Read our Reader/Apocalymon slow burn fic, Slice of Life, here. (Updates on Saturdays when I remember)
Check out our Apocalymon Ask Blog here.
If you're gonna vaguepost about us, block our main ( @rooks-roost ) so I don't have to see it. (Yes, seriously.)
DNI/BYF:
(soft dni) proship/anti-anti/etc. (this is just a personal comfort thing and should not be compared to anything else on this list, please. Our sys doesn't identify as antiship, but I include this heads up because we tend to get way too "it's that deep" about all the art we like lol, and ik that can rub a lot of folks in that community the wrong way.)
anti-otherkin
homophobic/transphobic
terf/radfem/swerf
transmed
queer exclusionist
racist, pro cop
ableist
anti-endogenic, anti-nontraumagenic, anti-thoughtform, etc.
Look I know it's been like. Little under a week since Digimon UP dropped and all, but man I am struggling so hard to give a shit about it. I've never played idlers before and all I can think is "this is an ice maker game" every damn time I try to open it and go "I want to see the silly little sprites."
Like at that point I just want a sprite gallery--- that's the most enjoyment I've gotten out of it so far since the game play is "babysit the Holo Machine while number go up."
All the sauce went into the visuals for this game and even then we need more avatar gear imo.
Also as much as I want to be disappointed that this isn't a v-pet app, I did get reminded that there was literally no advertising for DUP besides the sprites themselves and really zoomed in shit so you couldn't see like any of the UI.
I just kind of clowned on myself with that expectation ig.
Still disappointed DUP isn't really a game though.
Look I know it's been like. Little under a week since Digimon UP dropped and all, but man I am struggling so hard to give a shit about it. I've never played idlers before and all I can think is "this is an ice maker game" every damn time I try to open it and go "I want to see the silly little sprites."
Like at that point I just want a sprite gallery--- that's the most enjoyment I've gotten out of it so far since the game play is "babysit the Holo Machine while number go up."
All the sauce went into the visuals for this game and even then we need more avatar gear imo.
guys you don't want the full essay on beatbreak and parasocial production, this thing is gonna be dissertation length at the rate i'm going
(you very much do want the full essay, i promise, but it would be responsible of me to wait until beatbreak is done to write it)
(doesn't stop me from constantly being frustrated at lost potential and willful ignorance on the part of the production team but that just means you get my bottled rage in one dose instead of a billion posts of me bitching about beatbreak lol. yes, i know i've posted a few times about my disappointment but i also have been trying to keep it to a reasonable quantity because lord knows there's only so much you can throw into the tags before people start blocking you for ruining their enjoyment of a series. which, fair, curate your browsing experience, but also i want people to be more critical of the things they enjoy because that will only help push the creators of these things to make them better!!! graaaah!!!)
going through the digimon tags as is my wont and i think i need to clarify what i mean by "parasocial production" here, because before i was calling it the dickens-moffat effect for lack of a more concise term to use lmfao. and unfortunately "concise shorthand" for me is also "obtuse bullshit" for everyone else, as funny as the term is to me personally.
(for context, i'm talking about how dickens would write his novels in a serialized form, while also referring to the absolute chaos that was the end of bbc sherlock where the fandom was convinced everything super bad was actually leading to something SOOOOO good i promise wait there has to be more it isn't good yet)
in this specific scenario i'm talking about how the production crew of beatbreak is actively looking at what we as a fandom are doing and there is no insulation between production and fandom. the way i was explaining it to some of my friends is that it's a little bit like if you have a fanfic author who gets popular while they're writing a fic, then starts to change the fic in a way that is more in line with what will get them attention as opposed to what their original creative vision was.
as someone who's done creative bullshit for decades now, it should be clarified that there's a difference in intentionality here. when you're collaborating with others (whether that be through rubber duckying your ass through a piece of writing or getting critique), there's an element of selection to what you actually implement into the final process. you kill your darlings, leave things on the cutting room floor, blah blah blah.
i would be curious to know whether there's any selective process in terms of the creative vision of beatbreak, rather than what will get the most clicks. we've seen throughout the gift arc what appears to be a lack of cohesive creative vision. it comes across as some dogshit first draft garbage. would we get a lot of the things we're getting if this series had insulation between production and publication (and thus the crew and visible fandom reaction)?
who fucking knows? we don't live in this timeline.
anyways next time anyone wants vague post about something i explicitly said "i want to wait until the series ends because it would be irresponsible if i assumed what i think is going on is going on," maybe block my main ( @rooks-roost ) while you're at it so i don't have to see it in the fucking tags
i come here to give a shit about what i watch but i also work a full time job so whatever i guess.
