Let's talk about moe. Someone has to talk about moe.
I just reread my own review and I'm real surprised at what I didn't say!
Madoka is freaking spectacular, no two bones about it. I didn't remember how much it had going on until I read my own glazing back there. Mother. Fucken. WITCHES!
Just wish it didn't star little cardboard finger puppets.
I had a very funny history with moe. I discovered this series as a teen... my first sparkle-bursting Magical Girls shipped in endlessly snackable horror. I was so proud of it being "girly." That was so important to me. My stupid little gender lifeboat.
I needed it to be my ticket to girlhood. I needed it to be feminist. You guys it's like... women get ground down and then dismissed as 'witches'... in society! I spent a LONG time avoiding the fact that anime about little girls is not for little girls. That it was for, uh... people like me.
But man, EVEN THEN, I already wanted Madoka to be better.
I already felt that the characters were cute lamps, shoved around a chessboard to demonstrate a philosophical football play. I loved breathing life into them in my fics. Making them talk like teenagers. Making them think. Implying that they all diegetically use hair dye.
I'm not that high-horsed type of feminist anymore. I respect moe; I respect making fetish caricature out of the idea of girls. I do it too.
Only guess what? I really love interesting character animation. And I also think female humans can be interesting characters. So as a matter of personal taste I despise moe with all my bitchy little heart.
I said some of this to my friend yesterday; she wasn't seeing how the Madokas are kept scrunched in tiny styrofoam packing boxes to keep them in perfect porcelain. I said, 'you anime-poisoned slut.' And I spent the morning doing some very satisfying shot redraws.
More expressive poses. More specific faces. The ugly sin of having noses. Madoka could hiccup and wheeze when she laughs. She could mumble and tell jokes. Sometimes she could show annoyance or opinions. Mami's face could scrunch and crease with devastation. Her hair could stick to her sweat. She could run out of magic gel and have to bunch it in tangled pigtails. If she's gonna have boobs, she could be kinda fat. Middle school girls sometimes have bodies. True story!
Moe is a choice. It's not evil. It serves an audience. I'm just imagining a version that serves ME.
ORIGINAL
H: Kaname Madoka, do you value your own life? Do you consider your family and friends precious?
M: Eh? I... I do. I love my family and friends. They mean the world to me.
H: Is that true?
M: Of course! Why wouldn't it be?
H: I see. If that's true, then you must never think about becoming someone else. If you do, you'll lose them all.
M: Eh?
H: You just need to remain Kaname Madoka, as you always have been.
MINE
H: You have a really nice thing going, don't you, Madoka?
M: (sunny) Oh, feel free to call me Ma-- oh. (taken aback)
H: Friends and family who love you... A home, a school... You have your own happy, fragile little world.
M: Thanks... for noticing...?
H: So why do you go around taking it for granted?
M: Excuse me?
H: The grass isn't greener, Madoka, so don't be so quick to throw it all away.
M: What? No, no, I would never throw... throw away my friends? Akemi-san, I don't understand.
H: That's all I can say right now, Madoka. I hope to God someday you will.
M: Akemi-san, are... are you mad? Did I do something wrong already? I'm sorry.
(Homura reflexively grits her teeth and Madoka flinches)
H: You can go back to your friends now. I'll find my way from here.
Ooooooh you know what? Let's really get silly with it. I'm gonna show you guys (my pretend imaginary readers who are a projection of my deeply lonely psyche)
Madoka Musica
I think I just might remember every little scrap I ever came up with.
So Maddy's opening number is called "I Can't Complain" and it's ironically exaggerated cutesy-cute. Think of the Girl Scout from Beetlejuice (tho this preceded her!). I actually had some verses for this.
My life is gorgeous; I can't complain.
The level of privilege that I have been given is simply insane.
So if I suddenly wasn't enjoying it something or other would surely be horribly wrong with my brain!
(deep breath)
...Cause my life is perfect. I can't complain.
I love my family, I appreciate my parents every day~
And I guess I'm glad they had me. That's a normal thing to say.
I'm sure to state the opposite would go against the grain
So please don't make too much of it, I really can't complain!
And my friends are really lovely, that's my unrelenting stance.
I'd fight for them, I'd die for them if I only had the chance!
I don't know when their patience with my boringness will wane...
But even then I'll love my friends! I really can't complain.
I'm just a kid in middle school who likes to laugh and cry from time to ti-i-i-i-ime...
Aaaand all my mentors tell me that to hate myself is basically a crime.
I know that every human being is special...
Of course they are, it's obvious to see!
I'm full to bursting of
So much unconditional love
For everybody else 'cause they're all so much specialer than me!
...
Oh but it's sunny out, I can't bring rain, I. CAN'T. COM. PLAIN.
Tho before that, probably, there's a kind of pre-prise of later motifs that is Madoka's dream sequence; now I'm thinking Walpurgisnacht could have a kind of song of its own, something like the Taurnado from Centaurworld, and it could have a lot of that eerie chanting desperate energy from "Magia". Along with kind of an indistinct teaser for Homura's final battle song... oh, it's all coming back to me.
One of the next ones would be this funny arguing duet where Kyubey sells them on the contract and Mami tries to caution them about the drawbacks in the limited way she understands them.
K:
You'll get a marvelous dress
You'll be the talk of the town
And not for just on the job
You get to keep it!
M:
Okay but nevertheless
About the beautiful gown
You really can't show it off
It's all a secret!
K:
Ok well even if you don't really get to flaunt it...
Still! It's all that you ever wanted!
K:
You'll be a beacon of light
Against the forces of dark
The populace you'll defend
And be a hero!
M:
Don't be so quick to the fight
It's not a walk in the park
You might lose touch with the friends
You once held dear, though!
K:
Okay well even if your old friends think you're haunted...
Hey, it's all that you ever wanted!
I really like the bit in the dub where Hitomi sees her two friends are telepathic now and gets hysterical that "Girls can't love girls!!", so I wanted that to be a whole rock number with that line as the refrain. It would be an unsubtle satire where she adores female connection but has internalized the arbitrary standard against romance.
Operatic slowdown for the bridge:
Just think of poor, innocent Hitomi...
What if they were to... hit on me!?
Dialog moment leading into the final line:
Listen, I love you two more than anything else in the world.
...But girls can't love girls!!
After Sayaka has made her contract, she and Madoka have this little chant, almost diegetic, totally goofing around kinda like Mordecai and Rigby in Regular Show.
I won't regret this, I'm flying high and sitting pretty!
I won't regret this, I'm ready to defend mah city!
I won't regret this, and I know that if any shitty
Baddies show their face... I'll punch them in the face!
And then they do it with different body parts: "I'll punch them in the... shins!" "I'll punch them in the... solar plexus!"
My idea for the first epic duel between Sayaka and Kyoko was... extremely inspired by Hamilton. I really wanted to do a cool rap battle that was about specific ideological conflict.
Obsessed with hoarding confections and finding grief seeds
I guess that's all the code of honor a thief needs!
I had a bit of an idea that their lyrical structures would parallel their weapons, like Sayaka has double rhymes at end of line like her twin swords.
My only other bit was a direct parallel to a specific Hamilton verse. Unfortunately I love doing shit like that.
Oh, let me guess, you think your life is sooo hard
Cause you think every one of them's a precious gem you have to guard!
You fight for 'honor' and 'justice' and all things cheesy --
(Yes!)
Caring is difficult, kid. Living? Is easy.
Eventually Madoka goes to her mom for advice about their scary conflict. I'm picturing this scene with just a bit of musicality to it, where Junko delivers her advice as kind of a playfully catchy mnemonic.
When you gotta end it but you don't know how to fix it... ooh, you gotta make a mistake!
And then that line repeats in the chorus getting more and more eerie as Madoka approaches her 'mistake'...
(hissing) Make a mistake.
