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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
feotakahari
txttletale

i often get asks that are like 'how do you enjoy anything' and similarly have a lot of detractors on web site who call me, like, 'joyless', and i feel like that's kind of revealing about the way these people conceptualise criticism (& especially political criticism). like esp. when i say something like 'DOOM 2016's central conceit of a heroic ubermensch righteously massacring an infinite horde of subhuman invaders is fundamentally a reactionary fantasy' i think that people assume that means i played the whole game through gritted teeth or threw it down in disgust but nah i played that whole thing and had a great time. i just also made some mental notes and thought them through afterwards. i just find it weird so many people find those things to be in abject contradiction

jambeast

The thing that always gets me annoyed at tumblr user txttletale is that like, obviously, you should be able to reasonably predict, that when you say “This Videogame You Like is Fascist” or “minecraft is seeped in white-supremacist settler-colonialism” or something, like the obvious takeaway that anybody is going to get from that is that you think it’s morally reprehensible and a big problem and calls for boycotts and activism.

Because the vast majority of the time, when someone says something like that, they mean all that other stuff. It’s an incredibly reasonable trained response given prior experience that when you hear that you see it as an attack, because usually it is an attack - seeing it as an attack is usually correct!

jambeast

I recall a similar kinda post where people were talking about movies - someone said something like ‘it isn’t problematic to like fight club because actually the clear moral message is that the thing it portrays is *bad*, portraying a bad thing is not the same as advocating it! I'm sick of us sending death threats and suicide baiting to people who don't deserve it because they said they liked media that we wrongly accused of being problematic when it wasn't.”

And I said something like “And even if it -is- problematic, you’re still allowed to like it! 300, for example, is a clearly fascist movie, and you’re still allowed like it as a movie."

And that got me, like, a shit load of very angry anons, which I think says something about how there’s a pretty strong belief that if you think a piece of media is fascist, you’re not supposed to admit to liking it! Like according to a sizable amount of people, a moral condemnation of a piece of media is kinda synonymous with a moral condemnation of its audience, and without the context of a post like this explaining it, you wouldn’t really have reason to believe that this particular poster is an exception.

furthersuns

300 is an instructive film to consider in light of the tumblr/breadtube style approach to media engagement, because it’s a film that highlights what that approach commonly gets wrong.

It begins by showing that Spartan society is undergirded by ritual child abuse. Where the pressure to conform and perform violence is enforced through a culture of obnoxious and lethal toxic masculinity. The violence is beautiful, operatic, and deeply, deeply uncomfortable.It ends with the Spartans dead nearly to a man, with the reveal that the entire preceding story was diegetic propaganda told by the lone survivor who stands to profit heavily from it.

300 depicts a fascist society, but it’s not a flattering depiction. It invites a reparative (antifascist) reading because of and through it’s problematic elements. The film plainly shows why such a society is terrible —

— but noticing that requires engagement on a deeper level than "depiction = endorsement” and “problematic = bad.”

it also requires a willingness to accept “discomfort” as a valid emotion for media to purposefully cultivate
zexreborn
txttletale

i often get asks that are like 'how do you enjoy anything' and similarly have a lot of detractors on web site who call me, like, 'joyless', and i feel like that's kind of revealing about the way these people conceptualise criticism (& especially political criticism). like esp. when i say something like 'DOOM 2016's central conceit of a heroic ubermensch righteously massacring an infinite horde of subhuman invaders is fundamentally a reactionary fantasy' i think that people assume that means i played the whole game through gritted teeth or threw it down in disgust but nah i played that whole thing and had a great time. i just also made some mental notes and thought them through afterwards. i just find it weird so many people find those things to be in abject contradiction

jambeast

The thing that always gets me annoyed at tumblr user txttletale is that like, obviously, you should be able to reasonably predict, that when you say “This Videogame You Like is Fascist” or “minecraft is seeped in white-supremacist settler-colonialism” or something, like the obvious takeaway that anybody is going to get from that is that you think it’s morally reprehensible and a big problem and calls for boycotts and activism.