god this whole gift arc really is such a nothingburger of wasted potential
i think when it officially concludes i'm going to do an ep-by-ep treatment to write it better than they did because genuinely other than cold rains??? this arc has been slop
miharu has about as much personality as 1% milk when she conceptually could have been the most interesting thing we've had in digimon (a partner who is subordinate to their digimon).
the head writer should know better, he's been in the fucking industry for over 20 years. do better.
guys you don't want the full essay on beatbreak and parasocial production, this thing is gonna be dissertation length at the rate i'm going
(you very much do want the full essay, i promise, but it would be responsible of me to wait until beatbreak is done to write it)
(doesn't stop me from constantly being frustrated at lost potential and willful ignorance on the part of the production team but that just means you get my bottled rage in one dose instead of a billion posts of me bitching about beatbreak lol. yes, i know i've posted a few times about my disappointment but i also have been trying to keep it to a reasonable quantity because lord knows there's only so much you can throw into the tags before people start blocking you for ruining their enjoyment of a series. which, fair, curate your browsing experience, but also i want people to be more critical of the things they enjoy because that will only help push the creators of these things to make them better!!! graaaah!!!)
bought DWNO like half a year ago and am only now playing it
i'm still in chapter 1 and have two ultimates, occasionally am getting confused and frustrated by silly things, but overall the game has a loop that is crunching something in my brain.
i have never played a world style game before now.
i don't think i'm doing it exactly right but i also don't think there's a right way to do it and i'm just vibing.
Set after the events of Digimon Story: Time Stranger.
When Aegiomon sends the Agent out of the Akashic Record, he fails to foresee the consequences of breaking the tooth of a gear from its proper place. Chronomon's plan has succeeded— Aegiomon bears the curse of Timekeeper, guarding the Record. It's a future he accepted upon his lone shoulders in his naivete, convinced its weight would be bearable.
But a broken gear cannot turn forever.
Agent Dan Yuki, coming to after being ejected from the Akashic Records, witnesses the intro to an anime that shouldn't exist at Vision Square. The looming shape of the Wall of Hope ghosts the edges of the horizon, and this time, no Operator calls to guide the missing tooth that has snagged the fabric of time yet again.
I'm forever mad that for all the remakes and revamps and god knows what else Adventure gets they always leave my goat Apocalymon out. IF HE'S NOT THERE WHAT'S EVEN THE POINT..
After episode 33 of beatbreak and Ichinosuke being one of, if not the only black coded characters in the series so far I started thinking "Wait, surely there are some brown/black civilians in beatbreak...they wouldn't just have every one be an antagonist, right?"
So I went back and checked, and as you can see in the image above...it's fucking dire. 16 brown characters with only 4 being named, and half of them being antagonists, not to mention Ichinosuke being the only one with an actually black hairstyle... This is not a good look for a show that is trying to show that it can handle various societal topics!!!
And I'm saying this as someone who's been enjoying beatbreak! I do like the show and I can see what it's going for but I'd be lying if I said this didn't make a lot of the theming feel....hollow, if that makes sense.
I do still wanna hold out hope that we can get some brown/black characters that are at the very least civilians that survive but, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried.
guys i think we overhyped beatbreak too hard because holy fuck they went from juggling to fumbling to actively spiking that ball straight into the ground like a football.
i feel like this episode is a masterclass in what not to do when you have a plot. the characters don't feel like themselves, they lowkey baited us with a reina ep, and then she had 2.5 significant scenes in the ep.
we wasted time with tactics one last week that could have better been spent on building up a relationship with tomoro and miharu. you two have met twice. why are you just ignoring the claim that she's a cult leader. you SAW HER take the cult leader helmet off.
yes. tomoro is a character who will defend anyone he sees as an outcast like him. but two seconds of "yeah i have an older sibling i love too!" earlier in the ep does not a contradiction to terrorist cult bullshit make.
notice too how he said "i'll explain later" to reina in that final fight? you know why? because if he said "they're accusing her of being the gift cult leader" she would have been like "oh that's bad let's take her into OUR custody" but NOPE "no time to explain fight!!!"
like for fuck's sake.
if the point of the gift arc was to have miharu get close to tomoro and thus make it harder for him to deal with the cognitive dissonance of her being the leader of a hyperviolent cult... maybe, just maybe, we could have had more scenes in the GIFT ARC about miharu doing that? instead of her standing ominously in the background murmuring his name like a 12 year old with a boy band crush???
nah we had to introduce tactics one for a filler episode.
i think it stings so much because you contrast these last two episodes with maybe the best stand alone episode in all of digimon? there are writers involved in this project that know what the fuck they're doing which makes this so insulting to me!
since the end of tactics i've been doing the equivalent of sticking out a task because you need to see it done. it has been painful watching ep after ep waste my time.