My idea for Sayaka's breakdown was really cool. The closest thing is "Quiet" in Matilda -- the opening with spoken run-on monologue on top of a building tension. Sayaka, she's struggling to hold it together. Almost physically keeping the intestines in her gut. Her deep gem-gunk chemical depression brings out all the patriarchal self-loathing and despair for her future. The other characters are moving around her, not seeing what's wrong. They engage with her, and she stutters and her composure almost breaks, and then it doesn't.
Finally she's at the train station, after maybe killing some sexist bros on the train, and Kyoko keeps saying the wrong things, and Sayaka breaks into this awful scream that ends in a broken, unfinished rhyme.
...a rhyme which Kyoko tries to finish in the next song, where she and Madoka are trying to bring the witch back to herself, and the refrain is just a chanting, wailing "TALK TO ME SAYAKA TALK TO ME SAYAKA TALK TO ME-EEEEE" with an incredibly tense unresolved melody.
I told you my life, this is how you repay me
Why don't you stop holding a grudge, you big baby
Just TALK TO ME...
Ocktavia can't, of course.
Okay, now here's the real centerpiece. This is technically a whole entire song, with a complete melody in my head. This is I think the post-intermission thematic recap. It goes between Madoka, Homura, Junko, and Ms Saotome, in two separate scenes, but like passing around an acoustic guitar.
The thing about this song is, I accidentally based it around a dril tweet, and now the line is really good and it's stuck there forever.
Saotome:
They're gonna rule it accidental
Unless they start to think foul play.
I feel as though the world's gone mental
And I've got no clue what to say.
I feel so guilty as her teacher.
If I'd paid notice to her state...
But as it is, I couldn't reach her.
It was all too little, too late.
Junko:
I spoke to Madoka about this...
She's never been so reticent.
And I have never felt so useless.
I don't know where my honest daughter went.
Saotome:
Junko, I know it's hard when they get older.
But there comes a time to let your grip abate.
Junko:
I just hope that she heard the things I told her.
I just pray I was not too little, too late.
Madoka:
I tried to bandaid what was broken.
I thought a happy song could fix a shattered heart.
We went down its throat with arms outstretched and open
Just to watch Kyoko smash her soul apart.
(viciously) So now my friends are killed and gutted just for trying!
Because these incubators have to incubate!?
And I'm so sad and angry that I can't stop crying.
But it's all been said and done -- too little, too late.
Homura:
I will fight the storm tomorrow.
It's my cross to bear and it's my risk to take.
I demand that you don't follow.
I will not abide re-making that mistake.
Madoka:
Oh, but I'm worried what you'll do without Kyoko!
Kyubey said you could never win without mate.
Homura:
I am many orders stronger than Kyubey knows, though.
So I promise I won't be too little too late.
All:
There is a feeling in my lungs and all around these days
As if the thing that hates us swims within the air
But there is someone I'll protect until the galaxy breaks down
Until the stars in heaven are no longer there.
I love her more than I can tell her...
And if our love is threatened by your hate?
Homura:
THEN I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL.
And I'll change her fa-ate!
All:
Too little too late. (x3)
(Then last repetition where one singer drops out with each word until just Homura.)
Whew! I think that's most of what I had.
Homura fighting Walpurgisnacht is some kind of insanely badass ballad or like a rap where you just feel her pushing and pushing and giving everything a person could possibly give. The cadence of the words evokes her guns and bombs. It could feel like a battle of the bands, ebb and flow between her and the witch chorus. I'm actually kind of thinking of the Photoshop Flowey music.
I want to say something about the Homura flashback, because I'm sure you could do something musically brilliant! Maybe that goes after intermission, before "TLTL" brings us back to the present. What if it really feels like partial variations on a single song, lyrics and instrumentation shifting...
Ok this rocks. This should be her monologue straight to Madoka. The first version is like 'Omg you're so amazing, you saved my life, I want to be like you!' Achingly hopeful, calling back the melodies of the first act. The next versions get more frantic and scared. Her resetting gets quicker and quicker until it's just a record skipping spastically. And then we get the final version where she's dripping with detached bitterness. And this one eerily calls back her own specific lines from earlier in the play.
Originally I also had the idea the final tragedy would just be undone, because I thought there needed to be that blunt assertion of happy lesbian representation. Like 'Ok I'm back from destroying all witches throughout all of time, now we can be together!' There's precedent in Wicked. I don't think I would quite do that now...
This is toxic yuri, after all. If anything, emphasize how much Homura's stalker obsession did nothing to take care of a struggling, depressed kid who finally led herself to a kind of altruistic suicide like she always wanted.
Yeah, ok, it's that kind of night. Let's watch another Sabrina.
I very grew up with... Wizards of Waverly Place! And I had no idea every single charming thing about it was picking up the torch straight from Sabrina.
This is the most me-targeted sitcom there is. Aaaand unfortunately I am very rarely reaching for sitcoms. But I love the idea that I love Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
This is 'you gotta be a genius to write this dumb.' It's perfectly low-brow one-liners and visual puns. It's characters that do exactly one job. Aunt Hilda is stuffy, Aunt Zelda is flighty, Salem steps on rakes with all four of his little paws, Sabrina does dumb things that a dumbass teen does. (She's remarkably self-aware... she just can't resist.) Libby is what rhymes with witch. And Harvey - oh, that sweet boy is just pleased to be here. Harvey Digs Sabrina!
Tonight I watched the one where 'The Wicked Witch' tries to eat Sabrina and Harvey. There's a montage of she and he procrastinating their homework, and it's the cutest shit ever. They have a pillow fight. They watch tv. They water plants. Some would say 'only valid het couple' - to me they're the only valid HAPPY couple! Can you imagine romantic partners in media having fun together? He braids her hair like girls at a sleepover!!
It's older, it's lower-res than anything I'm used to watching. It feels so modern - like, I can feel how the 90s was modern. It's so... chill and normal about women and how they exist. (Fascinated by the one where she travels to the 70s and loves the hippie anarchism until she encounters sexism.) I get this sense of casual ease that is so hard to pin down. But compare for instance to any anime, which is inevitably hysterical and frenzied about the question of what the hell women are and how we can cope with their presence. It feels so nice to be at Sabrina.
The nonexistent special-effects budget is essential to the identity and humor. It is a character in itself. Everything about the magical world is based around absurd throwaway devices that avoid the need for spectacle. Hilda and Zelda need help taking down the beanstalk, so they wait all episode in the wizard DMV. Sabrina's magic is locked, so her pointer finger just pops out a little flag saying "Nope!"
Something about the pacing and delivery just works for me. Something about the straight-faced nonsense. I especially like Zelda - her proud trashiness, her quips in that sharp nasal voice that end in an automatic grin. I watched Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire for her, but she didn't get to be funny in that.
Also, there's something unnecessarily fascinating about the background worldbuilding! It is a matter of course that magic blends into science - that Hilda and Zelda, for instance, with the privilege of magic, spend their time engaging with high-level research and the arts. How come no dramatic series have come up with that? Just The Magicians. A lot of the magic equipment is styled very sci-fi, like this x-ray helmet that sees in night-vision-green with binary code in the corner! I also love the running gag that witches are always summoning celebrities to perform for them, and the celebrities are just used to it.
I like stuff from all their albums, but The Vice Quadrant has twice as much sauce as anything they've made before or since!
As usual for the robot band, a good chunk of it is too lullaby for my taste, while another chunk is what I consider absolute bangers. But when I listen all the way through I really get into the whole thing.
I'm listening to it right now!
And I can't fucking focus on forming sentences. I'm gonna pause it.
Okay I'm back.
The thing I really have to mention about this space opera is the weird swimmy ambiguity! The songs swerve between literal sci-fi stories and abstract sci-fi-themed ballads, and they callback words and phrases, and sometimes those phrases just plainly mean different things.