Because the vast majority of the time, when someone says something like that, they mean all that other stuff. It’s an incredibly reasonable trained response given prior experience that when you hear that you see it as an attack, because usually it is an attack - seeing it as an attack is usually correct!

zexreborn

It feels like there’s a legit generation gap where those of us who are old enough to remember 90s censorship debates really fully internalized “I can like X piece of media without endorsing everything the characters do as morally upright” and the kids that came after didn’t to the same extent.

furthersuns

Agreed.

It’s important to realize that the reason why a an acknowledgement of (or suggestion of) problematic elements would lead to the “obvious takeaway” of a profound moral judgment is a result of the specific expectations of (roughly) 2014-2020’s social media as well as the broader trends in media engagement and popular systems of analysis that influence it (breadtube, for example).

It’s not a natural or obvious outcome, it’s a social norm.

It’s a trained response because it has been trained.

probably beyond the scope of this discussion but needless to say I have some tremendous disagreements with that era's style of media engagement
tanadrin
tanadrin

interesting minor fact from the latest If Books Could Kill–in many countries, including the US (which has quite a high baseline rate of people willing to be organ donors), the big bottleneck for organ donation isn’t volunteers for donation, but broader healthcare system issues, like availability of surgeons capable of facilitating donations

apollopigeon

theoretically, could a gay couple swap one testicle with the other person and then have a 50/50 chance of impregnating a woman with each of their sperm?

transgenderer

Did you mean to respond to this post….

triviallytrue

hold on let’s hear them out

tanadrin

hmm. i can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t work, but it would be annoying to have to be on immunosuppressing drugs to prevent rejection for the rest of your life when you could just mix two different sperm samples in a test tube and let them duke it out

frighteningly close to the plot of Jojo part 8
vanilla-blessing
vanilla-blessing

qb's top 10 seasonal anime of 2022

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2022 in anime was a year of many known quantities, but what really ended up sticking out were the shows few saw coming before they took the world by storm, and before we knew it, everyone was watching a guitar-playing pink blob with severe anxiety while drawing her band on every album cover ever made. 2022 was the year I watched a new Gundam for the first time, I experienced unforgettable trash gems like Pride of Orange, ESTAB-LIFE, and Extreme Hearts, and I was let down more by the wasted potential of the Biscuit Hammer anime than any anime I've ever watched, easily. All considered, this year was unusually good on average for the shows I finished, so I ended up with a glut of series I wanted to put on this list that I had to cut down for time. I would make this list longer, but you know, then it might come out in 2024.

Top 10 in order:

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Cyberpunk Edgerunners - Studio TRIGGER's take on the world of Cyberpunk 2077 was an unexpected contender - it was announced so long ago I sort of forgot about it, I wasn't expecting much from the batch release of a Netflix-Trigger anime after BNA's messy release, I underestimated the potential of Cyberpunk 2077 as a setting after the very public trash fire of the video game, and it should have been overshadowed by the next thing after a quick Netflix dump in the middle of a season. Should have had its lunch eaten by the similarly edgy violent action of Chainsawman, should have been yet another failed videogame anime, but none of this stopped Cyberpunk Edgerunners from being the anime I enjoyed the most from 2022.

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Bocchi the Rock - the breakout hit school band anime of 2022 was also relatively unexpected, although I at least knew it was stacked with talented animators going in, I didn't predict the sheer memetic power of the result. This series shatters the fourth wall over its knee and livens up an already pretty funny manga with demented, free-flowing gags in a particular way that wouldn't work at all without detailed and well planned sequences which come off so naturally it's hard to believe this was originally a (lightly subversive but still) 4 panel strip. The album cover redraws were the best thing to come out of Bocchi and I hope they never end.

