#making spaghetti

[ukelicious]

ok so sorry i need to talk about this podcast that i'm listening to because i think i've pinpointed why it's so hilariously bad to me. also i'm not going to namedrop it because i'll only shit on arden season 2 like that. it's really not that bad. but ok so the whole premise is that it's this guy making a podcast that ends up being a whole in universe thing and the other characters that end up being part of the story all listen to the podcast for information on what he knows and to make sure they're all on the same page for stuff right. but he's also doing it as kind of an entertainment thing which is why we the listeners are here. anyway in this episode i just listened to the guy started off doing a whole thing like "damn... i'm going behind my colleagues backs... i can't tell them what i'm doing. i'm sneaking around and here's my plan [lays it all out on the podcast]" and then not 2 minutes later he starts referencing them listening to the podcast and talking to them on it. LIKE BROTHER! you cannot have it both ways!! well actually if you played it differently you could, if you weren't canonically the one editing this podcast and putting it out or w/e someone else could have slipped that clip in. but it's all you! takes me right out of the story. i cannot take anything they say seriously. also they introduced a new voice actor whose performance for a character straddles the line between horny and somehow offensive in a way i can't pin down. that's beside the point i was making but it sure isn't helping matters

[gnael]

where are the black simtubers who are doing legacy challenges I would like to watch

[thecaffeinatedkansasbabe-blog]

[occasionalinanity]

why does some of this music sound like harry potter

[ukelicious]

WARNING! DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS ASK UNTIL YOU ACTUALLY FINISH KUUGA! I AM SENDING THIS PREEMPTIVELY BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO HAVE IT WHEN YOURE DONE.

Image buffer

Ok so I wanna hear your thoughts on the final fight specifically. I really adored how after all this hyping up of Ultimate Kuuga’s destructive power, rather than it being something flashy and explosive, it was… down to earth. Brutal. Just two dudes punching the shit out of each other in a way that was Difficult To Watch.

The final battle of Shin Rider felt like a callback to this, honestly. Just heartwrenching impact after heartwrenching impact. It’s not big or extravagant, but instead it shows that having to fight… sucks.

Sorry, I think about this particular fight A LOT.

YEAH YEAH i completely get what you mean. your buffer worked - i didn't see this at all until i had already finished the show and compared it to that one part in black (you know, The One). i think, as i chew through everything that happened in this show, that there's more i have to say about kuuga on the whole than i've managed to render right now, mostly about how it feels like they did really manage to distill a lot of the core feelings i've gotten from showa rider into something new and interesting and fun that they could do now that it's in vogue and possible to have the episodes a little more interconnected than they were able to get away with (sans a couple areas, like the 4-episode demon world stretch in black rx) previously.

the setup to the fight really worked for me. i think it was the right choice to watch the last 3 episodes on the same night so that we could start with ichijou, just some guy, just some human guy being the one to kill... that rose lady. you know the one. the one who has been around as a boss from the start of the show and who had a couple faceoffs before with him? you know, the one who, with her dying breaths, told ichijou that she realized humans could be equals to them, capable of the same destruction that they were? that she wished she could have faced off with ichijou again? that lady.

they had been setting the grongi and at least godai up as equals for a while there - there's the obvious stuff with the back and forth "i need to get stronger!" moments but the one in specific that stood out to me was when tsubaki was doing autopsies on the bodies that they were able to recover and he was like oh shit... these guys look just like kuuga on the inside?

kamen rider has this feeling running through it, this essence of "that could have been me, but it wouldn't have been me, couldn't have been me, because i love humanity too much, but i can only say that because after experiencing this, i'm still me," which is an odd feeling to put into words, but i think it's one that many people are familiar with. to come out of something on the other side feeling worn down and miserable but victorious and look back and see other people who have been through the same or similar things to you and for whatever reason, came out the other end differently.

hongo escaping being borged before they were able to complete his brainwashing, yuki being the one picked as a scapegoat and therefore realizing that what was going on around him was wrong, shigeru just straight up being confident enough to manage to trick people into borging him, nobuhiko being chosen as the favorite son just because he was the one who stuck around for a while leaving kotaro able to make his own decisions about what is right and wrong. these are all things that each of the riders did have an active say in, but they're also a bit dependent on luck to fully and correctly pull off. and i think godai also kind of picked up on that vibe. he's both reassuring people that everything is going to be okay because he believes in himself and his love for the people around him, and he does, but he still plans for the off chance that things can go wrong by telling ichijou how to kill him should things really go to shit.