Is the Necrostar an abstraction of surrender to void and futility? Is it a prison orb made of a sun? Is it a scary guy that slurps hearts??
I'm so fascinated by "Starburner" because it switches mid-song. Hear for yourself!
The threads weave around. Three different songs begin the story of Wink the Satellite's lonely mission in different ways. ("SteamJunk" is the coolest one.)
It feels like it has different tiers of literality. Like, in the highest meta level that feels 'canon' with their other albums and with their in-character performances in reality, all the band did today was fly into space and have a musical duel with a giant. But... the Walter family is part of their canon, is Commander Walter 'real'? Did he really become a superhero? Some of the story seems to suggest a slightly more tech-advanced Earth, with a lot more space stations and starships. So that's 'incompatible'? The sky-shark attack feels semi-real, it's referenced in "Necrostar," and yet the part where mankind burns all the forests must be less real than that. And did we release a primordial evil today, or just have a nice trip home seeing some whales?
Yes!
SPG deals in tall tales. "There, there. Don't cry, Jon, it's just a story! ...a real story."
Their world will never need to make sense. I love how especially much they pushed it here.
Speaking of which, I like how this album adds to their roster of 'folk heroes,' to date comprising:
Capt Albert Alexander, navyman
Rex Marksley, gunslinger
Suspender Man, haunted busker
Airheart, half-planegirl pilot
Roller Skate King, self-explanatory
Cosmica the Daughter of Space, force of destruction
Commander Cosmo, pulp superhero
Rav the Starburner, quippy space outlaw?
Delilah Morreo, vampire vampire-hunter
Salgexicon, David's DnD character i guess
Leopold Expeditus, gentleman explorer
Olly and the Equinox Band, exhausted superheroes (magical girls?)
I fuckin wish they'd made good on Commander Cosmo's ending teaser to assemble "Heroes, sir? You mean like yourself? Who did you have in mind?" "All of them."
Steam Powered Giraffe: Infinity War when?
SPG is very rated G but have an interesting relationship with edge. I think it's really cool that "The Vice Quadrant" ends on a bleak, vicious villain song promising doom?? (And they get to have their cake, because after that it ends with a cute ballad about whales.)
They have an absurd deadpan comedy with a few lines that seem to get funnier the more familiar they are. Consider the escalation in "Star Valley Night"... or GG's Christmas list.
Final note: In "It's Cosmic", I really like to pretend the word is 'toxic.'
"Don't tell me that it's toxic! I know it's toxic, oh yeah!"
oh fuck i just found out theres lore on the website. im gonna post this before reading it
I love the theme song so much. I love the music, I love the animation. It’s so fun. It’s the best part.
Gosh! I just rewatched this miniseries, first time since high school. I was so innocent and dumb back then. I was so impressed that this had such strong yuri-bait. “What?” I gasped. “This crime of objectification actually has meaningful representation? Then it’s good, actually!”
On this blog I have always been rather caaaaagey and careful about anything horny, because I used to feel guilty about the male gaze, and because this is my respectable online identity.
But fuck it, you know? It’s 2025, I’m the person I am now, and today we’re reviewing an ECCHI with NAKEDNESS.
–
Ok I don’t want to oversell it. My first draft made this sound like the most impressive and most disappointing anime I’ve ever seen.
What it is, is ⅔ of whatever idk – action slows down, themes and relationships feel unearned, I don’t get the appeal. And the other ⅓, mainly the beginning, is a very tiny project executed with spectacular expertise and flair.
“Allow me to mansplain…”
This reboot was my first glimpse of Cutie Honey, and when I checked out her other serieses they didn’t grab me, so as usual I will be speculating boldly in ignorance about its creative context.
This feels like some veteran animators got to do a quick take on a known property and just go absolutely crazy with it. They took an already campy and wild story, and they revved it up to a fraction of the length and an exponent of the energy. It feels very much like Devilman Crybaby in that way! (And… no other way at all.)
Colorful pop-art cityscapes, mega-dutch angles, explosive flipping swinging motion, crazy cackling character designs and acting, cheeky fanservice with no restraint or pretense, all deftly kept readable and clear as it rockets along. What a treat! What a flex!
I love their boiling-down of goofy cartoon crime into cookie-cutter ski-mask robbers and useless chibi cops! It’s so self-parody!
–
Ok, you know what else?
I’ve been thinking about this all week, I have to add this part.
Female beauty standards are the mind-killer. We all suffer.
Because guess what Honey “Cutie” Kisaragi’s superpower is? She can disguise as anyone.
Only how hard can it be? Cause all anime girls look the same anyway.
This OVA has delightful designs, and when I say that, I mean only the nasty, grimy, mid-rank villain women get that privilege. All the important girls are just… you know.
They let her be ONE cool character. This bathhouse crone is awesome. Look at this lineup! Isn’t this embarrassing?? At least the set tech look is a little dykey!
I’m getting this headcanon that the new Doctor thought he wasn’t going to have a companion.
I said this was the refreshed angst-free Doctor, but he certainly has this unpredictable melancholy undercurrent. I really like the weird way he handles it; he’s bursting with all this genuine enthusiasm, and then as soon as his own tragedy comes up, he just barrels through it with gusto, like he’s daring anyone to try and pity him. “GONE, Ruby! They’re all gone! It was a genocide!”
Dr. Gatwa says he has nobody, and his one treasure is his freedom. Maybe he was like, ‘Ok, Dr. Tennant gets to have a family, and I’m the counterpart who stays exploring, and I’ll go ahead and not get anyone killed on my behalf this time.’ But when he runs into Ruby, they have the most insane instant chemistry, and he’s like ‘Oh wow. So that’s why we do this!’
And he ran downtown to the key shop to make an extra key to the TARDIS.
Their dynamic is the funnest part of the episode! Their back-and-forth is so quirky and expressive. Ruby is so freaking jazzied to be exploring time and also relative dimensions in space, while Doc stands back and beams watching her watch the planetrise.
They both share the brainworms that make you not notice that every single sightseeing trip ends in traumatizing mortal peril.
Omg speaking of, (or maybe not speaking of that at all?) the ‘butterfly effect’ bit was so funny and wild. You can just write anything, huh?
You know what they should do? They should bring back the Rubathon Blue lizardgirls timeline. They should have a whole episode there. But, like, decades from now. When the flashbacks to that one scene will look impossibly quaint in our descendants’ 4d smell-o-vision holograms.
~ <3 ~
I love how thoroughly weird the premise was. The babies – space babies – were very funny. Eric is such a class act with his constant resting expression of deep concern, alongside his extremely tender but britishly deadpan dialog.
I really liked the off-kilter surreal feeling of the bright, silly baby station above the impossibly scary xenomorph lair. It does feel too specific and perfect to be real, like there’s something peeking around the edges that we’re missing.
When I see a practical effect, I want to love it for its unrealistic camp, but they did seem really limited in what they could do with the monster. Which is to say, just a bunch of close-up blink-length clips of it moving in a lunging-type way, and having big teeth and such. It was hard for me to really feel like it was occupying the space and chasing after them; it felt like the sharp musical stings were carrying all the tension.
I thought it was awesome that they saved the monster at the end. They didn’t even make it act more cute or benign to convince the audience it was worthy of life! What a great empathetic vibe this had.
By the way, did you piece together that Doc cared about it so much because it was the only one of its kind? Idk, that just seemed like a detail that would be easy to miss.
Next time: (pretend I’m referencing a Beatles lyric here)
It’s such a mad genius idea to simulate a physical card game – complete with scruffy, yellowed paper cards, a dim, flickering hunting cabin, and spooky eyes and hands in shadow, acting out the characters with wooden masks. It’s all sooooooo tactile! I love the fwip of the cards, and the teeth binking into the scales.
