#I assume there must be a fandom overlap of some kind here lol

[vaguely-concerned]

...wolf hall!henry viii/cromwell version of the locked tomb pool scene, except that at the end of the book henry cheerfully eats cromwell's soul and chops his head off with all the whim and vigor of ianthe snacking down on babs

#I assume there must be a fandom overlap of some kind here lol #I am aware I am being absurd but I'm having fun and that's all that really matters <3 #wolf hall #the locked tomb #and yes. yes I am saying what we're all too afraid to say wolf hall!cromwell is cavalier coded fdakshj #I am mostly being funny here but there are some very interesting thematic parallells to me between these series #especially when you hold henry and john up to each other and marvel at the overlaps even tho their backgrounds couldn't be more different #they're just the very hungry caterpillaring up everyone else in the narrative and everyone frantically has to try to live with it #at the beginning of the books cromwell has a family and his wife and his daughters and wolsey and rafe and seems quite happy #and then by the end his whole life is swallowed up by henry because that's just what henry does #in all his hubris cromwell thinks he can handle it because he's really smart and has escaped abusive dynamics before but uh-oh!!! #both book series are partially talking about imperialism filtered through a lens of narcissism #master secretary thomas cromwell 🤝 the lyctors 'I must restrain my cannibal king/best and only friend' #well about that folks. I don't know how to tell you this but --

[skaruresonic]

About Sonic 3, I feel the only reason the fandom (and what I assume is non-fandom becayse most of their exposure to Maria as a character amounts to "she dies lmao") wants to see her death on-screen so much is because it'll be a "funni maymay" like "this kid-friendly movie has a freaking child get shot on-screen, funniest shit I've ever seen".

Like, remember the very first trailer for the first movie? Did you know that a good number of recent comments under it are actually sad that the movie didn't turn out as bad as it could have been and wasn't a "giant memefest" that people could "enjoy" in an ironic sense? It's just the lowest hanging fruit for those who just want to meme on the movie.

Tangent, but I'm actually interested to see how much this crowd overlaps with the crowd which swears up and down that Mr. Principles is Quintessential Sonic, and if you don't agree, something must be wrong with you on a moral and psychological level. Folks who cry the moral high ground the hardest tend to make for the biggest hypocrites lol.

Dead Maria jokes are nothing new. Fandom's cracked them since time immemorial. The thing is, though, I would think that 23 years since SA2's release, people would be past that and maybe try to follow in ST's stead of giving her life more importance than her death. Because there is absolutely merit to the idea that she only died to give the men around her something to angst about... But the solution to that isn't to voyeuristically focus on her demise to the point of making it a meme?

---

Like, remember the very first trailer for the first movie? Did you know that a good number of recent comments under it are actually sad that the movie didn't turn out as bad as it could have been and wasn't a "giant memefest" that people could "enjoy" in an ironic sense?

(and what I assume is non-fandom because most of their exposure to Maria as a character amounts to "she dies lmao")

Well, considering nonfans seldom respect Sonic as a franchise because of muh inconsistency, I'm inclined to not give their opinion any merit. They can come back when they've played the games. Not holding my breath for that one lol.

I'm just baffled that fans are also clamoring to see Maria get shot onscreen because it's like, et tu, Brutus? You should be past this kind of childishness by now. Much like how Shadow's backstory cannot retroactively become any Deeper by cramming in more pointless angst, seeing her die for the hundredth time will make her death seem more overplayed than poignant. At this point, asking to see her die is just a voyeuristic desire to see suffering for suffering's sake.

Also, if you think about it, neither X nor ShTH showed her explicitly getting shot. They just heavily implied it, to varying degrees of tastefulness (including the sound of the gunshot was... not ShTH's best decision, to put it extremely lightly, but at the very least the game didn't show the bullet going into her body).

I really don't mean to be the "don't have fun" guy. However, seeing everything about Maria online get boiled down to her death, her memory being dangled like a carrot to get a Pavlovian reaction out of Shadow, or her being dismissed entirely as a "generic" character really bugs me as a fan of the character. I'll be the first to admit her handling has flaws and maybe isn't the most fleshed-out portrayal around, but I also feel fandom exacerbates these problems by further objectifying her in this manner. Again, nobody's out here cracking Tikal stampede jokes every time her name crops up.

The whole point of Maria's character is that she's a normal girl, and it is a tragedy that her life was senselessly cut short. She isn't some great scientist like her cousin and grandfather, nor does she need to be. She represents humanity's capacity for goodness in spite of the horrors it inflicts.

