Alfred: We need to have a talk about your brutality, Sir.
Bruce: What are you talking about? I don't kill people. You know that.
Alfred: Yes, but brutality encompasses more than killing people. For example, are you absolutely certain it was necessary to grab a man by the face at 80 MPH and then chokeslam him a hundred feet into the ocean?
Bruce: ...
Bruce: I can explain.
Alfred: I don't think you can, Sir.
finished up a mystery dungeon-esque theme i've had sitting around for a while. wanted to do something rhythmic and groovy. soundtrack to getting obliterated by a tyranitar using earthquake or something
Wigglytuff / "Gran Bluff" art that I'm honestly not that proud of anymore 💔 but with all the PMD art I've posted already I thought I might as well just share this one
...Now stay here for a bit if you wanna see me yap about PMD2 fun facts!!!
The Guildmaster doesn't have a name in most languages (he's either called Guildmaster Wigglytuff or just Wigglytuff in every version, even in Japanese)
However, here in Spain he receives the name/title of "Gran Bluff", which can be translated as "Great Bluff"
"Bluff" isn't a Spanish word (it has no meaning, maybe they just liked the sound of it, who knows), and we also refer to the Pokémon species Wigglytuff as "Wigglytuff"
The "Great Bluff" thing is just a funny nickname the Spanish translation gave to the Guildmaster for no reason as far as I know lol, perhaps they took that word from English, or maybe they decided to use the last syllable of "Wigglytuff" and turn it into "Bluff", but I don't know why they didn't just use "Tuff" instead, or why this only happens in the Spanish version, or WHY the Guildmaster has a nickname in the first place...?? The rest of the guild members do keep their original names! (Chatot, Sunflora, Loudred, Bidoof, etc)
Anyways, I've always thought he was known as "Great Bluff" in other countries, but a few years ago I found out I was wrong haha. It's a shame! Great Bluff sounds super cute and having a nickname makes him seem like a more unique character in my opinion <:')💖💕
Same thing happens with the guild's name. While in every other language it's known as "Wigglytuff's Guild", the Spanish version refers to it as "Pokégremio de exploradores" ("Explorers Pokéguild"), or just "Pokégremio" ("Pokéguild") for short
I find it very interesting that the Spanish translators were the only ones who felt like playing around with these specific names haha, I've grown up knowing the Guildmaster and his guild like that and I like the way they sound a lot!💕
not a kh fan or a pokemon fan where did the character kidnapping come from. it's fascinating to observe but i'd like to know why
okay so basically, theres a kingdom hearts mobile game called kingdom hearts union cross (khux for short) thats fully lore relevant (now out of service as of 2021) that featured a very very loved character named brain (yes thats actually his name). He looks like this:
at the end of that game he woke up in a new place we had yet to see and thats pretty much where it left off.
In 2022, they announced a new mobile game, called missing link. he showed up in the trailer for it, lots of kh mobile game fans were very excited.
the thing is. we were told the game was releasing last year. we had a closed beta for it early last year and then... nothing. no news. not even an announcement that its been delayed or anything. this particular corner of the fandom has been slowly going more and more insane these past three years. people have been starving for any kingdom hearts news at all for the past three years and brain fans especially seem to have been going insane.
this is a fandom who go completely off the wall bonkers with no news. 'stairposting' was a thing after khux dried up, where everyone talked about their favourite step in a. random flight of stairs in an area of khux. i am not joking. 'stairposting' is a whole-ass tag filled with khux posts almost exclusively, i just grabbed a couple but theres a lot if you search it
(first post) (second post)
lots of jokes recently about how hes trapped on the balcony he was seen on in the trailer this past week. ive seen 'roofposting' and 'balconyposting' for a while.
enter the new pokemon legends ZA trailer. we got footage of the game for the first time on thursday, as well as getting to see what the protags look like.
this is the male protag.
all of the missing link fandom has decided this is brain now, that hes finally free from his balcony and decided to fuck off to pokemon france since his game is never coming out.
people were making posts about him being trapped on the balcony THAT MORNING before the announcement, even. and you know what the kicker is?
i'd like an orange juice. and. and an orange juice. and an orange juice. and and and and and an orange juice. and. and an oran. an orange juice. and an orange juice. and an orange juice.
for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal
before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"
and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"
agshjfsj you know what? sure. I can do this from an in-universe perspective too
for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to when it was on air.
firstly, you'd better hope it stays up on amazon prime, because it aired 24/7 for multiple decades, so the size of it is astronomical. there's a reason the other streaming services dropped it - the server costs alone are ridiculous. but even on prime there are ad breaks in it that it never used to have, because back then all the advertising was product placement, but modern advertisers want mid-roll ads, and they really break up some of the most emotional moments imo.
(and don't get me started on the music licensing btw - all of the changes are bad, but the song swap in episode 9775 killed me dead. awful)
not to mention that the vhs, laserdisc, dvd, and blu-ray releases have been out of print for years. and if you want to try torrenting it, to get it in even barely decent quality you're gonna need at least 300TB of free space, and that's not including the deleted scenes and director's commentary tracks, which are a whole other thing.
secondly, everyone has this parasocial thing where they feel like they grew up with Truman, because their mom kept it on in the house when they were a kid or w/e, and we need to just. get over it. I mean, he's just a guy. you're not special for liking him; everyone likes him.
like, some of you guys are worse about this than you were with Steve from Blue's Clues, and that's saying something. you've gotta move on.
and people need to be nicer to the actors who played his friends and family, too. like I know the ones who were adults at the start have a lot to answer for, but the kids were pushed into this by the industry just like he was! and they don't deserve to be cancelled on twitter just because their dad got them into acting as a 3yo or w/e. like. come on.
thirdly, because of the way the show ended, we need to actually address the fact that we don't know what happened to him? like, Truman wasn't some actor who quit, he was lied to about his whole life, and now nobody knows where he is! and after the SAG-AFTRA strike when the crew and extras were fighting to get paid for the work they did on that show, did fucking anybody think about Truman? if anyone's owed residuals, it's that guy.
I just feel like nobody's taking it seriously that he's not a celebrity? he's a kid who got shoved into a machine, and after what happened to him, it'd be completely fine if he never showed his face in public again.
(though personally, I want him to just so he can sue the shit out of everyone involved in his upbringing. but that's just me.)
anyway on a fandom level, if you want to help, the Truman Archival Project is looking for some eps that were lost due to corruption, and some scenes that got cut later. there's a list on the wiki, but there are a lot of gaps and old tape formats that need converting, so if you can help, go do that!
and Truman, if you're out there - I hope you're living a good life. whatever comfort and entertainment you bring to people really means nothing compared to the value of you getting to live a normal life. I hope you're having a good time, wherever you are.
when it comes down to it, what was done to you was awful. nobody deserves to have their most private moments shown to millions of people without their consent.
it's probably bad that we've normalized this experience.
OP I’m digging the little jab you made with how in-universe you wax poetic about respecting Truman’s dignity as a human being but then in the same breath turning around and insisting the public must keep as much of his life available to voyeuristic eyes for as long as possible, instead of maintaining his privacy as best as one can by letting his moments be left irretrievable. Just the sheer dissonance and hypocrisy 10/10.
Sure it sounds like hypocrisy, but did you consider that OPs stance is one of documenting accuracy. Yeah most contributors to the TAP are voyeuristic boomers, but there are good people making sure every ethical violation is being documented and catalogued. Having an accurate record of what happened to Truman will help future generations learn from our mistakes.
It takes at least three generations (minimum) to make real change. First, the generation that caused the harm, (boomers for Truman, but many of the YT/FB parents are genX or millennial as well). Then, the kids that were raised in the culture of harm, who decided to buck the tradition and do better with their kids; (genZ and genAlpha parents are being a bit more judicial with what they post, but we still got a long way to go). Finally, the generation raised by those who rebelled are able to teach their children why we don't go back to the old ways.
We owe it to our children's children to record our history accurately and completely. How can we learn from our mistakes, when they've been erased for whatever Amazon decided was more profitable? To paraphrase George Santayana: Those who fail to document, and learn from the past condemned their children to repeat it.
I really love this conversation, because yeah, when I wrote this I was thinking about both of these angles. what would it be like to be a fan and have so much nostalgia associated with the show, but also care about Truman as a human being and want him to have a good life?
like, if it was actually me, actually in this situation, what would my position on this be? would I want the show to be erased forever (for the sake of Truman), or would I want it to still be available, even potentially as a complete and thorough archive?
I think it's a complex issue, and there's not gonna be an 100% right answer to this 90s-movie-based thought experiment, but...personally, I think I would be a part of the archival group.
this is kind of a long one, but hear me out
let's talk about the legality of this situation, first of all, just to kind of explain the specific situation that I was picturing when writing that in-universe meta post.
(obvious "I'm not a lawyer" disclaimer - somebody please correct me about things if I'm wrong. but also, remember that this movie was set in the late 90s, so modern laws don't necessarily apply to this)
(also when it comes to opinions, this is a nuanced issue so I am begging you to read this post all the way through if you intend to respond. I am not letting this be a piss on the poor situation here.)
in the USA, when you're under 18, your parents consent to things for you. medical treatment, education, religion, whatever - legally, that's how that works. in the movie's universe, Truman was adopted by a TV studio, and that studio decided on his behalf that it was okay for him to be lied to and to have his entire life broadcast 24/7 to the entire world.
legally speaking, what they did up until he was 18 might be considered okay. like in-universe, a 90s court might look at that and go "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I mean you were technically his parents and you wanted this for him, is it really any different from what happens to other child actors?" and decide that everything that happened when he was a kid is 100% fine and legal. Truman might not even have a claim on any money from the show's profits, because the Coogan Act wasn't updated until 2000, and there were a ton more ways to get around it before then.
is any of this...a good thing? would it feel fine then, in that world, for streaming services to have the show available, but only the parts where he was a kid?
I mean no, that's fucked up, but it is a possibility.
think of all the reality shows in real life where the child actors stopped participating once they were adults/had control over their own situations. there are tons of shows still available that feature footage of kids who as adults are probably not chill with having all of that out there. but their parents consented for them, and they don't have power in this situation.
so basically 1. hey is this fucked up? yes! but also 2. to a point, this is genuinely how it works in real life and it's so dark and terrible if you think about it for more than five seconds. I'm not even joking when I say that children are one of the largest oppressed classes.
moving on
with the parts of The Truman Show where he was over 18, it gets dicier, because then he's just an adult man that they're lying to and basically holding captive. but...what if the network thought about that, and prepared for it? honestly I would expect them to try and cover their asses with this, considering how deeply, ethically questionable all of this is.
Truman would have turned 18 in the mid-80s. could the TV studio find enough "evidence" to argue that Truman would have difficulty living on his own, or that him leaving his current scenario would be damaging to him, and so it would be better for him to stay under their control? would a mid-80s judge grant a TV studio a conservatorship over this incredibly sheltered, deeply profitable man?
in the universe of the movie, yeah, maybe. in a world where a TV studio can adopt a child, why wouldn't they be able to also do this? people are granted manipulative conservatorships like this over celebrities in real life. so sure, that possibly could have happened to Truman.
so now we're in the position of: hey this sucks everything sucks, Truman might not even be able to succeed in suing them if he tried. he might get a lot of "sucks to be you, what money are you even gonna pay your lawyers with?" and be told to kick rocks. and The Truman Show might remain available to watch everywhere, perfectly legally.
that's the situation I was imagining when I was writing the in-universe meta post. as a legal system and/or as a society, it was decided that The Truman Show was allowed to be available online, and that the network could still make money off of it. Truman may not have received any of the profits, and he might not have had a legal right to them at all. if he did, maybe due to laws changing since the show went off-air, that's something that he would have to deal with in court. or if there was money that he could come take ownership of (a Coogan account, or wages marked as unclaimed property, etc), there wouldn't necessarily be a way for him to do that and stay out of the public eye.
no matter what, he would be risking his hard-earned privacy if he were to try to do anything about what happened to him.
now we get to the questions that are interesting to me:
1. if the entire show was somehow deleted (from the network's servers, from legal streaming sites, from cable TV reruns), would that ultimately benefit Truman?
I don't know.
The Truman Show was broadcast 24/7 for a huge amount of his life. he's a part of the cultural zeitgeist. his existence was entertainment for millions worldwide, and for as long as he's alive (and well beyond that), people will remember him. he was a phenomenon. his face was one that everyone recognized, and that people parasocially felt familiar with. and that's not even mentioning all of the home video releases that would still exist (and yes, also the piracy sites, because nothing fully disappears online).
Truman's privacy was thoroughly violated, and he can never undo that. it's not possible. he can live a private life somewhere, rely on the people that were trying to fight for him, but even they would have seen his most intimate moments, his most difficult personal struggles, and the awkward stuff he did when he thought he was alone.
even if every recording of the show were to magically self-destruct overnight, would it really do that much for him? would Truman be able to live out his life in peace, not being recognized on the street or being hounded by people wanting to know what happened to him? would deleting everything keep him from being pointed at in grocery stores, hearing strangers talking about him, seeing articles about himself online?
even with the show deleted, could he ever be sure that anyone would really know him as a complete and independent person?
maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think he could ever escape it.
2. if the entire show was somehow deleted...would that benefit the network?
yeah, probably. I think it would. in my meta post, I honestly wasn't imagining the poster working on archival projects just for the sake of voyeuristically watching lost episodes. it can definitely be read that way, and for someone who grew up with the show, they would probably get some level of enjoyment out of it. but I don't think that would be their main motivation.
when older shows or movies go to streaming now, a lot of the time, they get edited. sometimes they change music for licensing reasons, sometimes they try to clean things up to be more (stupidly, excessively) "child-friendly", but they also remove things that could be considered "offensive".
honestly, I disagree with that practice. it's like what ducking-awkward was talking about above - I think it's important to preserve media as it was originally presented, even if parts of it were bad. we do ourselves a disservice by making squeaky-clean versions of things that had complicated pasts, especially when we do it to appease advertisers or otherwise make money off of it.
like uhhh think about the film White Christmas! very fun movie, a total classic! it also sucks the military's dick an absurd amount, and has a song that's hardcore nostalgic for minstrel shows, with a degree of racism that feels...unbelievable.
if we were to edit the movie to be less offensive to a modern audience, we would be misrepresenting it as a film. we need to be able to acknowledge that media in the past (even media that has good qualities!) had fucked up stuff in it, and then we need to sit with that discomfort. it's important, so that we can learn from it, and be aware of how much of the media being made right now is going to seem messed up in a couple decades as society progresses.
now sometimes older stuff on streaming gets a content note instead, but editing and censoring still happens, all the time. episodes go down, lines get changed and ADR'd. even old youtube videos (on popular/respected channels) can have parts cut out of them or changed, in a way where nobody would be able to tell that the original contained something objectionable.
in the universe of the film, The Truman Show started in the 60s and ran through the late 90s. if it was put on streaming services when those started getting big...what do you think they would edit out?
a corporate entity took a baby and subjected him to a manipulative social experiment, and recorded all of it for the world to see. when putting it online, would they leave in anything that might make the network seem...less than respectable? situations where someone should have stepped in to help him, but didn't? personal moments that would really highlight just how much they exploited him? there are lots of things that would have seemed okay in the 60s-90s but would have a general audience going, "hey...wait..." by the late 00s-20s.
in a world where that's the case, and where Truman's own personal wishes are unknown...would you be willing to convert old VHS tapes that someone recorded from live TV, to make sure you had all of the network's mistakes documented? to work so that, in case Truman ever wanted it, he could have evidence of everything that happened to him?
yeah, I think I might. I think I might do that. I'm not saying it's an 100% innocent choice to make, but I don't think anything is in life. and if I were in the exact same scenario as the fictional person I imagined in my meta post, I think I would probably do the same thing.
3. would historians want The Truman Show to be deleted?
probably not. I'm not one, so I can't speak for historians as a group, but if something was so culturally significant that it captivated the entire world for 30 years, it would be really important for us to have good records of it to understand...well, more about ourselves as a society.
why did people find this compelling? what about it drove people to obsess over it? why did it lead to such strong feelings of connection to a complete stranger trapped in a fictional town? what did people think about it, as a whole - did the majority of people approve of the network doing this? did people watch it like watching a car crash, out of morbid curiosity? what were the protests like, when it came to the group that was arguing that Truman should be told about his situation and given the choice to leave?
like, look...to compare it to a (very different but somewhat relevant) real-life scenario...would you delete all of Harry Potter?