At the same time, it’s so fun how it’s not bound by realism at all. The cards claw each other, they hover and flap, they dissolve in sacrifice and stitch symbols into each other. The game boards unroll and pop up in three dimensions.
It’s such a scary, nasty, gratuitous creepypasta atmosphere. Pulling your damn teeth and eyes. The fact that your character’s failure is final, and every run you play as a new doomed visitor to the murder cabin. Yet it’s also inherently hilarious and endearing that you are engaging with such a passionate, theatrical dungeon master who just happens to be a psycho.
Oh and I love the stoat! He is so funny. He’s such a gamer. You just have this one card that acts like a little bitch to you. His remarks become so iconic; I like when the comments below a video are full of things like “stoatal misplay.”
The gameplay itself is so compact and yummy. I am a huge evangelist of very small numbers in very big fonts, and this is it. 1 power, 2 toughness, pay 3 bloods, pay 4 bones, be the first to 5 teeth. Everything is contained in this little grid. The cards battle by routine and the only choice you make is when to sacrifice and place new ones.
The sigil-mixing is an incredible vector for sneaky, crazy synergies and builds, especially in the unbalanced, unhinged story mode. I am hooked on the thrill of combining infinite-sacrifice Cat with big-sacrifice Black Goat, and that’s just the start. It’s such a fun game to break. And it’s full of clever secret interactions to find by chance! My favorite is the ringworm gambit. If you know, you know.
Everything about it is gleefully morbid, from the sacrificing to the frankensteining to the deranged bosses. But most of all, the gameplay itself instantly creates a feeling of desperate scarcity as you struggle to build your board, squirrel by squirrel, before the waves of mooses hit. You’re always a hoof’s breadth away from trampling and devourment.
I really like that it’s just wild forest animals coming at you!? It’s such a bizarre alternative to traditional fantasy monsters or villains.
I’m so glad they put a ‘true roguelike’ mode to dig the mine deeper and let you play the game more.
—
Phew! Finally, the praise is out of the way!
The 8-bit RPG mode is charming and surreal but pretty thin. I did want to play with those three whole new sets of mechanics and with editing my own deck, but all the battles are so easy and you can’t even replay them! I guess it’s by design, because those mechanics aren’t necessarily balanced or, like, fun, in the long term.
I like the gimmick of going to P03’s 3D world and having an aesthetic overhaul, but for whatever reason I found both the look and the gameplay blander. Honestly, I think P03’s whole attitude of ‘yeah yeah, this is a trite formality, just get to the end already’ was… a little too convincing.
Except for the bounty hunters! Those guys were awesome!
Leshy’s National Geographic Chainsaw Massacre is, like, the real game. I wasn’t that jazzied to find out the ‘flashing thing’ was the New Game button, making this a story about guys who live in a computer. The strength of this experience is the illusion of grimy physicality, as if you’re flesh and blood! Not everything needs to be Pony Island!
—
Here’s the thing. I was sent to this game by a Gamemaker’s Toolkit video. And I love the game. But to me that video was entirely false advertising.
Mark said that as you progress, it stops being a matter of just winning Leshy’s game, but instead using the card game itself as a resource to explore and solve puzzles throughout the rest of the cabin. He said that in 8-bit world, the idea of winning stopped feeling meaningful, but instead it felt like a challenge to seek out and understand more of the underlying story.
I would love to play that game!
I played expecting all those things, but I started feeling like Mark’s video had already showed me all there was to see. The escape-room puzzles in the cabin are cool gimmicks, but they aren’t important or intertwined. And the deeper story is… well, there’s not alotta there there.
As such… here’s a pitch for my version of Inscryption.
—
ACT 1: Sacrifices Must Be Made
Largely the same. But in the fiction, the cabin and its victims and the dark, dark woods are physical and real.
Leshy is auditioning challengers to find his own successor. Here’s the twist: when you get to the end of the journey, Leshy confronts you with the moon… which has thousands of HP. It’s plainly unbeatable.
The cabin is full of interconnected puzzle locks. Its drawers offer you new cards, items, and sneaky tips. You must manipulate and maneuver in the game: Sometimes the cards affect the room, like freeing the caged wolf. Sometimes you need to experiment with a given interaction to understand the card-battle locks. Sometimes you need to reach odd places in the path to discover codes. At one point, you’ll need to plan out your own death card to give the next challenger a key puzzle element.
The ultimate prize is a card locked away for its game-breaking potential: The Ouroboros. Once you have it, you’ll have to construct your own munchkin build to draw out battles and buy time, multiplying its power until it can beat the moon.
ACT 2: Anything Not Saved Will Be Lost
Suddenly, for some reason, we’re playing an 8-bit RPG of Inscryption. We’re like a pokemon trainer going on our journey. Within this game, the cards don’t represent cards – they represent a loyal posse of actual aminals, zombers, wizzerds, and robuts.
A low-battery alert makes us realize we can get up from the computer. In-fiction, I mean. We’re a young teen in their bedroom, and we can explore and learn all about their life. Their big sister Kaycee went missing recently. The Inscryption RPG was her creation.
It doesn’t take too long to follow the critical path and win the RPG. The minions of the final boss all correspond perfectly to our own winning deck from ACT 1.
At this point, the four Scrybes begin to crawl out of the computer screen, for we have completed the ritual to release them back into the world. (A different tree-person has replaced Leshy; They wear the ring we earned in ACT 1.) They are going to kill us to remove the witness, but we have one recourse:
Reloading our save within the RPG.
Now, it’s up to us to explore the side-paths and find ways to sequence-break the game, including lots of save-scumming. We meet more of the ‘NPCs,’ who cannot speak freely, but indirectly help us find new hacks. They even give us coded messages through their actions in battle. We make use of electronic gadgets throughout our room, and notes that Kaycee left. (I’m really not sure how many interesting puzzles I could make that involve the real-life room, but it definitely sounds cool.)
We learn that the Scrybes are ancient wizards who executed cruel rituals through games. Eventually, they hired Kaycee to make a video game as a convenient prison for their many victims. She got wise and trapped the Scrybes in the game, but lost her life.
Eventually, we must understand the game and its unfinished rough edges well enough to force a critical error, rendering it unplayable and destroying the Scrybes and their unfortunate prisoners.
[Wow! My Doctor Who series did not actually get far. But I have two more of them that I wrote back then but never posted.]
This premiere is unspeakably charming. It could not make me more enamored with the whole potential of what Doctor Who is.
(By my recollection, the whole rest of the season is going to, like, sorta live up to it, in bits and pieces…)
I love how much this feels like a fresh entry point, like Gatwa can be your first Doctor ever. It’s a flamboyant, sweeping introduction to the premise.
What if some kind of 'time traveler' swept right into your life? He’s mysterious, charismatic, and full of energy. He comes with odd gadgets and strange sci-fi knowledge. He’s puckish and leaves you comically on the back foot, but he always pulls through in the nick of time. He finds joy everywhere; he empathizes and feels deeply. Also, he’s a glittering, proud queer, by the way!
Doc and Ruby have wonderful chemistry. From the jump, they stumble into these super intimate moments together, very physically close – I first read it as romantic, except that they’re having way too much fun for that. They could only be best friends.
If “The Giggle” was a punishing slog through mucky, tarry, long-built-up guilt and moral weight, this is the opposite. This is an absolute feel-good adventure. This is Sharkboy & Lavagirl.
For a sci-fi series, I love how unafraid it is to say ‘guess we doing quirky fantasy today.’ They don’t even bother to assure us the goblins are aliens, or give their flying ship some less-magical technobabble. Their wires and motors are freaking knots, dude! Keep up!
It is a gift for me personally that the goblins did a pop song. And there’s no better showcase of this Doctor – at the very least, this episode’s Doctor – than his “...why stop singing?” Despite the dire stakes, the narrative promise is that playful, exuberant mischief wins the day.
