#media babble

[valuedeversourcecustomer]

it pains me that we get a thousand modernized smurfs reboots for a target demographic of absolutely nobody in 2025 but no reboot of snorks. say what you will, both were terrible cartoons of their time but the antagonist of snorks is just a kind of pile instead of an antisemitic charicature and his name is "bigweed" and i think that counts for something

[squiditty]

Watching Halloween is Grinch Night

Heh, the Grinch has sensory issues in this one, too.  Funny how they kept that little bit of continuity despite ignoring just about everything else.

...And "Max's Lament" still makes me get teary-eyed no matter how old I get.

[squiditty]

Actually, there's a quote from Laura Riding that, I think, far better expresses the "Give me that!" frustration that so often underlies the creation of fanfiction: Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift; It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it.

full_metal_ox on Livejournal, by way of fanficrants

[squiditty]

In which Squid attempts to liveblog, part 0

Thanks to some recent discussions I've seen on Tumblr, I’ve finally downloaded Act 1 of Katawa Shoujo, the (in)famous disability-themed visual, and am planning on playing and commentating and/or liveblogging it as my time, spoons, and coursework allow.   If the first part makes a good (or bad) enough impression, I may give the full game a try, but for now I’m going to stick with try-before-I-torrent.

Prior to that nudge, the opinions I’d seen of the game had been primarily positive- what critique I witnessed of the game generally seemed to come from people who had never played any of it and were convinced (sometimes with ableist-sounding undertones of their own) that it could not possibly be anything but offensive.  Those who had tried it, including those who self-identified as disabled, generally seemed to have liked it- and while I know that “people who post at Fandom Secrets” is hardly a representative population sample, and “secrets which I chose to save to my hard drive” hardly representational even of that group, I feel like I should share what quotes I have easy access to since it’s reactions like these are a significant part of my first pre-impressions  going in to this.

 “Seeing non-villainous characters with facial deformities (even if most of them are burns inflicted after birth that don’t even look as bad as burns in the real world) makes me think that people with scars like mine, or far worse, can be seen as capable, worth talking to, and even attractive by the general population someday.”

“….Before, it was something I just tried to ignore and force past, refusing to consider myself disabled because ‘it’s not like I have a missing leg or something’.  But after seeing the characters (especially Hisao) face their disabilities and adapt to them, for the first time in my life I feel able to admit that I am disabled and that I should adapt to it, not try to overpower it.”

“…I never thought of myself as pretty.  I thought nobody would ever be romantically interested in me- in an amputee girl. 

Then I found this little game.  Seeing how big the fanbase is- how much people love these girls, for their personalities and their disabilities, has cheered me up more than I can say.  I’m so glad there’s finally characters who I can relate to who weren’t created as one-dimensional fetish fuel, and I’m even gladder that the fans don’t treat the girls as novelties but rather as (fictional) people, like any able character out there.

Since I’ve played Katawa Shoujo, I feel like I’ve gained new confidence in myself.  For the first time in 17 years, I can go out in public and not feel like my missing arm automatically makes me ugly.”

These are good messages, important ones, which don’t pop up often enough in mainstream media.  (Not that this game is particularly ‘mainstream’, but you know what I mean.)  There may be other, better sources to get them than a heterocentric dating game made entirely (as near as I can tell) by non-disabled people, but for at least a few people, this was the first place they found it.  This isn’t to say that I think any of the criticisms are wrong- I can’t speak to that until I’ve actually explored the game a little- but there’s  good to be found there, too, and that should no more be ignored than should the game’s problems.

[squiditty]

"People can't handle the fact that some people are just different without having something fabulously acceptable as balance, because otherwise we'd just have to accept autistic people on their own terms, and that's hard and challenging and takes patience and work."

-Shannon Rosa, talking about Fox's upcoming show Touch and the prevalence of Disability Superpower tropes

[squiditty]

Watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"

For tomorrow I know all those Who girls and boys

Will wake bright and early, they'll rush for their toys

And then... oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!

Why is the narration so quick to pin the Grinch's hatred of Christmas on his too-small shoes or too-small heart and not on, y'know, the whole fifty-three years of annual sensory overload misery?  

He's still kind of an ass (especially if he's the same Grinch as in the Halloween special), but anyone who doesn't think that's a valid reason for loathing a holiday is seriously underestimating how bad sensory stress can get.