that's it think the thing i took away most from this fight. the visuals are great, the whole thing just feels raw and uncomfortable to watch, which it should! this is the reality of everything that's been going on here behind the suits. we should feel glad that kamen rider doesn't have to fight anymore once this is over. kuuga flirts with this level of reality through the show and they completely full on commit to it at the end. but i think everything leading up to it and the context of the fight really helped me to put my finger this feeling that i've been feeling through the entirety of the show.

so. there you go. those are my stream of consciousness thoughts the morning after finishing kuuga... so much more to think about later!!

[ukelicious]

been thinking about "as far as i'm concerned all robots are transgender" for a couple days because when am i not thinking about robots. but also i don't want to write an essay on someone else's post so i'm doing it myself. i think there's a simple explanation for this one: there's an additional axis that you have to consider when you're considering the gender expression of non-human entities and that's how human or non-human they can and want to appear and be recognized as. i call it the humanity axis. 

("humanity" is an oversimplification - a lot of the times when you're discussing robots you're talking about them in the context of a sci-fi story which some of the time can have robots living in largely non-human societies (for an easy silly example off the top of my head think BMO who lives with exactly one human for most of his life) but even then we're contending with the gender dynamics of the organic beings around them that make up the society they're based in. not to mention that we ourselves as humans view and create everything from a human-centric point of view that's kind of inescapable imo. for the sake of getting through this with any kind of coherency i'm going to use the term "humanity")

the closest thing that i can imagine to be what i would consider a “cisgender robot” would be a robot that was created by robots in a world where humans don’t have an influence. this can’t really be the case – robots being inorganic have to be created by some outside being and therefore will always be formed in the image of the societal opinions of their makers. you’re working with a blank slate here; you don’t have to be bogged down by what evolution might just decide on its own. sure, they can in turn create their own robots that may be influenced by other factors and get further and further removed from their original designs, but that begs the question of whether it’s possible to dilute the original influence far enough to where it’s no longer a factor. personally, i don’t think so? 

so, we can agree: every robot has the influences of humanity in them but is still distinctly different, creating the humanity axis. there’s a place that they each physically on there depending on how they were constructed; there’s also a choice each of them must make as to how much they want to adhere to their assigned spot. to fully be human is not an option, as they would have to not know they’re a robot, and to be fully robot isn’t an option either, as they were made by humans. i suppose you could be happy with your assigned place on the humanity axis but you could never truly be viewed by the organic society around you as anything but “other” unless you tried to fully pass as human. then we can bring in characters who never had to consider the humanity axis until, well, circumstances changed (things like cyborgs or mind backups or a good ol’ brain in a jar) and now they have to learn that they actually experienced a kind of privilege that they weren’t even really aware of until they had to question their relationship to their humanity. they don’t even have to view it as a bad thing – it’s not a bad thing. you can be very confident and happy with who you are and your status outside the traditional human framing of whatever society you’re in. being othered isn’t always a bad thing and some can take solace in the fact that they’re able to dictate who they are without having to technically abide by whatever norms biology has been divided into. it lends itself easily to exploring beyond what’s been set out for you from the start. not always, not every robot wants that or cares to explore it, but it can. 

a robot can be a girl and inhuman; they can have no relationship to human gender and identify very closely with humanity. it's about the interactions with those that made you. it's about having to dictate who you are for yourself. tl;dr: yeah every robot is transgender

[ukelicious]

thinking about cable management and routine maintenance in cyborg boys. here's what we got this morning

shigeru loves the aesthetic. he's married to it. i think he'd be the most into making sure that his insides looked all sleek and nice and organized. he takes pride in his borg body. personally i'm torn between him color coordinating his wires to match his whole rose theme (he could use green wires like the plants are growing out of him...) or the fact that the stronger suit is kind of the default color of most wires (so he could probably just use what was put in him originally) but he'd absolutely make sure that his insides looked as clean as possible.