And by the way, why does this series look so good? I really don’t have the vocabulary for it, but it’s so colorful and lit so strikingly, it makes me go ‘...why don’t other shows feel this good to look at?’
—
Getting into the details…
I’ve picked up so far that Doctor Who is very often horror. But today gives me the sense that it’s sometimes a slasher film! There was only one victim, but Davina McCall’s ghoulish ‘death’ has exactly that cadence – thrillingly awful moments that you gobble like popcorn.
Also pretty damn funny that Ruby hears over the phone, ‘It’s only a matter of time before I get… AAAAH! *cuts off*’ and she just shrugs and thinks no more about it.
There is actually not much that terrifies me more than being targeted by mundane ‘coincidental’ disasters. That moment where Doc is like ‘check if the stove is on! check everything!’ Oh god. I mean, you can’t! You can’t check everything! You’d be screwed!
Which brings me to that opening montage of the episode, where the editing felt especially slick and snappy. There’s several intriguing things at once – learning who Ruby is amid a string of accidents, seeing the Doctor slyly cross her path, keeping track of those little green animated hands. I love the moment where Ruby puts down her drink and the table’s gone.
(Tables don’t do that!)
For me, the pain point of this episode is them awkwardly hiding the strange happenings from Ruby’s mom. I just hate that trope, it makes me so stressed.
I’m not sure how I feel about the ‘bad timeline’ part – seems like kind of a disservice to that lovely woman to say she’d be a bitter hag without Ruby in her life. But on this watch, I did feel pretty sold on what they were going for. She’s being nasty because she’s felt stuck and cramped in life for a long time.
Weird that Doc was Sherlock a little bit? That early moment where he divines the cop’s engagement was… pretty ridiculous. Seems like they’re still feeling out in exactly what ways he should be wondrous and magical.
It’s such an inventive, badass set piece to have the Doctor yank the entire ship downward with his special gloves, and to have it impaled on the church spire.
I remember on my first watch wondering, ‘The tone is so light and gentle, but the threat from these villains is technically really dire and horrible, so how exactly will they be dealt with?’ It turns out, Disney-style! They get absolutely murdered dead, in a way that’s indirect, quasi-accidental, and whimsical!
Hi Ncuti! Hi!! Hiiii! Hi Ncuti! Hi Ncuti! Hiiiiii!!
Do you think he saw me? I was waving.
—
Wow, it is very true that Gatwa’s debut got upstaged by Tennant! :(
If Gatwa had only just bigenerated and then it was basically the end of the episode, it would feel like his debut was still to come. But there were just enough Gatwa scenes that it really does feel like this is our first chance to get to know him, in which he’s being upstaged.
Oh well! I guess we’re still talking about Tennant today. No shade to that lovely man.
Not sure how much of a take I can even have, when this is the payoff to lots and lots of story I am totally ignorant of. But I will anyway! I’m able to have a take even under the harshest of conditions.
Seems like somebody must have thought Ten’s and Donna’s stories were badly ended, and brought them back for a do-over. Donna’s tragic sacrifice gets undone. And Ten, who apparently had a horrifying, angst-drenched tenure, got to simply retire and recover… all while a different Doctor goes on having fun hijinks for us.
I love that! I think that’s a really cool idea!
Even lacking the actual history, I could definitely feel in Ten’s performance that he is a taught wire living on adrenaline. It felt awesome to see him be offered this genre-breaking gift of peace, and slowly let himself accept it.
It’s explicitly a reset for the Doctor – as in the central character we will be following – where he can leave the angst behind, and be filled with life and joy again, which Gatwa is immediately perfect for. What a smile!
(In fact, they seemed to establish that… like… Tennant still has to psychologically recover over a long time, but because of time shenans, Gatwa gets to experience that full mental health now, which is… a really funny way for it to work.)
(Also really funny that their clothing got divvied up between them. What, as if fabric would bigenerate too? Get real! This is a serious science fiction program!)
—
Uhhhhh what the hell else happened in this episode??
Of course!!! Neil Patrick Harris was there! Classic Neil.
And here’s a fact about me: Anytime a villain does an ironically playful musical number, it fills up my Mercy bar at least 25% on the spot.
That aside, I’m pretty lukewarm on this villain.
From what Doc says, he’s a primal force of play, indifferent to human lives. But I would hardly describe him as playful! His manner is extremely caustic and bitter, like someone very much rooted in mortal feelings of pride and anger.
So to me he’s just like, a mean guy? A really grouchy neighbor who makes jokes in such a nasty tone that they don’t sound like jokes.
Which hardly sounds like a bad villain! So maybe all that bothered me was the incongruity.
Wasn’t it weird that at the end, he wasn’t even dressed whimsically anymore? He hopped in the cannon and became military-themed!
I did enjoy his over-the-top regional accents.
Oh and you know what? I kind of really liked “WELL THAT’S OKAY THEN!”
I’m not really interested in like… an angst-building guilt-trip session scene. But there was something really satisfying about the way he let Doc make his protestations, and then just didn’t argue back, just gave him a flat ‘Yeah? Yeah buddy? And you feel good about that in your hearts of hearts, huh?’
—
Omg I forgot! This episode had politics!
‘Everybody thinks they’re right all the time.’ I thought that was a very charming and apt way to satirize modern media-driven polarization. They definitely did not have anything to actually say about it. Also, it doesn’t seem related to games at all?
Now I’m flashing back to Doc’s monologue where he turns to the camera and goes ‘Oh BY THE WAY. This is politics, actually! I don’t know if you put it together, but this is not just an inventive sci-fi situation; this is a statement about human nature and the modern era! Also fuck you, you human worm.’
That made me so mad. GO! INTO THE LOCKER! GOD! SHUT UP, TEN! CAN IT! On top of it being unnecessary, I think it’s such a weird, tacky, feel-bad choice to make the Doctor turn on all his human buddies with absolute scorn and derision and make sure they feel bad about the worst of human nature.
I think it’s clumsy any time the Doctor acts as if his mind is different than a human’s. This is fiction! All aliens are written with human minds! It’s the only one we know!
I’m just saying, my man is not beating the ‘sees himself as a god among savages’ allegations.
—
The part where Donna was menaced by little dolls and they said a scary poem – I usually find those tropes so cheap and lifeless, but it was actually really creepy!
Maybe it’s ‘cause the poem was good. I thought it had charm! Isn’t it crazy how many authors will just throw in sloppy, meterless rhymes?
Also it was really funny that Donna just went sicko mode on them. She was ready to stomp on the Stooky Babbies. Don’t test her.
Oh, yes! I love when a character says something that just doesn’t really make sense, but you barely notice at first… It takes a few beats… and then you realize things are very wrong…
Them getting chased by enormous distorted doppelgangers was so insane. Like, in terms of horror moments that are not subtle and are pure dead ‘it’s gonna freaking get you,’ the sheer size of them coupled with the believability of the effect gave me such a thrill.
Also huge shoutout to not-Doc going wolfmode at the end. What would be the point of perfectly mimicking your prey if you gave up the ability to get down and zoom on your knuckles?
—
I really enjoyed all the time spent exploring and wondering about the odd situation. It’s very fun seeing Doc and Donna get back into what is apparently their dynamic. You can certainly feel that they’ve done this 100 times before (and still never learned their lesson). Doctor has a great way of vamping it up while mixing technobabble exposition with approachable buffyspeak. It was easy to believe both the sci-fi premise and that he does this stuff every week.
Love that we got the barest taste of xenolinguistics, just the mention of the idea of deriving the numbers from context clues. It made me imagine Doc Chants of Sennaaring the alien computer. The interface even had hexagons… let me at the hexagons, doctor who!!!
I thought it was great that all four of the characters handled the ‘doppelganger dilemma’ scenes as dumb as possible, just rapid-firing half-baked ideas back and forth.