All caught up on beatbreak and ngl while i wouldn't say i hated the ep it was kinda sour for me for one reason specifically
Spoilers for ep 33 below
So far Ichinosuke is like, beatbreak's third named brown character and considering his hairstyle he's also the first black coded character and ngl the fact that so far the only brown characters in beatbreak have been antagonists (granit is a civilian now but he is also a former antagonist) is not sitting well with me at all
I've also been noticing a lack of black/brown civilians, so much so that I am currently in the process of checking past episodes to see if i can prove myself wrong but I am 12 episodes in and it's not looking good...
Part of me still hopes that we might get an episode with brown characters that aren't antagonists but it's looking pretty fucking dire rn
We probably wont ever see Tactics 1 again. Really felt like a waste of an episode when we've already done the Tomoro and Raito stuff over and over. I dont understand why they didnt just make it GIFT members instead of random Tactics leftovers that did not and will not matter.
EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY! UGH!!!
FUCKING WASTE OF TIME IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY!!
long ass rant below the cut. you have been warned.
there are so many ways this episode could have been WAY more interesting but the writers chose none of them and instead gave us the most egregious kind of "filler" possible (i really hesitate to call a lot of stuff filler but this fits the bill)
we have:
fucked up weird animation
characters you haven't seen in forever or thought about in forever suddenly showing up only for 2/3 of them to get kidnapped and have no interesting character moments
TOMORO is the one that doesn't get drugged? HUH??? you go out of your way to show chiropmon going "weird" multiple times. chiropmon does nothing about it. makoto gets drugged. you could have had MAKOTO interacting with raito (something we hadn't seen yet)
hell! you could have had reina interacting with raito (let her call him a jackass! the narrative is too kind to that little shit as it stands!). why? pristimon has a refined sense of smell from "drinking" so much tea.
BUT NO EDGY BLUE FUCKER IS HERE AWWW YEAH WE GOTTA GET SOME CLIPS OF HIM INTERACTING WITH TOMORO! (i was telling one of the discords i'm in that i low key think the decision to do this was to get raitomo shippers to do free advertising for the show and i'm not convinced i'm wrong. no tremendous hate to raitomo shippers but i don't see the chemistry and i think this kind of shit is beatbreak's equivalent to teen wolf queerbaiting but that's another essay for another time when i don't have things to do)
the ONLY thing i think i liked about this ep was like. we see the digimon doing stuff on their own ig. raito confirmed caring about monodramon is nice.
now to be clear on my "filler" definition here: i don't think every episode has to have plot or shit to be worth the airspace. for me, "filler" is an episode that feels like it's just there to say you had an episode.
in appmon, there's an episode that's a series recap with silly things in between (a clip show) that they did in part because they got moved to a different time slot; this is the most rudimentary kind of filler. it adds nothing but reminding you of what has happened before.
in transformers: prime (bear with me here), there's a clip show episode that could similarly constitute "filler." but while being a recap, it also has a narrative frame that gives the clip show new context and texture. it tells us something about the world and makes us appreciate what the writers are doing better. nothing of plot relevance is done. this is "filler," but it is still filling.
then you have the episode of beatbreak that just came out. it isn't a clip show, but the thing about it is that we didn't really learn anything new about the world of the story. "raito bullied other tactics teams! :(" yeah what the fuck else is new he's an asshole. this was some first draft shit that really comes across as wanting to be subversive about the beach episode trope and instead fails to deliver on both beach episode needs and story needs.
"raito is working with a five star" is maybe the only important part of that whole episode, and it isn't given enough gravity in the moment for me to take it seriously. we're supposed to think the five stars are this corrupt organization thanks to klay being our intro to them! gasp! "you're working with the five stars?!" tomoro says. two camera shots later he smiles at raito because he says "i want to get stronger and beat you tomoro" GAG SHUT THE FUCK UP.
that writing doesn't tell us why raito is interested in working with the five stars. it doesn't establish anything new about raito and essentially wastes our time for about five minutes at the end of the episode with the writing team winking at raitomo shippers like "yes we see you blowing up the beatbreak tags." it's not in character for tomoro to brush off someone working with the five stars so easily. it's bad writing for him not to be more pissed than a quick ":( but five stars bad"
we don't learn anything new about granit or hotaruko either. they're there to just get kidnapped.
this is the kind of episode that the more i think about it the more angry it'll make me, and that's disappointing off the heels of what is maybe the best singular episode of digimon in the entire franchise (i am not exaggerating). "cold rain" was insane.
Digimon fans spamming tweets with the latest new evolution (without any content warning) just 2.5 seconds after the latest episode dropped and before its available on most sites just so they can have a hit tweet without caring about how many people they have spoiled:
