#vi mumbles

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In hindsight it's kind of bananas how the first ASOUE book is Olaf trying to marry Violet but also in hindsight it's such a perfect prelude to everything going on in the series. Olaf's whole plan hinges on the simple fact that it's 100% legal for a 14 year old girl to get married to an adult man as long as her guardian allows it (which, if I recall, is a thing in many places in the United States!) and it just leaves open the horrifying possibility of marrying your own (step)daughter - what is she gonna do, say no? to the person who she depends on for a bunch of things like food and shelter?! And presumably Olaf chooses the pretense of a play because maybe someone like Justice Strauss will say no if he just drags Violet to city hall with the same blackmail material, but once he gets the thing done there's not much to be done about it. Society is built in such a way that children are vulnerable to exploitation at every turn; Olaf spends the first half of the series trying to attain the legal and social position that most readily allows him to control and oversee children - a guardian - and only drops the pretense when the kids are finally deemed unworthy of even backhanded "protection" by the world of adults

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Currently remembering how the ASOUE Netflix adaptation, in its twin tendency to overexplain and to get really jarring with the metafictional aspects, both made The Great Unknown definitely-a-beast when its nature was ambiguous in the books for a reason and had a character outright allude to it being a metaphor for death. Which is doubly frustrating because that's not incorrect but the big, question mark-shaped entity is also very much alluding to a big theme in the series which is the neverending questions that haunt our entire lives and histories and how few answers we can truly grasp and whether it's worth trying to anyway

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Umineko secret ending

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JoJo's Strange Journey

Shin Megami Tensei: Bizarre Adventure

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Speaking of Paranatural I've gone on about this but zooming out it's kind of hysterical to me that TGU, the powerful reality-bending wight that is basically undergoing an uneasy quickening into self-awareness, has as its host a kid who is constantly struggling with whether existence itself is worth the price paid for it. and also with poverty and maybe gender dysphoria on top of it. Let's let the extremely depressed child be in charge of the Baby of Mass Destruction's psychological quickening, that'll go just fine

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It's very funny but also sad to read Bobby Schroder's long-teased article on IDW Sonic fandom's treatment of a particular female character (plus a bunch of other stuff) because I don't follow Sonic stuff so I was ambiently curious what sort of controversy was involved and even by all-ages media standards it's. so hilariously nothing (the controversy. the article is good stuff). Zoinks Scoob, it's the misogyny!!

Vriska at least chucked a guy off a cliff and broke his spine. Hell, SU discourse was at least about women with a zillion issues in a weird situationship hurting each other and themselves in the middle of a protracted intergalactic conflict and/or leaving their small child to deal with all their mistakes. The bar for what a fictional woman can do before she draws the ire of certain subsets of fandom is so fucking low. What kind of male (and otherwise not particularly othered) character gets this treatment? Bakugou I guess??

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Adding a little bit to last night's Paranatural post, I think a good lens to understand TGU is play. As in, a low-stakes (what isn't low-stakes to a powerful wight who has barely developed a sense of self?) process of experimentation and simulation. Peekaboo understands things in terms of game rules; they even have a little back and forth with a drowsy Dimitri about whether or not rules create or restrict fun

(That conversation, in fact, also highlights an interesting aspect of TGU: possibility needs, in a way, actuality for raw material, otherwise it's not really anchored or based on anything. I've reblogged a very good analysis before that has TGU represent, in a meta way, the gutters between panels wherein anything can have happened in the mind of a reader)