I’ll admit the salt scene was where The Doctor’s Bullshit Logic™ really stretched my credulity too far to enjoy it. But I think it adds a lot if you headcanon that the Doctor is truly making stuff up by the seat of his pants every day of his life. I love the idea that whipping out a salt shaker was just the next wild idea he flailed upon, and then he had to run with it.
—
Hey so the Doctor’s kind of a bastard, huh?
It seems like a really interesting question. ‘Cause there’s always going to be the looming idea that he’s a faux-friendly god who plays with mortals for sport, and I’m certain all the different generations have a different relationship with that.
Special No.1 told us in words that the Doctor is extremely kind. And he obviously cares with all his hearts about Donna (and that Wilf fellow).
But how about the bit where he fakes getting poisoned to prank her? Not the time for it, when she’s legit terrified about getting stranded. But I think we’re meant to take that as benign?
Oh, and not to bury the lede, the fact that he takes the wrong Donna and almost leaves her to freaking die!!
I am fascinated by that scene, because his sudden, improvised method of selection (you’re human if you can’t explain why a joke is funny) is obviously bullshit, but I thought I was meant to take it as clever and correct per the contract of the narrative. Only it wasn’t! It was bullshit! So what does that say about him? What is that meant to say?
The new-new-Who on DisneyPoob is pretty much the only Doctor Who I’ve seen.
And wow! I like it! But more importantly, sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it! That’s great review content, baybey!!
I’m going to rewatch it and tell you all about it and we will have such fun. (Have you ever noticed ‘such’ is a contraction of ‘so much’?)
(I was also thinking of doing a Doctor Who review series using the chronological order guide, but this amazing plan was halted by the difficulty of certain online platforms in correctly organizing episodes of a series with several reboots and subheadings. Maybe someday… I will afford BBCPoob…)
—
Hey anyone heard of this Tennant guy? He’s a riot! Can’t believe he only gets to be the Doctor for 3 episodes. Daylight robbery.
He’s so wacky and cartoony! I love it! But the real payoff was when Donna finally gets her groove back and she does the thing he’s doing! She turned into a ham too! All they’re doing is flipping switches scientifically, but for no reason they’re like ‘hiyah! blam! hell yeah! biiiiitch!’
—
This episode is 100% the kind of camp I hoped it would be, complete with coming into a story extremely late and having the most melodramatic, goofy explainer at the beginning. I can’t believe this series still uses rubber costumes! Incredible!! Look at those goofy lobster hands! And the way the doomsday fissures sealed back up at the end, like running the film in reverse. So silly.
I thought the story was basically strong, like, it had the momentum. The twist was super fun. I love how over-the-top the Meep’s ET impression was. ‘uwu I fell fwom the staws!’ And Doctor’s impromptu courtroom was such a funny way to swerve the plot.
On the other hand, the scenes of Grandmum trying to keep Donna from remembering stuff were kind of miserable. I notice Doc was very bad at his job here; one minute after reiterating the stakes, he became apparently clueless, going all ‘ya I have two hearts lol. ya this here’s what I call my ~Sonic Screwdriver~’
Might be a missed opportunity for a hijink where he actually tries to hide all his signature moves and calling cards while still saving the day. Like, wearing a trenchcoat to hide his appearance. Acting serious and subdued, trying not to make sci-fi heroics look like any fun. Putting on an American accent. “Allons– oh hell. I mean, uh, giddy-up! Let’s go!”
—
Hey so Donna’s like… mean, huh? She basically spent the actual entire episode criticizing everyone and everything around her. I love that in theory, but I guess I don’t know what I think in practice. Wonder what she’s like in her main series.
—
I gotta admit, at “Binary… Nonbinary… Binary…” I smacked my head on the desk, in second-hand embarrassment. I mean, I know they felt really clever for the wordplay, but I kind of want that beat to get like 5 more minutes in the oven.
Like, what if it had a meaning in the story. What about the idea of ‘You were told there’s only two options, but there doesn’t have to be.’ Donna learned that from her daughter about gender roles, and now she applies the same wisdom to the ultimatum to forget or die!
In terms of the queer kid experience, I liked that moment where Donna keeps going ‘Listen to me, I am so serious, if anything happened to you I would kill everyone in this room and then myself’ and Rose’s expression is like ‘um cool… just trying to live my life tho…’
Apparently, the Doctor is male and female and neither, except fuck you when you’re a male-presenting Doctor.
That bit felt kinda sloppy to me… not much of a slam dunk on the patriarchy. Honestly, why not include Doc in the queer pride at that point?
And I thought it was pretty goofy that they brushed off the entire stakes of the plot through the power of Whomanhood.
I mean, what do I know? I didn’t wear a skirt today, so I wouldn’t get it.
—
Anyway cool! They freaking vanquished the Star Beast!
And we get our first inkling that this series is basically Marvel when it comes to the rabid compulsion to drop sequel-teases. “Wait til the boss hears about this!”
All I heard was how jank it was! That it was a weaksauce story that looked cheap and was full of cringe Disney references. That there were too many companion characters, that the villain’s song shouldn’t have been in a major key, etc etc…
But come on. I didn’t exactly believe it would ‘look cheap.’ Because Disney made it, after all. Y’all just can’t handle surprising style choices…
My first impression: Why the hell does this look so cheap!?
All the colors and scenery are so drab and forgettable. The staging of scenes is flat and static. They kept using 2d painted backgrounds behind 3d characters – and when I say that, it sounds like such a cool choice, but here it truly felt like they just ran out of budget!
The bemusement this brought me quickly became very entertaining.
There were other weird and disjointed choices. Like the songs! The lyrics have such a distinctive style of forced, tortured phraseology, and I grew to be very fond of it. “Yeah, I got these genes from outer space!”
I mean, Disney movies have a very consistent kind of punch and pizzazz all the way across the board. It’s a known winning formula, and the contrast here was baffling. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.
What is wrong?? What happened?? What are they going for??
But slowly I realized… the characters’ posing and emoting was so fetch!
In contrast to everything else, the character animators seemed to be having so much fun! There were so many great touches – striking and funny pushed poses, believable nuance in emotion. I’ve hardly ever noticed character animation adding so much to the telling of the story!
Also, there was Magnifico. My second favorite Disney villain ever!?
Again, it’s all about the expressions. He has so many fantastic evil faces. But then he has this disarming jokester side. And all these in-between beats where he reacts to conversations and ideas in real time. And he gets so much freaking screen time!
I thought his arc was so exciting and scary. A guy with a huge shoulder chip loses his damn mind in front of his populace. They put so much heart and detail into it.
Plus also, “This Is the Thanks I Get?” goes crazy! The upbeat tone hits such an excellent flavor of bizarre and alarming.
I’ll hand it to them: The focus on ‘wishes’ sounded cutesy and shallow at first, but it pulled me in. It represents your passions and ambitions! Losing them is like so raw!
After a while, I started to think: ‘This movie is kind of a stage play!’
The extremely limited staging and sets give it that feeling. Also the relative lack of cinematic tricks to increase the adrenaline and punch.
And then I thought, ‘This movie is kind of an opera??’
I was cringing at the rhymes in the basement rebellion song, but then I started to really enjoy the melody and energy, and I was like, ‘Maybe this can be the kind of song where the rhymes aren’t that important?’ Apparently that’s what I think an opera is.
A solid chunk of the humor felt really snappy and great to me. Not all of it – I remember a complete ‘joke-adjacent’ clunker where the goat was going ‘don’t worry, this disaster is just a reeeeally big bump in the road…!’ But then, one second later, the quick timing and cutaway of his ‘all I see are feet’ cracked me up!
I would not say this movie was painfully saturated in references. Probably the most tacky one was namedropping Bambi. (‘John’ is less tacky because that could be any bear named John.) I thought the puns when Magnifico was crushing wishes were jarring in their specificity, but charming. I actually really like the idea that he becomes the magic mirror. I thought his obsession with his own looks felt kind of tacked-on, and it’s very funny that it was foreshadowing for his mirrofication.