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Pop Team Epic 2 - some kind of fucked up comic strip but aoi shouta is there? I thought they promised they wouldn't make this

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Mob Psycho 100 III - everything I said about the second season of the popular shonen manga adaptation but moreso, it finishes out the series in exactly the way I hoped it would. Third OP is just mad flexing. look how many hands we can draw. Episode 8 changed my life forever. knowing they nailed the landing retroactively improves the whole series for me.

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Do It Yourself - original anime by studio PINE JAM, DIY is pure aesthetic hobby-ani with a mildly entertaining cast of extremely animated characters. very enjoyable but may not have enough momentum or things happening for some. soundtrack is another standout by y0c1e but at a noticeably different speed from Gleipnir and Spyce.

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Kaguya-sama Love is War: Ultra Romantic - everything I said about the second season of the popular romcom manga adaptation but moreso, it reaches the climactic peak of the series in exactly the way I hoped it would. I'm still reeling from the entire rap battle episode (sub and dub), and can't believe the Starship Troopers ED was real.

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My Dress Up Darling (Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru) - excellent manga adaptation, effectively gets across the dangerously horny but strangely wholesome vibe of the series.

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The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2 - everything I said about the first season of the popular magical girl romcom manga adaptation but moreso, it reaches an inflection point in the manga with exactly the same manic pacing and blatant disregard for breathing room I hoped it would. out of everything else on my list I hope the most this one gets another season, because it kind of needs it.

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Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch from Mercury - original anime in the long-running GUNDAM series which is sort of like Robot Jox for kids. This is definitely the first time I've watched anything from Gundam before it was completed and I immediately regretted not having more to watch as a direct consequence. Half of my enjoyment right now is coming from experiencing it in tandem with the rest of the internet, but it's sure to hold up in retrospect as one of the best modern Gundam seasons. Look forward to a future very annoying post by me claiming g-witch ripped off Granbelm.

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Call of the Night - another above and beyond manga adaptation, probably the anime OP of the year. It strongly intensified my longing for studio SHAFT to not be dead anymore.

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Assorted Shoutouts

Going by rating number scale rules, Chainsawman and Spy X Family should be here, but I'm not going by rating, I'm going by what I feel deserves more attention. those anime already have too much recognition.

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The Executioner and Her Way of Life (Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road) - If you asked me what the most hidden gem is from 2022, this is what I would answer immediately. Irresponsibly complicated and unusual take on the hated isekai genre in the most disrespectful way possible, twisting anything familiar about that tired setting into an unrecognizable pretzel shape. Recommending this is a challenge, because the less I explain the better it is, but nobody would want to watch this on its face. Everyone should watch it though.

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Ya Boy Kongming - banger soundtrack and some eye-popping color choice elevates this manga adaptation from average to a certified Cool Time.

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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: STONE OCEAN - My favorite (not best) Jojo part, the anime greatly improves the readability of the last third from the manga.
Tokyo Mew Mew New - It's almost comforting how little they tried to update the love triangle of incredibly shit boyfriends in this remarkably normal magical girl anime reboot. I pleaded for someone to make a normal regular magical girl anime reboot and they delivered something totally acceptable.

Reiwa Di Gi Charat - Dejiko drags society kicking and screaming into the Reiwa era. This is the anime of all time of 1999, 2022 and 2023.

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  • qb - friend of the no show (@queuebae on twitter still, unfortunately)
superb-fox
harringtonraejepsen

with the new john mulaney special out i just want everyone to know that it's not because of his divorce that i refuse to watch it. honestly, i think how the internet handled that was weird. it was a personal romantic relationship that we didn't have all the information on, and as someone who had an addiction problem i'm not going to judge him for making (what looks like to us) a bad decision right after he got out of rehab, and if you would i think you need to look inside yourself as to why you think that's okay. i'm not saying i loved watching that, but i think we need to have grace for people in difficult situations and i normally would want to hear his side, perhaps even through a comedy special!

why i refuse to watch the new special or engage with his content is he openly and happily platformed a transphobe right after he started getting heat for being openly transphobic. i'm not letting that go.