Can you imagine the strength of character it must take not to hate the people who hunted you down and shot you, and instead retain your hopes for mankind's happiness? Where do you think Shadow gets it from? Gerald didn't give him a soul identical to hers for no reason.

but nah let's pop a cap in her ass so Shadow can do a cri

#asks

[sleepymarmot]

I hate sex! *CROWD BOOING*

Alright, here are my thoughts on the new single. Which took so long to write down that between me listening to the song for the first time before the video was even available and me putting this post into the queue, the author did an entire AMA and made some of these thoughts outdated lol

First of all, I think this was one of the songs I heard on that one public livestream I was lucky to catch a few months ago. I distinctly remember hearing something that must have been the “Newsfeeds, groupies, critics, analytics” part and thinking “Oh that’s bitter, can’t wait to know the full context”. Or maybe he’s been working on multiple songs of this kind, dunno. 

My first listen was on the Spotify app, and people have been saying that the sound quality on it was off. My ear’s not good enough to compare, though the Youtube music video version does sound better to me for some reason... What’s weird that when I listened for the first time, and later after a few hours, I felt underwhelmed by the vocals, then I didn’t, then I did again, and pretty sure it fluctuates from listen to listen? My ears work in mysterious ways.

Now here’s a thing I found interesting and kind of surprising. I’m not familiar enough with the music videos to count the ratio, but from what I’ve gathered, this is about distancing himself from his image associated with Self-Ish specifically. (The line “Guess I’m just selfish” doesn’t sound accidental. [Edit: according to the AMA it is an accident which is hilarious.] ) But... wasn’t Self-Ish itself, too, about alienation from the past self everyone knows you as? Some of the lyrics even seem to specifically call back to the ones from Self-Ish: the reference to the age 27 (“-Ish”), the idea of one of the selves confronting and killing another ( “...Cotard...” and “...Capgras...”). Is this another turn of the spiral of self-rejection? Is it what “I would dance on his grave, but the music I play seems to say take me instead” means — the very celebration of outliving an outdated self is fossilized into another (just like at the end of the video, the screens now also show W. W. pelting himself with tomatoes — which took me embarrassingly long to notice)? It’s just a very weird idea to me that fans of this album specifically would want him to forever remain the same when the big finale of it was finally becoming ready to move on. 

Re: criticism of fandom. While I very much sympathize... Is it so surprising that songs talking about not being normal and not fitting in attract an audience who relates to that, and indeed acts on its social awkwardness by being cringy and/or inappropriate? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Make good art about not being normal, get even less normal people as fans. Though I guess this applies more to clumsy social interactions than to obliviously taking lines out of context which I assume has been happening on the Third Hellsite?

It’s always kind of awkward when an artist is being negative about their fanbase and/or previous work, though, isn’t it? First of all you feel guilty and defensive about liking what is now “the wrong thing”. (Yes I am clutching my chest every time W. W. says something negative about Cotard’s Solution.) Then you feel supportive of the artist — but by doing so, aren’t you casting judgement on the “bad fans” and therefore presumptiously placing yourself in an opposition to them as a “good fan” while in reality you might also be part of the problem? I must admit I’m easily annoyed even by harmlessly immature things, and I clearly haven’t seen the worst of fan behavior because I intentionally avoid places where it’s likely to happen.

(Also thinking: the pressure to perform femininity as gender nonconformity for him as a man is obviously different from the pressure to perform femininity as gender conformity that women are subjected to, but it brings to the surface what femininity really is. It is a performance, an extra level of adornment. Expecting it of a person means not accepting them in their natural state.)

On another note, it’s very funny how this song could easily have been called for example Human After All but instead W. W. chose a title that’s provocative and completely misleading about the song’s content and tone. Also amusingly misleading in a similar way but opposite direction: releasing a song with the lyrics like “I’d rather leave” and “career suicide” as a first single for an upcoming album.

The music video is very good and elevates the whole thing to a new level. Hope to see more of this kind. As the people familiar with this blog might guess, the premise of an artist in a room where his past work is projected onto the walls is my sort of thing lol. (Are all of these the videos he took down, or is there only a partial overlap?) Full disclosure: I’m extremely inobservant and it took several times before I actually saw what was going on in it. I. e. the Will in black and white from the apartment is the one throwing the tomatoes (which he has gathered in the apartment) and the Will in black behind the camera is the third one. I conflated the two black-clad ones instead at first.

#music #ww #observation #blah blah blah