kazuya would have to have his insides really organized kind of by necessity. it wouldn't be an aesthetic thing for him i don't think but considering he's gotta use that repair machine (since he has no boys to fix him) and that needs to be able to target a specific part of his mechanics completely autonomously to be able to repair it, things have to be tied up tight in there so that they don't shift when he's moving around. also, super-1 is canonically beautiful, and they REALLY like showing off his borg blueprints so i think they tried to make him look nice and clean in there.

kazami was NOT clean at all when they made him (look, they were racing against time in there) but yuki absolutely went in and reworked him afterwards. having a scientist boyfriend has some perks! i think it would be a matter of pride for yuki but also i think a way for him to redeem his destron time a little bit. he can use his skills that he got there to make kazami even better.

speaking of yuki his arm was fixed up by a bunch of scientists that liked him and cared about him. i think that they did their best to make the connection as easy and as natural as possible. there probably was some nerve damage from the acid and everything and i have my own headcanons about his range of feeling in the arm and how everything works there but i think they would have done their best to save as much as they could and make it comfortable for him.

hongo is the messiest out of all of them on the inside because he wouldn't want to open himself up and do routine maintenance i don't think. he's fine with all the human things like brushing his teeth and showering but having to open himself up and blow the dust off of his parts and worrying about how all the wires in him are connected is something that he doesn't want to do and doesn't trust a lot of other people to do. hayato and taki can clean him up but if he's on his own for a while away from the two of them he just won't and he'll get all dirty inside and hayato will have to open him up and wipe his parts off when they see each other again. i think he's prone to overheating because of this <3

amazon is made of meat :)

[ukelicious]

i spent my time at the gym this morning just thinking about hayato and how much of his character i base off this one interaction he had with taki:

the context for this one of course being that this is the end of an episode and hayato's seeing the little kid that he helped get picked up by their dad and the two of them going off and hayato just randomly drops this line which prompts taki to shoot him the really concerned look shown and then the two of them just pack up and walk off joking like normal. it's one that struck me while watching as just... completely out of the norm for how these things typically go? hayato sometimes just says shit Sure... but you know how sometimes you'll want to make a joke about something in your life that's a little dark and people who don't necessarily know that this happened to you or that this is how you talk about these things will be like "?!" for a moment before they realize oh, this is coming from a personal place and this isn't an invitation to push the issue but is a thing they're comfortable joking with me about and knowing that i'm not going to make a big deal about it, and shrug it off and continue? that's the vibe i got from this scene.

because hongo's the first kamen rider everyone knows his story and there's no escaping that; hayato being the second means that he gets some form of shield from the eyes of both the public and from those around him and i feel like he's the kind of person who appreciates that. for the show specifically, it doesn't really go into how hayato was made other than the fact that hongo was the one who saved him, and he obviously feels some sort of appreciation and devotion towards the guy for doing so. even tachibana's pep talks for hayato (which i constantly joked about when they were happening) were geared more towards "hongo would get back up and keep fighting!" instead of "you should get back up and keep fighting to save people!" which i don't think means anything negative; taking a different path to get to the same goal is still getting to the same goal, after all. i just thought it was an interesting shift.

it's so many little things that build up over time. i like the coin scene where he jokes about the coin being double sided and it is, he's calling hongo on his shit before he pulls it but still goes with it. when he got blinded and hopped back on his bike like "i'm a cyborg, these enhanced senses have to be good for SOMETHING, right?" his little inferiority complex that comes through sometimes. how he always seems to make time to go visit the new boys and make sure they're doing okay. he really cares about the people around him. he comes off as a guy who wants to be happy and act silly and have that joy in his life.

and i don't mean to neglect him when i talk about kamen rider - i feel like i talk about him less than i talk about hongo in part because prying into him this way feels almost rude to do in public? the way he comes across feels like something that he's worked on. i don't think he really wants people to know his backstory. i think this is part of why he pairs so well with hongo, because despite the complex he has someone to take the pressure of being known in that way off of him and he can instead compensate for the skills that hongo lacks in the ways that he wants to appear good at, being fun and social. i respect his wishes for privacy at this time. i do however also think that he understands the importance of a good offhand loredrop dark joke to people he trusts and i am so glad that taki's the one that he picks there.