it's actually so crazy how much the simpsons would fucking suck if it didn't have any of the simpsons characters. just a bunch of shots of empty houses and streets for half an hour while nothing happens. that would be so badddd lol
yeah that tends to happen when you remove characters from media. without characters its all just background. i guess movies set in scenic locations would still land as kinda nature docs but even then
the Rennala fight is extremely fucking funny because like. you break into a grieving woman's room and act out the "how many kindergarteners could you take in a fight" meme, and then the opening dialogue for phase 2 implies that what you're fighting is actually a projection of Renalla at her full power conjured up by her daughter Ranni. but then you kill "her" (the projection of Renalla) and her final words are "Little Ranni... weave thy night into being..."
except they're not actually her final words because you reload and she's sitting there just fine. so what actually happened was you killed Ranni's tulpa of her mom. which means Ranni made her own mom say the equivalent of "my daughter... my favorite child who has never done anything wrong ever... you were right about everything... you're going to win at politics... and your waist is snatched..."
to fallout 4's immense discredit in the matter, its decision to mandatorily define all female player characters as lawyers who married a soldier puts it behind literal fallout 1 on "does the female character feel like you're the punchline to a joke"
to elaborate on that a bit, it's actually toothgrittingly misogynistic that they contrived a scenario where there are two player characters and one of them was clearly conceptualised as The Wife of the Male Player Character, while the other was made as a character first. it's remarkable they managed to do that in a game with a character creator and no mechanical distinction between genders
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
I hope gta6 flops I hope rockstar goes under I hope it kills the AAA industry as it currently exists and stigmatizes the concept of ever-increasing development costs in pursuit of ever-bigger games for years to come and we enter a golden age of low budget game development as consumers flock to playing indie games
To boot, I just learned there will be no disk version of the game. I am not buying this game, there is no way I am spending 80€ on a game I can't lend to friends.
Say what you will about Fringe (2008), but as far as "bullshit excuses to keep your leads with obvious chemistry out of the sack (because writing relationships is hard)," goes, "he knocked up her alternate-universe doppelganger while she was pretending to be her" is a pretty damn good one.
Like damn girl, I don't blame you for feeling some kind of way about that.
Soviet swimmer Maria Havrish congratulates her rival Elena Kovalenko, who defeated her in the breaststroke competition at the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR in Moscow, 1956 (photo by Lisa Larsen)
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