I'm a trans person. I despise J. K. Rowling to my very core. if I could press a button that means she never makes another cent, I wouldn't even think, I would just do it. she's actively harming people, and using the power of her wealth to do it.
but would I delete all of Harry Potter? books, movies, video games, merch, etc. would I erase all of it?
no. I mean fuck, I lived through the popularity of this franchise, I know what things were like. HP was so culturally significant that if I did erase it, there would be huge gaps in future historians' knowledge of the 90s-10s. like it or not, historically, it's kind of important.
it shaped the way we look at media. it was a huge phenomenon the likes of which we might not ever see again in our lifetimes. and when people in the future are looking into what a horrible person J. K. Rowling is right now, what she's doing to attack people and how she's using her power for just...evil? they'd want to know the details of how she got that power. they'd want to understand how references to her media worked their way into pretty much everything else. how she was seen as progressive for so long, and how politicians and evangelicals called her books satanic. how fan communities formed and the drama that happened in them, how lives were changed and saved and ruined, legendary and beautiful fanfiction written and deleted, the spread of that horrible feeling when something you once loved was made by someone you now hate. fucking...snape wives. this may all seem stupid, but this is all a part of the big picture of understanding why and how people are the way that we are, and what we were like in that era.
that's what The Truman Show would be like, in the universe of the movie: media that affected the lives of millions, that made a lot of money for some truly horrible people, and something that can help us to understand what our horrifying, capitalistic, complicated human society is like, and why it's like that.
would you erase that from history? would it do any good to society if you did? I'm actually asking: what would you do with all of this?
it's just...it's something interesting to think about.
final thoughts:
okay, I'm done talking about The Truman Show. let's talk about real life
most states in the USA don't have legal protections for child actors. out of the ones that do, most of them don't have comprehensive legal protections for the kids working on reality TV shows, let alone for child youtubers, the children of influencers, etc.
for the kids in those situations now, would deleting all of their content make their lives better? would keeping it around provide evidence of the ways they've been mistreated? would historians want the media preserved, to look back on all of this and try to understand why we allowed this to happen in the first place?
I don't know. I really, truly, do not know.
I don't think there's a perfect answer to any of this, especially when so much damage has already been done. but it would be nice if, someday, we could protect children that are in these situations. not like any of these "protect the kids" laws that are blatant censorship and do nothing, but actual protections for kids who are being exploited, even and especially by people close to them, and who have legal control over them.
I still think about the kids who have their biggest tantrums memorialized online for all time, their teenage mistakes available for any future employer to find, reuploaded in tiktoks and reels and shorts and whatever else we'll end up inventing. kids who are tormented and harassed for the sake of "content", who might grow up and have to deal with everyone remembering their most mortifying moments, and who might not even have any claim to the money people made off of them without their consent.
we can't make stuff like that go away permanently, but we could regulate it, and help protect kids who become public figures. in 2024, California expanded the Coogan Act to include child social media content creators. other states could put these kinds of protections in place too, and this could change.
maybe - and this is just a thought, but maybe - it's pretty bad that we've normalized this experience. maybe that's something we should work on.
See I'm just a fucking nerd and was wondering how much space you'd really need for a show running that long and OP you weren't far off with 300 Terabytes
And thats assuming it's been 1080p 24fps with full quality sound since it's start, which it probably wouldn't be, so 300 Terabytes is probably even closer
Just for out of curiosity I wanted to see how much that would rlly cost
Here's how much 430 Terabytes would cost using various different types of drives
(note: some of these would be borderline/actually impossible to make work, more just as a highlight of how much storage costs)
Standard 1 TB nvme drives (this is the most common drive found in a personal computer): $25,800 (USD)
1TB data drives (also common, though slower and cheaper): $21500
oh believe me, when I wrote that number, I wasn't just guessing. I was also being a nerd and going, "well personally, I prefer my HD video to be at minimum 1GB/hour, ideally more for decent bitrate in dark or noisy scenes. so...30 years, 24/7..."
like nowadays I go for 2-2.5GB/hour files if I want something to be really good to look at, but yeah, 300TB was the number I calculated for "barely decent quality." xD not that file size always translates directly to video bitrate ofc, but you get it!
that is wild though, I didn't actually look up server costs! I just looked at my own 14TB HDD and went, "hmm. expensive."
do you ever know something way too specific and don't even know who to tell about it. like "oh in super mario party they reused victory animations from available characters in mario party 10." who do i tell this information. do i send a letter to my grandma. do i text my therapist. do i call a random number and tell them about it.
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
origamiaround