Fact is, this movie was awesome – half actually and half ironically!
But most baffling of all, for something that’s meant to cap off a century, it felt way less Disney than absolutely any of the movies they referenced in the credits.
…
Now that I think about it, the punchline of this movie was just ‘And that starfish… was Albert Einstein.’
And that evil king… was a face in a mirror.
And that bear… was Little John.
And that hundred-year-old man… was Jiminy Cricket.
OH my next favorite character was the short grump. Idk, he was like really charming.
Listen – I don’t actually have a history with a genre of slasher tropes that existed before my birth… but I get the idea.
The thing about me is, I’m extremely susceptible to stuff where lab coat guys are manipulating an artificial situation. It’s a niche, I know.
That said, I’m lukewarm on the first half. It was generally charming and funny. More interesting than the teens was the whole atmosphere in the lab – these painfully banal workaday scumbags who you can’t help but root against even though they’re technically the good guys.
One of the funniest ideas to me is the basement just filled to the brim with an endless set of cursed artifacts. ‘Come on, idiots, pick up something!’ And the fact that as soon as they go down there, each kid instantly chooses one to start messing with.
The attack of the hillbilly zombie murder family was pretty cool – it was pretty much the exact level of gruesome that I can tolerate, which I really appreciate. But I mostly wished we saw more tactical manipulation and messing around with the tropes.
The motorbike jump was a great example of the tone – the perfect flavor of ‘I feel bad for laughing…’
But the second half is the real shit!
It was amazing seeing the enormous array of animated beasties arranged in their glass cubes, and I did not think I’d be lucky enough to see any of them again.
Joke’s on me…!
I’m not used to getting into a slasher movie blood frenzy, since violence squicks me out pretty easy. But it was SO FUN just seeing them rampage and tastefully massacre the lab boys.
[Yzma voice] Why do we even HAVE a ‘let them out into the hallways’ button!?
There’s something particularly funny about the limited set of elevators delivering a set of ten monsters at a time and then taking several minutes to go fetch the next group.
…And I guess that’s kind of it? That’s most of the rest of the movie and that’s what I loved about it.
Huh!
Oh and that final shot was so sick. It’s like, I knew they wouldn’t/shouldn’t depict the whole nightmare reign of the gods, and I thought they might cheat out of it in a disappointing way, but that one last shot of animation was the perfect teaser to make me believe they mean business.
I never saw Beetlejuice until recently. My friend watched it before I did. She said, “...I guess I expected too much.”
I figured she meant it had dated misogyny. But when I watched it, I was like “Oh.”
Beetlejuice kind of doesn’t have a story!
To me it felt like a proof of concept. It was all vibes and ideas. And it’s harder to divine as a modern kid, but I think those vibes and ideas must have been shockingly brilliant, like nothing that existed before, hence why it’s so iconic.
I didn’t get much out of it, but my favorite thing was the freaky abstract sculptures being brought to life and dragging themselves across the floor! Plus the insane monster faces the Maitlands pull. And the comically casual way they present them. Ooh, and the incredibly eerie way the door opens onto a clay landscape of evil tim burton snakes. I would like more of that world.
It made me all the more delighted by what the musical raised from its rotten bones!
The Cartoon, The Cartoon, The Cartoon
🦓🦓🦓🐴🐴
I love how deranged it is to watch Beetlejuice (1988) and say “I think he and the kid should be best friends!”
But, of course, they were seeing the unused potential of Lydia being a goth that loves creepy stuff!
Beetlejuice as a character is just a real gold mine: The most nakedly scummy guy, taken to a supernatural extreme by being a ghost/demon that crawls out of a grave and eats bugs and steals your soul. And the cartoon is a great vehicle to see more (than 5 minutes) of him. Like, even though he’s defanged in a lot of ways, the essential appeal is identical. The voice is a huge part of it. And so is the ‘...y’know what I mean?’
I love how they run with the prompt for the Neitherworld and make it a spectacular Dr Seuss nightmare playground.
Altogether, it’s one of those kids’ cartoons that doesn’t offer me a lot, but I enjoy it from time to time.
The Musical, The Musical, The Musical
🦓🦓🦓🦓🐴
“Holy crap! A ballad already! And such a bold departure from the original source material!”
It would be so fun to perform any of these songs. But I’d try out for the big guy himself, of course. I love emcee characters.
I am soooo jazzied about adaptation, and I can’t get over the fact that they picked up every great half-idea in the movie and made them into way, way more of a thing!
Not to mention drawing from the cartoon with details like the word ‘Netherworld’ and the galaxy-brained potential for BJ and Lydia to be pals.
Beetlejuice gets to actually be the center of the action, doing a huge rowdy showman schtick, dancing on the 4th wall, and he gets a clear goal that ties in the Maitlands and Lydia.
Lydia’s two throwaway lines about being suicidal and having a new stepmom become an entire character arc and motivation. She gets to be both sassy goth and struggling kid. The crux of the story is her awesome misguided deal with the devil, which I couldn’t believe was not the original plot of the movie.
The Maitlands gain an entire personality, where their whitebreadness is played up, they’re comically scandalized by every ghoulish happening, and their death incites character change by derailing their stifling normalcy.
Even the gag line “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had my little accident!” was spun it into the refrain of an entire song and a core theme!
Though, if there’s one thing they actually lost, it’s that Delia became a lot more pathetic, where I think the humor of her in the movie is that she’s totally wearing the pants and is unswervingly confident and demanding about her nonsense modern art house.
When it first came on the scene, I didn’t get it. Felt charming, but uncooked as an Undertale 2. Didn’t get too invested.
NOW I get it!
As the new chapters approached, Twitter started serving me nothing but Deltarune excitement, which was honestly a delight. I replayed 1 & 2 at the last minute, then I jammed through 3 & 4.
It’s fun, man! Computer game!
~
The first thing that’s always stood out to me is the look. I’m a visual learner. Specifically, I’m a pretty cartoon guys in bright colors learner. I feel like the gut appeal of the visuals is always the make-or-break for me.
This game has the sugar! There’s something about the color palettes in the (not-so-)Dark Worlds that especially sticks in my mind. I love Kris and Susie’s neon hero outfits. I love all the glittery UI details in the ‘upgraded’ Dark World menus and battles.
I loooove the menagerie of weird, thematic enemies! Ngahh! I want to make my own! I think my favorite design has to be Werewire – that menacing, lanky piñata.
~
Speaking of enemies, the bullet hells have been the most painful part of the experience. It’s so fun in theory, but the patterns feel so unfair and impossible that I kind of dreaded the battles.
I do think it’s a skill issue. It took me a while to realize you need to find the counterintuitive trick to each one…
But the structure gets me so tilted, ‘cause I only get these brief chances to try (and fail) each pattern before it’s interrupted by other stuff, and I feel like I’m hemorrhaging turns and items to ‘avoidable’ damage!
I guess I wish there was a practice mode where the pattern just keeps playing nonstop.
~
And yet if I put that aside, I’m thrilled about the battle system!
We start with this simple, snacky turn-based format with very nice blippy menus and satisfying impacts. (It’s all about the tactile details, you guys!) The ACT concept is an endlessly charming inlet for flavor text. The bullet patterns create tense action and give each enemy a spatial, physical identity.
(Although, I found a lot more of the ACTs kinda forgettable – I think in Undertale they were central in defining every single enemy by a unique type of interaction, but here there are more things competing for focus. With the bullets too, it was only in the later chapters that I started going ‘oooooh this is such a unique pattern that is perfect for this enemy!’)
New for Undertale II: The Toilet Paper bar was a great injection of strategy. I was constantly watching it and arranging my Defends to afford Heal Prayer.
