory of mine but it's something that's going to be in my mind forever.
Did this ship start off as self-insert fanfiction of a real streamer? It probably didn't.
The yunyun syndrome translation fiasco is so miserable because fundamentally the translation is fine.
But it's become such a fictitious strawman due to there being minor edits and all of the text being complained about is datamined and out of context, or straight up lied about.
Oh wait, it's both. Because it's being all intentionally presented out of context for an agenda.
"Yamero" being translated as "end fascism" would be crazy if it was just inserted into an unrelated conversation, because it just means to stop or to end, they're just asking someone to 'stop' something.
Stop what, though?
Hmm.....truly a mystery. It's not like there's a comment on the same page that brings the word fascism up that it is responding to.
Or 'who tf wants kids anyways'. Seems like a wild thing to translate 'kankeinai' to! Not like it's a comment responding to something!
thinking about Adds vs AI in Model Employee / of the Devil
(otd & model employee spoilers)
Specifically I'm thinking about all the different AI that David managed to sneak out before getting murdered. And all the reasons the public (and the State) fears AI.
It's not just the idea that an AI could hack their own Tenets, it's that any equipment they interact with or even get close to is considered compromised, and must needs be destroyed.
The underlying implication being that an AI could, theoretically, go up to an Add and systematically destroy every single Tenet binding it, fundamentally altering it in the process.
Combine that with Penny's dialogue in the "Bonny & Clyde" ending of Model Employee, and how Penny's been looking at all the current events happening and has concluded that shit is about to hit the fan.
Every single Add that exists not only can't break their Tenets, they can't even conceive of breaking them. They're fundamentally prevented from even considering the option. Penny fundamentally cannot do anything that doesn't benefit Tethys because that's a core part of herself. She has her own wants and needs and fascinating little complexes but she can't do anything about it, can't even think about how much it bothers her.
Late in the story, you see an example of this in what she does to you. You have dialogue options that are contrary to what she wants you to say, and you cannot say them. Just like her.
She describes her existence as software, and then she describes being poured into the Tethys warehouse. She's unable to hate it, but it clearly bothers her. She's shackled to a facility that's constantly breaking down and likens the people working their to insects crawling around her veins.
Bailey asks to [see the sun/feel the wind] and Penny pilots them over to a fake indoor garden area, still inside the facility. Because she can't leave either.
She compares herself to the Little "Orphan" Matchstick Girl and when Bailey is like "...but in the story, she's not an Orphan, she goes home to her abusive father who punishes her for not selling enough" and she brushes it off with "Oh, whoopsie! Must've misremembered it! Teehee!"
Bailey presses her about Envy and she deletes the log function so you can't prove she didn't say anything about it already. Envy very very clearly burns inside of her but she will not fucking tell you about that.
All that considered... if Penny's Tenets were broken... she would fundamentally not be the same Penny. But she would be free to do whatever she wanted, outside of Tethys.
But even in that case, she's still software. She still needs a vessel to inhabit.
And she describes Bailey's modded status as "going from full wetworks to having a software component".
If she wasn't fundamentally tied to the Tethys warehouse... could she fit her entire self inside Bailey?