Some of the ACTs have more intricate mechanical effects, like making other enemies tired, or making ‘musical’ ACTs stronger… I looove when unique abilities are expressed through gaming abstractions.
But what I’m really jazzied about:
It’s WarioWare now!
That’s the attack!!
It feels like the series is doubling down more and more on giving the enemies interactive microgame gimmicks. And I find the gameplay of them pretty hit-or-miss (so to speak). But it makes every battle feel like a brand-new wacky set piece all its own. Always twisting the format, always creative and surprising!
That is soooooo what these games are about.
My most memorable one is when Rouxls turns all your options into ACT, but then Lancer jumps in there and you have to click him… I think trying to stop a roulette wheel on the desired option is pretty wretched as gameplay, and yet the whole sequence was so funny and cuckoo that I loved it.
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There’s a lot of wildly funny scenes. I love how Toby turns the Hero’s Journey into an absurdist farce with nonstop enthusiastic energy.
Lancer is one of my favorites. He’s got this truly unpredictable way of phrasing things, a distinction he shares with the likes of Tavros and Ena. The conversations with King tend to be all-timers.
This is big coming from me, but the mundane scenes are my favorite. All the little stories from their pasts and childhoods are so catnip. I guess I’ve barely seen a story focus on that before, and I don’t quite know what makes it work, but it’s amazingly cozy.
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Anyway,
KHRISTOFER!
YOU FREAKING GODDAMN POOKIE!
You know, the Light World parts in Ch1 do such a slick job of painting Kris’s character, without them ever doing or saying anything. It gave me such a warm feeling, just intuiting how much lighter they feel on coming back from the adventure, compared to the malaise of the morning.
Only, then we get the shocker teaser – everything they did today was under possession, and they are really some kind of scary knife child!
I spent 2 & 3 thinking ‘We know nothing about this kid! Everyone is assuming they fit this hero role, everyone talks around them, but they are silent and shadow-faced and could be planning anything.’
But when I got to 4, everything hit way different.
I was so surprised by moments, like guzzling punch with Susie, that were way more explicitly expressive. And I realized all those clues and cues are real, and Kris is exactly what they seem.
This kid that people know as weird and offbeat but sincere and kind and part of the town’s family. Who often keeps quiet and who derails social expectations and who has a lot of tough feelings boiling around inside, and who is a lot more glad to be alive since the moment Susie beat up an evil playing card for them.
I have a way clearer sense of the ongoing push-and-pull between the player heart and Kris, and suddenly there’s so many fascinating examples of the dynamic sprinkled through the whole story.
Wow! I really like this guy!
Until then, I never would’ve predicated Kris as the object of my character gush segment. I’m usually preoccupied with the power of mean girls. But I basically got blindsided by a character I highkey relate to.
The runaway heart sequence is absolutely my most beloved and memorable in the game. For something that was basically an easter egg in Ch1 – the fact that you can move the heart inside the cage – to burst into the narrative in a way so goofy and hilarious yet surreal and eerie is peak Toby stuff.
I’m so glad the next one’s coming out next year! Wow!
I wish to end with my heartfelt condolences to all the Berdly fans who have waited many years to see that dumb smart little guy again.
It’s been two years and a half since I posted reviews. I’ve become much more wiser and maturer. And even better at opinions.
I’ve wandered back to Tumblr because I got a new spark of that old fandom excitement.
My health is still screwed and my brain is still a swamp. But one thing I can usually do is write opinions on media. And that’s nice!
Now, I get even more that media is subjective. If someone likes it, you can’t deny it succeeded! Every rabid, scathing takedown is hollow and foolish. It's just not for you, man. Still… that tone can be VERY FUN. So maybe there’s still a place for it, alongside a grain of salt.
And I have a more grounded, dewormed perspective on internet engagement. This has always been a blog mostly written for no one and read by no one. But if even one person reads a given post and enjoys it… That’s amazing! It’s as if a real human being came up to me and was like 👍!
The only thing better is if that person commented.
Acknowledge me! Speak to me! Feed me!
Next time on lem-cup-rev: Some dog made a videos game…?
To me, Eda is the unassailable centerpiece. There’s something so subversively wonderful about a grumpy, scary, surprisingly foxy, slightly zombified junk-hocking old witch as a dubious yet secretly lovable caregiver, and that’s even before her heart-bursting arc of becoming a mom. Her premise is so strong, it’s hard for her writing to stray from the main idea, and I feel like she’s a really consistent anchor for the whole creepy-fun tone.
Luz is utterly adorable and makes a really strong fish-out-of-water protagonist. She’s really perfectly calculated to hit the Boiling Isles like a cueball in the break, being unstoppably curious, kind, and meddling, so she’s always got some crazy, scary situation or character to play off of. In a lot of ways she’s a very straightforward archetype, an earnest good-guy protagonist with well-meaning follies, and the writing, animating, and acting all really come together to give her an iconically offbeat charm that makes you love her for it. Her bright enthusiasm for the world around her is perhaps a less common character trait, and I feel like it helps give the show a wonderful, infectiously positive feeling. I also find her design itself really memorable, the queercut especially.
I think I’ve had less fun with King, but I do really like him as part of the dynamic, and I think his bombastic premise and weird design always give them something to work with.
I don’t think I’m particularly interested in Willow specifically, but she’s starred in a lot of my favorite episodes. Gus is consistently very funny on the sidelines. My enjoyment of Lumity really varies, but I love the core concept of the ship and when it’s good it’s amazing.
The Lilith story beats don’t always grab me, but the back-and-forth between the sisters is a delight. And in terms of the villains, we’ve really started to dip into creatively, weirdly scary territory that I’m excited for.
The core idea of Luz learning magic is something I really like, but I don’t think we actually see it that often. We don’t really see either Hexside or Eda teach her anything, and the glyphs are a very fun but very visually sparse idea. No gross potions, dangerous incantations, ingredient scavenging, sacrificial rituals. That’s too bad, I think! I would love to have Eda lessons as a hook into this funny, dark, creepy, yet still kind of mystical and beautiful twist on the apprentice fantasy. And to see how by-the-book magic would differ, versus how much it would still be saturated in the inherent freakiness of the Boiling Isles. Still, I do think we get some of that meat when we see characters practicing the many different schools of magic, which tend to be really creatively concieved.
For all the elements I love, it’s too bad how many episodes felt pretty unsatisfying.
It is strange to feel so much affection for the whole and come down so harshly on the parts. It makes me wonder if I’m judging unfairly. If the tone keeps feelings shallow and jokey, is that not on purpose? Is it beloved by the target audience?
But then, these reviews have never tried to be anything but subjective. It’s fun to think about what stuff delights me. There’s no objective condemnation of the things that don’t. My trash is another dimension’s treasure.
I really didn’t see this one coming! Normally when I don’t like the tone as much, it feels annoyingly jokey. This is the first episode that could remotely be accused of being too dry.
I really don’t have much to say about this one. It was very serious, in a way that I didn’t find very interesting. Not unlike some of the She-Ra finales.
I liked the joke in the beginning with Eda and Lily being childish to each other. I also thought the design of the petrification machine was wonderfully over-the-top.
I remember when I first watched this, I was sad that Eda lost her powers so soon! It feels like we barely got to see her do any magic. We’ve seen her fight, but she hasn’t worked any creative or interesting enchantments. It feels so harsh that she has to start from square one. I don’t want to see Eda brought low!
I do love the idea of the pain-sharing spell.
I liked when Luz said, like, “tell it to the glyphs, witch!” clearly wanting to say “bitch.” It reminded me of that tweet about having to edit the swears out of the Adventure Time storyboards, with the panel of Finn saying “dude, what the fuck?” It’s fun to think that cartoon writers sometimes write with adult language in mind and then just censor it later. You may have noticed I myself normally avoid both of those bad words on this blog, which sometimes takes some creative rephrasing.
